Qualla: Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station

Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith Webb, CC BY 4.0. On 7 February 1846, the merchant ship Heywood ran onto a sandbar called North Bank with twenty-two souls aboard. The lifeboat that put out from Ynys Llanddwyn - a tidal island so remote it could only be reached on foot at low water - brought all twenty-two back alive. The station that launched her had no full-time crew, no telegraph, no slipway worth the name. What it had were a row of pilots' cottages and a few extra hands from the village of Newborough, willing to row into a winter sea on the chance that someone out there needed pulling from it. The Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station served for eighty-one years before the same problem that closed it in 1836 closed it again, for good, in 1907.

Image: Keith Webb | CC BY 4.0

Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station: The First Boat, 1826

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Noel.morgan2000, Public domain. Ynys Llanddwyn was already populated when the first lifeboat arrived. A row of stone cottages on the island housed the pilots who guided merchant ships up the Menai Strait toward Caernarfon. The Caernarfon Harbour Trust placed a boat there in 1826, betting that the pilots could d...

Image: User:Noel.morgan2000 | Public domain

Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station: The Second Boat, 1840

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Noel.morgan2000, Public domain. In 1840 the Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck tried again. They bought a 26-foot lifeboat from Taylor of Limehouse for £65, built a 32-foot boathouse on the island, and enrolled four extra men from Newborough village to thicken the crew. This time i...

Image: en:User:Noel.morgan2000 | Public domain

Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station: The John Gray Bell

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Noel.morgan2000, Public domain. In 1866 the station received a new boat with a story. John Gray Bell had been a bookseller in Manchester and an honorary secretary of the RNLI's Manchester branch. When he died, donations in his memory funded a Llanddwyn lifeboat that took his name. After the boat was completed i...

Image: en:User:Noel.morgan2000 | Public domain

Llanddwyn Lifeboat Station: Quiet Closure

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit en:User:Noel.morgan2000, Public domain. Twenty-two years of service brought the Richard Henry Gould only ten launches and just two lives saved. The shipping had changed. Steam was replacing sail, and ships in trouble were now further out or differently in trouble than they had been in the 1840s. The crew problem return...

Image: en:User:Noel.morgan2000 | Public domain