Meet the volunteer hero risking all to save souls at sea

The novelist Joseph Conrad, who was a merchant seaman before becoming a writer, paid tribute to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) just before its centenary in 1924.

He spoke of the seafarer’s admiration for the lifeboat crews who ‘go out on a black night without hesitation to dispute our homeless fate with the angry seas’.

The Dungeness Lifeboat

A century on, little has changed. The craft may be sturdier and faster – a modern lifeboat can cross the Channel in an hour – and there is more technology on board, including radar, but the volunteer crews are still there in all weathers to help those in trouble at sea. In Conrad’s day, there was a limitless supply of fishermen to crew the lifeboats.

With the near collapse of commercial fishing, the RNLI now relies on volunteers with little seagoing experience – men and women who have to be taught how to tie knots, pay out an anchor chain, read the tides or scoop a lifeless body from the water.

Gregory grew up in a landlocked part of Britain but, as a child, he was entranced by a ­Ladybird book about lifeboats. Years later, when he moved to ­Dungeness in Kent – the ‘end of the world’ of the title – it seemed only ­natural to join the local crew.

Crews used to be summoned by a gunpowder rocket. Nowadays they all have pagers, and when the call comes, they drop everything. As Gregory says wryly, you need a sympathetic employer and an understanding spouse to do the job.

In his early years as a ­volunteer, weeks would pass without a callout, but once migrants started crossing the Channel in ever increasing numbers, the tempo changed.

Lifeboat at the Edge of the World is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

Soon the lifeboat is rescuing exhausted people from flimsy boats on a daily basis. Seeing the hulking outline of Dungeness’s nuclear power station, the migrants sometimes ask if they have arrived in London.

On one particularly terrible night in December 2022, an overcrowded dinghy breaks apart and the Dungeness crew find themselves frantically hauling people out of the water.

One of the crew is feared lost but is found safe, swimming towards the shore with a drowned man in his arms. Officially, four migrants died but Gregory believes the true number is at least twice that.

Many disapprove of the RNLI rescuing migrants. Gregory writes that helping people in distress is not just a moral choice but a legal one: ‘to ignore a cry for help at sea would be to break the law, no matter whether on one side of an international border or the other.’

This is a powerful and moving book, full of thrilling set pieces conveying what it’s like to be at sea in a gale so strong and salt-laden that your eyebrows and eyelashes are blown clean away.

You cannot be anything but awestruck by the dedication and selflessness of these lifeboat crews, who know better than most how ‘the border between life and death is even thinner than that between water and air’.