Anne Noonan was 20 years old when she gave birth to her son aboard a merchant ship lying off the Cornish coast. The Fravizo had no doctor aboard so her Captain requested that Anne and baby Tim be taken ashore for a check-up.

It was 25 September 1960 and the first shout for the new Watson class lifeboat Solomon Browne of Penlee. The volunteer crew picked up a doctor and midwife from Newlyn and transferred them to the Dutch ship. Just before midnight the Fravizo moved into Mounts Bay so that mother and baby could be transferred to the lifeboat.

‘My son was lowered from the ship to the lifeboat in a fish basket and I was stretchered from one vessel to the other,’ remembers Anne. ‘Both the Dutch crew and the lifeboat crew were wonderful – I was pretty scared at the time and they were very reassuring. We were both devastated when [2 years later] the Solomon Browne was lost with all hands as, somehow, we regarded the lifeboat as “ours”.’

Last September, Anne and Tim visited Penlee Lifeboat Station to mark his rather unusual 50th birthday. They went aboard the Severn class lifeboat Ivan Ellen with Coxswain Patch Harvey and, in a surprise to them both, were accompanied by Ken Prowse and John Trewhella – the ambulancemen called to assist when mum and baby were brought ashore all those years before.