Lisa : It’s the 18th March 2019 and this is an interview with Jim Roberts at his home in Bembridge and Lisa Kerley is the interviewer. Good morning Jim.
Jim : Morning Lisa.
Lisa : Could we start the interview by you telling me your full name?
Jim : Yes certainly, it’s James Richard Roberts.
Lisa : And your date of birth?
Jim : 1946.
Lisa : And, where were you born?
Jim : I was born in Ryde.
Lisa : Can you tell me your parents’ names?
Jim : Yes, my father was Gerald Roberts and my mother was Winifred Roberts.
Lisa : And, where were your parents born?
Jim : My father was born in Ventnor and my mother in Bembridge.
Lisa : And are your family ‘Islanders’ going back further generations?
Jim : Yes, father … on father’s side, his father was the local Butcher in Ventnor and going back a further generation, his father used to run the, I think it’s the Bugle Inn in Yarmouth. Mother, she was a member of a well-known local family in Bembridge and if you look in a book called ‘Bembridge Past And Present’ which was published in 1909, she comes from a family called the ‘Love’s’ and the book says was only a small number of families in Bembridge at that time which ‘Love’s’ were actually mentioned. They actually mentioned the fact that a well-known local family, possibly in smuggling of which one member was usually detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Lisa : And what was your father’s occupation?
Jim : My father was a Journalist, and for the majority … I think he worked at the Ventnor Mercury I think it was initially, but for most of his journalistic career he worked for the Isle of Wight County Press and was a District Reporter when he ran the Ryde office with a staff of three, I think, and then later he went to Newport and was the Deputy Editor.
Lisa : So you said you were born in Ryde. Did you grow up in Ryde?
Jim : Yes, for the first eight or nine years and then on my grandmother’s death we moved back to Bembridge to look after grandfather.
Lisa : Where did you go to school?
Jim : I went to a PNEU School in Partlands Avenue at Ryde and then to Ryde School in Queens Road and then finally ended up at the Isle of Wight Technical College.
Lisa : Did you have an idea of when you were at school of what you wanted to do as a career.
Jim : No, that came about very much through my father and a BBC Cameraman that was on the Island at the time and they decided, well, that perhaps our local Airport, they could get me an apprenticeship there. So, I went for an interview and at the interview I was asked, you know school reports and what the headmaster had said about me. And he had said … I think he’s trying to find something good to say. But he basically said, “He’s done a great job recently with the theatrical part of the shows that they put on at Ryde school with the stage lighting etc.” And the guy that was interviewing me said, “Ah right, well in that case you can be an electrical apprentice.” And that’s all how it came about. And then I went on to be, a … do a five-year apprenticeship at the College with Britten-Norman and qualified as an Aircraft Electrician.
4 minutes 59 seconds
Lisa : Thank you. I’m here today, specifically, to talk to you about your service with Bembridge Coastguard and I wonder if you could tell me when your first association with them was and how it came about?
Jim : Yes, back to the Press world for this one. One of the other things I hadn’t explained was that my mother was, in latter years, the local Correspondent for the Bembridge area for the County Press. She did work for the County Press during the War as a Reader at Newport. But anyway, she did the local reporting at Bembridge and, of course, in those days it was a round of going to see the Vicar and the Undertaker and the Coastguards and the Lifeboat and that. She came back one day and said to me, “Would you like to be a Coastguard because they’ve got some vacancies?” And I’d sort of toyed with the idea of basically being interested in some of the Lifeboat things because at that time my godfather, a character called Perce Weaver was in fact the Honorary Secretary of Bembridge Lifeboat. So, to take up something in that marine world I thought was quite interesting. So, I went and had an interview and joined the Coastguard’s way back in the mid 1960’s
Lisa : And, can you tell me a bit about the sort of organisation back then during that time?
Jim : Yes sure. In that particular time, they had a number of what we call regular or full-time paid Coastguards at Bembridge. In fact, there was three of them and they used to do what they called constant night watches which was between two…sorry between 10 o’clock in the evening and 6 o’clock in the morning in the summer and 7 o’clock in the winter. Then, when the weather was bad, we used to do a thing called bad-weather watch when it was foggy we used to do a thing called thick-weather watch which meant that we had to fill in the extra hours between six or seven in the morning through to 10 o’clock at night so we had somebody on duty all the time. So, we had a team of, in those days, called ‘Watchers’ and they filled in the gaps and we did quite a lot of the night watches as well. So … but also associated with that we had our own Coastguard Rescue Team, in those days it was called the LSA – Life Saving Apparatus Company at Bembridge whereby we were trained for use of British Board equipment complete with firing rockets with a rocket line out to ships that had got in too close and had run aground. We did that for a number of years until the 1970’s when that job – the Coastguard was reorganised to a certain extent and that job went over to the helicopters. Then, from then on, the rescue side of it continued in the other phase which was the rescue work.
Lisa : So when your…when you first joined, did you join as a volunteer or were you a paid member of staff?
Jim : No, I was always a volunteer, but you have to remember with the Coastguard that volunteers do get paid as well. There’s a reason for that and what a lot of people don’t understand is the role of the Coastguard because in the UK there are a number of organisations that go to make up the whole network. Those organisations are mainly voluntary based which is like the RNLI and a number of the local independent lifeboats etc. The role of the Coastguard is that somebody has to be in charge and actually decide on, as the emergency calls come in, what resources are sent to them. It’s not quite like a Fire Service where somebody phones up and says there’s a fire, ok we’ll send you along a fire appliance, or if it sounds bad, we might send two. In the marine world there is a lot of choice and the Coastguard that receives the 999 call has to actually decide what sort he’s going to use depending on what else is going on at the time and what’s the best resource so he can use initially, maybe a local Coastguard to go and have a look at the situation and assess it. If it is obviously far more urgent, somebody’s phoned up, they can see somebody drowning then he’s got the choice of whether he sends a, what they call an ‘ all-weather lifeboat’ a big lifeboat which is similar to what we’ve got at Bembridge and at Yarmouth or an inshore lifeboat similar to the ones we have at Bembridge and Ryde, Cowes, Freshwater and Sandown. In addition to that you’ve got the helicopters, you’ve got other boats that are out there that could go to the scene. So, it’s a role of co-ordination which is the best resource, but bear in mind you can have in the Solent area a lot of incidents going on together. It’s not unknown on a windy day to have something in excess of maybe ten incidents running all at the same time. So, you’ve got to use your resources to be able to cover everything that’s happening and still think that 999 call or a mayday call might come in at any time.
11 minutes 39 seconds
Lisa : So, back in the 60’s when you were first involved, was there a Manager of the service at that time? Can you just tell me a bit about the organisational structure in Bembridge?
Jim : Yes, at that time we’d have had a Station Officer who was our full-time Coastguard and he had two regular Coastguards that supported him. Above him there would have been a District Officer but there was one District Officer for the Island and he looked after all the Island Stations and in those days, he used to reside in the Coastguard House out at Totland Bay.
Lisa : And, how many Coastguard Stations were there on the Island at that time?
Jim : At that time, there were, we’re talking about the mid-1960’s here obviously, we had a full time …Coastguard Stations which had full time staff at Bembridge, Ventnor and the Needles. But in between those there was what they called Auxiliary Coastguard Stations at Sandown, Blackgang, Abbeyfield, Brook and a place called Cliff End which is between Totland and Yarmouth. And they were all run under the … by the District Controller and the whole country was broken up into Districts which all had very similar setups.
Lisa : So, at the time that we’re talking about, in the mid 60’s, where was the Coastguard Station at Bembridge?
Jim : At Forelands, on the edge of the cliff opposite the Crab & Lobster Hotel, or Crab & Lobster Pub as it was in those days but elevated in more recent years. The Station as you see it today is actually situated on the cliff edge just the other side of the car park in the Crab & Lobster; however, that has been there over the last fifteen years or so and that position prior to that, we had a smaller Lookout Station there but that was replaced by a more modern building with vehicle facilities and training facilities and things like that which the previous Station just basically had a lookout and downstairs there was room for the rescue equipment for the breeches buoy.
14 minutes 30 seconds
Lisa : Did you have a vehicle at that time?
Jim : Vehicles came along a little later, probably about the 1970’s. Prior to that, if you had to transport the life saving apparatus gear, breeches buoy gear, each Station had a local Contractor in Bembridge, it was people called Preston’s, Charlie Preston who ran the local Coal Merchant in the village and you used to phone up and say, “Bring your lorry down.” Of course, if you go right back in time the same thing used to happen, but it was with horse and carts and the Coastguard used to have their cart, but they had to go and round-up a few local farmers horses to pull it along. But, going back to the vehicles, yes, they came in and the first one we had at Bembridge was always … always sticks in my mind because it happened to be a Hillman Imp and it was just that you could put three or four staff in it and go somewhere, you didn’t have your rescue equipment or anything like that in it. However, there was one disadvantage because at Bembridge none of the three full-time Coastguards had a driving licence and that was very similar on a lot of Stations around the coast so there was this sort of six and nine month period where we all had to learn to drive which was fine because all the Auxiliary Coastguards didn’t have a problem, we could all drive [laughing]. But yes, there were one or two hair-raising incidents with the regulars actually learning to drive, but perhaps we won’t want to go into those.
Lisa : So, I wonder if you could cast your mind back to those days in the mid to late 60’s. Tell me a bit about the type of equipment that you had then for rescues.
