The Importance of Mutual Aid

The lifeboat association was prompted by an appeal to the British nation it was published in 1825 by this guy called William Hillary and what Hillary wanted to do was to support the foundation of a kind of national institution that was going to help victims of shipwrecks. He couched this project actually as quite sort of in nationalistic terms I suppose or in patriotic terms as sort of part of the duty that British people would have as one of the great seafaring nations. The original idea came from this sort of rather patriotic seafaring tradition, he thought that once you set up these organizations locally on the coast then they could be replicated across the globe.