Martin Woodward on Saving Lives at Sea
You ask about what it looked like inside the Station and I mean that Station was built in 1922, the Pier. It was built for a new motor Lifeboat called the ‘Langham’ which you will see up at Arreton Cross. We’ve got it up in the field by the Museum there. That’s the one that the Pier was built for.
So it remained unchanged for an awful long time, apart from a couple of modifications when the ‘Jesse Lumb’ came in ’39, it had to be extended to incorporate a bigger winch, but when I was a boy, it was just a traditional Lifeboat Station with tongue and groove boarding and the yellow oil skins hanging up in the racks there and the ‘Jesse Lumb’.
And the ‘Jesse Lumb’ that used to have a tipping cradle which was … it’s now come back for this boat but in the meantime they took it away after the ‘Jesse Lumb’ which tipped the boat up hydraulically up to a level so that you could actually work on the boat inside the Boathouse, on the level which was quite forward thinking for those days.
So, it was great, and the good thing about those days were the characters involved in the Lifeboat.
Peter Smith, as I said, he was the Coxswain from 1956 to 1985, so he was there for almost 32 years by the time he actually signed off, so he was the youngest serving Coxswain. He was only 26 from memory when he took the job on, he was the youngest Coxswain in the RNLI at the time and when he finished he was one of the longest serving ones as well, but he was a great guy, he really did a lot for me and he taught me a lot and took me under his wing really and that’s how I started off in the Lifeboat.
I started off there pretty much after I, you know, 12 years old or 13 years old I was down there cleaning the brass and that’s how you did it on those days. You were slave labour for a while and then you might get taken out on some Regattas or whatever, and then I did my first service job on the Lifeboat.
It was what they call now ‘a shout’ not a term I like, just off here in August 1965, before my 17th birthday, well, you were supposed to be 17. But because I’d been down there and under the wing of Peter and within the Lifeboat community if you like, then I was considered part of it I suppose, but it was great.
It was a very small Boathouse in comparison to what it is now, I mean this was rebuilt in 2010. With the previous boats you could only just get the boats in there. There was no real headroom. Everything folded down so it was pretty squashed, and when I took over as Coxswain, I actually filled it up with pictures and statistics and everything so that if we were out on a service … you know, if the Lifeboat was out, we were out on a job, then people could look at all the pictures and the history and there was something there for them to look at rather than an empty Boathouse.
So, yeah, it was a traditional … it was quite sad to see it go in a way because it was quite traditional, but things move on.
