‘Being able to do something for someone – giving them that extra chance – you just feel pleased that you’ve done it,’ says Jennie Court, before our interview is brought to a sudden halt. We’re interrupted by the shrill ringing of a bell from the lifeboat station behind us. She turns and runs.

No two stations are the same, but this one, Tower at Lifeboat pier, is very different from the RNLI’s coastal facilities. It’s a floating structure on the River Thames in the heart of London. From my position, the Millennium wheel and Houses of Parliament are just visible in the misty distance, framed by Waterloo bridge. Water taxis, barges and pleasure cruisers glide past, the moored E class lifeboat rocking gently in their wake. The bell continues to ring, doing the same job as the beeping alert on a coastal volunteer’s pager. Tower lifeboat crew, the RNLI’s busiest team of lifesavers, are being summoned for an immediate launch.

Jennie is already wearing her drysuit and simply has to grab a lifejacket and helmet to be ready. Like all crew members here, full-time and volunteer alike, Jennie works shifts at the station, dressed in her drysuit at all times. It helps them to meet their 90-second response target. People who find themselves in London’s cold, surging river are rarely wearing lifejackets. Without immediate help, they will inevitably succumb to the speedy tide, hidden debris, busy traffic or man-made obstructions. In Summer especially, Tower crew also deal with many ‘medevacs’ – incidents involving ill or injured people stranded on watercraft or the foreshore.

Jennie’s two fellow crew members are now aboard the E class lifeboat and she joins them, taking the helm, roaring the waterjets into life and heading off under the bridge. Within 15 minutes, they return: it was a false alarm. A well-meaning member of the public had seen someone peering over Lambeth bridge only to see a figure wearing similar clothes on the foreshore below a moment later. They raised the alarm. ‘Thankfully, no one had fallen or jumped off the bridge after all,’ says Jennie. ‘We discovered a beachcomber taking advantage of the low tide!’

London calling

Jennie’s unpredictable, all-action role as a fulltime helm on the Thames is a far cry from her first job with the RNLI. She joined in 2002 as an administrator at the charity’s Headquarters in Dorset. ‘That job involved organising lifeguard training, but working for the RNLI inevitably raised my interest in the lifeboat side of things too,’ says Jennie. ‘I wanted to pursue that and,’ she mentions modestly, ‘I managed to qualify as a sea survival trainer in 2005.’

She soon got a job at the RNLI’s own Lifeboat College, teaching first aid, sea survival and firefighting to volunteers from across the UK and RoI. ‘That was a great job, but it also confirmed that I desperately wanted to be a crew member myself, saving lives on the “front line”,’ recalls Jennie. ‘I live in Bournemouth, though, which is too far away from even Poole or Mudeford to meet their response times.’

But Jennie was not to give up so easily. When she heard that Thames lifeboat crews included volunteers who were ‘on station’ for 12-hour shifts, she came up with a solution. When not working in Poole, she could travel to London and volunteer at Tower! Accepted onto the crew, weren’t her first experiences on station something of a shock, swapping the controlled conditions of the College for the hectic Thames? ‘No, it worked really well. My first aid knowledge proved really useful with the medevacs.’

Rather than taking a well-earned rest during the College’s Summer break, Jennie used the opportunity to fill in as the Tower lifeboat full-time Mechanic in 2007. ‘I enjoyed that taste of being a full-timer so much that I applied to be a helmsman,’ says Jennie, who successfully took on the role last year. She remembers her first shout behind the wheel of the E class vividly: ‘You’re always thinking: “Am I going to get it right?” but it went well. We were called to Southwark bridge where a woman had jumped into the River. She was very distressed, the water was a bit lumpy and – that’s the thing with London – it was 5pm on a sunny day so we had quite an audience. It was very nerve-wracking.’

Despite such an intimidating first rescue in charge, Jennie says she has loved her job since day one. ‘I’m the only full-time female member of the crew, but we’ve got eight female volunteers – and Janet Kelly our Station Manager takes the helm too if she’s needed. Women aren’t treated any differently from the men. At the end of the day, as long as someone can do what they are required to do on the lifeboat, there’s no issue.’

With the interview over, Jennie can get back to helping her crew mates ready the lifeboat for the next launch. There’s no telling to whom or what they’ll be called next but one thing’s certain: here at the busiest station in the service, that bell will be ringing again sooner rather than later.