Martin Woodward on Saving Lives at Sea

Always via the Coast Guard, well nearly always by the Coast Guard. I mean if one of the crew were down here or the Coxswain was working on the Lifeboat or on his fishing boat here, and he saw a red flare, then you could go and self-launch without any Coast Guard being involved, but most of the time it would be reports to Coast Guard and then they would then ‘phone what they called the ‘Hon Sec’ in those days, which was Weaver, up the road, a great guy, and then he would ‘phone the Coxswain and say, “Oh, we’ve got this job” which would go out and then we’d fire the maroons and then go.

Some of the crew, a long, long time before bleepers obviously and pagers, and that’s how the crew were called and they were big old maroons too, they were fired from up in Weaver’s Yard and they were big ones and then gradually they got superseded by the little hand-held ones which were not half as effective.

With the big maroons, you could actually hear the ground charge that fired it up in the air before the main maroon went off. A real big thump.

They were great days, and the great thing about that time was that the whole community was interested in what the Lifeboat was doing and obviously for PR, for Public Relations, and you know involving the local community, that was a good thing because when the maroons went off, everybody used to rush down to the Pier Gates and all gather there and see what was going on and of course it’s quite sad that nowadays you don’t get that because people get paged.

I mean I fought hard to keep them maroons in my final days before I retired from the Lifeboat, and we did keep them until I left, because I thought it was really important that the village should know when the Lifeboat goes out.

Obviously you’ll always get one or two people say, “Oh, it frightens my dog” or whatever, but 99.9% of the people enjoyed knowing that the boat was going out.