Rescue Partners

The RNLI's gold medal for gallantry was awarded first in 1824 to Charles Fremantle of the Lymington Coastguard for swimming with a line to rescue crew from the 'Carl Jean' ashore near Christchurch. Like fishermen and seamen around the coast, Fremantle seized whatever was available to save the lives of fellow seafarers.

Many people proposed ingenious equipment to save lives from shipwrecks. Captain Manby experimented firing mortars to carry a line to a ship, achieving his first rescue in 1808 from the 'Elizabeth' 150 yards off the beach. The following year he brought the crew of the 'Nancy' ashore using a 'cot' slung beneath the line.

The Board of Ordnance and then Parliament endorsed Manby's invention, and the Preventive Water Guard were supplied and drilled with his Life Saving Apparatus (LSA). Apart from rockets replacing mortars, Coastguard LSA supplied by the Board of Trade altered little until the twentieth century brought electrically ignited rockets and lines of man-made fibre.

On 24 November 1864 Coastguards began a rescue from the 'Stanley', aground on rocks beneath Tynemouth. In the dark they were unable to supervise helpers from the large crowd and the LSA jammed. While runners fetched the nearest replacement, onlookers helplessly witnessed the steamer break up drowning 26 crew and passengers. Within a fortnight the Mayor hosted a public meeting which formed the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade to provide trained assistance with LSA. In 1866 the Board of Trade's regulations for Coastguard using LSA urged them to establish new volunteer companies

By 1913, 404 companies existed, and records for 1856-1909 show 17,446 lives saved from shipwrecks by LSA and shorelines. In 1923 the Board of Trade introduced an annual award for the Best Wreck Service. However, improvements in ships and lifeboats meant fewer casualties along the shoreline and the number of LSA rescues was decreasing. Following the enquiry in 1931 the Board of Trade formed the Coast Life Saving Corps, for LSA (watching and intelligence work) and this absorbed many of the old companies. In 1966 the 7,000-strong Corps became the Coastguard Auxiliary Service which used LSA until it was withdrawn in 1988.

Professional Coastguards have increasingly been concentrated in a small number of high-tech Maritime co-ordination centres dealing with thousands of emergencies. It is the Auxiliaries of the Coastguard Rescue Teams who are often first on scene feeding back information. In the 1990s their membership of 3,200 volunteers was reorganised. Initial Response Teams were designed for rapid call out to assess situations, while Back Up Response Teams formed mobile search and rescue units, trained and equipped to work on cliffs and in mud, and with rough terrain vehicles and boats for reaching inaccessible cliff and river sites. Issued with specialist equipment and trained by Coastguard officers the volunteers in these Coastguard Rescue Teams carry the tradition of local life saving into a third century.