Jim : The mid to late 60’s was very much just the breeches buoy equipment ourselves. It’s not until you get into the 1970’s that things started to change, and it was realised that the Coastguards themselves should do more. Funnily enough, it obviously worked backwards for a few years, because if you’re looking in some of the history books and that for the Coastguards in the turn of the century 1920’s/1930’s they all had Coastguard skiffs or boats that they used to row. But in those early days the Coastguard service was a little differently orientated because they only took on the search and rescue role round about 1920’s/1922; prior to that they were what’s called a ‘Coast Preventative Force’ whereby they were more engaged in looking for people, smuggling and Revenue evasion. Those in the early days when they had even more Coastguard stations the Coastguards then used to patrol between Stations carrying muskets and various places like that. When you go back in time and as you look around the Isle of Wight and there’s several good books written about this particularly on the Island. There’s one particular Lawyer on the Island who, on his retirement has written a book about Coastguard Stations, you’ll find that if we start … Coastguard Station you can recognised them through a certain type of building. There’s one on Culver Cliff, there was one at Forelands, there’s another one down at Bembridge Point. The next one was on Seaview Dabber, just to the right side of where the tollgate used to be. Some at Ryde, Fishbourne, at the end of Fishbourne Creek, and also at East Cowes, if you go down on the front there’s a row of Coastguard houses there and the patrols used to run between there. And, if you go further there’s another set of houses over at Egypt Point at Cowes. And, so they go on round the Island. You’ll find some in Yarmouth, you’ll also find at Totland Bay up on top of the cliff there and at Atherfield and Brook along the Military Road. Then you come back down to Ventnor. And, I think, if I remember rightly, there was probably the old Station at Shanklin as well. But that’s going back to the, you know, 1920’s/30’s.
Lisa : Do you remember any of the very first rescues or jobs that you were called out to?
20 minutes 5 seconds
Jim : Yeah, it’s always a little bit difficult this question because when I finished, somebody asked me the question, how many rescues have you been involved in and I didn’t know. And I got some of the books out and went through and had a rough tot-up and over the years it was well over 2,000. So yeah, the … possibly in the early years the ones that come to mind are the night that the … this is about 1976, when two oil tankers collided off of St Catherine’s. They were called the ‘Pacific Glory’ and the ‘Allegro’. They collided and when they parted, unfortunately there was a lot of oil spilt and the ‘Pacific Glory’ actually caught fire. At the end there was some 40 or so people lost their lives. The ‘Pacific Glory’ actually floated on the tide and came up from St Catherine’s. The ‘Allegro’ wasn’t too bad, she managed to sort herself out. But the ‘Pacific Glory’, she was disabled. She actually came up on the tide and ended up right off of Forelands and she was probably a couple of miles off and I always remember the next morning, seeing her and the oil was all over the stern and the sea, the oil which was on the sea was actually on fire and it was actually on fire for about half a mile behind the boat. I think the Southern Television, as it was at that time, actually said, their headline was ‘The day the sea caught fire’ and they sent their camera crew down to see it. But it was a horrible incident because there was an awful lot of people that were killed on it, a lot of Chinese seamen and the Bembridge Lifeboat went out to assist and they took their local Doctor, local Bembridge Doctor at the time, Dr John Arthur and he basically coordinated the medical side of it and he commandeered a vessel, a CAT volunteered it’s services called the ‘Norweiler’, in setting up a ‘field hospital’ on board and the injured crew members were brought on board there and at the same time we had the Inter-Services Hovercraft unit at Lee-on-Solent and they sent some of their hovercraft down to the Norweiller and actually took the injured people off and took them into the hospitals in the Portsmouth area. So, yeah, that was probably the first big incident that I was involved with and saw. Probably after that one of the other memorable ones was the grounding of HMS ‘Alliance’ on Bembridge Ledge which is one of the Naval submarines and she’d been out on an exercise south of the Island together with another sister submarine and they were coming back, I believe if I remember rightly, one Friday evening. Their exercise had overrun and the word was at the time that they were having a race back, to get back, because of a ‘mess dinner’ or something. But anyway, what basically happened was that the ‘Alliance’ tried to cut a corner on Bembridge Ledge and actually ended up on the Ledge itself and there was always a interest into the start of that casualty as far as the Coastguards were concerned because on that particular day one of the younger full-time Coastguards was actually the Duty Man at Bembridge and he received a telephone call from what was Gilkicker signal station. Gilkicker is on the Mainland coast in the Lee-on-Solent area; they were one of the radio stations for the Navy at that time and the phone call came through for the guy at Bembridge and said, “Can you go and have a look round, we’ve got a strange report here, it seems we’ve got a submarine in trouble in Whitecliff Bay.” So, the particular Coastguard at the time went up to the Coastguard tower, had a look off, and he was only there a couple of seconds, had a look in Whitecliff Bay and ‘I can’t see anything there’ and thought ‘hang on a minute what are these lights straight off me?’ And he had a look through the glasses, and it was dark, he said, “Bloomin ‘eck, it’s not the Whitecliff Bay, it’s right off the station there.” At the time, he actually picked up the phone and called the Station Officer who was indoors and said, “Mr Gear I’ve got a submarine aground on the Ledge, can you come up to the lookout?” The reply he got back was, “Don’t be so bloody stupid Frank” and the phone went dead. So, he thought for a minute, rang back, he said, “I’m not joking” he said, “there is a submarine on the ledge.” “Oh, bloody hell.” That’s just how it all happened to start, but you know, it’s always an interesting little story, that, of how the incident started. Later, in that evening, the wind got up, as quite often it does, and it got up to a good force eight gale and of course it started to get a bit uncomfortable. So, by the morning, the Navy had started to amass one or two rescue vessels and some of their heavy haulage vessels and of course it was too rough to do anything. So, there was concern for the sailors onboard so two things happened. One was that they decided there were going to get a line aboard the submarine, and by a line a rocket line. But, the distance between the shore and the submarine was that great that the rescue equipment we had at Bembridge wasn’t long enough to reach. However, there was two other sets on the Island, one at Ventnor and one at Needles; which were called ‘A’ Sets at the time and they could fire a rocket well over half a mile. And, a set of equipment from Ventnor was brought to Bembridge and the rocket was set up on the beach and fired over the submarine and they got the line on board. I always remember that because at the time they weren’t going to affect a rescue but they had a line on board should they need to. So they decided to … they needed somewhere to secure the inner end of the rocket line and that was accomplished because the District Officer turned round to me and said “Right Jim”, he said “Get the other end of this rocket line” he said, “I want you to go up over the cliff.” He said “Go up to the Coastguard Station” he said “and we’ll tie the rocket line onto the Coastguard station.” So, my part of that exercise was actually to take the inboard end of the line, tie it onto the Coastguard Station. We actually ended up, not that we would have held it, but we had the line holding the submarine on the … tied to the Coastguard station (laughing). What actually then happened was that a little later in the morning the…it was decided, although the Bembridge Lifeboat and that were all standing by, it was decided to use the section rescue helicopters to actually come along and lift about half the crew off, which they did and landed on the beach and the part that I played in that was I was the Coastguard Officer on the beach taking radio equipment out to the submarine so we could talk to it and helping to bring the sailors ashore. So, yes, that was quite an interesting weekend. It was also a local … there was crowds and crowds of people turned up on the Sunday morning to have a look at it and there must have been a best part of 500,000 people that turned up just to see this submarine on the Ledge there. So that was an interesting episode. What I was going to say, one of the Sunday papers managed to get a beautiful picture because standing in the car park of the Crab & Lobster there was various signs, car park signs, and they’ve got this picture of the submarine on the Ledge, and in front of this they had the car park sign and all it said was ‘No Parking’. So that’s the sort of a brief local history of what happened to HMS ‘Alliance’. By the way if you want to see her, she’s there in all her glory at Gosport, now open to the public and you can go and have a look round, see if you find the dents, Bembridge Ledge made.
30 minutes 18 seconds
Lisa : Oh, there’s some things that you mentioned that I’d like to go back and ask you a bit more about. Were there … through the year were there times when you were busier in the year than others?
Jim : Yes, generally during the summer months the very busy time would usually be the school holidays in the summer. But there’s no rhyme nor reason to it really. There was one particular Easter weekend that I remember, and it turned out to be very foggy all of that weekend. We actually got called out from Good Friday to Easter Monday I think about nine times all on different incidents and people getting into trouble in the fog. So yes, there was always one thing that we find, and it’s … I don’t know why it is, but when you actually look at the incidents, we used to call them casualties, that they would occur in batches and if … you could go for some period, several weeks sometimes without getting any callouts or shouts, is another term for them. But, when you got one you … the first thing you said after it was finished is “Ah, well we’d better get everything up together because we’ll get a second one very shortly.” And, nearly every occasion we used to get a batch of three, over four or five days and then it would go quiet again. Then you’d get another batch of three but, it was … you’d never work out why, you know it just came like that. But, yeah, you know, but yes, so it was … I think we said Coastguarding is a lot of waiting around and inactivity and then a sudden hectic activity and then you go back again. But, of course, during the summer months you never knew and weather conditions made a lot of difference to it. Strong winds, fog, that’s when people used to get into trouble and sometimes on very sunny days; kids getting lost, people wanting to climb cliffs and things like that.
Lisa : Could you tell me a bit about the cliff rescue side of things?
