Memories
The following account is from Barbara Heal (Hookey) who at three or four years old remembers a launch in the early 1920s:
Charles New was another loyal member of the crew. Charlie helped with the lifeboat from the age of 16 until the 1914-18 war when he joined the Hampshire Regiment.
Another story concerned Phil Jacobs, who like his brother, Ben, was a large man, tall and upright in his trademark bowler hat (see Lifeboat presentation photograph).
Herbert (Bert) Morris (1909 - 1991) was a member of the crew of the Brook lifeboat Susan Ashley from 1929 to 1937. Bert had a fund of stories about the Brooke lifeboat, one went back to the First World War when a destroyer came ashore in fog on the bar at Brook.
Jack Seely describes how many survivors found it hard to believe that it was safer to leave a big ship for such a little one as the lifeboat…
It was often extremely difficult to get survivors to jump into the lifeboat at the right moment. In his book Launch, Jack Seely describes how the great waves lifted the boat level with the rails of a ship and then dropped it 15 to 20 feet when the wave fell.
Robert Cassell recalled the drill in the 1930s:
Just before a practice or any launch, the chief helper would come along and issue badges. If you never had a badge, you never got paid.