The rescue service has a long and glorious history of saving the lives of people, wherever they come from
A couple of weeks ago, I was at Lizard Point in Cornwall. The old lifeboat station below Britain’s most southerly cliffs has long since been replaced but the rusting structure remains, a stubborn legacy of heroism past. It was from here, in February 1907, that the biggest sea rescue in the history of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) was launched when the liner SS Suevic was thrown on to the jagged reef offshore in high winds and dense fog. For 16 hours, the lifeboat crews rowed out and rescued all 456 passengers (including 71 infants). The ethnicity or country of origin of those rescued was not recorded, as it has not been recorded for the 146,000 other lives saved during the RNLI’s history.
There has been much talk in recent years of the relevance of some of our monuments to the past. The lifeboat stations that circle our coastline, crewed by volunteers and funded by charity, are living reminders of the humanitarian impulse that remains the best of us. Nigel Farage’s attempts to undermine that spirit last week, by characterising boats saving drowning refugees as a “taxi service for migrants”, went against everything that the Lizard lifeboat and all the other crews risk their lives for. The fact that donations to the RNLI are up 3,000% in the days since is a welcome indication that the spirit that sends those crews out is as appreciated now as it ever was.