Jim : Yes sure. The cliff rescues in this area here were mainly centred around Culver Cliff but there’s quite a lot of cliff at Culver so we get quite a few chances to go up there. Unfortunately, a lot of them fall into the category of being people that are trying to commit suicide, or in fact, have committed suicide and the amount of body retrievals that we do is not for the faint-hearted, because you’d see a number of dead bodies every year to be quite honest. You used to have to get used to it. But, every so often, we had a situation, we’d actually managed to rescue someone and that is always very, very good because the morale of the team goes up exponentially and get a, sort of a glow that lasts about 24 hours. When you can come back after a rescue and think to yourself, well if it hadn’t been for us and we hadn’t been there, that person wouldn’t be alive, so that compensates for all the grotty bits that you had to do. But, you know, that did happen every so often we thought, right this was really worth doing, I actually saved someone’s life.
Lisa : Can you talk through the process how you would actually help someone, the equipment that you would use to do a rescue on the cliff?
Jim : Yes sure. The equipment has changed over the years. Basically, it is very similar. If you’re going to go down to do a … go over the cliff and bear in mind that Culver, the highest part of Culver is about just over 200 foot, but when you get to the cliff edge it’s less than that ‘cos the Bembridge fault is the highest point. You would tackle that. First of all you need what we used to call in the days a ‘bag’ which is basically a pair of canvas breeches which are like shorts and you put a leg into each of those and you were attached by always two ropes, that’s not necessarily obvious in the immediately … why you need two ropes but it’s very vital because if one of them breaks you’ve still got another one. They are the ‘lines’, they’re known as cliff lines. They’re attached to what they call a holdfast. Now, a holdfast has to be a very strong point that you can secure anything to, and that was achieved by having some steel stakes about inch, inch and a half diameter which were actually driven into the surface of the cliff using a big 7lb mallet so it was quite hard work driving these … we would usually put 4 stakes in for a holdfast and then lash them together and then the two cliff lines would be attached to that. We’d also have what we called ‘breaststroke’ men as well, not that necessarily had to be a man, either it was a cliff man or as breaststroke man. Just a term that they used to use because when I was running the Coastguard, I think at maximum we had 4 lady members in the team. But the breaststroke men or women, their job was to go to the edge of the cliff, see what was going on, watch what was happening with the cliff man or woman as they descended and assist them when they came back over the top of the cliff. One of the hardest things doing cliff work is when you get just to the top, at the edge of the cliff, is getting that cliff person over the edge because they’ve got to go from … if they’re walking down the cliff, and you’ve got to turn your body through 90 degrees to walk on the top of the cliff. But when you’re doing that with somebody else that you’ve brought up or somebody you’ve brought up in a stretcher, it’s not that easy. So, the breaststroke people, yeah, had their work cut out, just that last bit, it’s only about five or six feet, that’s where the real hard work comes in. Obviously, a cliff man has a lot of hard work as well because it’s quite critical going up and down. You can get lumps of chalk falling on you, that happens nearly every time, so of course they all wear cliff helmets to allow that to happen, or it’ll happen to get down there safely shall we say. But it wasn’t unknown for our people to come back and we scrapped the cliff helmets after the rescue because of the dents in it. From time to time you used to get a lot of injury in the shoulder because the rocks would hit them on their shoulders as well. So that is, yeah, it’s the basic set-up. Over the years, in the early days it was all hand-hauling so you needed at least 10 people up on the edge of the cliff to pull the lines, to pull the cliff man and the casualty back up. And ten people can reasonably move two people over the cliff, bearing in mind you’ve got their entire weight so it was really quite hard work. As the years went on though, we did get winches on the front of the vehicles and then we got portable winches we set up and carried by two people which were a great innovation because it took a lot of the hard work out of it. You wouldn’t have wanted more than three or four people to be rescued because you were too physically exhausted. When that sort of thing happened, you get another team to come in and back you up. So that’s in brief summary what’s happening at the cliff top. In later years, obviously, earlier years it was all controlled by whistles and a blast on a whistle. That, in later years, that was all controlled by radios and was much better.
39 minutes 36 seconds
Lisa : Yeah, I wanted to ask you about communication and how that changed over the years?
Jim : Drastically actually. In the early years when I first started there was little communication, direct communication, other than the telephone between the Coastguards and anybody else. The Lifeboats, when I first started had radios on board, but they were what we called MF radios, medium frequency radios, and could transmit over quite a distance but the only people they had to communicate with were what they called the Coast Radio Stations. Coast Radio Stations were run by the GPO and they were not too frequently spaced around the coast in the UK. Luckily, for us in the Solent area we had one on the Isle of Wight which was down at Niton and surprisingly known as Niton Radio and lots of people on the Island even to this day can remember the mast and there’s still some of the mast about. As things progressed during the years, Niton Radio did cease to exist and was taken over communications by the Coastguard. But in the early days everything had to go through Niton radio as matter of … funny, well at Bembridge we couldn’t actually communicate directly with Niton Radio on the phone, we actually had to telephone our Headquarter Station at Needles and then Needles would telephone Niton Radio and then pass the message to the Lifeboat and then the Lifeboat would come back with its message to the Coastguards at Needles, which would then be passed to Bembridge and then we’d pass it to the opposite at Bembridge Lifeboat. So, you know you’re not going to get quick communication. If that all worked efficiently it was probably 10 minutes from sending the message out to getting the message back. However, as time progressed, VHF radios were brought in on the marine band and the Coastguard Stations started to have VHF radios put in. I can remember in the early days when the radios were installed at Bembridge, so that we got practice on them, we used to have to call one of our Mainland Stations up every hour during the night just to gain practice in using them and we’d be there at half past two in the morning calling up Selsey Coastguard, Bembridge Coastguard radio check and if they weren’t on duty we’d call Calshot Coastguard. But the whole idea was to get us using the radios. But they came in very effectively we could then talk directly to the Lifeboats and after a little bit, we could talk directly to the helicopters as well. Initially the helicopters were on UHF and that meant we had another step in the chain to get a message through to them, but the Lifeboats had UHF on so you could send a message to the helicopter but you had the Coastguard, the Lifeboat, the Lifeboat would send your message to the helicopter and then it would come back again so it was all … it worked, but it was long winded choice though. Then when they had the total reorganisation of the Coastguard service, communications improved because after a few years then basically the Coastguards took over all the communications around the UK, radio wise, and at that point the GPO Coast Radio Stations like Niton Radio and that all faded away.
Lisa : How did you know when you were needed for a particular job or a callout. How did you … how were you communicated to?
Jim : That changed over the years. Initially, if it was just a single person was wanted, you probably got a telephone call. However, going back when we were talking about the days of when we had the rescue equipment with the breeches buoys then if we wanted the whole team, the Coastguard Station would actually fire two maroons and very similar to the maroons that were used by the Lifeboat in those days, the…if the Lifeboat was wanted there was four maroons fired, which had – they’d burst with a green star. If the Coastguard were wanted, they fired two maroons and they had white stars, and if both were wanted, of course, you got all six. And that was fine, but over the years, I think Health and Safety got the better of it because those maroons were rather dangerous devices and they were fired out of our three/four inch diameter mortar and you had to strike a fuse on the end of it on a short piece of fuse which was no more than about two to three foot long and then you had something like about six to eight seconds to get out the way before it actually exploded and the mortar turned over and over until it got up to two or three hundred foot where it would explode with an extremely loud bang with the appropriate star. But, of course, you do get bits and pieces of debris that came down from it and that used to cause some problems in some areas. There was one occasion when one piece of a maroon actually ended up on the top of a baby’s pram. So, over the years it changed and as radio technology and that progressed and right up to the current day it’s actually by pagers and they’re actually probably the most effective way of doing it and everybody carried a pager. Of course, if you think that there’s about between three and three and a half thousand of what we called auxiliary Coastguards, but they’ve now been renamed as Coastguard Rescue Officers, that’s quite a big bill to pay for pagers. But now, everyone’s now got one and they can either individually page you or group page you so they can call out a whole team by dialling one number or if they just want say one or two people, they can just dial a single number and make it happen like that. Prior to the pagers coming in, if you … we used to have to have a duty person on call or in fact two people on call so there was always two people in the village and that meant you were … before the pagers arrived, you were actually on telephone call so you couldn’t go anywhere where you couldn’t be contacted by telephone and if it wasn’t any of the normal numbers you had to phone into Headquarters at Lee-on-Solent and tell them where you were going and what telephone number you’d be on and you still were expected to be within about a couple of miles of the Station all the time. Now that’s fine, but it does get a bit trying when you’ve done that for a dozen years or so and yeah, there was always a certain number of people in the village, there was always two Coastguards and there was always two members of the Lifeboat crew, Duty Coxswain and the Duty Mechanic, that always had to be within that distance and that can be quite a tie. But when you got the pagers it was a lot better because you didn’t have … and of course if you wanted to go out somewhere there was nothing to stop you going out but you had to find somebody else to be on call for you so that was another phone call or maybe two or three phone calls to find someone that was going to be in the village they could be on call for you and you had to tell Solent Coastguard that they were … who was going to be on call for you and then when you came back from wherever you’d been you had to go through the rigmarole again and tell everybody that you were back and so it was quite a bit of a tie, so that the pagers really did help that.
Lisa : So were you on call when you were at work at the Airport?
Jim : Yes, yes, no all the time. I was relatively lucky working at Bembridge Airport because I could probably make the station in about three or four minutes which was fine, from the Airport and did do on many occasions.
Lisa : So, could you tell me a bit about how your role in the Coastguard changed over time? Because, how long was your actual service?
