WOMEN TO THE RESCUE
Photo project pays tribute to RNLI heroes
WOMEN of the RNLI is an exhibition opening at the National Maritime Museum on March 2, to highlight the role of women in the lifeboat service.
The exhibition features Síle Scanlon and her mother Máire from Ballycotton, Co Cork, both part of the Ballycotton RNLI. Síle joined the RNLI having grown up around the station, and now both serve on board.
Coinciding with Women’s History Month, the exhibition will celebrate the vital role that women have played in saving lives at sea, in a variety of roles throughout the RNLI’s 200-year history. It includes a series of 42 photographs by Jack Lowe, which have recently been acquired by Royal Museums Greenwich, as well as oral histories and historic objects.
The images form part of Lowe’s ongoing Lifeboat Station Project, an attempt to photograph all 238 operational RNLI lifeboat stations and crew members at each.
Lowe uses a 12x10 inch (30x25cm) Thornton-Pickard field camera from about 1905. The photographs are then developed using a process called wet collodion, a technique invented in the mid19th century. This creates beautifully atmospheric and evocative photographs with a sense of timelessness.
Lowe’s project began in 2015, with over 150 stations across the UK and Ireland now photographed. Once finished, it will be the first complete photographic record of every RNLI lifeboat crew.
The National Maritime Museum holds the world’s largest maritime collection, and is widely regarded as the finest maritime museum in the world.
It’s part of Royal Museums Greenwich, which also incorporates the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the 17thcentury Queen’s House and the clipper ship Cutty Sark.
Greenwich has always had associations with maritime matters, exploration and navigation — as well as being a bridgehead for occupation.
It was one of the main landing places for the Romans in 55BC. The legions camped on Blackheath before taking over the rest of the country as far north as Hadrian’s Wall.
Henry VIII lived at Greenwich, the Royal Navy has roots on the waterfront, and the area of Greenwich has played a key role in politics, warfare, colonisation and the slave trade.
Cartography naturally plays a big part, with charts dating back to the early days of exploration, manuscripts including official public records, ship models and plans, scientific and navigational instruments, and instruments for time-keeping and astronomy.
At the nearby Royal Observatory the Prime Meridian today runs through London SE10. Although having something of an exalted name, this is not some natural phenomenon like the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes. It’s just a brass line running through the grounds of the Observatory. Having said that, because it theoretically divides the two hemispheres of the world it’s probably one of the most photographed brass lines in the world.
Greenwich has been the home of the Prime Meridian since 1884 — in other words, it stands on zero degrees longitude, dividing the globe. It is also the home of Greenwich Mean Time, which reminds me of an excellent April Fool’s jape back in 1999. Guinness had its PR people announce that it was to sponsor GMT, and henceforth it would be known as Guinness Mean Time. The story landed in many of Britain’s newspapers. When the truth emerged, they were not amused with the latitude Guinness had taken with the facts.
But I digress. The Greenwich Meridian, already widely used in nautical charts, was accepted as the standard in 1884. After much discussion, 24 different global time zones were agreed on.
However, David Rooney’s book About Time reckons that standardised time had an ulterior dimension. It was foisted on us by temperance campaigners. They lobbied MPs to ensure that publicans who sold alcohol outside licensed hours could not plead they were hazy about the time.
For further elucidation on this, the Irish Museum of Time in Waterford goes into more detail.
WOMEN of the RNLI runs until the end of June, see rmg.co.uk. Admission is free