The inventor George William Manby (1765-1854) was a Norfolk man, and a school-fellow and friend of Nelson. His younger brother Thomas also joined the Navy and rose to rear-admiral but George was trained for the artillery at the Royal Academy, Woolwich, though he instead became a captain in the Cambridgeshire Militia. From 1803 he was barrack master at Great Yarmouth where in 1807 he saw a naval gun-brig, the 'Snipe', wrecked within sixty yards of the shore with the loss of 144 lives. It occurred to him that rescue in such a case required a rapid physical link with the shore, so he borrowed a small military mortar fom the Board of Ordnance and devised a means of using it to fire a rescue-line to a stricken vessel. It was first attempted in earnest, and successfully, when the brig 'Elizabeth' was wrecked at Yarmouth on 12 February 1808, just when Manby was first promoting his invention's official approval: this was rapid, bringing him widespread fame and various awards. When small rockets became reliable, they replaced line-throwing mortars, but Manby - who also improved other related aspects of lifesaving - was a pioneer of the principle involved. He is presumably the figure shown firing the mortar in this image. Pocock exhibited two oil paintings of Manby's apparatus in use in other incidents at the Royal Academy in 1815 (nos. 119 and 270) which are now in the Castle Museum, Norwich. They belonged to Manby, who was a significant local collector of marine works and patron of the Joy brothers in particular. The NMM also has three small but highly finished wash drawings of the subject by Pocock, which are probably preliminary studies: the present drawing may be partly based on one of these (PAD 8838). He also exhibited two watercolours of the subject at the Old Watercolour Society in 1811 (nos. 152 and 162), and this drawing is apparently the second of these. Exhibited: NMM Pocock exhib. (1975) no.56 and also illustrated in David Cordingly's 'Nicholas Pocock' (1986) pl. 69, but with the incident wrongly dated 1801 which may copy an error in the OWCS catalogue. [PvdM 10/08]