Between labour and moral duty: social conflicts, volunteer work and the moral economy of life-boating in the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (1850–1914)

ABSTRACT

The history of humanitarianism in the nineteenth century, and more specifically of the lifeboat movement, has so far paid limited attention to the role of rank-and-file, working-class volunteers and the ways in which they interacted with the broader moral framework of humanitarian causes. In order to contribute to this history, this article looks at social conflicts between lifeboat crews and local committees as related in inspection reports of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. It argues that these conflicts hinge on the double nature of lifeboat work as both labour and moral duty, the incommensurability of these two aspects and the ways in which different social actors interpret them. It frames these tensions under the concept of moral economy and argues that the practical implementation of the humanitarian imperative of lifesaving at sea is partly a result of tensions and negotiations of mutual monetary and non-monetary obligations of the various actors at play at station level.

KEYWORDS:

• Lifeboat
• RNLI
• moral economy
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• volunteering

Introduction

On 7 November 1906, the Wicklow Lifeboat of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) launched into service to rescue the schooner Ethel. The launch was made under pressure from the local crowd and against the wish of the coxswain of the boat and honorary secretary of the station – while the coxswain was in charge of the boat, the decision to launch or not was taken by the honorary secretary. The launch turned out to be unnecessary and the local committee made the decision that the volunteer crew would not receive their usual pay for the service. This did not go down well with the crew, and the inspection of the station reports the following happening:

The honorary secretary (Mr Robert Lees) was violently assaulted by men of the enrolled crew of this lifeboat and another man used most abusive language to him. The honorary secretary received a severe blow in the face, which knocked out one of his teeth. […] Summons was taken out against the man who actually committed the assault, but the case was withdrawn on the man making an apology. (Precis Book N, p. 310)

The episode described in this excerpt puts a few elements into focus. First, volunteer work in the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in the early nineteenth century was paid in the sense that it was monetarily compensated in some form. Second, payment was a source of conflicts between crew and station management and, could, in that case at least, culminate in physical violence. And third, the limited consequences faced by the crewman having delivered the blow offer some insight on the agency possessed by lifeboat crew members in situations of conflicts because of their volunteer status. All these elements shed light on the complexities of volunteerism as a form of both labour and moral duty. Before discussing in more detail the implications of these characteristics, some elements of context are in order.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution, commonly referred to as ‘the Institution’ in its internal discourse, was founded in 1824-1914 as the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. It is an organisation made up of a majority of volunteers with the mission of rescuing people in distress at sea in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was founded in London at a time when local lifeboat stations were also being created along the coasts of Europe (Cameron, 2009; de Courcy Ireland, 1983; Evans, 2003). Its national scale the goal of alleviating the suffering of strangers ‘at a distance’, as Luc Boltanski (1993) put it, and the propagation of a novel moral imperative of saving lives from shipwreck no matter the personal risk (Trüper, 2019) placed this institution firmly in the field of humanitarianism.

Following the foundation of the Institution, and more regularly from the 1850s onwards, an Inspector who was generally a reserve or retired Royal Navy officer paid by the Institution visited lifeboat stations twice a year. During these visits, inspectors would talk to the crew which was generally made up of fishermen and other working men from coastal dwellings as well as to the local committee, headed by its Honorary Secretary, which drew upon local elites. Both groups were entirely male: women, while present in the institution notably as fund-raisers and donors were not part of the crews, nor were they on committees. Inspectors were also all male. Inspectors report would include information about the state of the boat, the needed repairs, the fund-management of the local station, and about conflicts occurring in the visited stations.

Even though physical violence such as in the case referred to above is a rare occurrence in these reports, conflict between the local committee and the crew is a frequent one. As in Wicklow in 1906, the payment of volunteers was a common object of these conflicts: While lifeboat crews, excluding coxswains, were not employees of the institution and did not receive salaries, they were compensated for their volunteering time, on service as well as on exercise. The labour dimension of life-boating and its impact on the humanitarian cause of lifesaving at sea has received very little scholarly attention.

There are numerous more or less institutional histories of the RNLI that tend to focus on heroism, on the technical evolutions of rescue methods (Beilby, 1994, Cameron, 2009; Cox, 1998), and on major figures such as William Hillary, founding figure of the RNLI (Gleeson, 2014). Academic research on the lifeboat movement has presented it as an early example of humanitarianism (Trüper, 2019), as having institutionalized a lifesaving heroism by giving regular form to voluntary work, and by having established, against older, more neglectful and opportunist practices (Rule, 1975), an imperative to risk one’s own life to save lives. The ways in which this moral imperative was put into practice, and the agency of working-class volunteers is however largely absent from this historiography. Although they are often more subtle than a punch to the face, the conflicts recorded in the RNLI inspection books are a window into the actions of these volunteers and make it possible to better understand the ways in which the humanitarian cause of lifesaving at sea was negotiated and acted upon in practice.

It is a shared feature of many of these conflicts that they touch on the incommensurability between the moral value of lifesaving at sea and the economic value represented by the payments given to volunteers for launches and exercise. This article argues that the studied conflicts highlight two aspects of life-boating. On the one hand, the work of lifeboatmen on the boats – such as pulling oars, cleaning stations, setting sails – can be seen as labour. While voluntary, lifeboat work was not very different from the work activities of the fishermen and boatmen composing the crews. On the other hand, life-boating also means to risk one’s own life in an attempt to save the lives of others. It was framed as a moral duty and as a potential locus for heroic action. What is at stake here is the network of monetary and non-monetary values attributed to that volunteer work and the mutual obligations between lifeboat crews, local committees and the broader institution resulting from it.

