Special milestone for RNLI as it celebrates 200 years of lifesaving

The RNLI is celebrating its 200th year of lifesaving with a number of celebrations.

They are marking the run-up to its birthday on 4th March by highlighting the work they do.

Dave Cocks, station chairman of Redcar RNLI, said: "I formally joined the RNLI way back in 1978 as a young man with lots of hair and less fat on me. I grew up around the lifeboat station. My father was on the crew for something like 54 years, so it was almost inevitable that I would follow in his footsteps in some shape or form, so when the opportunity came I was more than glad to do that.

"I joined as a crew member so we used to go out and do the rescues and then eventually, I moved over onto joining some of the operations on shore. I became the press officer for a while and then I finally became the operations manager in charge of the lifeboat station. I did that for about seven years before I reached the sort of age where I thought it was time to slow down a bit, so now I'm the chairman.

"It was a guy that had been capsized in his canoe at Saltburn. We'd been called out to search for him and we were searching, searching and searching. We eventually saw him at the top of a wave, we took the lifeboat over to where he was, I reached over the side to pull him out of the water and he was actually looking up to heaven. He thought he was going die. I decided that he wasn't going to die and it turned out that this young man was a teacher.

"Over the years the boats have changed and the tasks that we go to have changed quite a lot. We get a lot of involvement in mental health issues these days. The equipment of the crew to protect them from the weather has changed, but there's two things that haven't changed throughout all that time; the first is that the sea has never changed and the other thing is the volunteer culture."

Find out more about the RNLI's 200 birthday on their website.