Qualla: Horton and Port Eynon Lifeboat Station

Horton and Port Eynon Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the south coast of the Gower Peninsula, just off Underhill Lane at Horton Beach, a small boathouse holds an inshore lifeboat called Barbara Jane. She is a fast inflatable hull capable of being launched in minutes, designed to reach swimmers and capsized kayakers and people cut off by the tide. She is the latest in a line that goes back more than 140 years, and the people who maintain her remember the names of the ones who did not come back.

Image: Eirian Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0

Horton and Port Eynon Lifeboat Station: Two Shipwrecks in Two Weeks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. In January and February 1883 two ships came to grief at Port Eynon Point within eleven days of each other. The steamship Agnes Jack grounded on 27 January, and villagers stood on the cliffs and watched eighteen men drown. They could do nothing. On 7 February the schooner Surprise...

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

Horton and Port Eynon Lifeboat Station: The Janet

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. A Daughter's Offering served for 22 years and saved 39 lives before she was replaced in 1906 by a slightly larger boat named Janet, paid for by a bequest from a colonel in Cheltenham. For ten years Janet pulled men off wrecks along the Gower cliffs. Then came 1 January 1916. A di...

Image: Eirian Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0

Horton and Port Eynon Lifeboat Station: The Names

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. A sculpture in the churchyard of Port Eynon Church remembers the three men lost from Janet on New Year's Day 1916. William Gibbs, coxswain, was sixty-six years old, a man who had spent his life on this coast. William Eynon, second coxswain, was forty-six. George Harry was also fo...

Image: Eirian Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0

Horton and Port Eynon Lifeboat Station: Quieter Decades, Still Watching

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. After half a century without a station, the western Gower coast got a new kind of lifeboat in 1968. Small fast inflatables, light enough to launch from a beach with just a few volunteers, had been introduced across Britain in 1963 in response to a growing tide of weekend swimmers...

Image: Eirian Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0