The life savers of Waterloo Bridge

It's a beautiful summer's evening in Central London - a busy time for saving lives. The blue sky is streaked with contrails and out on the River Thames, between Chelsea and Albert Bridges, the crew of an orange E-Class lifeboat is on training drills. In the middle of 'fire on board', the VHF radio crackles on Channel 0, the search and rescue frequency: 'London Coastguard to Tower Lifeboat London.' 

'Tower Lifeboat, go ahead.' 

'We're getting reports of a male and female on the edge of Battersea Bridge. East side.' 

There's been some banter during the training drills but that all stops as the three-man crew - with me in the 'fourth seat' as an observer - switch to response mode. At the helm Craig Burn eases back the throttles of the twin 435hp Volvo engines and we surge upriver. 'A female threatening to jump,' he confirms. We're on the fastest boat in the RNLI fleet - capable of 44 knots or 50mph - and in what seems like seconds we've reached Battersea Bridge and are scanning the east side, using our hands as visors against a blazing sunset. There are already curious onlookers up on the embankments and the bridge, drawn by our blue light and speed through the water. There are blue lights, too, on the bridge itself - the police have arrived. No sign of would-be jumpers on the east side so we swish through the arches and scan the stone parapet on the other side. 

'That bloke in the white shirt looks a bit iffy,' says Burn, pointing at a figure walking jerkily across the bridge followed by a woman. The couple seem to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with police officers. After confirming that the situation is being contained 'landside' we return downstream to Albert Bridge, in case the original report had specified the wrong bridge. The police are there too and one officer shouts down to tell us: 'Drunken couple. They did climb over [the parapet of Battersea Bridge], but they climbed back. Safe and well.' 

It's a stand down. But there's little time to relax. A minute later the radio crackles again. The coastguard has information that a man who 'has previous' in threatening or attempting to commit suicide from Tower Bridge may be on his way there again. Burn points the bows of the boat at the Square Mile's jocularly nicknamed skyline - the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie, the Gherkin, not to mention the Dome of St Paul's. Tower Lifeboat is on another 'shout', and depending on our speed of response and action, someone may die in the next few minutes or live to be grateful for our intervention. 

How many of the thousands of people lining the embankments who witness our progress downstream knew there were lifeboats on the Thames in London - and have been since 2002? The answer is probably very few. According to a You Gov poll conducted in 2012 only 16 per cent of Londoners were aware that the RNLI, which celebrates its 190th birthday this year, operates a search and rescue service on the river through the capital. It's a disappointing finding for a charity that uses a largely volunteer workforce and receives not a penny from central or local government, relying almost exclusively on public donations and legacies. 'We've had to chip away for 12 years to build our relationships and our awareness with the public,' says Janet Kelly, the Manager of Tower Lifeboat Station, located at the north end of Waterloo Bridge. 'It's been quite a challenge to get to where we are now but there's still much, much more to be done.' 

You might ask what more Tower Station has to do to raise its profile. It is already the busiest lifeboat station in the country, responding to more call-outs and saving more lives per year than any of the other 235 stations dispersed around the coasts and waterways of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. In 2013 its crew was called out 492 times, rescued 128 people and saved 19 lives (a life is deemed to have been saved if, without the attendance of the lifeboat, it is beyond reasonable doubt that a person would have died). Comparable figures for the busiest coastal station, Southend-on-Sea, were 142, 180 and zero. But nobody - nobody I asked, at any rate - has a clue about any of this. 

'I think in London you're competing with so much other news,' says Janet Kelly. 'If a body is found on a beach around the coast it tends to make the national papers but the fact that there are so many bodies pulled out of this river, for all sort of reasons, is never news unless they're famous or a victim of crime.' Each year between 30 and 50 dead bodies are pulled from this stretch of the river - and the figure would be much higher if it wasn't for the presence of the RNLI and the Marine Policing Unit, formerly the Thames Division of the Metropolitan Police, based at Wapping. The 13 road and pedestrian bridges on Tower Station's patch, from Tower Bridge in the east to Battersea Bridge in the west, and the embankments between them, attract people who jump, or threaten to. 

