Hanging from the ceiling of the River Towy Yacht Club in Ferryside, on the Tywi estuary in Carmarthenshire, is a brass ship's bell inscribed H.M.T. Restive 1940. This article tells the story of the ship behind it. Restive was a Royal Navy rescue tug built at Selby in Yorkshire in 1940, whose task was to reach torpedoed and burning ships and bring them home. Based at Oran after the Operation Torch landings, she assisted the minelayer HMS Manxman, towed the burning troopship Strathallan for fourteen hours, beached the Liberty ship Nathanael Greene and the merchantman City of Perth to save their cargoes, and on 4 July 1943 rescued more than three hundred survivors from two troopships carrying Canadian soldiers to the invasion of Sicily. She later served the Normandy landings, towing the damaged cruiser HMS Frobisher home to England, saved the new aircraft carrier HMS Albion in 1949, and in 1957 starred as three wartime tugs in the film The Key. She was sold in 1965. How her bell came to Ferryside is not yet known, and the article ends with an invitation to anyone who remembers.