Eleven years before the lifeboat station opened, on 12 March 1853, the schooner *Harmony* foundered in a gale just off Greencastle harbour. Ten men in a small open yawl, led by H.M. Coastguard boatman William Brice, pulled out into the storm and rescued three men and a woman from the wreck. The RNLI - or its predecessor body, the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck (RNIPLS) - had been giving silver medals for acts of gallantry at sea since its founding in 1824, and Brice was awarded the silver medal for the *Harmony* rescue. It was these kinds of stories, multiplied across the Irish coasts, that built the case for permanent lifeboat stations in places like Greencastle. The traditional pattern of coastguardsmen and local boatmen launching whatever rowing boat was to hand was magnificent but insufficient. The lifeboat - purpose-built, self-righting, crewed by paid coxswain and volunteers - was the institutional answer.

In July 1864 the RNLI's journal *The Lifeboat* announced that a station had been established at the entrance to Lough Foyle. The first boat was a 28-foot lifeboat. The committee specifically mentioned 'the dangerous Tuns Bank' as the reason for the station - and noted that while wrecks had not been numerous in the immediate vicinity, the volume of passenger shipping leaving Derry made the precaution essential. The Derry passenger trade in the 1860s was enormous. Ships of the Anchor Line and other carriers sailed regularly to New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Quebec, carrying Irish emigrants at a pace that would not slow until the early 20th century. The station was located not in Greencastle village itself but at Port Blaney, a hamlet a short distance north-east where the coastline opens onto the Atlantic and where the lifeboat could be launched directly into open water rather than fighting tidal currents in the lough.

By 1871 the original 28-foot boat was judged insufficient. 'So many large emigrant ships are constantly leaving the Port of Londonderry,' the committee minutes record, 'and should accidents happen to them at the entrance of Lough Foyle, where the boat is placed, a larger boat was considered necessary.' A 33-foot 10-oared lifeboat replaced the original. The Liverpool steamship company Johnson Grainger & Co. transported the new boat from England to Lough Foyle free of charge - and returned the old boat under the same terms - the kind of corporate philanthropy that kept the early RNLI running on a shoestring. On the morning of 11 November 1873, in a northerly gale, the barque *L. G. Biglow* of Nova Scotia signalled distress near the Tuns Bank. The launch of the lifeboat was delayed by what was described in the records as 'the misconduct of the Coxswain' and the reluctance of some crew members to go out in the conditions. A coastguard officer took command, a fresh crew was assembled, and the boat went out under tow from the steam tug *Admiral* - but had to turn back when the tug was damaged. The following day, in calmer weather, the lifeboat rescued the crew. Second Coxswain John McGuinness was awarded £25 in compensation for injuries he received in the rescue.

RNLI lifeboats were funded by individual legacies - the donor naming the boat, the name lasting as long as the original endowment provided maintenance money. When Mary Beckwith of Tynemouth died in 1880, her £800 legacy was assigned to the Greencastle station, and the existing lifeboat was renamed *Mary Beckwith*. In 1902 a new 35-foot self-righting lifeboat arrived, funded by the £644 legacy of Elizabeth Ann Willis of Weston-super-Mare, who specifically asked that the boat be named after her late husband, the artist Henry Brittan Willis. The *Brittan Willis* would serve at Greencastle for the next 26 years. The naming-by-legacy system meant that small RNLI stations like Greencastle carried, on the prows of their boats, the names of dead spouses and parents and children from across the British Isles - a kind of mobile memorial that was also a working rescue vessel.

On the evening of 28 June 1914, in dense fog and calm seas, the Anchor Line ocean liner *California* ran aground on Tory Island off the north Donegal coast. There were 1,100 passengers and 270 crew aboard. Multiple lifeboats were called to the scene; the Greencastle boat *Brittan Willis* launched at 11pm and was towed the 80 kilometres to Tory Island by the tug *Earl of Dunraven*, arriving to find all passengers already taken off by other vessels. The *Brittan Willis* stood by for 12 hours while the crew tried to refloat the ship, returned to Tory Island on 1 July, and remained on station until 5 July before being released. Fourteen years later, in 1928, the Greencastle Lifeboat Station closed - made redundant by the placement of a motor-powered lifeboat at Portrush in 1924, 19 kilometres east, which could cover the Tuns Bank from across the lough at much greater speed. The Greencastle boathouse still stands. It is now a private residence. The *Brittan Willis* was transferred to another station. The crews scattered. And the Tuns Bank, the dangerous sandbar that had given the station its reason, was eventually rendered manageable by modern navigation, charts, and the disappearance of the great emigrant trade. The lifeboats had outlasted the ships they were built to save.