Though voluntary work has been studied in its relationship to the state, notably as an element of pre-welfare policy (Harris, 2010; Kramer & Krüger, 2019), and although there have been various discourses surrounding its definition and the motivation to volunteer (Kelemen et al., 2017; Korte et al., 2020; O’Toole, 2013; Taylor, 2005), it appears that, in the case of paid volunteers in the 19^th century, the specific interaction of monetary and non-monetary values has received only limited scholarly attention outside of the military context (Berkovich, 2017).

In order to analyse the complex networks of economic and moral obligations between the different social actors in the lifeboat stations, the concept of moral economy appears as a particularly pertinent framework. Thompson (1971), who coined the concept in its current usage focused on the modes of action and representations of English peasant farmers rioting against high bread prices. To use the concept of moral economy in the case of lifeboat stations is by necessity to shift it beyond its original context. This is not a particularly new endeavour. This concept has repeatedly been used for the study of humanitarian contexts (Fassin, 2009; Götz, 2015), notably to understand the ways in which humanitarian organisations allocated resources in emergency situations such as famines (Brewis et al., 2020). This paper will draw on the discussion of moral economy as a situation of the mixing of monetary and non-monetary values borrowed from Trüper (2022). The aim is to understand what monetary values (exchangeable values, concretely payments received in exchange fro work, indemnities in the event of death) and non-monetary values (values exempt from exchanges, such as duty, honour, bravery, and discipline) were attributed to the various aspects of voluntary life-boating work by the different social groups involved in the stations. This article also deals with moral economy in that it examines the way in which the differing representations in terms of monetary and non-monetary mutual obligations between the social groups involved shaped the observed conflicts. By exploring the moral economy of lifeboat stations, the aim is to gain a better understanding of the moral imperative to save lives at sea as being partly born of the incommensurability between monetary and non-monetary values and the conflicts between the social actors involved in the lifeboat movement.

Material and methods

The main material used in this research are the reports from biannual inspections visits, which were sent to the central committee of the Institution in London and logged in registers titled the Precis Books of the Institution.¹ The reports cover stations in Great Britain and Ireland.² The research process included a reading of reports, an identification of major subjects of concern and conflict, and the construction of a typology.

A small note should be made here concerning the bias inherent in the sources. While this article is mainly concerned with the moral economy of the lifeboat station, and the interaction between lifeboat crew and local committee, the sources used came from an Inspector and were sent to the central committee of the Institution. This means that references to the broader Institution and their meaning production concerning the moral imperative of lifesaving at sea intervene and will have to be taken into account. It also means that in each conflict the actors potentially include the crew, their coxswain, the local committee headed by their honorary secretary, the inspector, and the central committee of the institution. While the reports do account for lifeboatmen’s actions in their conflicts with the broader institution, their perspective is always rendered through the filter of the inspector’s report. This is a limit of the available sources that should be acknowledged. The archives are here read against the grain, paying attention to the actions of lifeboat crews and the ways in which the power relations in the station inform their interpretation by inspectors.

Three main types of conflicts and tensions have been identified³: exercise pay, injury compensation, and cases in which the crew refused to launch the boat into service. These types will be successively explored in order to shine a light on the role of social conflicts in the building of the humanitarian cause of lifesaving at sea.

Exercise pay and the disputed value of discipline

In the early 1900s, crewmembers on lifeboats as well as helpers who participated in launching the boats received a monetary compensation both for exercise and for rescues. Exercises, which were to be held on a quarterly basis, consisted in launching the boat and drilling common manoeuvres that were likely to be needed on service. Crews also exercised during inspections, unless quarterly obligations had already been met. The exercises, which were required in accordance with the Institution’s regulations and regularly enforced from the 1850s onwards, were paid at a lower rate than service (Green Books, 1880-1967). The rates of payment varied depending on whether the crew launched the boat in summer or in winter and during the day or at night-time (Precis Book N, p. 54).⁴ Records mention a 4s. compensation for exercise for volunteers − 5s. From the late 1880s onwards (Precis Book I, p. 439) – and a frequent 10s. for every service (Precis Book H, p. 422).

Even when looking at texts written by administrators of the RNLI the place of exercises in the mission of the institution appears complex. In 1893, C.W. Macara, one of the founders of the Lifeboat Saturday movement – a new mode of fundraising for the lifeboat movement developed in the 1890s which consisted in large parades and street collections – provided a summary of the official status of these monetary compensations:

It cannot be too prominently put forwards that the lifeboat-men are volunteers, and that the pay they receive is not intended as remuneration, but simply as a recognition of their services, and to compensate them for loss of time from their ordinary occupation, while engaged either for practice or service in the lifeboats. It is obvious that no amount of money could adequately recompense these gallant men for many of the services they render, when they frequently endure long exposure to cold and wet, and undergo the fearful tax to nerves and mind, when for many hours, sometimes even for more than twenty-four hours at a stretch, they are tossing in the lifeboat, waiting for a chance to reach the wreck, and only keeping the boat to her work by constant attention and continuous labour. (Macara, 1894, p. 5)

Here, the discrepancy between monetary and non-monetary values is very visible, and noted by the social actors themselves. The work of the lifeboatmen is proclaimed as impossible to remunerate, and yet the volunteers receive their pay. That pay is presented as both a compensation for lost income and as a ‘recognition’ for their services, a role also filled in other instances by medals and other non-monetary symbols. What’s more, Macara proclaims the incommensurability of recompense and service for both exercise and rescue. However, the ‘services’ he describes are clearly related to rescue – and yet still qualified as labour.

