Qualla: Minehead Lifeboat Station

Minehead Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the evening of 19 December 1941, a partially submerged object was spotted drifting in Blue Anchor Bay east of Minehead. The Minehead lifeboat coxswain, John Slade, took his own private boat out with his cousin and the station's signaller, Thomas Escott, to investigate. They never came back. The object was a German magnetic parachute mine, dropped from an aircraft and lying just under the surface, and when their boat touched it the explosion was complete. Two men of the same family were killed in a single moment, doing the same thing that crews at this station have been doing for over a hundred and twenty years: getting into a boat and going out into the Bristol Channel to see if anyone needs help.

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Minehead Lifeboat Station: The 1901 Boathouse

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RobThinks, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution built the original Minehead boathouse in 1901 for £785, at the western end of the town beyond the harbour where the beach gives access to the sea at any state of the tide. For the first two years the boat was dragged across the pebble beach...

Image: RobThinks | CC BY-SA 4.0

Minehead Lifeboat Station: The Bristol Channel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Bristol Channel has the second-largest tidal range in the world. Spring tides at Minehead can exceed eleven metres - water dropping and rising more than the height of a three-storey house twice in twenty-four hours. The currents in such a channel are fierce, the visibility fr...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Minehead Lifeboat Station: Slade and Escott

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. John Slade and Thomas Escott were not strictly on duty that December evening in 1941. There was no official call-out for a wartime mine; what they thought they were going to investigate was wreckage. Slade was the coxswain, the senior man on the crew. Escott was the shore signall...

Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Minehead Lifeboat Station: Volunteers, Still

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1970, after seven decades of pulling, sailing and motor lifeboats, an inflatable inshore lifeboat was added at Minehead and kept in the tractor garage. It proved so useful that in 1973 the all-weather boat was withdrawn altogether; the station has been an inshore-only operatio...

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0