At just over 535ft, Beachy Head (a corruption of the medieval French Beauchef, meaning, roughly, beautiful headland) is Britain's highest chalk sea cliff. A lure for suicides since the 7th century, when St Wilfrid apparently found the locals throwing themselves off in despair after a three-year drought, it is topped these days by an array of trenches so you can't drive over the edge, a telephone box with a direct line to the Samaritans, and, most afternoons and evenings, by volunteers from nearby churches who will, if they spot your intentions early enough, try to stop you jumping.

Until last week, the cliff was also patrolled by Keith Lane, a 57-year-old Eastbourne window cleaner whose wife, suffering from severe depression, took her life there in March 2004. Every night, Lane would walk the four miles from Beachy Head to Birling Gap, talking people out of ending their days. In the three and a half years he had been doing it, he saved 29 lives (although some came back for a second go). Far more, sadly, escaped him: figures from East Sussex coroner's office suggest 34 people died on the cliffs in 2004, 20 the following year, 11 in 2006 and 17 so far this year.

No more. Last week, Lane's charity, the Maggie Lane Trust, was formally wound up and Lane halted his cliff-top vigils. Petty jealousies and "childish backbiting" from the volunteers of the Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team have left him feeling angry, demoralised and undervalued, he says: "I've even been accused of encouraging suicides here, by the publicity I was accused of courting. It's cruel and unfair." The Coastguard, which, like the Chaplaincy Team, will not comment on Lane's allegations, has criticised his "unprofessionalism", complaining that he does not alert the emergency services or even don a safety harness before scrambling down to haul waverers back from the brink.

"The official view is that the lives of rescuers can't be risked," says Lane. "That's fine in principle. But people are alive today because I didn't hesitate."

A sentiment with which, notwithstanding the eminently sensible officially approved rescue procedures, we find it difficult to argue.