Conflicts surrounding those exercises show a different notion of the nature of exercise work, especially a differing conception of the interactions of monetary compensation and moral obligation between lifeboatmen and the Institution. While the inspection reports present exercising as a moral duty, and the payments as compensation, actions of lifeboat crew show them understanding these exercises as labour and denying their value towards contributing to the moral imperative of saving lives at sea. The implementation of exercise by the Institution should also be considered in the broader context of a disciplining of the labour force in the 19^th century, and also as part of the broader movement of the extension of drilling practices throughout the civilian world (Miller-Tremblay, 2021).

In this context, the amount paid to lifeboatmen per exercise became a source of many conflicts which inspectors mostly reported when lifeboatmen refused to launch on exercise – or, though far more rarely, on service. However, the inspectors only reluctantly brought up this issue as it conflicted with the idea of volunteerism which was central to the self-perception of the lifeboat movement, especially from the perspective of its organisers. This is shown in the ways in which the Institution would often react to demands for increased monetary compensation, and to said compensation being treated by volunteers as a form of salary. In 1861, for example the RNLI took over the Dublin Bay Lifeboats from the Dublin Ballast Board. The next year, the inspector condemned the demands for higher pay by local fishermen in Bullocks near Kingstown (today Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin) as betraying a ‘mercenary spirit’ (Precis Book D, p. 96). As a result, their services were dispensed with, and local coastguard men took over their positions. The action as well as the use of the word ‘mercenary’ shows that the management of the institution saw demands for wages as antithetic towards the moral economy of life-boating. For them, volunteerism, as a practice of moral engagement, by necessity went along with a limited role of monetary compensation. The implied military metaphor should also be noted here, even it is relatively weak: it comes time and again in texts on lifeboatmen, themes of courage, honour and volunteerism being present even before the formal birth of the Institution, in its founding documents (Hillary, 1823).

Tensions around the payment of exercises are salient in the inspection books for example in Dundalk 1875 (Precis Book F, p. 419), Drogheda 1879 (Precis Book H, p. 107), Newcastle County Down 1884 (Precis Book I, p. 163), and Sunderland 1892 (Precis Book K, p. 391). The Dundalk case is of particular interest and deserves a detailed examination.

The Dundalk station, on the East coast of Ireland, was established in 1859 upon request from the local harbour commissioners (Swan, 1970). This request came as the result of a shipwreck in 1858 where an ultimately successful attempt to rescue the crew of the barque Mary Stoddart from Liverpool resulted in the deaths of some of the crew of the first local boat sent to her rescue (Precis Book C, p. 109). Although it was not the first case in which such a rescue effort had been provided by the local population, the deaths of some of the rescuers became the central reason why the local community requested the RNLI to establish a station in Dundalk. After the founding of the station, the harbour commissioners kept an active role in running and financing the station alongside the local committee. The following years were marked by several instances of conflict surrounding the payment of exercise, with crew members and helpers appealing to the Institution – which was represented by the Inspector – to obtain the payment if they didn’t receive it from the local committee following a rescue (in 1871), or to be supported in their refusal to launch during bad weather in 1874 (Precis Book C, p. 109). In both those instances, their demands were successful.

In 1875, when the Inspector arrived and attempted to conduct exercises with the crew, the men ‘assembled, but they refused to man the boat unless they were promised full payment for the previous Quarter, although they had not been afloat’. They stated that they had been promised 4s. a quarter ‘whether they went out for exercise or not’, which did not correspond with the common practices in the RNLI (Precis Book F, p. 419). In this instance, the crew members failed to prompt the Inspector to decide in their favour in their dispute with the local harbour commissioners. Instead, the Inspector referred the problem back to the local level. There is a stark contrast between the crew members who used forms of protests which are common in labour conflicts, forms very close to picketing (King, 1985; Quinault & Stevenson, 2021), and the reaction of the inspector who considered the protest a question of discipline and deplored the lack of attention from the harbour commissioners to the ‘conduct of the crew’ (Precis Book F, p. 419). The use of the word ‘conduct’ is interesting here as it denotes a moral value attributed to discipline in itself. This conception could be attached to broader construct of military virtues, the study of which reaches beyond the scope of this article. However, its application in a civilian context should be noted. This contrasts with the attitudes of lifeboat crews whose actions relate to the monetary value of labour. Still, their position is not devoid of moral language either since it position refers to a promise that the local committee made to them, and their refusal to exercise was based on the assumption that this very promise had been broken. In that instance what was at stake was the place of discipline in the moral economy of the station. The inspector – an officer of the royal navy – viewed discipline as central, a position apparently not shared by the crewmen. The lifeboat crew’s action was unsuccessful partly because it had already been decided before the conflict happened that the station would be moved and another crew would be formed. Hence the usual leverage that lifeboat crews gained from being volunteers was absent in this case.

In those cases, it could be argued that complaints around lack of payment were the only aim of the lifeboat crews. However, other elements are often present which give some indications as to lifeboatmen’s understanding of exercises, and the power relations inside the stations.

Frequently, lifeboatmen argued that there was no point in such exercises since the crews were largely made up of fishermen who were quite capable of handling a boat. The local committee sometimes shared this position such as was the case in Balbriggan in 1893 where the committee refused to organise additional exercises due to ‘the men being fishermen’ (Precis Book G, p. 30). Here, fishermen were considered to already possess the necessary skills required to be lifeboatmen. These situations of conflict suggest that the understanding of exercise as a source of virtue through discipline was not shared by the fishermen.

