Ayr had its first lifeboat in 1803, decades before the Royal National Lifeboat Institution would standardize the service. The boat was built by Henry Greathead of South Shields - the man whose Original-class lifeboats had effectively invented the type - and was funded by Provost Geo. Charles and the Royal Artillery Co. of Ayr, operated by the Harbour Commissioners. It served until around 1819, when it was replaced by another North-country type funded from harbour dues and a donation from Lloyd's of London. We do not know exactly when that second boat went out of service. Around 1843, the record goes quiet.

In October 1859, the RNLI journal The Lifeboat announced the placement of a new 32-foot self-righting lifeboat at Ayr - a pulling-and-sailing design with twelve oars, double-banked, and sails for when the wind cooperated. It cost £179, 18 shillings, 8 pence, and came with a transporting carriage. A new lifeboat house was built next to the River Ayr at the north-west end of South Harbour Street for £249, 18 shillings. The station at Ayr was the third the RNLI had opened in Scotland - the institution was expanding fast, and Ayr's harbour was busy enough, and dangerous enough, to warrant a place near the top of the list.

By 1867 the original lifeboat was found unfit for service. Its replacement was a new 32-foot self-righter funded by the Glasgow Workmen's Lifeboat Fund through the particular efforts of Mr G. Norval. Before coming to Ayr, the boat went first to Glasgow, where it was exhibited, named Glasgow Workman by Miss Norval, and launched into the River Clyde to test its self-righting capability. The London and North Western, Caledonian, and Glasgow and South Western Railway Companies all conveyed the boat and its carriage free of charge - a small example of the way Victorian Britain treated lifeboats as everybody's business. On 29 April 1868, in another northwest gale, the Glasgow Workman launched to the schooner John C. Wade of Newry, stranded off Troon. After great difficulty, the lifeboat brought off the five-man crew.

On 10 March 1887, after twenty years of service, the Glasgow Workman was retired. Her replacement, a 34-foot lifeboat, arrived at Ayr railway station and was paraded to the slip dock in a procession that says everything about how a Victorian town honoured its lifeboat. Mounted police led. A team of horses drew the boat on its carriage. Behind came the lifeboat committee, the Town Council, the Custom House Officers, the Volunteers (Artillery), the Rocket Brigade, the Volunteers (Rifle), the Ancient Order of Shepherds, the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Free Gardeners, the Good Templars, and a very large crowd, all to the music of the Ayr Burgh Band. After the dedication service, the boat - a gift from Mr Thomas Kinkade Hardie of London, named Janet Hoyle after his wife - was launched into the harbour and demonstrated. A steam crane capsized her. She righted herself instantly. Two more lifeboats would carry the same name, all funded by the same donor.

Not every rescue made the newspapers, and not every rescuer was a professional. In 1882 the RNLI awarded its Silver Medal to two men of Ayr: John Steel, the Provost, and Peter Murdoch, a fisherman. They had done something extraordinary enough that the highest civilian honour the institution gives was bestowed on both of them in the same year - a Provost and a fisherman holding equal medals. The lifeboat house itself was moved around 1906 to the junction of South Harbour Road and Fort Street, costing £634, 4 shillings, 4 pence, probably because the harbour railway line built in 1900 had needed the original site.

Technology closed Ayr Lifeboat Station. On Thursday 14 January 1932, at a meeting of the RNLI's committee of management, the decision was made: motor-powered lifeboats had been placed at the flanking stations of Troon (1929) and Girvan (1931), rendering Ayr's pulling-and-sailing boat obsolete. A motorboat could simply cover more sea, faster, with fewer men, and could come from either direction. The boathouse closed. The men went home. After 73 years of formal service - and more if you count back to 1803 - the Ayr Lifeboat Station was finished. Today the building's former site is part of Ayr's working harbour, but the rescues continue: Troon RNLI, the closest active station, covers what Ayr used to cover, in faster boats, on the same dangerous water.