On 29 December 1916 the steamship Alondra ran aground on Kedge Rock outside Baltimore Harbour. Sixteen of her crew got away in one of her own lifeboats and were drowned when the boat capsized. The Venerable Archdeacon John Becher, who had been appointed Honorary Secretary of a Baltimore lifeboat station that did not yet have a lifeboat -- the new boat's engines were still tangled up in wartime shortages -- gathered a crew and put to sea in a local boat. He failed twice and put back to shore at dusk. The following day, with rocket apparatus and the help of two Royal Navy trawlers, the remaining twenty-three crew of the Alondra were brought ashore. The RNLI Silver Medal went to Becher and to Lieutenant Arthur Sanderson of HM Trawler Indian Empire. Within three days, four local fishermen earned the same medal for their efforts on another wreck, the steamship Nestorian, lost on Cape Clear Island. Seven gallantry medals to one stretch of coast in less than a year.

The lifeboat that finally arrived at Baltimore was funded by the United Grand Lodge of Freemasons of England, in commemoration of the safe return of Queen Victoria's seventh child, the Duke of Connaught, from a tour of Canada. She was to be named Duke of Connaught. Then the Easter Rising happened, and the Anglo-Irish War, and by the time she was ready to enter service in 1920 the political weather in Ireland had changed completely. Naming a brand-new Irish lifeboat after a member of the British royal family was no longer, perhaps, the gesture it had been in 1913. No official record explains the change, but the boat that Lady Coghill of Castletownshend christened with champagne at Baltimore was named the Shamrock. A different Watson-class lifeboat, also funded by the Freemasons, was sent to Scotland in 1921 as the Duke of Connaught.

On 13 August 1979, the shipping forecast for Fastnet went from a routine south-westerly 4 to 6 at 13:55 to a storm force 10 imminent by 23:00. The Fastnet Race fleet, strung out across the southwest approaches, was caught by a depression that had been only modestly forecast. The Baltimore lifeboat The Robert was launched at 22:15 and was at sea for ten hours, eventually towing the yacht Regardless and her crew of nine into Baltimore the next morning. Before the crew could rest, the boat was tasked again, to the rudderless yacht Marionette south-west of Galley Head, which she finally located after a six-hour search. Twelve more sailors came home behind her. Fifteen people died in the Fastnet that night across the wider fleet. The Baltimore crew received a special framed certificate from the RNLI for their part in the rescue.

In October 1985 the lifeboat went out to a yacht sinking off Mizen Head. The yacht turned out to belong to Charles Haughey, then Leader of the Opposition and shortly to be Taoiseach for the third time. He was pulled out of the Atlantic and put down at Baltimore alive. In August 2011 the Baltimore boat, then Hilda Jarret, was one of the boats that rescued the twenty-one crew of the maxi-yacht Rambler 100 after she capsized south of Fastnet Rock during that year's Fastnet Race. The skipper, the American businessman George David, was among them. By 2012 the new and larger Tamar-class Alan Massey had arrived, too big for the existing boathouse; rather than rebuild, the station dredged a mooring pen alongside. The shed has been kept and refitted as crew quarters. Old building, new boat, same work.