Beaumaris sits at the eastern entrance to the Menai Strait, the narrow water that separates Anglesey from the Welsh mainland. The strait looks tidy on a chart and behaves like nothing of the sort on the water. The tides run hard. The Lavan Sands, just east of Penmon, dry to vast flats at low water and turn into a labyrinth of shifting channels as the flood comes in. The wind funnels down between Anglesey and the Carneddau, accelerating and shifting direction. Sailing ships running up to Liverpool used to anchor in the offing waiting for tide and weather, and when neither cooperated they went aground. The Rothsay Castle disaster of 1831, a paddle steamer wrecked on Dutchman Bank with the loss of 130 lives, prompted the founding of the Penmon station in 1832. Beaumaris came later, but the need was the same.

Children of a certain generation will remember the moment. In 1966 the BBC television programme Blue Peter, presented for children every Thursday afternoon, launched an appeal asking viewers to collect paperback books for sale. The response was so enormous that the appeal funded twenty-eight inshore lifeboats over the years that followed, all named Blue Peter. Beaumaris received its first inshore boat, Blue Peter II (D-127), in 1967, and the station's inshore lifeboats kept the name through four successive boats. A generation of children grew up knowing that the lifeboat at Beaumaris was theirs in some small way, paid for by jumble sales and stamp albums and tinfoil-collecting drives. The link held until 2010, when the current boat Annette Mary Liddington (B-838) took over, funded by a bequest from John Grover Liddington in memory of his mother and by local donations.

The first motor lifeboat at Beaumaris had an unusual delivery. Completed in August 1913 by Thames Ironworks with a 60-horsepower Tylor petrol engine, the 43-foot boat was first taken to Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight, where King George V went out on her for a short trip. She remained at Cowes through the early months of the First World War, construction delays at the new Beaumaris boathouse holding her there, and finally reached Anglesey in July 1914. Named Frederick Kitchen after her donor, she launched thirty-eight times in thirty-one years of service and rescued forty-six lives from the strait and the open sea beyond. The arrival of a motor-powered lifeboat at Beaumaris made the older oar-and-sail station at nearby Penmon redundant. The Penmon station closed on 31 March 1915, after eighty-four years of service.

The new Beaumaris boathouse, pier, and deep-water roller slipway near Tre-Castell Point cost £4,500 in 1913 money. Frederick Kitchen and her successors launched from there for most of the twentieth century. By 1991, with larger and more capable boats stationed elsewhere along the coast, the slipway was closed and demolished, and the all-weather lifeboat The Robert (ON 955) was withdrawn from service after thirty-five years. Beaumaris transitioned to inshore operations only. A small boathouse near Victoria Terrace housed the early inshore boats. A more permanent building came in 1975, with extensions in 1983 and 1991, and a completely new station in 2000. The current B-class Atlantic 85 lifeboat, Annette Mary Liddington, can operate in worse conditions than her forerunners and reach incidents anywhere in the strait and out into Conwy Bay.

The crews are volunteers. They have been volunteers since 1891. They are pagers ringing in the middle of family meals, drills on dark Tuesday evenings, training courses in Poole, and the long quiet days when no call comes. The Menai Strait still produces casualties, more often these days from small craft and paddlers and divers than from ships in distress. The fundamentals have not changed. A boat goes out when something needs help. The crew comes home, mostly, when the job is done. The town of Beaumaris stands behind the station the way coastal towns have always stood behind their lifeboatmen.