The Sea Shall
Not Have Them
Scroll down to watch the classic 1954 feature film 90 min , starring Michael Redgrave, Dirk Bogarde,
Anthony Steel and the iconic RAF Air Sea Rescue launches.
The 1954 British film The Sea Shall Not Have Them offers a striking cinematic parallel to the world that produced Carimuda and her sister RAF Air Sea Rescue launches.
Starring Michael Redgrave, Dirk Bogarde, and Anthony Steel, the film dramatises the real‑life dedication of RAF Air Sea Rescue crews during the Second World War, men who risked their lives to save downed airmen from the freezing waters of the North Sea and English Channel. Its very title was borrowed from the wartime motto of the Air Sea Rescue Service, capturing the fierce determination that “the sea shall not have” those who served in the skies.
In the film, the narrative centres on the desperate efforts of an RAF launch crew battling weather, time, and enemy action to rescue survivors from a crashed bomber. The sleek, fast wooden boat depicted owes its design lineage to the same generation of pinnaces and launches from which Carimuda descended.
The production used genuine RAF high‑speed rescue craft, many built on the Isle of Wight (where Carimuda was built) or along the south coast during the war, and those vessels were near‑identical in form and function to Carimuda’s class. The roar of their triple engines and their hard‑chine hulls slicing through rough seas in the film authentically conveys the engineering priorities that defined boats like 1272 - speed, strength, and reliability under duress.
For audiences of the 1950s, the film wasn’t mere drama; it was recognition of a service that had operated in near‑secrecy during the war. Carimuda, built only eight years before the film’s release, embodies exactly what The Sea Shall Not Have Them sought to commemorate, the quiet courage of small‑boat crews who worked beyond visibility or glory. Watching Bogarde and Redgrave on screen today, their dialogue about endurance, duty, and cold seas mirrors the lived reality of those who crewed pinnaces like Carimuda out of places such as Gibraltar, Poole, or Calshot.
Seen in that light, Carimuda is the real artefact of the world the movie tried to recreate. Her copper‑sheathed hull and RAF provenance make her a surviving witness to the history the film fictionalised—a physical continuation of the same story of rescue, service, and British wartime ingenuity that Redgrave and Bogarde brought to the screen.