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Awards of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 14, 2026
Entity authorityQ104834733 ↗
Source-derived summary

The National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was established on 4 March 1824, becoming the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck (RNIPLS) on 20 March 1824, when it received royal approval from King George IV. The Institution became the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) on 5 October 1854.

Ever since its inception in 1824, a number of awards have been established by the Institution, both for gallantry at sea, and for service to the Institution. None are approved by the Crown, and are therefore unofficial awards. As such, they do not appear in the official British order of wear, although the principal lifesaving award, a Medal of the RNLI, can be worn on the right breast in uniform by members of the British armed forces.

RNIPLS / RNLI awards

Gallantry Medal

The medal was established in 1824, to reward "humane and intrepid exertions in saving life from shipwrecks on our coasts, deemed sufficiently conspicuous to merit honourable distinction". The medal can be awarded in gold, silver and, since 1917, in bronze.

While awards are now usually made to lifeboat crew, they have been made to anyone for their efforts to save life at sea. A considerable number of awards were made in the nineteenth century to coastguard officers, for their efforts in coastguard boats, lifeboats, or even as part of a Rocket brigade. Awards were made to civilians who affected a rescue by wading or swimming into the sea from the shore. In 1991, the RNLI Bronze Medal was awarded to the skipper of the salmon workboat Challenge, for a rescue effected at Burra, Shetland.

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This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Awards of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution” as open-knowledge reference entry. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1824, 1854, 1917, 1991—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Awards, Royal and National can be independently traced.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as open-knowledge reference entry. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104834733. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1824, 1854, 1917 and 1991.

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This entry incorporates text from “Awards of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.