Portishead lifeboat crew abandon 'birthday cake' for call-out on RNLI's 200th anniversary

  • Watch our report from Ben McGrail

Lifeboat crews and those who make their work possible have been celebrating the organisation’s 200th birthday.

However, at Portishead, one crew were happily having a slice of cake when the call went out to attend a possible incident, their fourth in three days.

In their usual manner the crew members, who were already in full kit for the occasion, ran immediately to their craft and headed off.

The crew is part of a team of volunteers that give up their time to be available 24/7. Like their colleagues around the country, their job is quite simply to save lives at sea.

Portishead’s station is one of 238 across the UK and Ireland and the time given up by these people has been essential to the charity’s work over two centuries.

The crew get a slice of birthday cake just before they are called out

Community Manager Emily Gale said: Not only are we celebrating the amazing work that the volunteers do today but we’re also commemorating the sacrifice and the commitment from previous generations and we’re also trying to inspire our next generation of lifesavers.”

Crew member Cameron John said: “We know we’ve got a callout when the pager goes off. It never goes off at the right time, our families will tell you about that, but we do it because we love it and we want to help people.”

Helm David Hodges said: I’ve volunteered on the lifeboat in Portishead for coming up 26 years this year. We never know what we’re going out to - we get all manner of different calls here and it’s incredibly rewarding to be part of a team that goes out and assists people in distress.”

Crew member Lu Shepherd said: I’m physically quite small, my eyesight isn’t that good, I was early 40s but, actually then I applied, got a place and just haven’t looked back, really. I just love it. So it is very different to my day job, yeah, I’m a teacher, I’m head of performing arts at a local school so yeah you couldn’t really get much different.”

The RNLI has saved nearly 150,000 lives over the last 200 years.