49 minutes 20 seconds
Jim : It was forty-two, forty-three years. When I first started, I was what was called a ’Watcher’ which meant that I went down and did supplementary watches to the Coastguards’ regular watches which is something we discussed earlier. After a period of time I was then also into the say, lifesaving apparatus team, later known as the CRE Team actually, Coastguard Rescue Equipment Team and in that, everybody used to have a particular job to do and you were all numbered off, from number 1 to number 11 and each person had a job, My job was number 6 and number 6’s job was actually to attach the breeches buoy to all the lines. So I had to go through a succession of various nautical knots on this and no two … none of the knots were the same so there were, I think, about six attachments you had to make and every one was a different knot and then actually attach the breeches buoy via a block up onto the hawser or the other ‘whip’ pending on which method you were using. And then you had half the team on, ‘cos the breeches buoy was hauled out on one line and hauled in on the other. So, you had to help do the hauling like, very similar to what I was describing on the cliff rescues earlier on. From then on, beginning of the 70’s when they started to reorganise things the Headquarters Station was, on the Island, at the Needles, actually out by the Needles Lighthouse. That’s quite a scary place as well because there was somebody on there for 24 hour watches and over the years I did do a few out there. But the most interesting thing about that is the Coastguard Station stands right on the cliff edge. When I say right on the cliff edge, the cliff edge comes straight up and the building’s right on the edge of it to the point of view that the Guards on duty out there always said that they knew when the weather got up to gale force 8 they didn’t need any weather forecast to tell them that because that force 8, the wind coming up the English Channel would hit the side of the cliff face at the Needles and inevitably it broke off little bits of pieces of chalk and plinth and that and they would get blown up the cliff fact and then the wind, as it came over the top, would take them … some of them would actually splash against the glass window and you know, it’s like lumps of shrapnel type of thing coming in. So, they always used to know when they’d got to force 8 because there was some debris kicking in, flung against the side of the window up there.
Lisa : What about St Catherine’s Lighthouse, was there a Watch there?
Jim : Er, yes. There was three Keepers I think at St Catherine’s, the Principle Keeper and two Keepers and they did a night watch. So, there was one on duty every night and they had various tasks to perform during the night but their main thing, probably was that the lighting-up at sunset and shutting down at sunrise. And they always used to go through a … quite a routine of cleaning in the mornings and you know the whole lot would be cleaned every day. And that includes all the mirrors, the windows on the outside and things like that. They also had to be aware of what the visibility was because in those days a lot of Lighthouses had foghorns and it was up to them to decide when visibility … I think our criteria was always one mile. I think the Trinity House had a similar criteria. When visibility dropped down to that distance then the fog horn was sounded much to the dismay of all the local residents, it would continue to blast at least once a minute, for a large number of hours. I mean, although I heard the fog horn at St Catherine’s, living in Bembridge we had the same thing on the Nab Tower lighthouse. Now that was quite intrusive and that carries five miles away, but you could hear when it started up and one rather long blast once every minute and I think it was…
Lisa : You were saying there were changes to the whole service in the 1970’s, can you tell me a bit more about that?
54 minutes 48 seconds
Jim : Yes, what basically happened there was that they withdrew a lot of the regular Coastguards from the Stations around the coast which, Bembridge, for arguments sake, was known as a ‘constant night watch station’. And, they put them all to the Headquarters Station, but they did leave a regular Coastguard, who was a Station Officer, to look after the auxiliary staff and they were all … the Station Officer ran all the auxiliary staff. However, the other staff, the other two supporting Guards did go to, in fact they had to trail all the way out to the Needles every watch that they had from Bembridge. In fact, towards the end, there was about five of them that were doing that. At that time from then onwards, things started to change because we’re now going to the period whereby the breeches buoy was used less and less and the helicopters were taking over the job of that. But, also, everything was done on the coast was being done by the Auxiliary Coastguards or Coastguard Rescue Officers as they later became known. And then it was all government organisations because, of course, the government is, sorry, the Coastguard – HM Coastguard is part of the government is part of the Department of Transport, or DTI now. They were always looking to centralise and save money over the years, so the idea was that we had our Rescue Co-ordination Centres around the UK and not too many of them either on the south coast. There was one at Dover, one at Solent, one at Portland and then I think the next one down was Falmouth. So that shows you how well it was integrated. So, at that point, the Stations that were actually on the coast were very much there for rescuing and for their local knowledge because when you put your regular Coastguards into these Headquarter Stations, which were known as MRSC’s – Maritime Rescue Sub Centres – and every so often you had a MRCC which was a Rescue Co-ordination Centre which was supposed to look after a whole area, the coast was really on its own and for a few years they ran with a Station Officer at each Station and then they decided to put several stations together and put them into what they called Sectors and the Isle of Wight then became ‘A’ Sector with the three stations, one at Needles, one at Ventnor and one at Bembridge. Subsequently to that they decided on having a little more coverage, and they had a small team at Ryde and another small team at Newport and this was mainly to get people on-scene very quickly but the Newport team also had another function because they had to be the liaison with the Coastguard Helicopter on the occasions that it came into a medivac from St Mary’s hospital which was quite frequently that that happened more frequently than people actually know. Although nowadays that is also supplemented by the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance Service, but both services still run medivacs in and out of St Mary’s.
Lisa : When did you take on the role of Station Officer at Bembridge?
59 minutes 7 seconds
Jim : That came about in 1980. I wasn’t actually initially Station Officer because that was a rank that was left for the regular Coastguards. But I was actually what was called ‘Auxiliary in Charge’ which is a title that’s been used round the coast for many, many years and the Stations at Sandown and Blackgang, Atherfield, Brook and all that who just had their own Rescue Teams, always had an Auxiliary in Charge. But, of later years, that title was dropped or faded away and it actually … they brought back the title of ‘Station Officers’ and then a bit later on we also had ‘Deputy Station Officers’, which was … also brought about new insignia that the people had to wear. And, at that time, I was on the National Committee for the future and the way ahead of the Auxiliary Coastguard service and I had a part to play in what insignia everybody wears on their uniform and, in fact she still does even to this day. The only thing about it was that there was always a slight difference between the regular service and the what is now the Coastguard Rescue Officers and the Regulars always mimic the insignia of the Royal Navy. But the Coastguard Rescue Officers had the same number of bars, but we were only allowed to have white ones and not gold ones. But that didn’t matter. So yes, that was a period for quite a number of years. One person was selected from each of the Districts to represent that District on a committee which met, I think it was once of twice a year, depending on how busy you were and decided on how the input from the coast on how we should go forward and what sort of equipment we should have. That was quite an interesting time.
Lisa : Did your duties and responsibilities change when you became the Auxiliary in Charge?
Jim : Yes. I think the first thing that became immediately apparent was, ‘Oh dear, I’m responsible for everything’ and before you go along and do whatever you had to make a few suggestions, but if it all went wrong it wasn’t your problem. Then suddenly you get elevated and ‘Oh dear, it is all my problem and where do I go for help?’ There … you had to become very, very self-sufficient very, very quickly because there might not be any immediate help, there might not … might be occasions when you’ve got quite a major incident and it’s down to you what you do and, you know, this became apparent over the years. I remember a particular incident down on the … in Seaview when we had a dead whale. A very large dead whale floating just off of Seaview and it was decided that it needed to be beached and disposed of. I think our colleagues at Ryde Rescue had the job of towing it ashore and I suddenly found myself in the position of ‘where do you want to put it Jim’? And you think, ‘hang on a minute’, there’s all sorts of problems with dead whales. First of all, they carry lots of diseases especially around their air holes and things like that and they’re diseases that are quite well … infect the general public. ‘What are we going to do when we get it ashore?’ Well, it’s all got to be cut up and it’s got to be transported to wherever we’re going to bury it. When you bury it, you have to bury it at a certain depth and you have to get lime to go in the bottom of the pit to help it decompose. All these things rush through your mind and there’s somebody, you know, with a Lifeboat out there and this whale saying, “But where do you want us to do it?” As it was, it was decided upon bringing this ashore by Puckpool Park which we had a nice bit of flat beach on and there is a position there where you can actually get lorries down onto the beach to …because, you know, a large whale, when you cut it up you’re talking about diggers, you know, three/five tonne lorries and big things like that to remove it. They’re absolutely huge things. So, you know, there was all sorts of responsibilities that suddenly came flooding your way. Another one that comes to mind immediately was when one of the fast CATS arrived to Portsmouth caught fire and they managed to get it into Ryde Pier. The engine room had caught fire and the Fire Brigade put it out, but of course, then Wightlink were not in a position to move it because the MCA had taken over, the MCA being the Maritime Coastguard Agency and you were their representative on sea, the same as with the whale incident, the local Coastguard is a representative of the receiver of wreck. So, you have to make their decisions for them and say right, we’ve looked at this, this is what we’re going to do. But anyway, getting back to the Ferry at … she was tied up alongside Ryde Pier. “Right, will you go on board and make sure it is … you’re satisfied that it’s safe for the vessel to be towed back to Portsmouth? And when you are, Wightlink will send across their boat to tow it back, but it’s up to you to make sure on the Maritime Coastguard Agency’s behalf that you’re happy for it to go back.” “What?” (laughing). You know, you can get into all sorts of positions there. An incident that’s happened quite recently, the guys on scene would have found themselves in exactly the same position, is when the Red Funnel Car Ferry ran aground in Cowes Harbour. Its local representative has to go on board, interview the Captain and make all the initial decisions because you’re the person who’s … [the recording appears to pause here]
1 hour 7 minutes 7 seconds
Lisa : Could you tell me about what happened on the night of the famous hurricane in 1987?