Modes of opposition to the principle of exercising took on different forms. For instance, in Kingstown in Dublin Bay (today Dun Laoghaire), the local committee suggested to engage other men for exercises instead of those who launched into service, as the latter simply never showed up for any exercise. This solution was presented in the inspection report at a time when exercising had been temporarily abandoned. In November 1878, the inspector who agreed to this solution wrote:

Captain Sargeant R[oyal] N[avy] Inspector visited this Station. He was informed by the coxswain that the crew declined to exercise and that the boat had not been afloat for exercise for about 18 months. […] The reason given for no exercise having taken place was that, as the men who did service in her never appeared at exercise, the Local Committee considered it only wasting funds to send out in her a crew of old men and others hanging about the harbour who would be perfectly useless for actual work. (Precis Book G, p. 113)

Previously, the local committee had employed older men to exercise to at least appear to follow the Institution’s rules, possibly due to a pressure to spend their allocated funds. The fishermen saw exercising as a job not worthwhile for men of working age, and the hiring of older men for exercise meant additional revenue for people otherwise less able to work. The precise reason for why the men refused to partake in the exercises is not provided in the report, but potential reasons include the possibility to earn more money by other means or a general disdain for the practice. Although there is no detailed information in the inspection report, it appears that the committee must have exerted some insistence towards exercising by the crew: by the next year, it had been ‘prevailed on them [the crew] to take the Lifeboat out for exercise for the March quarter’ (Precis Book G, p. 115). Still, during the same inspection which coincided with the testing and voluntary capsizing of the new lifeboat to demonstrate its capabilities, the actual crew was absent once again, and the former exercise-only crew consisting of older fishermen manned the boat (Precis Book G, p. 115).

Occasionally, the risk-taking for exercise became a source of conflict. In Seaton Carew (England) in 1878, an inspector reports that ‘several of the crew remonstrated at being brought out to exercise in such weather’ (Precis Book F, p. 2), particularly for being made to cross dangerous rolling waves during the night for the exercise. The inspector then answered by claiming that the risk was not foreseeable, the weather having changed unexpectedly. A similar case was also recorded in Carnsore in Ireland in 1894 where some members of the crew refused to exercise in dangerous conditions. In this instance, members of the coastguard replaced them:

District Inspector reported that he had experienced difficulty, on the occasion of his recent visit to the Station, in persuading the crew to go off in the boat for exercise. The wind was W.N.W. viz off the land; but there was a heavy surf. Four men positively declined to go and their places were filled by coastguardmen. (Precis Book I, p. 416)

The danger and physical difficulty of lifeboat work seems to have been far more resented in case of exercise than for service, which is indicative of a different place of exercise and service in the conception of volunteer work. In 1876, an inspector commented on the impossibility to find men for an exercise launch in Hartlepool:

In case of wreck, there would never be a want of hands to assist in launching the Lifeboat but, for exercise, the men do not care about coming 1/2 miles to launch a Boat off a flat beach, where all must get wet. (Precis Book F, p. 129)

And such complaints about getting wet in the middle of winter for an exercise were not limited to Hartlepool. In Sunderland in 1875, ‘the helpers refused to try to launch, stating that it did not pay them to get wet through in winter for eighteen pence, and demanding three shillings’ (Precis Book E, p. 138), and in Whitburn in 1897, the men ‘refused to get their feet wet’. The local committee granted extra payment to the 18 men who ‘kept to their work on that occasion’ (Precis Book I, p. 372). The lifeboat crews seemed to not consider the physical toll of the life-boating work as worthwhile for mere exercise without adequate remuneration.

Frequently questioning the necessity of exercising for men with an intimate professional knowledge of boat operations, lifeboatmen also considered that what could be expected of them in terms of physical exertion and risk taking in cases of exercises to be limited, and very much different from the imperatives of service.

The place of monetary compensation and the discipline of exercise in stations were subject to constant negotiations between lifeboatmen, the local committee, and the central committee of the Institution represented by the inspector. The increased insistence on exercise actually taking place at a quarterly frequency resulted in resistance from the lifeboatmen well into the 1870s and early 1880s. The local committees displayed various accommodation strategies to appear to be putting into practice the norms of frequent exercise imposed by the Institution. At the same time, the Inspector was in the position to mediate conflicts concerning exercise pay between the local committee and the lifeboatmen. Towards the end of this period, during the 1890s and at different dates for each station, the inspector instructed local committees to increase the pay for exercise. Sometimes, as in the case of Whitburn in 1891, this was done despite an initial resistance from the local committee (Precis Book I, p. 370). Following this change, conflicts appear to have occurred less frequently.

These conflicts surrounding exercise pay, especially with regard to its double nature as both paid labour and a voluntary duty, bear testimony to differing conceptions of the necessity and nature of exercise between different social actors within the lifeboat movement. They show the push of the central committee of the institution towards including exercising and its disciplining effects as core dimensions of the moral economy of lifesaving at sea, discipline being presented as a moral good, as well as the various forms of contestation these effort produced. The conflicts occurred mainly in the 1880s, receding in the 1890s. The lessening of conflicts around that time cannot be explained solely from the elements present in the inspection books, although the rise in compensation probably had a role to play. The hypothesis of a rising acceptance of the value of discipline and drilling practises can however been made, in a context where such practices diffused more broadly in civilian society on both islands (Miller-Tremblay, 2021). In Ireland in particular, the rise of volunteer drilling in paramilitary organisations (Beatty, 2016) and more broadly its links with conceptions of masculinity and citizenship (Heffernan, 2019) are likely to be a relevant context. The tensions between moral duty and labour practices are also visible in the case of death or injury compensation which bring together questions of merit and pre-welfare state social change.

