A dummy’s life is not a happy one in the Dover Strait. Like his fellow stuffed shirts he regularly gets dumped in the ocean so that trainee lifeboat crew can practice their MOB procedure.

But unlike his colleagues in less busy stretches of water, the Dover dummies risk inanimate life and limb in a rescue area fraught with roaring tidal streams, fog and thumping container ships.

Sometimes a leg will get shredded, an arm torn off, some effigies have even been decapitated.

This badly-injured dummy was spotted outside the Dover RNLI station – fit for little more now than November 5.