Jim : Yes, sure. The great storm in 1987, the night of the hurricane, as it’s known was on the 15th /16th October. It’s currently etched in one’s memory that particular night. Just a little background, it all started because as far as I was concerned myself and my wife had been out with a friend in Shanklin and when we were driving back home about 10 or 11 o’clock in the evening we found … well I noticed that going along Sandown, the tide seemed to be extremely high and I mentioned to my wife this was the fact. She said, “Yeah, I’ve never seen it that high, ever.” Didn’t think anything more of it. When we got back to Bembridge and going to back what I’d been describing earlier on, I had to actually phone up Solent Coastguard and say that I was back on call, because I’d been out of the village. And when I did, the Watch Manager over there said, “Oh, what’s your weather like over there Jim?” I said, “Oh it’s puffing up a bit, it’s not too bad, the only thing that I’d noticed was extremely high tide at Sandown as we came through.” He said, “Well, I’ve just had your opposite number from Newhaven phone up” he said “and he tells me it’s blowing force 9 there,” which is a severe gale, and he said, “and we haven’t had any inputs at all from anybody else, the weather forecast’s not saying it’s going to be too bad.” I said, “Oh, well let’s see what happens. Anyway, goodnight” and went off to bed. The next thing I knew was that the phone rang and it was somewhere after half past one in the morning and I said … I was grappling round to find the phone because, as these things happen, my other half had moved the bedroom round at the time. Once I found the phone and answered it, the same guy was on the other end, and he said to me, “John Brockman here Jim, can you get down to Shanklin?” He said, “We’ve got a report of white flares off of Shanklin Pier” he said, “and we can’t identify what it is.” He said, “The wind’s picked up a bit” and he said, “we’ve already sent the Ventnor Mobile down there but Ventnor Mobile have been coming down out over Cowley’s and they had a tree fall behind them, their Land Rover, and they’ve had a tree now fallen in front of them, they can’t go either way. Can you get down there and see what it is and then see if you can help out at the Mobile.” He said, “Oh, by the way be careful because the wind’s now force 11.” “What? yeah, ok right fine.”
1 hour 10 minutes 20 seconds
Next thing is, where’s the bedside light – no electricity, so get out and find some clothes to put on in the dark, get out of the front door, going up our little path which was in Foreland Road here, and a gust of wind picked me up, slammed me against the gate, the gate come off the hinges and I ended up sitting on this iron gate on the pavement thinking ‘what’s happened’? So, I then looked down the road and I could see all sorts of blue flashing going on. I thought ‘Oh, is that lightning, oh I dunno.’ Anyway, got in the car, drove down the road and as I got close to it, I found that it was electricity cables all arcing together and even worse, still they were in the road, across the road. So, I thought ‘oh, what do I do here’? I thought ‘hmmmm, I’ve got rubber tyres, we’ll try a daredevil bit and go straight over it’, which I did and looked round and they were still arcing behind me after I went past them. Got to the Coastguard Station; I also called out my colleague, No 2 on call who is John Hammond and he arrived a bit shaken as well. We discussed what we had to do very quickly. He said, “Well I think we ought to get some extra lighting” so we went round to the Coastguard Station because at that time the Coastguard Station was split up with a duty room, a garage and a lookout. And, we went round to the Coastguard Station. At that point we had a look, we had a large flagpole on top of the Coastguard Station and that was going about 30 degrees either way in the wind. So, we got in there quickly, got the equipment we wanted round to the garage. When we got round to the garage, he … no I opened one of the garage doors and unfortunately the garage was facing into the direction of the storm. So, that garage door got ripped out of my hand and broke a hinge. And, we looked at each other and said, “Well, we’ll go for it, you stay here and open the other garage door, I’ll get inside the vehicle first”, because we knew the garage doors would blow away from us “and then we’ll see what happens then.” Anyway, good that, started the thing, gave him the thumbs-up to open the other door, as he did so the wind caught it, pulled the garage door straight off onto the front of the vehicle and the roof of the garage disappeared. Luckily, he was upwind so he wasn’t injured at all. So, I thought, oh, the right thing to do here is put the vehicle in first, drive it forward and see what happens. And as I did all the debris just blew away; he jumped in and away we went. So, that was the start of the proceedings. We then went to see if we could go to Sandown, we couldn’t get past Bembridge School or Steynewoods because there was trees down. We then decided we’ll go the other via St Helens. We couldn’t get up Station Road at St Helens, but we could get up Latimer Road. As we got up there and went along the top of the Green there was a Fire Engine there which we recognised as the Bembridge one with quite a number of the firemen that we knew and all sort of shouted and waved at each other and they actually had a house there that the roof was lifting and they actually had a couple of lines over the roof of this house trying to secure it. So, we made appropriate gestures and went on. We got ok, then we got into Sandown, but the next excitement was when we were going through … past Skew Bridge and then going into, to Shanklin along past which is Wiltons Garage now. On the left-hand side is the or was the Gatten and Lake Primary School and we saw instantly there was obviously a huge gust and the gable end came out of Gatten and Lake Primary School and the walls along the road on the other side all collapsed into the road. Got a little bit further down and then it was a matter of ducking the dustbins because they were all coming down the road and being blown down the road but they were all quite airborne and they were actually going over the top of the Land Rover in the wind.
1 hour 15 minutes 9 seconds
There was one of two places where we saw hedges which weren’t upright, they were actually laid, with the wind, actually on the ground. And there was also one other place where we also saw a garden shed go over the top of us as well. So, we then ended up going down onto Shanklin Esplanade. When we got down the bottom and as we got there we thought ‘what’s all these … looked like railway sleepers on the beach in front of us’ and we turned the corner and went along. My colleague said, “Those aren’t railway sleepers” he said, “that’s all the wood that’s ripped off the Pier.” So, we went along there and yeah, by that time the whole area of the Pier, the walkway had all been stripped and blown onto the shore. The problem was we immediately found out there was possibly two fishermen that he been out on the end of the Pier and we didn’t know whether they had got ashore or not. So, we had to try and ascertain what had happened there. We soon ascertained what the flares were, they were actually electricity cables being torn apart on the Pier as the Pier was ripped apart. So, we then decided that we ought to go along and search all these sleepers on the beach because they were all part of one another and just to make sure if the fishermen were out there, none of them were amongst the sleepers and we couldn’t find anybody, but a little bit later on we did find out that they had got home ok. So that was the first part and we decided … at that point there was something else was starting to develop and also round about that time the Ventnor Coastguard Mobile had got itself free from Calleys and they’d come down and joined us. They managed to pick up a chainsaw by this time from somewhere (laughing) never did ask them where they got that from and we were both stood by because another incident was happening … the surf at St Catherine’s and we took shelter by Shanklin Sailing Club where you could get in underneath and most of the debris and stuff was blowing over the top of us at that point. We couldn’t really do much more about the Pier until we got some daylight. When we were down at Shanklin seafront, by that time the mean wind speed had reached 86 miles an hour with gusts up to 108 miles an hour. The hurricane actually developed in the Bay of Biscay and had moved towards the south coast of England causing around about 2 billion pounds worth of damage. The atmospheric pressure actually on the night, and we did actually get that confirmed by Southampton Weather Centre, at Bembridge was 959 millibars, which if you look at your barometers its nearly off the bottom of the scale. And it was also the famous night where the weather forecaster at the Met Office, Michael Fish, got it wrong, because he said, “No, a woman had phoned up and said she thought there was a hurricane coming.” He said, “No madam there was no possible reason to think that.” And, in fact the way that the Met Office were caught out because we’ve got copies of the barograph from Southampton Met Office and the storm suddenly took a turn for the worse about eleven/ twelve o’clock that evening, but that’s another story. At Shanklin, with the Mobile and we were waiting for some information and we found out that, or were told, that there was a Coaster putting out the distress message south of St Catherine’s Lighthouse and the Coaster’s name was the ‘Union Mars’. She had part of her bridge had been blown away and the Captain was using the emergency steering. Luckily, he did have a fair bit of sea room and he was using his best endeavours to see what he could do with his craft. And he was actually saying that, “Don’t send anybody out to my assistance, at this point, but I do want you to know that, you know, I’m quite severely damaged.”
