Graham Hall on Saving Lives at Sea
Initially, it used to be just telephones, they used to telephone your house and say, “We’ve got this”, it was all a bit hit and miss. I could never leave the house in case we got a call. When we had pagers, they’d page you, you’d respond to the page, call up the central operating, the ops room over in Lee on Solent which has now moved to Fareham somewhere I think but it was in Lee on Solent. Say, “Yes” you know, “This is the Hon sec Bembridge, what have you got?” and they’d tell me what the situation would be, and I said, “Fine, we’ll launch a Lifeboat to that” and then I would set in train the call out system.
Originally it was maroons that used to go up, big powerful maroons that used to go up and go ‘Bang’ and shake everybody’s windows. Then it was less powerful, hand-held maroons and then eventually it was all done on the pager. I just dialed a code in, and everybody’s pager used to go off.
So, they would then run down to Lane End where the Lifeboat was then and most of them probably knew there was something going on because they will have heard the Coastguard paging me on the pager you see so a lot of them, and then immediately ‘phone down to speak to the Coxswain, tell him what the situation was and, you know, where you’ve got to go or what the problem was. He’d then select his crew.
It was done on a system, get on the boat, launch, of it’d go. I then went down, usually went down, depending on how long they were going to be.
If they were going to be out for 12 hours I didn’t go down there then but if they were going to be out for a short time I’d go down to the boathouse, the moment the boat was in the water the Coxswain was responsible for everything that happened and he would deal with it all and then when it had finished we’d tell him if the lifetboat slip, whether it was, firstly always available because sometimes the weather was too bad to re-house the Lifeboat.
The Coxswain would know, and he could either go to Portsmouth, Cowes or somewhere like that and wait for it to get better and then the boat would come back, be recovered.
We sometimes brought casualties back to the Boathouse but the problem was getting the boat back and then getting anybody who was injured down the Pier so it was probably normal to take them over to Portsmouth where the ambulance could meet them at Portsmouth or sometimes on Ryde Pier. Not always, but that was usually the thinking, that it was probably better to get them off the Lifeboat in Portsmouth.
The boat would come back, get tied up, do the paperwork, da de da de da, wash it down, re-fuel it, get it ready for service before we left the Boathouse and then we’d all go home and wait for the next one and that’s how it works.
