The Boathouse on the Slipway

The first thing you notice about an old lifeboat station is how little comfort it offers. A Victorian boathouse was built to do one job: get a heavy boat into the sea quickly. Walls were stone, brick or corrugated iron, roofs slate or felt, floors laid to a slope so water could drain away. The tall doors faced the slipway or the beach, and above them sat a winch, a set of rollers and a track greased with tallow.

Inside there was no heating worth the name. A stove if the crew were lucky, a bench, a few pegs for oilskins, and the boat herself on her carriage. The boat's gear lived in locker boxes along the wall: cork lifebelts, oilskin coats, sou'westers, a compass in a wooden box, a drogue, a bucket, a lantern. Everything had its place because in the dark and the spray you cannot hunt for anything.

Calling Out the Crew

Crews were volunteers, usually fishermen, pilots, harbour men and their sons. They lived within a few hundred yards of the station, and they were summoned by a maroon — a blank rocket fired into the night sky — or by a hand-bell rung along the quay. Four minutes from alarm to launch was the sort of time a good station aimed at, and they often managed it.

Launching was brute labour. On a carriage, the boat was hauled by hand, or by horses borrowed from a nearby farm, down to the water and run off into the surf. From a slipway she was simply let go and slid, stern-first, into the sea while the crew scrambled aboard over the rollers. Men wore cork lifebelts, which kept a body afloat but offered no warmth and little freedom. In February, wet through before the first stroke, that mattered.

Oars, Rocket and Breeches Buoy

Until late in the period, most lifeboats rowed. Ten or twelve oars, a coxswain at the tiller, and no engine to fall back on. Later boats carried sails and, eventually, steam or petrol engines, but the oar remained a drill. Crews practised pulling in unison for hours on end, and practised beaching and relaunching in heavy surf, because that is where most boats came to grief.

Then there was the rocket apparatus — the shore side of rescue. A line-throwing mortar fired a thin line over a wrecked ship's rigging, to be hauled aboard by the crew. From that line came a heavier rope, then a hawser, and finally the breeches buoy: a canvas pair of shorts inside a cork ring, slung beneath the hawser and worked back and forth by pulley. A man climbed in, straddled the ring, and was hauled ashore over the boiling sea. Women and children often went first, wrapped and tied in.

• Rocket apparatus crews drilled weekly, often on a Sunday after church.
• The mortar line weighed little but had to be fired upwind, into the rigging.
• The breeches buoy travelled about one person every two minutes — a slow, freezing business.
• A "hawser party" on the beach hauled on the endless fall; a good team could exhaust itself in an hour.

The Harbour Village Around the Station

Nothing about coastal life stood alone. The station sat within a working harbour of slipways, net lofts, smokehouses, chandlers and pubs, and the same families who crewed the boat also fished from it. Harbour heritage here is not decorative. The roller path outside the boathouse, the iron bollards on the quay, the capstan base, the row of cottages built for boatmen — each tells you where the sea was worked and where the money came from.

Sea Angling from the Old Marks

Victorian sea angling grew alongside all this. Anglers fished the piers, the harbour walls and the shingle, and paid a boatman to take them out to the rough ground for pollack, conger and mackerel. From the shore they caught flounder, dab, whiting, pouting, bass and the occasional codling, baited with lugworm and ragworm dug at low water, or with mussel and limpet scraped off the harbour wall.

You can still fish the same marks for the same fish, and the old station usually tells you where they are. Fish the edge of the slipway where weed grows on the stone; the scoured hole at the end of the pier; the gulley the ebb tide cuts along the beach. Fish the first two hours of the flood with worm for bass and flounder, and the top of the tide over rough ground for pollack and wrasse. Boat anglers anchored over the wreck and reef marks still take conger on a heavy trace and a mackerel flapper — as Victorian boatmen did, minus the hemp line.

Reading the Station Today

Many Victorian boathouses survive as museums, angling club huts, cafés or harbour stores. When you visit, look for the practical details rather than the plaques. Find the slipway and work out its angle to the prevailing swell. Find the winch bed, the roller path, the iron rings set into the wall where the carriage was lashed. Stand where the maroon was fired and imagine the crew running, half-dressed, downhill in the dark.

Then walk to the end of the harbour arm with a rod. The sea has not changed much, and neither has the weather. That, more than any exhibit, is the heritage.