1 hour 20 minutes 2 seconds
At that point the Bembridge Lifeboat was put on full alert, but the crew must have been in the Boathouse at Bembridge but didn’t launch and the Coastguard didn’t want to send a single Lifeboat down there so decided to send Yarmouth Lifeboat as well. The Yarmouth Lifeboat was launched but it was decided she should come through the Solent via Cowes to Bembridge and anchor off Bembridge Lifeboat Station, and wait there and if the Lifeboats did go, they’d both go together from Bembridge. The interesting part of this particular story is that everybody was saying, “Union Mars, that rings a bell” and it did in the Coastguard Maritime world and then we suddenly realised why and that was because the ‘Union Mars’ had a sister ship which was the ‘Union Star’ and the ‘Union Star’ was the Coaster that was involved in a serious incident. It was the incident of when the Penlee Lifeboat was capsized and the ‘Union Star’ drove on the Cornish coast and the crew of the ‘Union Star’ and the Penlee Lifeboat were lost. That actually happened to the ‘Union Star’ because she actually ended up getting water in her fuel tanks and the engine stopped. But anyway, to continue the story off of St Catherine’s, the ‘Union Mars’, the sister ship, managed to actually change course, although it went round in quite a large circle and started to head up towards the Nab Tower which she eventually got up to the Nab Tower some hours later and the Yarmouth Lifeboat and the Bembridge Lifeboat continued to stand by until she managed to get herself into Spithead. At that point it was … it had got light in Shanklin and the Coastguards, I think there was five of us on scene, and we then went all the way along the beach. I remember walking along all … on the top of all the bits of wood that had been blown up onto the shore at Shanklin just to check that there was nobody there, nothing untoward. It took us an hour or so to walk over all this from our … one end…the bottom end of the … the road comes down onto the beach at Shanklin to actually the Pier itself. Looking out to the Pier the only bit that was actually left of it was just the inner end and the outer end and the entire walkway had been blown away and was deposited along the shore. So that was that. Our day wasn’t complete at that point because we started to make our way back towards Bembridge. On making our way back towards Bembridge there was a further report of red flares in Sandown Bay and we were requested to go to a high point to see if we could observe anything. The high point we chose was Culver Down. When we drove up Culver Down past Bembridge Fort and suddenly a man jumped out in the road, we didn’t quite see where he’d come from but it looked like from behind a bush, and waved us down. When we said to him, “You ok, what’s up?” he said, “No not really”, he said, “we’ve been sheltering” he said, “a couple of families”, we didn’t count them exactly, but it was at least 5 or 6 people there and they told us that they were the inhabitants of the Coastguard cottages at the end of the Down. They had actually vacated their properties when the hurricane came through and it blew all the windows in on the south side and the pressure was so immense that it blew all the windows out on the other side and sucked a lot of the contents of their house which we found out on the bank opposite and also the, I don’t think it was inhabited at the time, but the Culver Haven, which was the Pub on top of the Downs, that had suffered a similar fate where all the stuff out the bar and the optics and that were all strewn over down to the Bembridge Down.
1 hour 24 minutes 58 seconds
Anyway. coming back to the 5 or 6 people, they said to us, “Oh, can we get … now you’ve come up, can we get back down because there was trees blocking the way up.” We said, “Oh yes, you can because we cut them up with the saw, that’s how we got up there.” So, they said, “Oh great, we’ll get our car.” We said, “Have you got somewhere to go?” “Yes, we’ve got relatives in Sandown and Brading and that.” So, they disappeared and that’s the last we actually saw of them. But the amount of damage there was, yeah, their roofs were off … I’m not at all surprised that that’s what they wanted to do. They just wanted to get out of their houses because it was so dangerous to stay in them and they’d actually stayed several hours, sort of crouched under the gorse bushes up on the Downs. Anyway, from then on, we made sure everybody was ok and returned to the Station and – to see the rest of our colleagues who’d been called out, who were on duty waiting there. The flagpole that we saw wavering about had broken apparently about five minutes after we’d left the Station, because when the other people came down, the other Coastguards, the flagpole was broken so we just missed that little incident by several minutes. I think we finally got off duty about ten or eleven o’clock on that morning when a lot of the things had quietened down. So, that’s the night of the 15th/16th October 1987 in my memory anyway.
Interview ends
1 hour 26 minutes 47 seconds
Transcribed May 2019
Chris Litton
2nd Interview
Lisa : It’s the 24th May 2019 and this is a second interview with Jim Roberts at his home in Bembridge and Lisa Kerley is the interviewer. Thank you Jim for having me back for a second interview to cover some of the things that we didn’t get round to on the first one. So, could we start by you telling me a bit about the location of the various Coastguard Stations around the Island during your time in service?
Jim : Yes. Nice to see you again. The location of the Coastguard Stations. Let’s first have a look in the 1960’s and in that period of time we had … there were Coastguard Stations at Bembridge, Sandown, Ventnor, Blackgang, along the back of the White at Atherfield, Brook and the Needles, and there was also one at Cliff End, which is inside the Solent, up by the Forts, at the western end of the Solent.During the first half of the 20th century, there were many more Coastguard Stations when coastal patrols were carried out between the Stations mainly at night time. In the East Wight alone, there were many Stations whose buildings can still be found today at East Cowes along the Front there, at Fishbourne Creek, Ryde Esplanade, Seaview Duver, the Point at Bembridge, the still existing one at Forelands at Bembridge on top of Culver Down, at Shanklin and at Ventnor and those are just the ones that were there in the East Wight. As the service was modernised during the latter half of the 20th century, after the HM Coastguard Act was introduced in 1922, the Coastguard’s role was featured more on Search and Rescue. Many Stations were closed by the late 1970’s. There are only Stations left at the Needles, which is the Headquarter Station, at Bembridge and at Ventnor all of whom had cliff rescue teams. From 1980’s, all three Stations were staffed by auxiliary Coastguards with an Auxiliary in charge. After the Headquarters Station known as an MRSC, which stands for the Maritime Rescue Sub Centre was at the Needles was moved to Lee on Solent and became know as something we hear a lot about today, Solent Coastguard. At that time , there were just two full-time Coastguards on the Isle of Wight and they were known as Sector Officers. One was based in the East Wight whose name was John Finch and one in the West Wight who was John Trill. Later this was reduced just to one person known then as the Wight Sector Manager and Ron Philips, Jim Caithness and Mike Forsyth-Caffrey have filled these positions up to the present time. I became Auxiliary in Charge at Bembridge in 1980 until at 2011 and on my retirement, my place was taken by Martin Groom, who was my Deputy Station Officer. Yes, another change in job title. Auxiliary in Charge were renamed Station Officers around the turn of the century.
5 minutes 27 seconds
Lisa : For those years Jim, what sort of equipment were you given to deal with different rescues that you had to undertake?
Jim : When I first started, the equipment that we had at Bembridge was know as ‘Life Saving Apparatus Equipment’, a quaint old title and this was used for rigging breeches buoys and that was responsible for rescuing people from grounded vessels to the shore line. That included the ship’s crew, passengers whoever was on board, but one must remember that you are bringing people ashore in basically a life belt so you are only going to bring one at a time and if you had dozens of people to bring ashore, the crew were going to get very tired pulling people ashore maybe over several hundred yards by ropes in foul weather conditions. However, the equipment was withdrawn as a role and was their role was taken over by the rescue helicopters, so the breeches buoy equipment disappeared, helicopters took over.
Lisa : And about what time would that have been Jim? What year approximately?
Jim : That would have been the early 70’s that that took place. It really took place when the helicopters became capable of having winches put on board and capable of carrying several people that they had rescued. Initially, I remember seeing that we had the Whirlwind helicopters and then later the Wessex helicopters. Both of those were used and initially the base was at Thorney Island. Later, the base moved to Lee on Solent and that was run by the Royal Navy and one can remember their helicopters being painted in orange and blue. The RAF also provided helicopters from No 22 Squadron, but they distinctly different because they were painted bright yellow. When the helicopter here was set up at HMS Daedalus at Lee on Solent, the Coastguard Liaison Officer that was appointed was a gentleman by the name of Clary Gear who was previously the Coastguard Station Officer at Bembridge who trained me when I first started in the Service in Bembridge in the mid 1960’s. In more recent years, the Coastguard Service has used larger Sikorsky S 61-N helicopters famously known … one was India Juliet and India Juliet featured on a number of television programs that maybe some of you will remember. Over the last few years, the Service had used Agusta 169’s and even they now have been replaced by the Agusta 192.
10 minutes 8 seconds
Lisa : If a helicopter is required for a rescue, then can you talk me through how that works, the process?
Jim : Yes, sure. The helicopter is organised via the Coastguard Headquarter Station. Now in this area, we’ve talked about Solent Coastguard which is where the call will initiate. The Coastguard Service have Headquarter Stations and in my time they were known as Marine Rescue Sub Centres. All the distress calls, whether they be from telephones or from radios or members of the public reporting them, all those calls go into the Solent Coastguard Station. They then decide on what resources they need and for every rescue it is different. It is not like the Fire Service when they have a fairly simple job. They’ve got a fire; they send a Fire Engine or maybe a extending ladder vehicle etc. In the Coastguard Service, you’ve got Lifeboats, you’ve got helicopters, all sorts of things so the decision on what is sent depends on what the incident is and the Officers in Charge will make that decision. Sometimes though, that decision isn’t always easy to make if you don’t see what’s going on. If you’re on the scene, it’s much easier to decide what you want, so quite often, one of the things that happens is that the Coastguard send out one of their own mobiles, one of their own vehicles to be on scene. They will alert some of the rescue services but they also rely on their own vehicle getting on scene, making an assessment of what they can see and then they may update or increase the number of services they’ve got there so, Solent Coastguard will be the people that were able to call out a helicopter. Any of the Coastguards on the ground, if they could see that that was necessary, were able to request it and normally their request would be accepted. The Coastguard helicopters, in fact all the helicopters around the UK, because some are Royal Naval and some are RAF and this has changed over recent years and they are now all run by the Coastguard, but they were all controlled by a Control Station which was up in Scotland for a whole number of years. However, that has recently been changed and that is now down on the south coast at the UK Headquarters near Swanwick, so yeah, that’s basically how the helicopters are called out. They are actually on call 24 hours a day, but usually they’re crewed from early morning ‘till the middle of the evening then overnight they’re on .. they actually call it 45-minute readiness which means if they get a call the crew have to be got out of bed to get to the airfield and then get the helicopter in the air. Although it was known as 45-minute readiness, they usually manage to do it much, much quicker than that and you could get a helicopter in the air in 20-25 minutes at night.