About 45 per cent of the incidents Tower Lifeboat responds to involve such desperate people, either in serious suicide attempts or 'cries for help'. A further 15 per cent of call-outs are to passengers who have fallen ill or been injured on commercial vessels, from having heart attacks to choking on their dinner. The rest are in response to the myriad accidents and stupidities that result in people requiring rescue from the water - getting caught on the foreshore by the rising tide, going in after a dog or a dropped camera, deciding a swim would be a good idea. 'It's just part of the undercurrent of life that goes on in London,' says Kelly. 

The RNLI owes its presence on the Thames to one of the river's worst disasters. In the early hours of August 20, 1989 the pleasure cruiser Marchioness, with 131 party-goers, catering staff and crew on board, was rammed by a dredger, the Bowbelle, near Cannon Street Railway Bridge. The Marchioness sank within seconds. Tower Lifeboat, had it existed, could have been there in a few minutes. As it was the Thames Division of the Met (operating from the pier by Waterloo Bridge now occupied by the RNLI) did the job, rescuing 50 of the 80 survivors. Fifty one people died. 

One of the recommendations of the various safety inquiries conducted in the aftermath of the disaster was that there should be a dedicated search and rescue service on the river and in 2002 the RNLI established four stations on the tidal Thames - at Gravesend, Tower Pier, Chiswick and Teddington. In 2006 the station at Tower Pier moved to its present position by Waterloo Bridge, retaining its original name. 'We're essentially the ambulance on the river, first responders,' says Chris Walker, one of the 10 full-time crew who work at Tower Station. 

Tower operates round the clock on 12-hour shifts, from 7 to 7, using more than 50 highly trained, unpaid volunteer crew - 10 of them women - in addition to the full-timers. 'From binmen to barristers,' is how Walker characterises the demographic of the volunteers, who are expected to put in two shifts per month. In fact roughly a quarter are emergency service personnel, partly because their shift patterns mesh with the RNLI's working hours. The rest include businesspeople, city workers, a coastguard, doctors, a BBC cameraman, an HR consultant, an architect and a university lecturer. On the several shifts and visits I put in between May and July I met a firefighter, two paramedics, two employees of the Environment Agency, an account director with a PR company and two postgraduate students (studying, respectively, for a Masters in Composition for Screen at the Royal College of Music and a DPhil in International Relations at Oxford). 

Many have a background in sailing or some sort of affinity with water but there is another, less tangible binding agent, it seemed to me. Founded in 1824, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution represents a vestige of the Victorian spirit of philanthropy that also chimes with the Big Society idea that government ministers have gone so quiet on in recent years. Among the Tower crew I found a sense of common purpose that feels increasingly rare in today's selfie-obsessed society. 'I just like being part of it,' Sarah Garrett, the PR account director, told me. 'It sounds silly but everyone's so nice.' 

The RNLI may be a relatively recent presence in the middle of London but people have been jumping into the river, and other people trying to save them, since the Thames was a forest of masts and most people crossed it on ferries not bridges. In the 19th century (and right through to the 21st) it was the responsibility of the river police to deal with bodies in the water. They were based on a pier at the north end of the old, nine-arched Waterloo Bridge - a handy location as the bridge was a notorious jumping-off point - which they shared with the Royal Humane Society. Staffed by volunteers, the RHS resuscitated and cared for the people retrieved from the river - and the site of the pier they shared with the police is now occupied by Tower Lifeboat Station, right next to one of the piers of the old bridge. 'In a way it's gone full circle as we're also responding to calls for help,' says Janet Kelly. 'The need has never gone away.' 

