To his friends and colleagues, David Stogdon appeared to live entirely without fear yet he was a survivor of at least two near-death experiences. In 1940, during the Second World War, the destroyer Brazen sank underneath the young naval Lieutenant as he continued to fi re his anti-aircraft gun at enemy fi ghters. Twenty-four years later, he suffered lasting injuries through a serious road accident that seemed only to refocus his energies. The RNLI’s Operations Director Michael Vlasto remembers: ‘He treated the accident as just one more challenge to overcome.

’David joined the RNLI in 1952 as Divisional Inspector for Scotland, responsible for the lifeboats, crews and lifeboat stations there. He was to stay with the charity for over 30 years but he was no offi ce-bound bureaucrat. ‘He hated paperwork,’ smiles Michael. ‘He was on the train one day. He was looking at papers, then scrunched them up and threw them out of the window. He didn’t realise that members of the Committee of Management were also in the compartment, watching him!’

The lifeboats of the time were designed and built primarily for strength to endure the rigours of the sea, a quality that then excluded the ability to self right. This fl aw was soon to bring tragic consequences – but also the opportunity for David to demonstrate his innate skill of practical yet lateral thinking, driven by a passion to save lives.

Never again …

In February 1953, the Watson class lifeboat John and Charles Kennedy from Fraserburgh, Grampian, capsized on service in a heavy swell. Horrifyingly, fi ve of her crew were trapped under the lifeboat’s canopy and drowned, while the Coxswain died after being struck by debris. Only the Second Coxswain survived.

This was on David’s patch so it was he who visited the grieving lifeboat families. The experience left him determined to prevent a similar disaster happening again and, drawing on his own sailing experience, David instigated extra training for lifeboat crews in boathandling.

Fate had other ideas, though, and just 8 months later Arbroath’s Liverpool class lifeboat, the Robert Lindsay, was to capsize too, with six more volunteers lost to the sea. Adamant that there should be no more lifeboat widows and that something good would come from this awful loss of life, David changed his attention to the lifeboats themselves. He saw the need for a new design that would both perform better than contemporary ones and ensure a higher degree of safety for crew.

Foreign forebears

David had no background in engineering but, rather than handing over the problem to the RNLI’s naval architects, he threw himself into the project. He was neither too proud to learn from others nor afraid of literally getting his hands dirty. Michael Vlasto says of his friend: ‘I had a huge respect for David. He led from the front. He wouldn’t ask someone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He also believed in having a good work–life balance and encouraged young inspectors to get a lot of shooting and fi shing in, otherwise they weren’t doing the job properly!

’But David took trouble over his work: ‘He continually refined design until the best result was achieved.’ This was at a time when there was less theoretical and more practical research and before computers were commonplace.

It was the French lifeboat service’s small inflatable craft and the prototype rigid infl atables (RIBs) developed by Admiral Hoare at Atlantic college in the Vale of Glamorgan that were to eventually catch David’s eye. Their flimsy construction and propulsion by unreliable outboard engines should have ruled them out but David could see their potential to meet both his criteria of performance and safety.

All-weather and inshore

The fi rst RNLI infl atable lifeboat, the D class, came into service in 1963 and its direct descendents are still in operation today. For the fi rst time, a distinction was to be made between rescue craft designed for fast, agile work close to shore and those designed to survive all weathers far out at sea.

After his car accident in 1964, David moved temporarily to the position of Superintendent at the RNLI’s depot, then in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, before becoming Superintendent of Cowes base (now the Inshore Lifeboat Centre) on the Isle of Wight.

Here, his Deputy Mike Brinton and the Deputy Chief Inspector Tony Wicksteed assisted David in his quest for the perfect design and helped to convince the then Search and Rescue Committee that infl atables should be taken seriously.

In November 1970, the RNLI received a request for assistance from the British Red Cross following a tidal wave sweeping through the Bay of Bengal. True to form, less than 36 hours later, David Stogdon led the RNLI’s fi rst fl ood relief team to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). For a week they used their infl atable lifeboats to deliver food, clothing and medical help to people in desperate need. David and his crew fl ew out of the area just as the country was erupting into civil war.

On his return, David worked with Desmond Hoare to adapt his prototype RIB into a rescue boat for the RNLI and the fi rst B class Atlantic 21 went into service in 1972, to be followed by the Atlantic 75s and 85s in later decades.

Bigger and better?

David Stogdon now made perhaps the biggest leap of his imagination. He became convinced that a much larger RIB could perform just as well as an all-weather lifeboat. Over several years, he and his colleagues developed the 10.7m Medina that featured a protective wheelhouse and inboard engines – and waterjets instead of propellers.

The prototype was named Mountbatten of Burma and was shown at the London Boat Show of 1980, attracting huge attention. But the charity’s senior staff and trustees had reached their limit – they could not be convinced of the resilience of such craft in extreme conditions and they decided not to take it to production.

This wasn’t to be the end of the matter. When he retired from the RNLI in 1981, David was contacted by the Dutch lifeboat service, the KNRM. They were keen to develop his ideas further and appointed him as a designer and consultant. The Medina concept was well suited to the shallow waters around the Netherlands and, after improvements to the engines, waterjets and more, the fi rst of the KNRM’s Valentine RIBs went into production. Queen Beatrix named the Konigin Beatrix in 1984 – a dream come true for David.

Living on

Others saw the merits of the Medina-type boats: in 2004 the independent lifeboat station at Caister in Norfolk put into service one of the Dutch-built RIBs, while the RNLI’s Mountbatten of Burma, later found underwater in New Brighton, was rebuilt by Amble Boatyard and is on service with the Maritime Rescue Institute at Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire.

Meanwhile, the RNLI’s engineers have chosen a different but related course. The inshore and all-weather divide continues but is narrowing. Inshore lifeboats have grown much in size and power (the Atlantic 85 is just 2m shorter than the Medina and far exceeds its speed) and the next class of all-weather lifeboat, the FCB2, is planned to be waterjet-powered and capable of being beached for rapid transfer of casualties.

David Stogdon was certainly ahead of his time. Following the boom in watersports of the last 20 years, 60% of the RNLI’s lifeboat rescues are now carried out by inshore craft. The RNLI has embraced the worth of these vessels and may one day fi nd a way to incorporate other ideas of David’s in a way that satisfi es all of the charity’s strict operational requirements. Meanwhile, thousands of rescuees and rescuers alike, and their families, can be forever grateful to ‘the father of the inshore lifeboat’ for bringing them home safely.