Lifeboat Saturday

On Saturday 10^th October 1891, the first ever street collection for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) was held in a place you would not typically associate with the sea – Manchester. The inland city of Manchester may be known for its Ship Canal, but residents were moved to support the families of the 27 RNLI lifeboatmen, from St Anne's and Southport, who lost their lives rescuing crew members from the sunken vessel, Mexico, some five years earlier.

With the largest loss of life of any RNLI rescue mission, the scale, and the effects on the widows of the lifeboatmen and their children was immense. Widespread support grew out of an RNLI appeal to support the families left behind, and Charles Wright Macara, a Manchester-based industrialist, heeded the call, and with it ‘Lifeboat Saturday’ was born.

Outside Manchester Town Hall, 1891 © Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI)

Processions of bands, dancers, tableaus, and a fancy-dress bicycle parade were the were main attractions. In its first year, ‘the band of the training ship Indefatigable was, through Messrs. Shaw and Kirlew, secured, and the boys were boarded at the Strangeways Refuge free of charge’ (The Manchester Guardian, 12 October 1891). In subsequent years, the Refuge band played in procession along with the Indefatigable boys, many of whom were likely Refuge ‘old boys’ themselves.

One of very few mentions of the Refuge's participation in the day's events in the charity's magazine, The Children's Haven (November 1898)

Akin to their role in the city’s Whitsun parade, the boys from the Central Refuge and Brigades also provided additional security during the annual event, as they tended the large collecting boxes that were placed in ‘the main thoroughfares, railway stations, and places of amusement across the city’ (The Book of the Lifeboat, 1894). The boxes were said to have been made so that no money could be extracted by the passing public.

Lifeboat Saturday events soon spread across the United Kingdom; within two years this new method of public fundraising increased the RNLI’s income by over £200,000. Despite interruptions during the First World War, the events continued long into the 1930s until the onset of the Second World War.