Ilfracombe lifeboat service: part of the local community

The RNLI is 200 years old this year. But, here in Ilfracombe, our lifeboat service is very nearly that old too.

The first lifeboat in Ilfracombe was in the Harbour in 1828, just four years after the RNLI itself was founded.
The lifeboat was bought and managed by local people, with a little bit of help from the new RNLI.

In the early days, the lifeboat crew was primarily made up of people who worked, and often lived, in the Harbour itself.

They were mostly people whose livelihood was fishing.

This was great for the lifeboat service as the men knew the coast and the water well and could certainly handle a boat so
they were the ideal people to carry out a rescue.

However, there were times when it also caused problems.

In 1916, the lifeboat crew were all fishermen.

At the start of the herring season, all the local fishermen set out in small wooden fishing boats to catch as many herring as they could.

Within a few hours, however, a fierce storm left them all drifting out into the Channel and unable to get back into shore.

People on the land saw that the boats were in trouble and raced to lifeboat station to tell the crew to launch the boat.

It was then that they realised that the crew were the very people out at sea needing rescue.

Very quickly, people in the Harbour stepped up to form a rescue crew and launch the lifeboat.

They may not have ever set foot on the lifeboat before, but they were dedicated!

After hours of searching, they managed to find all the boats and bring every one of the fishermen home.

Today, some of our crew are still fishermen.

Others have trip boats in the Harbour.

But many of our shore and boat crew now have nothing to do with boats before at all.

They are carpenters, decorators, nurses, writers, engineers…

They come from all walks of life but they are all still rooted in our local community; every crew member lives or works within five minutes of Ilfracombe Harbour.

As a service, our strength comes from our local community.

The families of our volunteer crew put up with the pagers going off at all times of the day and night and support our crew by enabling them to train and answer shouts, as do local employers who allow their workers to down tools and head for the Harbour when they are needed on a shout.

The numbers of volunteer boat crew are matched by an equal number of volunteers who work behind the scenes, enabling the rescue service to function.

These, people, again mostly from Ilfracombe itself, serve in our shop, run our events, manage the lifeboat station, give water safety talks, show people around the boathouse and many more tasks.

And so many other local people make donations, attend our events, take photos, bring our crew tea and cake.

We might be here to serve the community, but we are also indebted to our local community.

Like those herring fishermen who needed the local community to rescue them, we still rely on our local community to support us.

Recently, Ilfracombe had a run of shouts with little time between each.

Long nights at sea were followed by more callouts during the day leaving no time to catch up on sleep.

Our volunteer crew were exhausted.

We relied so much on the support of families and friends, the leniency of employers and the flexibility of friends.

Cake brought to the boathouse was also very much appreciated!

So this is a thank you. Thank you for everything that you do to support your local lifeboat service to
help us save lives at sea.

We couldn’t do it without you!