Qualla: Lytham Lifeboat Station

Lytham Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA 3.0. Coxswain Thomas Clarkson got his boat through on a night when two other boats did not. On 9 December 1886 a German barque called the Mexico ran aground on Trunk Hill Brow off Ainsdale in a storm that the men of the Fylde coast still spoke of forty years later. Three lifeboats launched. Two of them, the Southport boat Eliza Fearnley and the St Annes boat Laura Janet, capsized in the surf, and twenty-seven of their twenty-nine crewmen drowned, the worst day in the RNLI's entire history. The third boat, the Lytham Charles Biggs, fought through and rescued every one of the twelve men aboard the Mexico. Clarkson got the RNLI Silver Medal. The Lytham station got an additional honour. The twenty-seven men who did not come home were laid out in temporary mortuaries up and down the Lancashire coast, and their names are still read every December.

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Image: Rept0n1x | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lytham Lifeboat Station: John Hayes Writes a Letter

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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. The...

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Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lytham Lifeboat Station: Eleanor Cecily and President Lincoln

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 r...

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Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lytham Lifeboat Station: The Night of the Mexico

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 Eliz...

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Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lytham Lifeboat Station: The Boats That Followed

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 wa...

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Image: Tom Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lytham Lifeboat Station: Walking the Sands Now

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0