Rescue before the lifeboat
Until the late eighteenth century, rescue from a wreck close to shore was a matter of improvisation. Local fishermen, pilots and coastal communities launched whatever boats they had, often in conditions that made rescue almost impossible. Coastal populations also had a long tradition of salvaging wreck goods, a subject taken up in the discussion of wreck salvage, but organised rescue of people was a separate and much later development.
The wreck of the Adventure of Newcastle in 1789, in sight of onlookers at the mouth of the Tyne, is often cited as a prompt for action in north-east England. A committee in South Shields invited designs for a boat intended specifically to save life in heavy surf.
The first purpose-built lifeboats
Two names are associated with the earliest lifeboats. The London coachbuilder Lionel Lukin patented a design in 1785, converting a boat to make it more buoyant by adding a cork-lined gunwale and air chambers. Lukin described his craft as unimmergible. His work is generally recognised as a first step, though few such boats were built.
At South Shields, the boatbuilder Henry Greathead built a boat known as the Original in 1790, following the committee’s competition. It had a curved keel, which made it easier to turn, and a thick cork lining for buoyancy. The designer’s claim was disputed by William Wouldhave, a local man who had submitted a model, and historians still recognise a degree of shared credit. What is clear is that Greathead’s boats were built in some numbers and were used around the British coast and abroad in the following years.
These early boats were rowed (pulled) by crews using oars, with a sail where conditions allowed. They were heavy, undecked and relied on crew skill. Launching was done from a beach, often through breaking waves, sometimes helped by horses to haul the carriage to the water.
The RNLI
By the 1820s, lifeboat provision was patchy and depended on local initiative. In 1824 Sir William Hillary, who lived on the Isle of Man and had seen many wrecks, helped to found the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. It was renamed the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1854. It is a charity funded by voluntary contributions, and its crews have always been mostly volunteers. Not all coastal rescue in Britain has been under its control, since some local lifeboat stations remained independent for a time.
The Institution took over responsibility for building and placing boats, paying for stations and awarding medals for gallantry. Its work encouraged similar organisations in other countries, among them German and Dutch societies in the nineteenth century, and the United States Life-Saving Service, which relied on shore-based surfmen and was later folded into the Coast Guard.
The self-righting lifeboat
In 1851 the Duke of Northumberland, then a patron of the Institution, offered a prize for the best lifeboat design after the loss of a lifeboat crew at South Shields the previous year. The winning design came from James Beeching, a boatbuilder from Great Yarmouth. James Peake, a naval architect at Woolwich dockyard, then modified it, and the Institution adopted what became the standard self-righting boat. It had high ends, a deep and heavy iron keel and watertight air cases, so that a capsized boat would tend to come upright again. This was a notable step, though it did not make lifeboat work safe. Capsizes still happened, and crews suffered severe losses on occasion. In December 1886, for example, 27 lifeboatmen from Southport and St Annes were lost in a single storm, in what remains one of the worst disasters in the Institution’s history.
Steam and then the motor
Late in the nineteenth century the Institution experimented with steam-powered lifeboats. They were heavy and expensive to run, and only a few were built. The more lasting change was the internal combustion engine. Motor lifeboats began to enter service in the early twentieth century, and by the middle of the century most pulling and sailing lifeboats had been replaced. Engines allowed lifeboats to travel further, to reach a casualty more quickly and to cope with heavier seas, though the boats continued to be protected by their sturdy build and air-case buoyancy.
Alongside this, lifeboats gained radios, radar and better navigation aids. These followed the same general path as those in the merchant fleet, which is traced in the history of marine radar, but were adopted slowly, because lifeboats were small and exposed.
What lifeboats rescue from
The need for lifeboats grew with sea traffic. The nineteenth century saw many wrecks on British coasts, and wreck disasters shaped public opinion and law. Campaigns such as Samuel Plimsoll’s, which led to the Plimsoll line on ship hulls, belong to the same period, and pressure for safer ships and better rescue went hand in hand. Lighthouse development and the system of lightship stations helped prevent wrecks, and the lifeboat dealt with the cases that remained. Later disasters, including the Titanic sinking in 1912, changed rules about the provision of lifeboats aboard passenger ships, which is a separate matter from the shore-based rescue craft discussed here. The accounts of famous shipwrecks often include a lifeboat rescue, and sometimes a failed one.
Inshore craft
From the 1960s the Institution added small, fast inshore boats, starting with inflatables and later including rigid-hulled inflatables. These are discussed in the separate articles on the inflatable and rigid-hull types. They allowed rescue closer to shore and in shallow water, and they were operated by smaller crews who could launch quickly.
Crews and character
Lifeboat crews have always combined skill and local knowledge with a willingness to put to sea in conditions most mariners would avoid. Crew members were traditionally fishermen, boatmen and others from the community, and in many places families supplied crews for generations. Their reputation helped to sustain public donations, which have always funded the service. The lifeboat remains a very visible symbol of volunteer sea rescue in Britain and Ireland.