Qualla: Burry Port Lifeboat Station

Burry Port Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit IwanThomas, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the morning of 18 June 1928, three Americans climbed out of a Fokker tri-motor floatplane in the muddy water of the Burry Inlet, just off Burry Port harbour. They had been airborne for 20 hours and 40 minutes since leaving Newfoundland and they were 135 miles north of where they had planned to be. The pilot was Wilmer Stultz; the mechanic was Louis Gordon; the third passenger, who had not touched the controls during the crossing, was Amelia Earhart - now, by virtue of having been on board, the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Within hours, two thousand people had walked out to the harbour to see her. The lifeboat station that watches over that same harbour has its own, less famous, story.

Image: IwanThomas | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burry Port Lifeboat Station: Llanelli, 1852

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith Lawson 11, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Burry Inlet has always wrecked ships. The estuary opens west between the Gower Peninsula and the Carmarthenshire coast, and the entrance is funnel-shaped - a configuration that catches vessels which have mistaken the Welsh coast for the Cornish one and are slow to correct. On...

Image: Keith Lawson 11 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Burry Port Lifeboat Station: The Burry Wrecks of 1868

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ham, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 23 January 1868, after a week of stormy weather, the wind dropped and dozens of ships set out from Llanelli and Burry Port at once - crews eager to make up their schedules, masters anxious about cargoes. The wind died entirely. Vessels found themselves dragging through a heavy...

Image: Ham | CC BY-SA 3.0

Burry Port Lifeboat Station: David Barclay of Tottenham

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Manfred Heyde, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1887 the sand at Pembrey Burrows had become uncrossable. The station moved again, this time to Burry Port itself, and Mrs J. S. Barclay of Tottenham paid for it with a bequest of £3,500 in memory of her late husband. The new boathouse cost £240 and change. The new 37-foot, 12-...

Image: Manfred Heyde | CC BY-SA 3.0

Burry Port Lifeboat Station: The Tiverton Swim

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JKMMX, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1973 drowning incidents in Carmarthen Bay had begun to climb - more pleasure craft, more swimmers, more weekend sailors who did not know the bar - and the RNLI decided to reopen the station. The first new boat, D-220, was funded by the Tiverton Swimming Club in Devon through a...

Image: JKMMX | CC BY-SA 3.0

Burry Port Lifeboat Station: Friendship at Anchor

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gareth James, CC BY-SA 2.0. Earhart's plane, the Friendship, sat in the Burry Inlet for a full day while the world's press scrambled to Wales. Photographs of the scene survive in the Henry Ford Museum: a high-winged Fokker on pontoons, anchored a few yards from the same eastern shore where the lifeboat stat...

Image: Gareth James | CC BY-SA 2.0