David Butler on Saving Lives at Sea

I joined in 1983. It was changing world, as far as the Coast Guard was concerned as we said before there was two radios amongst 18 blokes.

How you’re supposed to operate an emergency service like that just beggar’s belief really, and things didn’t really change until the late ‘80s and so the breeches buoy system of rescuing people off of boats which had been used since probably 1850-1860 was still on station, was still used and we were still training with it in 1986.

I mean it’s not so long ago really is it? And it was archaic stuff, and everybody had their place and I actually got lumbered with the job of launching the rocket and I have no idea why. I’d never fired a gun or a rocket in my life and trying to fire it over a target was quite hard work. It ended up, as technologies moved on with radios and radar and with navigation, less and less boats were coming ashore. I think in my time with the Coast Guard, large boats, and I say sort of like 40 foot plus, probably amounted to what two or three? Would you agree with that?

Andy Butler: Yeah, it wasn’t very many.

It wasn’t many at all whereas a 100 years ago it would be one every other week.

So, there was less of a use for that kind of equipment so the Coast Guard needed to change and adapt itself to what was needed in this day and age but before they bailed it all out, we used to have these Coast Guard competitions with who could set this gear up the quickest and who was the most efficient at setting it up and who could get their casualty out to the target and back, and that got quite fierce amongst the teams.

In those days you had Bembridge team, the Sandown team had been amalgamated into Bembridge, so you had the Bembridge team, the Ventnor team, the Blackgang team, Atherfield team and the Needles team and the Atherfield team were a law unto themselves and we always invariably ended up having these competitions out on their patch and they hated it because we were better than them.

And then they would accuse us of cheating because we would use two sledge hammers was a classic example. We was using our ingenuity because we wanted to win and then it would all tail off and then the Atherfield team which was made up basically of the Young family, ‘cos they were quite a big family, again you see the teams were made up of families, the Young family would then start fighting amongst themselves because we had beaten them but we cheated, but we hadn’t cheated so then they’d start squabbling amongst themselves and they’d be rolling around in the grass, fighting and shouting and hollering at one another.

Honestly we had had some good times on that and that was on the tail end of the breeches buoy. We never used the breeches buoy in anger.

I think the only time we ever used it was when Ventnor still had a pier, we launched the rocket across the pier, and we tied it to the pier and it was like a demonstration. I think it must have been over Carnival Week or something like that, and we put Robert Blake in the basket and nearly drowned him. That’s how lethal it was.

Andy Butler: It wasn’t a good system.

So, they took that gear away in probably ’87 ish, something like that.