Qualla: Conwy Lifeboat Station

Conwy Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the afternoon of 30 August 1970 a force eight gale was tearing across the bay west of Llandudno when the Conwy lifeboat - an open inflatable, three crew aboard - launched into it. The cabin cruiser Fulmar was in trouble west of West Shore with two men aboard. Brian Jones, Ronald Craven and Trevor Jones reached the cruiser, lifted both men off it, and watched the empty boat break up on the rocks moments after. They came home wet, exhausted, and famously decorated: each received The Thanks of the Institution inscribed on Vellum. The boathouse where they had launched from - a small slate-roofed building on Lower Gate Street, in the literal shadow of Conwy Castle - is still where the Conwy lifeboat lives today.

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Conwy Lifeboat Station: 1964: small boats, fast

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Denis Egan from Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, CC BY 2.0. The Conwy station owes its existence to a strategic shift inside the RNLI. By the 1960s leisure boating around the British coast had exploded; the old all-weather lifeboats, slow to crew up and slow under way, were missing rescues that needed an immediate response. In 1964 the in...

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Image: Denis Egan from Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales | CC BY 2.0

Conwy Lifeboat Station: The Arthur Bate boats

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JK the Unwise, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lifeboats in Britain are most often named after the donors who paid for them. In September 1995, in Conwy harbour, Miss Joan Bate named the new Conwy lifeboat in honour of her late brother Arthur, whose legacy had funded it. The Arthur Bate, D-482, served for nine years. When she...

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Image: JK the Unwise | CC BY-SA 3.0

Conwy Lifeboat Station: Estuary, sandbar, gale

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Swales, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Conwy lifeboat works one of the more treacherous estuaries on the Welsh coast. The river opens out where two railway bridges and a road tunnel cross from west to east, and a complicated set of sandbanks shifts with the tides. The Great Orme to the north generates its own weat...

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Image: Nigel Swales | CC BY-SA 2.0

Conwy Lifeboat Station: Fifty years

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0. The station celebrated its fiftieth anniversary on 18 June 2016. The man at the centre of the celebrations was Trevor Jones, then Lifeboat Operations Manager, who had joined as a young crewman on the day the station opened in 1966 and was still there half a century later. He had ...

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Image: DeFacto | CC BY-SA 4.0