In August 1875, three brothers - Samuel, John, and Joshua Fielden - wrote the RNLI a cheque for 2,500 pounds in memory of their father Thomas. They were the sons of John Fielden of Todmorden, a cotton-mill industrialist and Radical MP for Oldham, and they had inherited their late brother's estate worth 1.3 million pounds. The money paid for a 37-foot self-righting lifeboat at Holyhead, named Thomas Fielden, plus a new boathouse to keep her in. Sixteen years later the family gave another 2,000 pounds for the replacement, a 39-foot boat also named Thomas Fielden. Northern industrial money, channelled through three brothers' grief, kept Holyhead's lifeboat service afloat through the worst decades of the Irish Sea packet trade.

On 22 February 1908, the steamship Harold ran aground between North Stack and South Stack in heavy weather. The Holyhead steam lifeboat went to her. Coxswain Superintendent William Owen brought back every member of the Harold's crew. He was awarded the RNLI's Gold Medal - the institution's highest decoration. Ten of his crewmen were each awarded the RNLI Silver Medal for the same service: Thomas Brooke, George Jones, Lewis Jones, Richard Jones, Samuel Jones, James Lee, William McLaughlin, Charles Marshall, William Owen Junior, and Lewis Roberts. Naming them matters, because they did the work, in the dark, in winter, in a steam lifeboat, against rocks that had killed plenty of others. Holyhead has earned three Gold Medals and dozens of Silver and Bronze across its history. The Harold rescue accounts for eleven of those medals in a single night.

Bad nights kept coming. In March 1967, the Holyhead boat fought through gale-force weather to assist multiple casualties; Coxswain Thomas Alcock and Motor Mechanic Eric Samuel Jones earned Silver Medals, and six other crew received Bronze. Then in 1971, the lifeboat went to another rescue and lost a crewmember in the attempt - Bronze Medals to Mechanic Donald Forrest, Gareth Ogwen Jones, and John Michael Hughes for what they did before things turned. In 1977, Coxswain William John Jones earned a second-service clasp on his Bronze - meaning his second Bronze Medal for two separate rescues. The roll of honour for those who died serving the Holyhead lifeboat is etched into the station, and the medals on the wall represent only the rescues that succeeded enough for medals to be possible. The other rescues are remembered differently.

In February 2015, the station appointed its first female helm in almost two centuries of continuous service. The current boats are 14-07 Frederick Storey Cockburn, a 14-metre Trent-class all-weather lifeboat that arrived from the RNLI relief fleet in 2025, and the smaller inshore D-class Mary and Archie Hooper, on station since 2016. The original 1858 boathouse - built by Forrestt of Limehouse during the early RNLI years - still stands at Newry Beach, but it now houses the Holyhead Maritime Museum, the lifeboat work itself having moved to better moorings down the harbour. In 2007, Coxswain Brian Thomson was appointed MBE for his service. The station that began with a fifty-pound Lloyd's grant in 1828 has, by the count of medals alone, become one of the most decorated lifeboat stations in the entire RNLI.