Compensations for injury, retirement and death pre-welfare

From its very inception, the RNLI compensated the families of lifeboatmen who died attempting to save the lives of the shipwrecked. On this subject, the first annual report of the Institution, published in 1825, reads as follows: The means of ‘preserving the lives of shipwrecked persons’ include ‘the exciting to exertion, in the hour of danger, [of] seafaring persons residing on the spot, by the certainty of relief being afforded to their Widows and Families in the event of any accident happening to them’ (RNLI, 1825, p. 17.).

The money given to the lifeboatmen’s families who died in service was seen as a condition that allowed for the establishment of a lifeboat station and the participation of local seafaring people by assuring them that an attempt to save the lives of strangers would not result in the family of the lifeboatman remaining without any resources in the case of their death. This fact, mixing the moral value of lifesaving with the monetary value of pensions afforded to the families of dead crewmen represents a building block of the moral economy of the institution from its very inception. It is also comparable to coeval military welfare policies that provided pensions to widows and children of soldiers who were killed in action (Lin, 2000). The institution also distributed non-monetary recognition, in the form of medals, thanks on vellums as well as symbolic objects (Green Book, 1880-1967). The rules of attributions of monetary relief varied during the period studied, and were subject to conflict, but it remains that they were conceived of as monetary recompense for a moral duty, which was a frequent source of conflicts and tension.

Thus, the commitment of lifeboatmen as volunteers is made possible through this type of monetary compensation that fundamentally brings together monetary and non-monetary values, and partly transforms voluntary action into paid labour. Later developments surrounding pensions and injury compensation developed alongside broader trends of pre-welfare social policies in Britain, especially as coxswains were paid worker of the institution. These developments changed the status of injury compensation in the moral economy of life-boating.

Cases of relief being provided to widows following the death of a lifeboatman occurred quite early. In an 1841 Blyth case, ‘£20 [were] granted in aid of the fund for the relief of the widows and orphans’(Precis Book A, p. 8): to compensate widows and children, the Institution contributed to funds raised by the local community. This was also the case in Skerries in 1873, where the ‘Committee expressed their deep sympathy with the families of the drowned Lifeboatmen and voted the sum of £250 in aid of the Local fund for their relief’(Precis Book E, p. 346), or in Whitby in 1877 where the committee voted £50 to help the orphans of a coxswain who died on exercise in addition to the £22 raised locally (Precis Book G, p. 117). This, furthermore, corresponds more broadly to practices of the RNLI which always attempted to make sure that at least some of the money for the functioning of the station came from the community, notes being made in the Inspector Reports when the poverty of one particular village made it particularly difficult as it was in Clogerhead in 1871 (Precis Book E, pp. 231–232). This applied even when the crewmen did not die directly in service, although such deaths would usually be compensated more modestly. From the very beginning, the Institution treated monetary compensation as a reward for the fulfilment of a moral duty and therefore not exclusively as welfare. The money was distributed to the widows and children following a vote by the central committee, a seemingly routine matter. The implication of the community could also be analysed as a further link of obligation of the moral economy of lifesaving at sea, one in which the local community was expected to contribute to the burden of the enterprise, an element that doesn’t appear to have caused many conflicts.

While children and widows received relief from the very founding of the Institution onwards, compensation for lifeboatmen who were injured in service was paid much later. It was paid sporadically throughout the 1870s and only became a routine matter by the 1890s, with notes on the compensated cases becoming progressively shorter. This largely corresponds with the evolution of British law on the compensation of accidents in the workplace, which would have applied at least to those members of the crew employed by the Institution (Bronstein, 2008). As in most contemporary workplaces, prior to the 1880s reforms of workplace accident compensation regulations that granted the right for compensation, lifeboat crews largely depended on the charity of their employers in a paternalistic context. They also had recourse to local fundraising. Once compensations for injury became the norm, volunteers as well as employees received them, thus reinforcing the labour dimension of the volunteer work. However, the moral considerations did not disappear in the following decades.

Most cases of injury compensation only describe the injury and the provided amount. Some provide extra information as to how long the injured person was unable to work, from which the amount was calculated accordingly. For example, in Drogheda in 1879, the local committee voted to grant a ‘gratuity’ – that is a one-time payment made as a reward for service rendered – to John Garvey, a former coxswain at this station ‘who was washed overboard from the boat while endeavouring to rescue the crew of the S.S. Urania of Swansea on the 18 January 1877 and who has since been unable to do any work in consequence of the shock his constitution then received, he being an old man’ (Precis Book E, p. 339). This is coherent with the Institution’s initial aim to compensate relatives as the lifeboatmen’s inability to work would have had a significant negative impact on their family’s resources (Rose, 2007). The Institution also took into account the impact on other male members of the household who would have to care for the ill or injured crew-member, for example in Cullercoats in 1897 where the committee granted a £15 gratuity to the coxswain Andrew Taylor after he fell gravely ill following a lifeboat exercise in winter. The inspector wrote: ‘His two young sons who assisted him in piloting were unable to earn any money during the greater part of the time he was ill, they having to nurse him by day & night’ (Precis Book M, p. 85). The £15 attributed to the coxswain, however, did not cover all the expenses throughout the time he was ill, which were estimated at £54.