Lisa : So, there needs to be, I imagine, a good communication between the crew that’s on the ground and the helicopter crew.
15 minutes 14 seconds
Jim : Yes, sure. That was easier to do with the equipment that we have. Every Coastguard Officer that’s out on the coast and they called Auxiliary Coastguards and now called Coastguard Rescue Officers. Everyone has their own personal radio. Any of those personal radios can talk directly to the Coastguard helicopter, so yes, I can be on duty in Sandhurst but know that the helicopter is flying over and I can talk direct to the crew on board and similarly to the Lifeboat crews or the Inshore boat crews and so communications has always been good. The Coastguards in this area have a number of Relay Stations around so they’ve got very good coverage. Certainly, in my time the Stations were relayed the calls into the Headquarters, there’s one at Needles, one on the top of St Boniface Down. There’s one at Lee on Solent, one at Selsey Bill and at Newhaven and they could talk to any vessel or Coastguard unit in that area, 2000 square miles I think it was, virtually across to the French coast so communications was never a problem. The other thing, while we’re talking about communications is that the contact or the call-out for everybody is actually they have their own pager system which is either activated by their own radios or by a British Telecom’s system, so if there is a 999 call coming in, and there is always more than one person on duty, one of the others would decide what resources were going to go and while they were still talking to the person with the 999 call, there would be another operator who was activating the pagers. As soon as your pager went off, you’d turn your radio on and call in and quite often you could get to the point where you’d be being tasked to go before the other operator had put the 999 call down which you know is a very quick service. And like all systems, it wasn’t always perfect but yes, there was a very good … and again the helicopters worked the same way. You know, it was just one call and give them the information. Quite often we used to get further information given to us en route because we got underway and then more information would be coming in you were updated as you were going along.
Lisa : So, thinking back then, to the early ‘70’s, when the helicopter was introduced, can you think of any specific rescues that spring to mind where the helicopter was called?
Jim : In the early days, there was lots of incidents where we used to get the helicopter to come and investigate, particularly because one of the things probably people don’t realise is the higher you are the more you can see and from that point of view being in an aircraft or a helicopter you’ve got a much better view of an area. Probably one of the early ones that comes to mind was an incident off of Seaview when there was some windsurfers in difficulty and the … there were two or three of them in difficulty, our mobile got there and two of them were picked up. The third one was being blown straight across to the Mainland towards Hayling Island. The Coastguard that was on the beach, could keep his eye on the windsurfer because he’d had a visual, but he was getting a mile and a half, two miles off and we got the helicopter in. It actually came from Lee on Solent and because they didn’t know the exact position, we brought the helicopter in to Seaview until he found the Coastguard vehicle and they’re always painted blue and yellow with a yellow roof so obviously the helicopter Pilots can see them quickly and he turned over the mobile, the guy gave him the bearing to steer to, he turned over the top of the vehicle, went straight out on this bearing and came onto the windsurfer and they managed to winch him up quite quickly. They didn’t put the board into the helicopter because that’s a bit too dangerous but it’s the life that counts as opposed to the equipment. That’s the first one that comes to mind that I can remember in the early days.
21 minutes 46 seconds
Lisa : Were there times when the helicopter was called, and it wasn’t actually needed?
Jim : Yes, for various reasons. One’s got to remember that from the centre of the Isle of Wight, the flying time for the helicopter to be on scene is probably four or five minutes after it’s taken off, so it can be here within about 10 minutes or so. Sometimes, and it’s usually the first resource on the scene but sometimes it just so happens there’s a Lifeboat close by doing something else or there’s a Coastguard unit and they can effect the rescue, in which case whoever gets there first will effect the rescue. Normally, the helicopter isn’t called off or returned until we get to the point that we know that the casualty is safe and that the casualty doesn’t need to be transported for any medical assistance. But yeah, there are times but then again that can be the same for the Lifeboat ‘cos the helicopter gets there first and nobody minds as long as the person is rescued. Sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to see if you can be the one that gets there first but no, nobody will get worried about it.
Lisa : Do you ever recall a time when the helicopter was needed but it was out somewhere else on a rescue?
Jim : Yes, there has been occasions when that happens and you know, that’s just a fact of life. If it is a very serious incident and the only way is to get there by helicopter, then a helicopter will be moved in from another area and certainly in my time, we had a Coastguard helicopter at Portland so yes, I’ve been at incidents when the Portland helicopter’s been called in because the Lee on Solent one is busy but of course the one from Lee on Solent certainly to the east goes right the way up to Dover for casualties, so yes, it can be out on another mission, but that’s why you’ve got lots of different resources you can use and try and rescue it another way or another helicopter. I don’t think I ever remember an incident because the helicopter wasn’t available that people couldn’t be rescued, it was always done.
Lisa : Jim, did the Coastguard Service use any other type of aircraft or was it just helicopters for rescue?
25 minutes 5 seconds
Jim : No, the Coastguard Service did use fixed wing aircraft. They had a Marine Pollution Control Unit who used various old and newer types of aircraft for surveying oil slicks and spraying dispersant on them, and for many years, the Coastguard have trapped rogue vessels in the Dover Straits shipping lanes and they’ve identified these rogues by being two Islander aircraft manufactured in Bembridge by Britten-Norman, where I worked for the Design Office and was responsible for the installation and design of the equipment fitted to this aircraft which was based at Lydd Airfield.
Lisa : When you started at the Coastguard, did Bembridge have a vehicle of its own?
Jim : No, not in the early days. In fact, in those days, I’ve talked about earlier on, the breeches buoy equipment, in those days if you wanted to move that equipment which was heavy, you had a contract with a local contractor who had a lorry so you had to actually phone him up, get his to come to the Station, load all the gear up on the lorry and then drive it to wherever you wanted it on the Island. Several years after I started, they introduced the first Coastguard vehicles to the Island and we didn’t actually get a lorry, but we actually got a Hillman Imp, which for those you that remember, a rather small vehicle but … after that, things improved, and we got various marques of Land Rovers and later when their capacity wasn’t great enough to carry all the equipment we were also issued with trailers to go on the back to carry the extra equipment. After the Land Rovers, came the Nissan Terranos and then those have been updated with the Nissan Navara but all of them excepting the Hillman Imp, have the traditional Coastguard colours on them as we talked about earlier on with the blue and yellow and particularly the yellow roofs for recognition from above.
Lisa : Is it imprinted with anything on the top or is it just yellow? No lettering or symbols or anything like that?
Jim : Some of them actually have ‘Coastguard’ on the top in orange but some of the other Emergency Services did have what the ‘call sign’ of the vehicle on top but the Coastguards didn’t take that up wholeheartedly I don’t think.
Lisa : Can you tell me a bit about the hierarchy in the Coastguard Offices in those days.
Jim : Yes, sure. The senior structure initially in my time consisted of a Chief Coastguard who was in charge nationally, then the areas had Inspectors and then they were broken down into districts with a District Officer in charge and then when you got down to the actual Stations, there were Station Officers and Auxiliaries in Charge, but that was re-organised in the 1980’s and from then on we had a Chief Coastguard, the areas became regions so we had Regional Controllers and their Deputies, with District Controllers, Operation Room Managers and as we talked about earlier on, Sector Managers. OK?
30 minutes 7 seconds
Lisa : Jim, can you tell me about any of the incidents that really stick in your mind over the years? You must have seen so many and helped with so many rescues.