In Our Mutual Friend the mere sight of the river makes Lizzie Hexam shiver with fear. Much has changed since Dickens' day. The river banks are closer together, there are many more bridges, the wharves and warehouses have become offices, bars and apartments, and ships that saw action in world wars live out their dotage as restaurants and nightclubs. But the river keeps rolling and among the Tower Lifeboat crew there is a healthy respect for its treacherous waters. 'The Thames is a unique, dangerous beast,' says Chris Walker, who has worked on lifeboats in the Solent, one of the busiest stretches of water in the world. It is not just the invisible crosshatching of strong tides and currents, which can suck a person under in seconds, but what Walker calls the 'entrapment areas' and 'wee nooks and crannies' - behind the barriers of the London Eye and other pontoons, the gaps between moored barges, the floating cages designed to snaffle litter. Tower Lifeboat has retrieved bodies, both dead and alive, from all these slime-infested places. 

Then there is the river traffic, which is increasing year on year. More than 100 large and 63 small passenger vessels are registered on the Thames through London, carrying more than six million people between Gravesend and Teddington each year. Some are sleek commuter catamarans, taking people to work in the City and Canary Wharf, others are wide-beamed sightseeing boats resembling giant floating conservatories. Industrial vessels include the 'tug-and-tows', the tugboats pulling barges full of containers of refuse from a number of London boroughs to disposal sites in the lower reaches of the Thames. Ducking and diving among them are the private leisure craft, from canoes and sailing yachts to Dutch barges and narrowboats with tubs of geraniums on the roof. 

The congested river traffic does not just pose a risk to anyone in the water but registers its own share of accidents. In early June Tower Lifeboat was called out when a sightseeing boat crashed into Tower Bridge. Nine passengers were injured, one seriously. One of the shouts I went on was to a 74-year-old woman who had poured scalding tea over herself on a passenger clipper moored at Bankside, next to the Globe Theatre. It may sound like a minor incident but on a scale of 1 to 10 the victim rated the pain level at 10. Craig Burn soothed her with words and first aid, the crew called an ambulance and the woman, a visitor from Scotland, was overcome with gratitude. 'Expert assistance with smiles and kindness,' were her parting words. They would make a good motto. 

The complexity of tides and traffic requires highly specialised and detailed knowledge which is why Tower Station always employs two full-time crew on the boat along with one or two volunteers. This core of professionals is possessed of finely detailed mental maps of the river, familiarity with the boats that ply it, and a kind of instinct for its moods - what Janet Kelly calls 'situational awareness'. 

Two such are Craig Burn and Chris Walker, who take me out on the river during my first night shift. 'Compared to your average coastal station we have a lot more landmarks and points of interest to learn,' says Walker. Though Tower Station is busy all year round, there's usually a peak in the summer months. 'If the weather gets hot people want to swim. There's thousands of people on the embankments, the bridges. Lots more potential.' 

As we motor downstream he and Burn give a running commentary on salient features and dangerous places. We turn back at Greenwich, swinging round the stern of the temporarily moored HMS Bulwark (she was en route to the D-Day commemorations in Normandy), and return upstream to the Battersea church where William Blake got married and JMW Turner painted river scenes from the vestry window. Turner would have been slack-jawed at the modern city, viewed from the middle of the river at night, with buildings and bridges uplit in dreamy colours - the old County Hall in neon-blue, London Bridge in Dutch orange. 'It's a beautiful way of seeing London,' says volunteer crew member Adam Bancroft, sitting next to me on the boat. 

So beautiful, indeed, that it's easy for me to forget momentarily why we're here. But Bancroft, a paramedic from Hampshire, is under no illusions about the river and what it can do. Some people, he says, barely survive the drop to its surface - cold water shock can stop your heart in an instant - 'and if you hit the water at low tide it's like hitting concrete. We pick up a lot of people with spinal injuries, broken necks.' The 'mindsets' of the people he has pulled from the water are often very strange, he says. 'The majority are thankful when we turn up, they don't realise how unpleasant the environment is when you get in that water. But some are angry, some get aggressive. Some don't say much at all. Some even leave their shoes and wallets on the side when they jump in.' 