The cases of injury and illness compensation also influence the ways in which lifeboatmen used those modes of assistance and how their claims were treated by the Institution, e.g. in Staithes in 1897:

Committee voted a gratuity of £15 as recommended by the Local Committee as a mark of sympathy with Joseph Verell formerly a member of the crew of the lifeboat who had been ill for nearly 3 years and was slowly dying of consumption, caused, it was alleged, by exposure in the Lifeboat. The case had only just been brought under the notice of the Institution by the Editor of the Christian World and others. The local Committee and Honorary Secretary (Dr J.B. Lavruck) had carefully considered the case and were of opinion that his first illness was not caused by going off in the lifeboat on the occasion in question (31 January 1895) although it appeared to commence from that period. It also appeared that several members of the man’s family had died from consumption. (Precis Book L, p. 131)

The people asking for help on behalf of the lifeboatman presented his condition as a consequence of his work on a lifeboat. Whether they actually believed that this was the case is somewhat beside the point here, since what is interesting is their attempt to link the illness to the actual activity of a lifeboat crew and not to some broader duty from the RNLI towards its crew. The Institution provided a ‘gratuity’ as a ‘mark of sympathy’ while also denying any connection between the work on the lifeboat in the illness in question. In this case, the involvement of the local population and charity movements is particularly notable, even continuing in the following years when the Institution granted money to Verell once again ‘for the sake of public opinion’ (Precis Book L, p. 517). There appears to be an agreement between the Institution and the crew members that the duty of the Institution does not necessarily extend, in their shared moral economy, to the broader welfare of their crew outside of the context of exercise and rescue, at least not without the added pressure of public opinion, which appears as a tool for negotiating the precise limits of mutual obligation in the individual case at hand. If one accepts the idea that humanitarian relief is primarily targeted at distant strangers whereas charity serves local familiars, the case shows that the Institution despite its humanitarian character, could be coerced to act locally as a charity, as well. It appears to have been of the demands of the local volunteers that when needed the Institution would also extend charitable aid to them.

Aside from death and injury compensation and from the 1880s onwards, the RNLI’s lifeboatmen also started to receive money when they retired. Initially it took the form of gratuities attributed for their long-time and valuable services, and later and for paid crews, as pensions, from 1898 onwards (Green Books, 1880-1967). Earlier, retiring crew member had often received honorary compensations once they left service, for instance in 1877 in Arklow where a retiring coxswain received binoculars (Precis Book F, p. 431). In the case of volunteers, the pensions, which the Institution awarded to retiring coxswains and other paid members of the crew, did not become the norm. However, they did sometimes receive gratuities and the interpretations of life-boating as labour and as a moral duty did co-exist and mix in the sources. The justifications for awarding or refusing to award pensions prove that these two conceptions were not separated but could have been of differing importance to lifeboatmen and the Institution at large.

Requests for pensions demonstrate the aspects that were taken into account when determining if an individual lifeboatman deserved a pension. It also shows which arguments those asking for a pension put forward. In Howth in 1883,

Committee granted £50 to James Elliott who was one of the crew of the Lifeboat on the occasion of the rescue of the ship George H. Oulton on the 28th October 1881. He was exposed to the fury of the gale for several hours from which he contracted rheumatic fever followed by bronchitis. As a consequence of ill health, he was compelled to retire from the Coast Guard Service and thereby forfeited his claim to a higher pension which he would have been entitled to had he been able to serve his full time. He would now receive a pension of £19.15 per annum. He was a respectable sober man and had 5 children to support. He was a member of the Lifeboat crew for 9 years and 3 months. (Precis Book I, p. 45)

The money given to James Elliott was meant to compensate him for a loss of revenue due to his illness which came as a result of his service on the lifeboat. The argument to award him the money included the affirmation of his bravery – his illness was directly linked to a rescue in which he took part. The fact that his illness came as the result of an actual rescue and not an exercise most likely played a role in the admission of his claim. His sobriety and his role as the main breadwinner for his five children (there is no mention of a wife) are also put on the same level. Thus, a combination of monetary and non-monetary sets of value – his lost income and his good character – were put in place to award him a pension. Furthermore, the length of his service also contributed to him being awarded a compensation for the loss of his pension, even though this only comes as one element amongst many others. Finally, illness is here given a moral value: the state of the lifeboatmen’s bodies appears as part of the moral economy of the station, being compensated economically only in as much as the conduct of the crew-member is deemed morally upstanding.

By contrast, a petition submitted in 1907 in Greystones in Ireland by the former coxswain Edward Archer to obtain a pension ‘as he understood that pensions were granted by the Institution’(Precis Book L, p. 372) chose the length of service and the coxswain’s age as the main argument in his request for money. His request for pension was rejected as ‘The Station was closed [in 1895] nearly 3 years before the pension scheme was introduced and it was not retrospective’ (Precis Book L, p. 372) and he only received £10, which was five time less than Elliott received before the pension system was even introduced. Archer appears to have presented his service strictly as a type of work, which could be the reason why his case was less successful than the other one in which the petitioner’s argument brought together his length of service, his courage, his ill-health, and his moral worthiness.

