VIEWPOINT
The RNLI at 200 is as important today as it was in 1824,
THERE WAS A HUGE bang and a trail of smoke broke across the sky. I was a small boy, standing with my father on the shore at West Mersea island in Essex in the early 1960s. We were there to sail, and I was excited. It was a very windy day and the sea was turning from choppy to angry.
The bang and the smoke came from the signal flare summoning the volunteer lifeboat crew. A couple of weekend sailors had got into trouble, their dinghy had capsized and they had tried to swim to shore – now they were drowning. Men rushed from all over the village to launch the RNLI inshore rescue boat from its home in the old shed (which is still there), pull on their oilskins and head out into danger, just as thousands of RNLI lifeboat crew have done before them and since.
The men were duly rescued and brought ashore. My dad was a doctor and he stepped forward to help with the resuscitation. It’s a scene that I have never forgotten. I have sailed all my life and, happily, never needed rescuing, but ever since that day on the shore at West Mersea I have been in awe of an organisation that marks its bicentenary this week.
THE ROYAL NATIONAL Lifeboat Institution seems to embody all that is best about us.
Its crews are all volunteers, they risk their livelihoods and their lives to rescue total strangers in peril on the seas – for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. They are funded by the generosity of the British public, a generosity expressed in countless flag-days, legacies, sponsored walks and lifeboat-shaped collecting boxes in pubs across the land.
When the RNLI was founded by Sir William Hillary in 1824 there were 1,800 shipwrecks a year around our coasts. Britain was the premier maritime nation and saving those ships and their crews was vital for the reputation and economic health of the nation.
In the 19th century our ports were full of merchant vessels and many people in Britain had friends or family who were working in this great floating world. Today we no longer have day-to-day dependence on ships, but what we do have, almost as a legacy, is an incredible urge to get out and use the water for leisure. The lifeboat service has adapted to serve that demand. Instead of just saving working people who suddenly find themselves in terrible storms, the RNLI are ready if your dinghy is lodged on a sandbank or, holidaying, you get caught in a rip tide on an inflatable banana.
Anybody who puts to sea in a small boat or large ship knows that it can be a deadly place. The truth is that if you are shipwrecked, or simply fall in, on
