Qualla: Clovelly Lifeboat Station

Clovelly Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franzfoto, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the night of the 28th of October 1838, twelve fishing vessels left Clovelly Harbour for the fishing grounds in the Bristol Channel. Twenty-six men were aboard. A ferocious storm caught them at sea. One boat came back. The town lost more than twenty men in a single night — fathers, brothers, sons of a village whose entire population was perhaps four hundred people. The disaster prompted the founding, the following year, of the Shipwrecked Mariners' Society, which is still active today supporting the families of seafarers killed at work. It also began the long argument that ended with the building of Clovelly's first lifeboat station in 1870, after enough additional boats had been wrecked in the area to make the case impossible to ignore.

Image: Franzfoto | CC BY-SA 3.0

Clovelly Lifeboat Station: One Hundred and Seventy-Five Pounds

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Volante, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first boathouse was built in 1870 for one hundred and seventy-five pounds — about twenty thousand pounds in modern terms, a sum scraped together from public subscription. The station was rebuilt in 1892 with a proper slipway, which made launching in heavy seas safer. By 1950,...

Image: Anthony Volante | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clovelly Lifeboat Station: Coxswain Pengilly

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. John Pengilly served Clovelly Lifeboat for over forty-eight years. Fourteen years as Second Coxswain, twenty-four as Coxswain — almost half a century of being the man who decided when to launch into weather no sane person would launch into. In the thirty-two years from 1899, when...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clovelly Lifeboat Station: The Peruvian, The Mary Stewart

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MichaelMaggs, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the 16th of August 1903, the Clovelly lifeboat launched into a gale to two vessels in trouble — the schooner Mary Stewart and the yacht Gadfly — and rescued all eight people aboard between them. On the 12th of February 1906, in Bideford Bay, they stood by the five-thousand-ton...

Image: MichaelMaggs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Clovelly Lifeboat Station: Women on the Slipway

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographed by Adrian Pingstone (on a chilly Monday before the school holidays, hence so few people) and placed in the public domain., Public domain. A newspaper report from 1916 described something that would have been unremarkable in Clovelly and astonishing anywhere else: when the village's fishermen were unavailable to launch the lifeboat — at sea themselves, or away at war, or simply not at home — the women of Clovelly la...

Image: Photographed by Adrian Pingstone (on a chilly Monday before the school holidays, hence so few people) and placed in the public domain. | Public domain

Clovelly Lifeboat Station: Closed, Then Reopened

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1988 the RNLI closed the Clovelly station. The reasoning was economic — newer, faster lifeboats based further along the coast could cover the same waters more efficiently. The village refused to accept it. The community organised its own independent rescue service, manned and ...

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0