On a stickily hot summer’s afternoon in 1990 I spent three hours repeatedly bandaging and unbandaging a naked woman in the basement of a terraced house near Hyde Park Corner. The woman in question was tattooed to the Popeye-like left arm of a warehouseman I had been paired with during a first-aider’s course run by the Red Cross.

Half-way through that bizarre afternoon the heat got the better of one of the would-be first-aiders and she crashed to the floor in a dead faint, providing us with some welcome experience of handling a real medical emergency.

At the time, these events seemed like scenes from a Carry On Resuscitating film, but the training saved a life two weeks later when one of my quick-thinking former classmates stopped a stabbing victim from bleeding to death by whipping out a credit card and pressing it against his chest. The slogan “American Express . . . yes that’ll do nicely” is truer than the copywriters realised.

Just how many other lives have been saved by Red Cross members, with or without credit cards, will never be known. But the number must run into millions because there are now 125 million Red Cross and Red Crescent members in 160 national societies.

I Owe My Life ... celebrates the work of the British section of the movement which marks its 125th anniversary this year. Like the other national societies, it was set up at the instigation of Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman who issued an international appeal for a relief society for the wounded after witnessing the agonising aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859.

At first Britain was loath to take up his suggestion (a delay that the Standard newspaper described at the time as a “slur on our national humanity, a blot on our fair escutcheon”). But since 1870 the British have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the cause, both in wartime and peace.

The 50 contributors to this book, who include such luminaries as Jeffrey Archer, Nigel Havers, Mary Soames and Simon Weston, describe the huge range of activities that the British Red Cross is involved in - everything from disaster relief work to therapeutic beauty care.

Unfortunately, many of their pieces read like speeches to a black-tie dinner (which is exactly what some of them are). But there are treasures in these pages too: Shirley Williams’ description of her mother, Vera Brittain, putting her Red Cross training to work when making beds with “hospital corners”; Freya Stark’s account of how she survived on potted sausage and sweet biscuit “sandwiches” as a nurse in World War 1; a report of an arm amputation with a pen-knife at Cardiff tramway depot; and a recollection of how a Red Cross worker swam into a house through an upstairs window to rescue an elderly Norfolk couple from the great flood of 1953.

I will never forget Viscount Tonypandy’s recollections of the Aberfan disaster - it was Red Cross workers who took on the pitiful task of washing the bodies of the child victims - nor the letter from a Mr T Marshall, of Newport, Gwent, a former POW who describes the pleasure of receiving a Red Cross parcel and the even greater joy of watching a tin explode over the uniform of the Italian camp commandant (the camp officers always punctured tins to prevent hoarding for an escape).

Mr Marshall says that even now, more than 50 years on, he never passes a Red Cross collection box without putting something in. Neither should we. But whether we should donate Pounds 15.99 to the cause by buying this book is another matter entirely . . .