In 1892, work began on a 127-foot lighthouse at Withernsea to warn ships off this dangerous stretch of the Yorkshire coast. Trinity House designed it. Strattens of Edinburgh built it. It opened in 1894. By the early 1910s the RNLI was reviewing its station coverage along the Yorkshire shore and noticed something inconvenient: most of the rescue calls that came to the Withernsea station were actually for vessels in trouble seven or eight miles further south, closer to the busy mouth of the Humber. On 8 May 1913 the RNLI committee decided to relocate. The Withernsea station closed on 29 May 1913. The Docea Chapman, a 34-foot self-righting pulling and sailing lifeboat funded from the legacy of Joseph Chapman of Reigate, was towed south to a new station near Easington.

There was no boathouse waiting. For the first months at Easington, the Docea Chapman was kept under a tarpaulin on top of the cliffs at the end of Seaside Road, while the RNLI committee decided whether the temporary move would become permanent. It did. Construction of a proper boathouse went ahead at a cost of £1,047 - real money in 1914 - and was finished in spring 1915. The boat had a crew drawn from the local fishing and farming community. They launched into a North Sea that took ships and lives every winter with relentless regularity, and they did it for the same payment as every other RNLI volunteer in Britain: none.

On 13 February 1921 the steam trawler Mansfield got into trouble off this coast. The Easington lifeboat launched and rescued four of the nine crew. The other five were brought ashore by the Volunteer Life Brigade - rocket men, working from the cliffs - who fired lines out to the wreck and hauled the rest of the crew across. It was the kind of rescue that made the difference between newspaper headline and quiet maritime statistic. Five men plus four men plus a boat lost in February water: all of them survived. By 1933, with motor lifeboats elsewhere covering the same waters more efficiently and call volumes here dropping, the RNLI closed Easington station. The site fell quiet. Only the records and the place name now mark the twenty years when fishermen at the end of Seaside Road ran toward the sea in foul weather instead of away from it.