Back at the station Burn and Walker talk me through video footage of various rescues they've been involved with. The title of one of these mini films is 'Not everyone is pleased to be rescued' and shows a man swimming away from Tower Lifeboat, then obstructing his rescuers as they try to haul him aboard. Footage of a man in the shadow of HMS Belfast is more typical. He clings on to the ship's anchor chain for dear life as the lifeboat approaches. There is also a recording of the shout Burn describes as 'The worst job I've ever been on'. A woman dangles from the struts of Hungerford Bridge while the lifeboat waits, helpless. Burn was convinced she was going to dash herself to death on the concrete platform directly below. The camera catches the moment of her fall - she drifts down like a figure in a silent nightmare, but somehow her trajectory takes her clear of the concrete. She survives. 

Alcohol and/or poor mental health are almost always factors in the case of those who make a conscious decision to jump. 'The common reason is, 'Well, they won't change my pills',' says Janet Kelly. 'Or people who've had rows with boy- or girlfriends. We had an Asian girl who'd been raped and didn't want to tell her family.' Sometimes the criminal world intersects with these haunts of hopelessness - one man Tower Lifeboat pulled from the river, who muttered nonsensically that he was a 'Greek Muslim', turned out to be part of Romanian gang who had been targeting ATM machines in the City and had jumped in to evade police. 'But it doesn't matter why you're in the river or why you're stuck on the foreshore,' says Kelly. 'We're non-judgmental, and that is terribly important.' 

There's no such thing as a typical shift. Some are frenetic; many are uneventful. There may be no calls over the 12 hours and the crew occupy their time on training exercises out on the river for an hour or two then return to the station where they check equipment, clean the boat, drink tea and, on night shifts, get some sleep. But once the bell goes and the call comes in, from 999 calls routed through the London Coastguard, the shout is on: 90 seconds max to get into your lifejacket, on the boat and arrowing to the incident - unless the lifeboat is on the water already, in which case the reaction is instant. 

It's an adrenaline rush, as I can vouch for, but it is sometimes short-lived. That beautiful summer's evening, as we speed towards Tower Bridge and the man who may be intending to jump off it, the coastguard provides a swift update, probably having just received fresh information from a family member or friend of the man in question: 'That suicidal male with a fascination for Tower Bridge is on the train to Southend at the moment. So we can disregard that.' 

An hour later, having returned to the lifeboat station, we are called to two males 'threatening to jump' from Hungerford Bridge. It's a matter of seconds away and when we get there we find that two youths, one dressed in beach shorts, have climbed down the white struts supporting the bridge to the concrete base below. An audience has gathered on the walkway above and the lads appear to be showing off. When we arrive, closely followed by a boat from the Marine Policing Unit, they start to shin back up the struts. What they don't know is that submerged in the water directly below them is a concrete shelf that they would hit if they fell. 'Absolute stupidity,' says Craig Burn. 'They're playing to the crowd and they could end up in wheelchairs.' 

In the end it's another stand down - the two make it to the top and melt into the summer crowds - but 90 minutes later we're called out again, to a 'possible female threatening to jump off Westminster Bridge'. Another false alarm - the pattern of a busy evening - though it's impossible to measure the deterrent effect of having a lifeboat show up. 'It's all much ado about nothing at the minute,' says Burn. 'But hey ho. You've got to be in it to win it.' And he turns the boat back along the darkening river. 

On my final visit to Tower Station, Burn and his crew - fellow helm Stuart Morrison and volunteer Jenny Barrett - have just proved the truth of his little maxim. That morning they pulled a would-be suicide from the water, along with a 'good Samaritan' who jumped in after him. The man who tried to commit suicide had thrown himself from Hungerford Bridge at 7.15am. He told Barrett (the Oxford postgrad) that he had wanted to 'end it'. A jogger who happened to be on his way to work (as a statistician with the Greater London Authority on the South Bank) had other ideas. 

When the lifeboat got there the tide was threatening to sweep the two of them under the structure of the London Eye - one of those places of entrapment from which it is next to impossible to retrieve people. Another 90 seconds and it could have been too late. 'One life saved, possibly two,' says Craig Burn. 'Happy days.' 

Published in the Telegraph Magazine on August 16, 2014