Once the lifeboatman died, his pension was rarely transferred to his widow. However, the Institution did frequently approve a gratuity. As in the case of Balbriggan in 1919, those were provided as a ‘compassionate grant’, following the daughter’s argument that ‘her father paid the rent’ with his pension (Precis Book G, p. 110). Thus, grants were used to reaffirm the role of lifeboatmen as their family’s breadwinners, and the reference to a family needing support demonstrate the role of gender representations in the compensation of lifeboat work (Rose, 2007). Pensions therefore do not appear to be directly included in the networks of expected mutual obligations constituting the moral economy of the lifeboat station. In the case of employees, pensions appear as largely a legal obligation due to the labour relationship. The moral element is very much present, but appears to be fundamentally subjectible to negotiations and case by case appreciation of merit and need in a broader social context of class relations.

The systems of, and decisions regarding, injury and disaster compensation reveal the lifeboat movement’s ties to the broader development of pre-welfare labour policies in Britain in the late nineteenth century. The interactions between lifeboatmen and these systems shows how their practices surrounding labour compensation were integrated in the moral economy of lifeboat work. Yet, in this case also, sets of moral value which included questions of respectability and courage did play a role, and in cases of a crew’s refusal to launch into service, the question of the representations of courage comes into even starker contrast.

Refusals to launch and the place of honour in the moral economy of life-boating

So far, this paper has focused on exercises and cases that do not directly apply to rescue launches to save shipwrecked people. In some cases, however, delays or refusals to launch were recorded, for example in Tynemouth in 1863 (Precis Book C, p. 153), Drogheda in 1871 (Precis Book E, p. 221), Fishguard in 1882 (Precis Book H, pp. 117–118), Ilfracombe in 1886 (Precis Book H, pp. 163–164), Howth in 1899 (Precis Book N, pp. 431–431), or Wicklow in 1901 (Precis Book N, p. 305). While in most cases, like in Sheringham in 1883 (Precis Book H, pp. 12–13) this caused no debate, the impossibility of launching in particularly tempestuous conditions or without available crew being recognized by all, other cases were deeply conflictual. The clear transgression from the moral norm which was considered central to the lifesaving activity makes those relatively rare cases an appropriate vantage point to observe the conflicting representations and norms surrounding lifeboat work. The analysis shows that refusals to launch do not necessarily contradict the lifeboatmen’s acceptance of the risk to one’s own life as part of their service, and their reaction to the ways in which they were reprimanded further explains their representation of this duty. It shows the place of honour in the moral imperative of lifesaving at sea and its interactions with economic dimensions, even in cases where strictly moral questions might at first seem to be at stake.

In Tynemouth on 10 March 1863, when a ‘large brig’ went ashore near the harbour, ‘half a dozen men only’ (Precis Book C, p. 153) joined the crew, which was not enough for a lifeboat that required a crew of 10 (Graham-Farr, n.d.). Those who refused were ‘saying that they were not properly paid on the last occasion’ (Precis Book C, p. 153). With some delay, the boat eventually launched into service, maybe relying on volunteers from the local population as the report does not mention how the crew was actually hired. No disciplinary action seems to have been taken against the men who refused to take part in the launch, and the inspector attributed the delay as much to an ‘accumulation of sand’ on the slipway as to the ‘absence of most of the crew’ (Precis Book C, p. 153). This instance shows the agency granted to lifeboat crew by their status of volunteers. The crewmen in this case put the labour dimension of life-boating work front and centre, even as the core mission of the institution was at stake. The documentation of the case is however too limited for there to be more information to their relationship to this imperative.

In Drogheda, on 27 September 1871, the brig Manly was wrecked at the South Shore of the river Boyne. The station, which was located on the North shore, delayed the rescue boat’s launch, and the boat ended up not being able to cross the bar, on account of the receding tide. This resulted in the drowning of six of the Manly’s crew. One sailor ended up being rescued by one Miss Jane Campbell, who was awarded a silver medal of the Institution, while a Mrs Fox who assisted her received thanks on vellum. Neither woman had any direct link to the institution and they were given a purely honorary recompense (The Lifeboat, 1872, p. 209).

There had been attempts to establish a station on the South side, but they failed due to opposition by the local committee who refused to supply the necessary funding. The reaction to this event demonstrates different understandings of lifeboatmen’s duties. On October 10, the local committee alongside the local Harbour Board

denounced the crew of the Lifeboat as cowards and recommended that they should never be allowed to go off in the boat again; whilst at the last meeting of the Board, a resolution had been passed recommending that those who ultimately did go off in the boat and attempted to cross the bar should not be paid. (Precis Book E, p. 221)

There is a visible link between monetary and non-monetary value in this case. The work actually conducted is seen as not deserving of payment because of the delay in launching. The duty to launch appears as absolute, and non-payment as an appropriate punishment for a failure to meet this moral duty. Noting that no other men were available to man the boat, the Institution’s inspector argued against this position and also pointed out that: ‘he considered that the men could not justly be denounced as cowards, especially by those who had declined to provide them with the means of lessening the risks they would have had to incur’ (Precis Book E, p. 221). In this instance, the understanding of risk differed between the local committee which appears to have prioritised the duty of the lifeboatmen to attempt the rescue of the shipwrecked regardless of any personal risk, and that of the Inspector who, although valuing courage, emphasised the necessity to limit the danger to which the volunteers were subjected. He also saw a need for conflict management and the case shows his leeway in finding solutions and arbitrating between conflicting parties. The inspector’s argument was that committee members, by not giving the lifeboat crew the means to reduce the risks, had also failed in their own obligations. The conflict is easily framed in terms of moral economy: in this instance the failure attributed to the committee members is that to provide the monetary means required for reducing the risk inherent to the lifeboatmen’s moral duty.