Jim : Oh yes, sure. Probably some of the more memorable casualties or ‘shouts’ as they are known, that stick to your mind. Let’s have a little think now. Let’s go back to the morning of the 20th November 2005 and we were called out to a navigational obstruction in Spit Head which turned out to be the body of a very large dead whale. It was in a position west of St Helen’s Fort, moving towards Seaview. My rescue was launched by Southern Coastguard and managed to take the whale in tow. That wasn’t an easy job on its own, trying to lasso a whale and tow it with an inflatable but they did succeed. The Bembridge Coastguard mobile was also dispatched with myself on board and another crew member. On arrival, at Seaview Duver, we received a call from Ryde Rescue where should they take the whale. That was the first and only time in my life that I had ever been asked that question. What the answer is, what is the answer I thought. After a minute or two’s thought, I decided to beach the whale on the eastern end of the beach at Puckpool Park. Why you may ask? Well, it seemed to me to be the best place. It was shallow, flat sandy beach, currently it was near high water at the time. Also, we could control the general public who were bound to turn up and view, and most importantly we could get heavy diggers and lorries on to the beach as there was access nearby to the Seaview Duver road. The operation to remove the carcass took about three days to cut up and load onto lorries and clean up the beach and attracted as we thought, many hundreds of sightseers. Quite what the attraction of a dead whale was I don’t know but there was all sorts of pictures in the County Press about it at the time. Perhaps an earlier incident that I can vividly remember was one of a drowning I attended. This was in Bembridge Harbour channel, in the vicinity of No 8 Buoy, where two children got swept into the Harbour by the flood tide. We were called to take the mobile to the St Helen’s side of the Harbour entrance. While Bembridge Lifeboat and the IRB and the Coastguard helicopter searched the area. On arrival, the parents who had rescued one child but the other one was still missing. As we arrived on scene, the parents and the one child came to the mobile and details were taken. I was interrupted to take a call on the radio, and as I did so, the parents put the child in the mobile and said, “Can we leave him with you? Would you be happy as we want to go searching for our other children?” I was still talking on the radio at this point and just nodded. After a while the child in the mobile turned to me and asked me a question, which is one that I will always remember, and the question was, “When are you going to bring back my brother to me?” At that time, I had already thought that we were not going to find his brother on the shore. From experience we know that when you arrive on the scene, to a report of somebody in the water, if you cannot see them, it is most likely that they have already drowned. I don’t remember exactly what I said to the boy sitting next to me but hopefully it was appropriate at the time. Later that evening, the boy’s body was located inside Bembridge Harbour off the Redwing Quay and brought ashore by the Inshore Lifeboat. Let’s turn our attentions now to the Merchant vessel called the ‘Dole America’ which left Portsmouth Harbour with a Pilot on board. The Pilot was disembarked into the Pilot Launch at Newgrounds and the Captain of the ‘Dole America’ told the foreign crew member he had on the Bridge to take the helm and head for the Nab Tower Lighthouse while he got a cup of tea as he was suffering from the ‘flu. Shortly after this the vessel actually hit the Nab Tower Lighthouse. The Helmsman had not totally understood his instructions and had steered directly for the Lighthouse. The Pilot who had been on board saved the day by re-boarding the vessel and grounding it in the vicinity of the Dean Tower Buoy in case if it took on too much water and sank. If you are old enough to remember the television series ‘Howard’s Way’, you may remember the yacht that featured in the television show called the ‘Barracuda of Tarrant’ which was chartered for the program. It was 5 o’clock in the morning that two of us Coastguards found ourselves out on the edge of Bembridge Ledge, known as the ‘Sharpers’ after the owner of the ‘Barracuda of Tarrant’ on a return trip across the English Channel had mistaken the buoys that marked Bembridge Ledge and he turned to go up Spit Head at the West Princessa buoy instead of the Bembridge Ledge buoy. The consequence of which the yacht ran aground on the Ledge and unfortunately had a hole in her hull. Bembridge Lifeboat stood by as the tide rose and Lifeboat Coxswain Martin Woodward who was also the local salvage expert had attached salvage buoyage bags to the vessel. However, the yacht sank on being towed clear of the Ledge. At that time, I was sitting in the Coastguard mobile at the Lifeboat Station with the owner of the vessel who started to shed a tear or two as he saw his yacht sink under the water and disappear out of sight. Luckily the yacht was re-floated following the efforts of all on the scene and slowly but carefully towed into Bembridge Harbour for repairs. The best part of this story was it did sail away a few weeks later. The Spit Head area is always a good area for incidents and my memory now turns to the vessel called the ‘Flag Theofano’ carrying a load of cement, Portland cement if I remember right. She disappeared from the anchorage in St Helens Roads overnight without any calls for assistance. When the alarm was raised the next morning, a search by Bembridge Lifeboat and the Coastguard helicopter revealed an oil slick and a length of rope on the starboard hand side of the main shipping channel in Spit Head, again in the Dean Tower area. Investigations revealed that she must have dragged her anchor for some reason and sunk with the loss of all hands. The hull of the vessel was located, and wreck marks put in position. A ship’s lifeboat was the only other thing we found and that was washed up on the beach at Hayling Island. There are many other stories, but these are just a few but possibly one more to end with is the incident where a party of visitors to the Island had taken their speedboat into Whitecliff Bay staying in Bembridge and they went out in the boat and went round various vessels in Sandown Bay, came back into Whitecliff Bay, dropped off two of the crew on the beach and then proceeded along past Bembridge Ledge. Unfortunately applying too much power and with the sea conditions at the time, both the remaining two people on board were thrown clear of the speedboat. We first got a call from a local resident at Forelands who spotted the speedboat floating off of the Ledge with apparently nobody on board. When I arrived at the Station, it was apparent that there was nobody on board and we initiated an immediate search which included a beach search which is another type of search that the Coastguard’s undertake which is to sweep the beaches with a search party should any evidence have come ashore. On this particular occasion, the search party was in Whitecliff Bay was led by my Deputy Station Officer Martin Groom and he actually found the two people that were put ashore still looking for their two compatriots that had gone out on the speedboat. Unfortunately later when it was ascertained that these people were missing, Martin had the job of returning to these two people to inform them of the facts, not always an easy task, having done that myself on a number of occasions to actually visit a family and tell them that a member of their family had died. This story didn’t quite end there for myself because at a later date, the Coastguard were summons to attend an inquest at Newport. I, being the person in charge, the person that was the witness for the Coastguard and I remember being asked various questions by the Coroner and then he asked the family whether or not they wished to ask me any questions, at which point I was slightly taken aback when the family who had been crying at this point, asked me why it had taken 20 minutes to launch the Lifeboat. Well, the answer I gave them was that it wasn’t because the Inshore Lifeboat was launched within a couple of minutes of the call they received as soon as we realised what had happened. What actually happened is they had read the newspapers and they got the 20 minutes from the fact that the Bembridge Offshore Lifeboat was launched after 20 minutes. What had actually happened was that we weren’t sure why the speedboat was empty. The Inshore Lifeboat went round there very quickly, ascertained the engine was still warm and there were items of clothing onboard, realised it was somebody missing and then a full search was instituted and the Bembridge Lifeboat was called in and I think Sandown Rescue were called in and the helicopter was called in, Bembridge Inshore Lifeboat so what the family had been told or learnt wasn’t actually quite the truth, but it’s possibly one of the things the normal public don’t appreciate you that after some of these rescues, you then have to stand in front of the Coroner and explain your actions. Not always an easy thing to do.
47 minutes 40 seconds
Lisa : Jim, there must have been many people of the years that you’ve helped, saved their lives. Were you or your team shown gratitude for what you’d done for people?
Jim : Oh yes, on many occasions, possibly on a couple of occasions come to memory. One was rescuing a dog that had gone over Culver Cliff and returning to his owner who happened to be the owner of a well-known local Zoo in Sandown and he kindly came along a day or so later and presented us each with a free ticket to go in to the Zoo, but I think probably the one that mostly stands out in my mind was again a rescue of another dog and this time quite a large Alsatian dog and it had actually fallen into the moat around Bembridge Fort. If you know Bembridge Fort in the middle of Bembridge Down, that has a brick lined moat which is 40 feet deep. Now, that is fine but over the years, part of that there is now brambles and bushes and that have grown up in the bottom of the moat and this dog had actually fallen or ran and fallen into the moat but luckily hadn’t fallen against the brick bottom but was being held up by some of the bramble bushes, so we were called and we basically decided that we would treat it as a cliff rescue although we were going down a wall and Martin Groom was the actual what we call ‘cliff man’. He went down over and the problem with an Alsatian is, how do you bring it back up. Normally, we have what they call ‘animal bags’ which you can put the animal in but there was no way this was going to work for a very large Alsatian. You try and put an Alsatian into anything when you’re dangling on the end of a rope in the middle of a thorn bush. It isn’t going to happen, so Martin decided that his only best bet was to get hold of this somewhat frightened Alsatian and he actually put the Alsatian over his shoulders and held it with both legs and then the team actually pulled him up to the top of the moat wall, at which point we managed to take the dog off him and allow him to get onto firmer land. He got out of his what’s it. By this time the dog had run off over to his owner who was quite a large lady in a fur coat, and she stayed there for a bit and then she shouted out, could I say thank you to who brought him up. So, we said, “Go on Martin, that’s you, over you go” and he went over to speak to her and at this point she opened her big fur coat, grabbed him and gave him hug for rescuing her dog (laughs). Unfortunately, Martin never actually lived that story down.
Lisa : So, thinking back on your time with the Coastguard Service, your many, many years of service, reflecting back, what aspects are you most proud of Jim?
Jim : Probably the fact of being able to help a lot of people. I suppose although we were involved in quite a large number of deaths over that period of time, thinking back that the deaths that we were involved in were all in such circumstances that there was actually nothing we could do. So, to that extent, I would say that our record has been pretty successful. There are things that you can do nothing about, you know, it’s all happened before you get there, it’s a recovery mission. When I finished, one of the things … before I finished, I had to find out how many rescues I’d been involved in and I spent an evening trying to count them up. Not always an easy task but I never actually did complete it, but what I can say was before I actually stopped counting I got to just over 2,000.
55 minutes 3 seconds
Lisa : And your long service was acknowledged with a very special award. Can you tell us about that?
Jim : Yes, sure. Well it was actually acknowledged in two ways. One by the Coastguard Service themselves because there are official … because the Coastguard is a Government organisation, part of the Maritime Coastguard Agency, they have their own Long Service Medal and I got a 20 year Long Service Medal and then mine has got two bars on it and you get a bar for each 10 years of service over 20 years, so that’s something that the Coastguard Service and then about 2009 I think it was now, came home to lunch one day and Cathy was saying, “Oh, there’s a letter here for you. Looks a bit official” and I had a look at it and it had the post mark of SW1 1AA on it you subsequently learn ‘cos you get one or two of these things that it was asking if you would accept an honour and I opened the envelope and it actually was asking the question, would I accept an MBE for my services. It didn’t actually say services to what but for services which is something that I did accept and had a very nice day at Buckingham Palace with three other members of the family and I was presented with the medal.
Lisa : Well thank you so much Jim for sharing these very special memories with me for the project.
Jim : And thank you very much for coming along and recording them.
Lisa : You’re very welcome.
Recording ends
57 minutes 54 seconds
Transcribed August 2019
Chris Litton
