RNLB Lord Southborough (Civil Service No. 1) (ON 688)

With the outbreak of war in 1939 Lord Southborough was prepared for a busy time given her station on the coast facing the continent of Europe.

At 5:30pm on 30 May 1940 a telephone request was made by the naval officer in charge at Margate that Lord Southborough be launched to go across the English Channel to Dunkirk to help with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force.[5] Under the command of Coxswain Edward Parker the lifeboat headed off to Dunkirk, along with 18 other lifeboats which had been commandeered by the same orders. The Margate crew was one of only three[6] RNLI lifeboat crews used in the evacuation that were allowed to take their own lifeboat across the English Channel, the others were crewed by Royal Navy personnel. Lord Southborough was second to arrive at the Dunkirk beaches, with the Ramsgate lifeboat Prudential (ON 697)[7] arriving a little before. The two lifeboats spent their first hours on the beaches ferrying soldiers from the beach to larger ships waiting off-shore in deeper water to evacuate them back to England.[6] Lord Southborough is officially credited with having brought off 600[8] military personnel from Dunkirk's beach, but the true figure is thought to be far greater than this. 500 of these were conveyed from the beach at La Panne to the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Icarus. The Commanding Officer of the destroyer, Lieutenant Commander E. G. Roper,[9] said of Lord Southborough’s crew

On behalf of every officer and man on this ship, I should like to express to you our unbound admiration for the magnificent behaviour of the crew of the lifeboat Lord Southborough…. The manner in which, with no thought of rest, they brought off load after load of soldiers under continuous shelling, bombing and aerial machine-gun fire will be an inspiration to us all as long as we live. We are proud to be the fellow countrymen of such men.[10]

The lifeboat's Coxswain Edward Parker was one of the two lifeboat coxswains in the operation awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the other being Harold Knight, Coxswain of the Ramsgate Lifeboat ON 697.[11]

From August 1940 the Battle of Britain raged in the skies above the south coast of England,[12] and the R.N.L.I.'s lifeboats were used to rescue airmen that had come down in the English Channel and the North Sea. One of the busiest lifeboat crews during the battle was that of Lord Southborough. On 3 September 1940[12] Lord Southborough was sent out to search for a missing Spitfire pilot who had been shot down in an air-to-air engagement with a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt 109.[12] The fighter-pilot was Richard Hillary (a descendant of Sir William Hillary,[12] the founder of the R.N.L.I. in 1824) who had sustained extensive burns to his face and hands. He was rescued and taken ashore in considerable pain. The lifeboat crew later visited him in hospital during his recovery.[12]

At 1:40pm on 15 November 1940 the sirens were sounded in Margate to alert the town of an air-raid, and the crew of Lord Southborough were mustered in the Margate boathouse. From there they saw the Royal Navy Tug HMS Guardsman explode after she struck a mine off North Foreland headland.[13] Lord Southborough immediately launched to go to the aid of the tug; by the time it arrived at the scene H.M.S. Guardsman had sunk,[14] but the lifeboat was able to rescue seven of the Royal Navy personnel (from a crew of ten) whom they found clinging to pieces of the wreckage. On return the lifeboat's Coxwain reported that he could find no trace of the missing two Royal Navy crewmen, and it was presumed that they had gone down with the vessel.

At 5:45pm in the early evening of 10 April 1941[2] Lord Southborough was launched to search for a crashed Royal Air Force Blenheim bomber, which had been reported as having made a forced landing on Margate Sands 3 miles off shore after returning from an attack on Borkum, during which it had been damaged by anti-aircraft defensive fire. Lord Southborough located and rescued the three man R.A.F. aircrew using a small dinghy as the lifeboat could only get to within a quarter of a mile of the aircraft's crash site.[2]

On the evening of 27 April 1944[15] a Liberator Bomber of the United States Army Air Force crashed at Foreness Point.[16] The aircraft from the 446th Bomb Group, flying out of RAF Bungay in Norfolk, had been on a bombing raid over the railway-marshalling yards at Blainville-sur-l'Eau in north-eastern France, and was returning to its base when it came down, the crash killing 8 of 10 crew aboard, with two having parachuted out of the aircraft shortly beforehand. Locating the two survivors after a search, Lord Southborough rescued them and brought them back to shore.

Lord Southborough was sold out of the service by the R.N.L.I. in 1955. She was bought by the Crown Agents for further use as a lifeboat in the British Overseas Territories.[5] She is thought to have been afterwards sent to Benghazi, Libya,[5] her fate beyond this is unsure.