Cllr Hannah Williams’ husband joined the Mumbles lifeboat crew at 17. In 25 years on the boat, he saved 92 lives.
“And I know that because he actually has a certificate that says so,” she told councillors on Thursday night.
The Mumbles councillor was speaking as Swansea Council unanimously backed the RNLI, after weeks of abuse aimed at lifeboat volunteers in England.
Crews there have reportedly been branded traitors and threatened online after helping people crossing the Channel in small boats, with some of the worst of it in Portsmouth.
A Welsh Conservative, Cllr Williams won Mumbles at a by-election in June.
The seat fell vacant when Francesca O’Brien, who was elected as a Conservative councillor before defecting to Reform UK, became the Reform UK Senedd member for Gŵyr Abertawe in May.
‘Everything is cast aside the minute that pager sounds’
Cllr Williams, who still has family and close friends on the crew, said the RNLI was “intertwined with the history, the culture, and the people of Mumbles”.
The village has had a lifeboat station for nearly 200 years, she said, and it was the busiest in Wales in 2022, with 110 launches.
“The pager is always there,” she said. “It does not discriminate between a quiet evening at home, a child’s birthday, a family barbecue, a meal out. Everything is cast aside the minute that pager sounds.”
She spoke of the families who “dread the sound of the pager going off at 2:00 in the morning when there’s a force 10 blowing outside”, and who do not properly rest until they hear the front door open.
“That is why I found it truly appalling to see the way that some members of our lifeboat family have been treated recently,” she said. “They deserve our thanks, they deserve our respect, and they deserve our unwavering support.”
Eighteen volunteers lost in more than 180 years off Mumbles Head
The RNLI says the station has been saving lives for more than 180 years, winning 33 awards for gallantry, and that 18 of its volunteers have died trying to save others.
Four crew drowned in 1883, two of them the coxswain’s sons, and six more were lost when their lifeboat capsized in 1903.
The worst night came on 23 April 1947, when the lifeboat Edward, Prince of Wales capsized with all eight crew going to the ss Samtampa off Sker Point. Forty-seven people died, among them coxswain William Gammon, who had won the RNLI’s gold medal three years earlier.
Today’s crew are still answering the pager: in July they rescued two teenagers cut off by the tide between Limeslade and Langland. Last September, deputy coxswain James Bolter answered his 1,000th launch.
The RNLI, founded in 1824, marked its 200th anniversary in 2024 and takes no government money. In Mumbles, the crew’s own Raft Race turned 40 this summer.
Freedom of the city for the whole Mumbles crew since 1987
The motion was brought by Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Chris Holley and signed across the chamber, including by Labour council leader Rob Stewart and Conservative group leader Lyndon Jones.
It reminds the council that the freedom of the city went to Mumbles lifeboat station in 1987, to the whole crew rather than one person. Cllr David Hopkins, whose mother was Lord Mayor at the time, said she was right then and he stands by it today.
The motion calls the attacks on volunteers “simply unacceptable”, and asks the leader and the chief executive to write to the RNLI’s headquarters and the Mumbles station to pledge the council’s support.
‘They go out when others come in’
Cllr Holley told the chamber the volunteers head out into storms to rescue people in peril at sea. “They go out when others come in,” he said.
Cllr Stewart said some volunteers were having to take off their insignia so they could not be identified on the way to their stations. “That is simply unacceptable,” he said.
Without naming any party or group, he said the attacks came from “a belief that some human life is less valuable than others”, and called it fascist ideology playing out in modern-day Britain.
Cllr Peter Black said the Samtampa window in All Saints Church always made him think of the crew who went out that night. “They didn’t know who they were. They didn’t know where they’d come from,” he said. “They just knew that people were in danger.”
The RNLI says its crews launch when HM Coastguard tasks them, that all small boats crossing the Channel are classed as being in distress, and that it helps anyone without judgement.
The vote, in the chamber and online, was unanimous.
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