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feat or act of heroism’. He
learned to swim when he was
eight in a ‘pond, or the River
Severn, which ran near our
house’. At the age of twelve
he joined the merchant navy
to fulfil a childhood longing
for the sea and in 1873
received the Stanhope Gold
Medal from the Royal
Humane Society for trying to
save a sailor who had fallen
overboard. When in 1873
Webb read about J.B.