Qualla: Fishguard Lifeboat Station

Fishguard Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hugh Venables, CC BY-SA 2.0. Lieutenant Thomas Evans of the Royal Navy paid for the first Fishguard lifeboat out of his own pocket. He was Lloyd's of London's agent in town, the man responsible for shipwrecks and salvage along this stretch of the Pembrokeshire coast, and in 1822 he decided that responsibility was not really enough. He built a boat. He took it out himself when ships went down. By 1844 he had spent five hundred pounds of his own money on construction and maintenance, while the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck had once awarded the boat's crew a total of ten pounds. They gave him a special silver medal, double gilt with a gold swivel ring, for what they called his long continuing exertions in the cause of humanity. He kept going.

Image: Hugh Venables | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fishguard Lifeboat Station: The Sister Rescue, 1846

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim A Lee at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Four years before the RNLI took over the station, two sisters named Martha and Margaret Llewellyn waded into the surf at Fishguard on 22 October 1846. The smack Margaret of Barmouth was breaking up offshore, and three men were drowning in water shallow enough to reach. The sister...

Image: Tim A Lee at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Fishguard Lifeboat Station: The Official Station

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ceridwen, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 7 December 1854 the RNLI's committee resolved to send a thirty-foot self-righting lifeboat of Mr Peake's new design to Fishguard, along with funds for a boathouse. A local committee chaired by the Reverend C. H. Barham of Trecwn had raised 193 pounds, enough to be formally acc...

Image: ceridwen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fishguard Lifeboat Station: The Gold Medal Night

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ceridwen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Twenty-eight medals have been awarded to Fishguard crewmen across two centuries: eighteen silver, nine bronze, and one gold. The gold went to Coxswain John Howells in 1921 for what became known as the Gold Medal Service. Three other crew members received silver that same year; ni...

Image: ceridwen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fishguard Lifeboat Station: Blue Peter VII

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. In November 1993 the BBC children's programme Blue Peter launched its Pieces of Eight appeal to fund six new inshore lifeboats around the British coast. Schoolchildren collected aluminium ring-pulls, raised over 1.4 million pounds, and overshot the target so dramatically that the...

Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0