Jim Roberts on Saving Lives at Sea

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 1970s when that job – the Coastguard was reorganised to a certain extent and that job went over to the helicopters.