On a training exercise in 1939, the Cullercoats lifeboat capsized off Sharpness Point. Six crewmen drowned, including the Coxswain and the Honorary Secretary. The boat was the first non-self-righting lifeboat the station had ever used - a motor-powered vessel called Richard Silver Oliver, brought in two years earlier to replace the era of pulling and sailing. The surviving crewmen made a decision. They refused to take another non-self-righting lifeboat to sea. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution closed the Cullercoats station until 1940, when a self-righting replacement could be brought in. Eighty-five years of lifeboat tradition had ended in tragedy because something newer was assumed to be safer. The crew said no. The RNLI listened.
The Cullercoats station was founded in 1852 by Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland, president of the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck. The Duke personally funded the boathouse - 36 feet long, 15 feet wide, stone-built - and the boat itself. James Peake, Master Shipwright at Woolwich Royal Naval Dockyard, built a modified lifeboat based on the prize-winning design of James Beeching, and Colonel Colquhoun, Master-General of Ordnance, designed the carriage that would transport the boat from the boathouse to the water. Both boat and carriage arrived in Cullercoats on 3 September 1852. The lifeboat was named Percy in honour of the Duke. By 1858 the original Percy was suffering from dry rot. Its replacement, a 32-foot 10-oared lifeboat from Forrestt of Limehouse in London, cost £174, with a new and larger carriage costing a further £80 5 shillings. The Duke paid again. The new boat was also named Percy. The lineage of dukes and their boats continued through the 19th century, each successive Percy carrying the work of the rescue forward.
The motor-powered Richard Silver Oliver arrived in 1937 as the first motor lifeboat at Cullercoats - and the first non-self-righting boat in eighty-five years of station history. Its 35-horsepower engine gave a speed of 7.33 knots, and at £3,684 it represented a significant investment. The crew trained with it. Two years later, on a routine training exercise, it capsized. Six men drowned. The names included the Coxswain and the Honorary Secretary - both of them effectively the leadership of the station - and four crew members. The Cullercoats community, like every fishing-village community along this coast, knew the weight of six families losing six men. The surviving crew's refusal to use a non-self-righting boat was not stubbornness. It was an exact and informed judgment about which design they could trust their lives to. The station reopened in 1940 with a self-righting motor lifeboat. The 1939 disaster's eightieth anniversary in 2019 was marked by an RNLI commemoration that named the lost six and explained why their deaths reshaped the station's safety standards.
Following a coastal review in 1968, with all-weather lifeboats at neighbouring stations and an inshore lifeboat already at Cullercoats since 1965, the RNLI withdrew the Cullercoats all-weather lifeboat. The 37-foot Sir James Knott was formally withdrawn on 4 May 1969, transferred first to the relief fleet, then to another station in 1972. Over the following years, the inshore boats grew - first a larger twin-engine boat, then in 1991 a more capable design. Today, the station operates a single Atlantic-class B-935 Inshore lifeboat called Daddy's Girl, on station since 2022. The station's honours include the RNIPLS Silver Medal won by Alexander Donkin in 1827 and by Coxswain John Redford in 1853, the RNLI Silver Medal won by Coxswain Andrew Taylor in 1898, multiple Vellum thanks across the 19th and 20th centuries, and a series of more recent commendations. Helm Robert Oliver collected Vellum thanks in 1996, 1997, and 2012. Crewman Mark Charlton and David Pendlington both earned framed Letters of Thanks in 1996. Raymond James Taylor, Honorary Secretary, was made an MBE in 1995, and Geoffrey Cowan, Community Safety Officer, received the British Empire Medal in 2020. The work passes through generations. The names accumulate. The sea, as Cullercoats fishermen have always known, keeps no records of its own.
Cullercoats Lifeboat Station sits at 55.0355 N, 1.4321 W on the north side of Cullercoats Harbour, North Tyneside. Newcastle International Airport (EGNT) is approximately 9 nm west. The town sits two miles north of the mouth of the River Tyne; look for the curve of Cullercoats Bay between the headlands of Sharpness Point and Browns Point. Tynemouth Priory and Castle are visible 2 nm south, and St Mary's Lighthouse 2 nm north on Whitley Bay. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 feet AGL; the boathouse is at the head of the small harbour.