Martin Woodward on Saving Lives at Sea
If you look back to the old boys and I’ve got a tremendous respect for the old men and I consider myself really privileged that I knew a lot of those old guys … well, not a lot but certainly two or three were still alive as very old men when I was a boy, cleaning the brass on the Lifeboat.
And they were my neighbours so inevitably they were local fishermen as well in their working life, so they knew all the old methods and they could tell me the story and that what probably inspired me to get involved with the Lifeboat ‘cos they told me about these stories where they’d go out and they’d put on an old oil skin and a cork lifejacket and row out to sea in a gale and be out there for hours and hours, soaking wet from the outset and rowing, physically rowing.
Well, it sort of pales into insignificance … I’m not downplaying what modern Lifeboat crews do because you know you still get knocked around in bad seas and you get a bit wet but it’s completely different to actually going out there and physically rowing a boat.
And I know what it’s like because we’ve got that old boat that they used to row in. The 1887 ‘Queen Victoria’ Lifeboat that we use for re-enactments and things and I’ve rowed it and I’ve rowed it round the Nab Tower, rowed it down the Great River Race in London and a few other places and it’s not an easy thing to row. You imagine doing that in a storm, in a cork lifejacket, a big bulky thing full of blocks of cork.
And they went to sea in these old oilskins with these massive cork lifejackets which were incredibly uncomfortable things. I’ve got one, I’ve got an original one. There’s not many original ones around, and I value it tremendously because even the RNLI haven’t got original ones and I’ve actually rowed the boat with that on to see what it’s like and they were incredible people.
You move forward, it went to Kapok lifejackets, again very bulky but more filled with a fabric rather than cork, again just ordinary oil skin coats.
When I was a kid, or when I first went out on the boat, nobody wore lifejackets because they were so uncomfortable. They were so big, and the old boys just didn’t do it and they wore thigh boots, you know they had RNLI thigh boots. Well that’s the worst thing in the world you can wear, because if you go over the side, if they fill up, unless you can get them off, you’re going to go down pretty quick, so things moved on a lot.
In the ‘70s, we started getting a little bit more modern gear, but it was never really very waterproof, it wasn’t very effective. If you got doused, you got wet, but it’s gradually improved over the years and nowadays, the lifejackets are very small, they’re quite compact and obviously the rule of the RNLI in the last 20-30 years is that you must wear a lifejacket on the boat and they wear helmets and all sorts of things now, whereas in the previous era that didn’t happen.
You had basically oilskins and things in the ‘60s, early ‘70s and then it moved on to sort of light weight waterproofs and even then a bulky lifejacket which none of us really were that inclined to wear very often unless you needed to. It was the years of common-sense. I mean everybody knew that when you thought it was necessary to put a lifejacket on, you put it on but if you’re in the wheelhouse with a load of other people and you’re bumping into each other with these things on, it wasn’t practical. But everybody knew what they were doing and then you knew when it was time to put one on.
Today, everybody has one on all the time because they’re compact, so it’s moved on a lot.