Jim Roberts on Radio Communications

Lisa: How did you know when you were needed for a particular job or a callout. How did you … how were you communicated to?

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.