The Liberty disaster moved the RNLI's committee with unusual speed. The Inspector of Lifeboats visited Kimmeridge in October 1868; his report was approved on 5 November. By the April meeting in 1869, the Reverend Nathaniel Bond had stepped forward with an offer that made the project possible: he would pay for the boathouse out of his own pocket. The committee accepted gratefully. The first boat sent to Kimmeridge was the Mary Heape, an already-second-hand 28-foot Peake self-righter built in 1856 that had previously served at Hornsea on the Yorkshire coast. She was named after the wife of Benjamin Heape, the Manchester benefactor who had funded her. The Jurassic Coast had its lifeboat, gifted twice over by people who had never been there.

At eleven o'clock on the night of 9 December 1874, the German vessel Stralsund - bound from her namesake city on the Baltic - was driven onto the rocks east of Kimmeridge. The Mary Heape launched into the storm. The same storm threw her back onto the beach. The crew tried again the next morning, this time with the coastguard rocket brigade firing a line out to the wreck. Once they had the line, they could work. Across two trips, fifteen people were taken off the Stralsund and brought to shore. It was the kind of operation that the RNLI's Victorian volunteers performed routinely up and down the British coast: cold, methodical, often only possible because the worst of the weather had passed enough to let them work.

By 1881 the original Mary Heape was retired and replaced - by another second-hand boat. This was the Sheffield, a 32-footer built in 1866 and previously stationed elsewhere. Benjamin Heape funded the move and renamed her, too, Mary Heape. In 1886 the cutter Ceres of Poole was caught in dense fog when the wind shifted suddenly and drove her ashore. Two crewmen took to the ship's boat; it capsized and one drowned. The Mary Heape saved the master and mate, still aboard the wreck, and the surviving third man who had clung to two oars in the fog. In 1887 the second Mary Heape was retired in her turn. Between them, the two boats had saved eighteen lives.

On 9 May 1888 the third lifeboat - the first new one Kimmeridge had ever received - was dragged out of the boathouse to the launch of a signal rocket and the murmur of a sizeable crowd. After a speech from Lieutenant-Colonel Mansel and a blessing from the Reverend W. C. Browne, she was named Augustus Arkwright, after Captain Augustus Peter Arkwright of Dartmouth, MP for North Derbyshire. His friends had subscribed £675 in his memory and asked that the gift be sent to Kimmeridge. Records survive of only one service the Augustus Arkwright actually performed: in June 1892 she stood by the brigantine Lythemore of Llanelli, stranded on the ledge with a cargo of coal for Cardiff. The captain was in no immediate danger. The lifeboat laid out his anchor and waited for the tide to lift him off.

On 13 February 1896, after a report by the District Inspector, the RNLI committee voted to discontinue Kimmeridge Lifeboat Station. The decision was administrative, not dramatic - shipping patterns had shifted, neighbouring stations could cover the bay, and the costs no longer justified the post. After twenty-seven years and eight months, the boathouse closed. The Mary Heape lifeboats had saved eighteen documented lives. The Augustus Arkwright never made a recorded rescue. But the bay still claims wrecks; the ledge still catches the unwary; and the men who pulled fifteen souls off the Stralsund in 1874, named on no monument, did the work that volunteers up and down this coast still do today. The station closed. The reason for it did not.