Lytham's lifeboat story begins in 1851 with a Mr John Hayes writing to a charity in London. The Royal National Institute for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, the original name of the RNLI, had been struggling since the death of its founder Sir William Hillary in 1847. They could not fund a boat at Lytham alone and asked for matched local contributions. Hayes raised £200. Then the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners' Royal Benevolent Society stepped in and offered to fund the whole boat for the same amount. The first Lytham lifeboat was the Clifton, a 28-foot Beeching self-righting craft that capsized in 1852 and was eventually replaced. On 7 December 1854 the RNIPLS reorganised under the Duke of Northumberland's guidance, took the name Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and absorbed all eight SFMRBS stations, Lytham among them.

The 30-foot Eleanor Cecily, built by Forrestt of Limehouse, arrived at Lytham on 12 August 1855, named after Mrs Clifton of Lytham Hall. In October 1862 she went out in terrible conditions to the American full-rigged vessel Ann E. Hooper of Baltimore, aground on Horse Bank, and rescued fourteen people. Lytham coastguard George Read was aboard her that day and later received the Presidential Gold Medal for life-saving from Washington; monetary awards were sent personally by President Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of his own war. Two months later, on 26 December 1862, the Eleanor Cecily reached the Brazil of Liverpool aground on Salthouse Bank, on passage from Bangor, Maine, and brought thirteen people off. The Atlantic trade was busy in those years, and the Lancashire sandbanks at the mouth of the Ribble caught the unlucky.

What the bare facts of the Mexico disaster do not carry is the sound of a hundred mile-per-hour gale off the Sefton coast and the impossible decisions the boat crews were making in it. The Mexico was driven onto the sands and her crew clung to the rigging. The Southport boat Eliza Fearnley launched first and capsized in the surf, drowning fourteen of her sixteen men. The St Annes boat Laura Janet launched next; she was found upside down at dawn with all thirteen of her crew dead beside her. The Lytham boat Charles Biggs launched third under Clarkson and somehow got through. By the time she reached the wreck the men of the Mexico had been hanging in the rigging for hours, and Clarkson and his crew took every one of them off alive. Twenty-seven lifeboatmen had died to make that possible. Their families were Southport and St Annes families, fishermen and tradesmen with widows and children, and the disaster pushed RNLI fundraising and lifeboat design forward in ways that saved unknowable numbers of later sailors.

After the Mexico the station carried on. The Charles Biggs was eventually replaced after a 1911 service to the vessel Douglas of Preston, when an enormous wave lifted the boat and dropped her down onto Salter's Bank, undamaged but un-refloatable. Her crew had to walk home. She was retrieved two days later, and the new boat was the 35-foot Kate Walker, named for the wife of donor John Charles Walker. Kate Walker served Lytham from 1912 to 1931, launching just four times but saving eight lives. On 12 March 1931 the Lytham branch merged with St Annes to form the Lytham St Annes Lifeboat Station, which still operates today, and the new motor lifeboat J.H.W. arrived in April. The old boathouse at Lytham, built in 1863 next to Lytham Windmill, kept being used for equipment and boarding boats until 1960. The lifeboat house and the windmill still stand, both Grade II listed, on the seafront at Lytham.

Lytham today is the quieter half of Lytham St Annes, a town of long sands, green and a windmill and a couple of golf courses that the open championship occasionally visits. The Ribble estuary curls in front of it; in any direction the wet flats stretch to a low horizon. From the seafront on a clear day you can see across the bay to Southport, and somewhere between you and the far shore lies the Trunk Hill Brow where the Mexico struck and where twenty-seven men of the Sefton coast lifeboats died in the snow. The Lytham boat is gone, but its descendants still launch from St Annes when the coastguard calls. The work has not changed. The boats have just got faster.