The case also illustrates the ways in which lifeboatmen could react to the very serious moral charge of cowardice. Following the previously described interaction between the inspector and local committee, the committee finally agreed to establish a second station on the South side of the river Boyne. The inspector then met the fishermen on the North side on November 24:

The coxswain having returned, he and some of the leading men were met by the Assistant Inspector. They stated that notwithstanding the way in which they had been attacked they would always man the Life Boat when required. (Precis Book E, p. 224)

As their courage was placed in doubt, the lifeboatmen asserted a sense of wounded honour. They provided a list of names from which volunteers could be drawn, thus showing a public commitment to the risk-taking required of them. The readiness to face danger was an important element in the self-representation of the lifeboatmen themselves, something that could notably be analysed in terms of constructions of masculinity (Mangan & Walvin, 1987), the lifeboat crews honour being linked to their courage and the value of their public promise to take risks (Heinzen, 2020).

This incident gives a complex picture of the moral economy of the lifeboat station, in which risk-taking is viewed as an intrinsic part of the role by all actors present, but its boundaries as well as the responsibility of the local committee and institution towards providing the material means of reducing the risk is a source of debate and conflict. The recognition of the lifeboatmen’s honour appears as another element of the mutual obligations between local committee, institution and lifeboat crew building the moral economy of a lifeboat station.

Conclusion

Highlighting the monetary and non-monetary values involved in this voluntary work, has brought to light some of the main features of the moral economy underpinning the work of nineteenth-century lifeboat stations. Rescue at sea is both work – with monetary compensation for this labour – and a moral duty, involving the possibility of risking one’s life. The concept of moral economy makes it possible to understand the incommensurability between rescue at sea as paid work and as non-monetary moral duty as a nexus of the observed conflicts. The dual value of rescue work is at the root of many of the conflicts between the various social actors at the local level of rescue stations. These conflicts must be seen as playing a particular and important role in the institution and practical realisation of the moral imperative to save lives from shipwreck. In the source texts, the monetary and non-monetary aspects of life-boating appear as a variety of conflict types, around exercises, pensions, injury compensations and refusals to launch. The boundaries of the duty of rescuers and the reciprocal obligations between rescuers and the central and local committees involve both monetary elements – compensation for training, pensions, etc. - and non-monetary elements – discipline, recognition, respect for crewmen’s honour. The observed conflict can thus be understood as a negotiation of the boundary between these monetary and non-monetary aspects, conducted between social groups with differing understandings and interests.

The humanitarian cause of saving lives from shipwreck and the precise limits of the moral imperatives that derive from it are therefore not static or directly deducible from the institution’s founding texts. Rather, the humanitarian cause is a dynamic phenomenon, the result of conflicts and negotiations between social groups, which can be thought of in terms of moral economy, in the sense of a moving and potentially conflicting constellation of monetary and non-monetary values. The edges of the mutual obligations between social groups are also modified in the development of state protection of the workers implicated in it, and adapted to technological change.

This article therefore proposes to take into account the dimension of social conflict present in Thompson’s founding text on moral economy and to apply it to the humanitarian context. It also opens up a discussion on the history of class differences within the RNLI as a constitutive dimension of its mission statement. More broadly, the agency of lifeboat crew in the constitution and implementation of the humanitarian cause of lifesaving at sea is a further argument towards more attention being given to the role of working-class volunteers in the humanitarian movement. This article also shows a humanitarian organization functioning as a disciplining factor of its working-class volunteers as well as both the acceptance of the central cause by these volunteers and their resistance to some forms of standardization.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks their colleague in the AISLES project for the help conceiving and revising the manuscript. Particular thanks go to Henning Trüper and Lukas Schemper in this regard. They also thank Hayley Whiting at the RNLI archive Poole for her help with accessing the document. They thank Jasper Heinzen and Shane Browne for their help and suggestions. Thanks also go to Kaja Skowrońska, Marie-Astrid Hugel, Pauline Spychala and Mélanie Lallet for their imput on the manuscript and support as well as to Max Kaplan for his English-language proof-reading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grand agreement N°863393, AISLES, 2020-2025.

Notes on contributors

Nebiha Guiga

Nebiha Guiga has a PhD in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the University of Heidelberg working on the treatment of wounded soldiers during the Napoleonic wars. They are currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin where they take part in the ERC project Archipelagic Imperatives. Shipwreck and Lifesaving in European Societies since 1800.

Notes

1. RNLI Archive, Poole, Life boat Precis Book, A to N. Book B, covering the 1840s, is missing from the collection in Poole.

2. The question as to the particularities of the lifeboat service in Ireland would require a study of its own. Some elements such as the frequent recourse to coastguard men in Irish station suggest that significant differences may well have existed.

3. The question of lifeboatmen’s relationships to their boats and the way in which their technical and local knowledge was taken into account by the Institution, as well as the question of the routine disciplining of the crew and the local committee deserves its own research which could not be conducted as part of this article. Similarly, conflicts have been selected which pit committee and crews against each other in order to study the agency of the crews in the building of the humanitarian cause of saving lives from shipwreck. Conflicts internal to the crews or to the committees, which are also recorded, would require further research.

4. The Precis Book gives the rates of pay for winch men and helpers in Kingstown in 1901, which are as follows: « Winchman: Summer 4s. day, Winter 6s. day Summer 8s. nights, winter 12s. night Helpers Summer 2s. day, winter 3s. day Summer 4s. night, winter 6s. night » (Precis Book N, p.54).