Qualla: Penmon Lifeboat Station

Penmon Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ojsyork, CC BY 4.0. On 26 March 1823, the Reverend James Williams and his wife Frances stood on the cliffs of Anglesey and watched a hundred and forty people drown. The vessel Alert had gone aground close enough to hear the shouts and far enough that nothing on shore could reach her in time. Williams was a clergyman at Llanfair-yng-Nghornwy. His wife was as formidable as he was. The two of them spent the next five years raising money and political pressure for an organised lifeboat service on the Anglesey coast. The Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was founded in 1828. Their first boat, stationed at Penmon Point in January 1831, would launch eight times in its first eighteen years and save twenty-seven lives.

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Image: Ojsyork | CC BY 4.0

Penmon Lifeboat Station: Penmon Point

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ojsyork, CC BY 4.0. The station sat at the eastern tip of Anglesey, between Black Point and the small green hump of Ynys Seiriol, Puffin Island. The tides rip through this narrow channel. The Lavan Sands lie just to the south, drying for square miles at low water, threading themselves through with c...

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Image: Ojsyork | CC BY 4.0

Penmon Lifeboat Station: The Rothsay Castle and What Followed

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Penmon station had been operating for seven months when the paddle steamer Rothsay Castle, returning from Liverpool to take a day-trip party home from Beaumaris, ran aground on Dutchman Bank in the early hours of 18 August 1831. A hundred and thirty people died on a vessel th...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Penmon Lifeboat Station: Christopher Brown and the Settle Connection

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ojsyork, CC BY 4.0. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution took over the Penmon station in 1855. A new self-righting boat arrived in 1868, named Christopher Brown after the principal fundraiser of the Settle, North Yorkshire branch of the RNLI. Settle is nowhere near the sea, but Yorkshire towns fa...

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Image: Ojsyork | CC BY 4.0

Penmon Lifeboat Station: The Honours List

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ojsyork, CC BY 4.0. Penmon won medals heavily. Owen Roberts, a pilot, received the silver medal of the RNIPLS in 1838. Thomas Price, a fisherman, took the RNLI silver medal in 1854. William M. Preston, the honorary secretary, and Robert Roberts, the coxswain, each received silver medals in 1890 and ...

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Image: Ojsyork | CC BY 4.0

Penmon Lifeboat Station: Closure

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ojsyork, CC BY 4.0. The Penmon station closed in 1915 because Beaumaris had taken delivery in 1914 of the motor lifeboat Frederick Kitchen, a 43-foot vessel with a 60-horsepower petrol engine that could cover the same waters from a base closer to the town and more easily crewed. The transition from ...

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Image: Ojsyork | CC BY 4.0