Today marks the eighth anniversary since our Independent Lifeboat was officially named and launched on September 17th 2016. But of course, even before that date the crew of the St Abbs Lifeboat were giving years of faithful service to saving lives at sea. To celebrate this year’s  anniversary we are delighted to launch our new historical archive which celebrates and documents the St Abbs Lifeboat from its first launch in 1911 to today’s independent times. It is available by clicking on the news tab above or clicking here, so do please take a look and use the biggest screen you have for best results.
The archive is a project that is still very much in its infancy. The photos and documents shown on it are those that are currently held by ourselves in the Lifeboat Station. We know that there are many more photographs and documents out there held by locals, researchers and keen historians. If you have any documents or photos that relate to our Lifeboat we would be really grateful if you could get in touch, allow us to digitise your material, or send us digitised copies, and most importantly give us permission to display the material publicly on this site. This permission is key.
We will also, over the cold rainy winter months be sitting down with those in this village who have all the stories to tell behind these images and documents and we will add these to the archive….so keep checking back as this project grows. We will for example shortly be uploading some oral histories recorded by our long serving crew members Alistair Crowe and Gus Skene and we will let you know when these are available to listen to on the site.
We hope you like this addition to our website. We are very proud of our entire Lifeboat history and we are very pleased to be able to make this archive available to the public in perpetuity.
Thanks go to Alison Fuller-Shapcott for digitising the vast majority of the current material, and to Kreative Technology for their untiring technical assistance which has enabled this material to be displayed in this way online.
