Milford Haven is one of the deepest natural harbours in Europe, a long fjord-like inlet that has sheltered everything from Royal Navy frigates to modern LNG supertankers. In December 1867, Inspecting Commander Harvey of the Milford coastguard wrote to the RNLI in London arguing that a lifeboat was overdue. The committee agreed quickly. They picked Angle Point, on the southern shore at the very entrance to the haven, where the slipway could meet weather coming straight in off the Atlantic. The stone boathouse and wooden slipway cost £170-4s-0d, built by a Mr P. James. The first lifeboat was a 33-foot self-righting pulling-and-sailing boat from the Shadwell builder Woolfe of London, costing £275 more.

Most lifeboats start as letters and finish as legacies. Angle's first boat was bought with money from a man with one of the more striking family stories in Victorian industry: Titus Salt Jr., son of Sir Titus Salt, the Bradford wool magnate who built the model village of Saltaire to house his workers in conditions then unheard of. The younger Salt wrote to the RNLI on 23 November 1867 enclosing a cheque for £420 to defray the cost of the new station. The boat was named Katherine after his wife, Catherine Crossley of the Halifax carpet-manufacturing family, at a christening on 28 November 1868. The same name was given to a street in Saltaire. Industrial wealth and lifesaving philanthropy were, in this period, often the same letterhead.

Katherine gave way in 1888 to a 37-foot lifeboat called Henry Martin Harvey, which was sent back to London in 1891 to have a drop-keel fitted and returned in 1892. That same year the station's name shifted from Milford to Angle. The next leap was mechanical: in 1926 the RNLI announced plans for a motor lifeboat, and a new larger boathouse and deep-water slipway went up at a cost of £20,000, opening in January 1929. The new boat was the 45ft 6in Elizabeth Elson, twin 40-horsepower petrol engines pushing her along at 8.23 knots. Across 28 years on station she launched 58 times and rescued 144 people. Her coxswain James Watkins, who served 24 years in that role after 13 as second coxswain, earned a Silver Medal in 1944 for getting six men off the motor boat Thor in heavy seas, and a Bronze clasp the following year for a steamer rescue.

Angle's current lifeboat is the Tamar-class Mark Mason (ON 1291), on station since 2009. Her job has shifted with the haven itself. The estuary she guards is now lined with oil refineries, LNG terminals, and the kind of tanker traffic that did not exist when Katherine first launched. The crew still come from the village, still volunteer beyond the two paid staff, but in July 2024 the RNLI announced a six-month trial in which the all-weather lifeboat would operate from the Milford Haven port authority jetty rather than from Angle itself, a logistical compromise driven by the increasing difficulty of sustaining a slipway launch at a small village. The lifeboatmen and women themselves answer the same alarm their predecessors did 150 years ago. The water is the same. The ships, mostly, are much larger.