Qualla: Rhoscolyn Lifeboat Station

Rhoscolyn Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 26 March 1823, the Reverend James Williams and his wife Frances stood on the cliffs at Cemlyn on the northern coast of Anglesey and watched the vessel Alert break up on the rocks below. One hundred and forty people drowned, and they could do nothing. Five years later they had founded the Anglesey Association for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck and started raising money for a lifeboat. The first one went into the water at Porth-y-Corwgl, the little cove south of Rhoscolyn village, in 1830. Ninety-nine years later, on the cliffs at St Gwenfaen's Church a mile away, a memorial was unveiled to the five Rhoscolyn men who never came home from the wreck of the coaster Timbo in December 1920.

Image: Jeff Buck | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rhoscolyn Lifeboat Station: What Williams Could Not Forget

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0. James Williams was rector of Llanfair-yng-Nghornwy on the north coast of Anglesey, a parish whose people lived from the sea and watched it kill them. The Alert disaster in 1823 changed his life. The Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck -- the bod...

Image: Jeff Buck | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rhoscolyn Lifeboat Station: Owen Jones and the Alhambra

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the last day of 1845, in a gale running hard from the west, the vessel Alhambra was being driven onto the rocks off Rhoscolyn. The lifeboat crew were launching their boat into the surf, knowing they would not reach the ship in time, when a local man named Owen Jones did someth...

Image: Jeff Buck | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rhoscolyn Lifeboat Station: The Ramon Cabrera

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0. The strangest patron in the station's history was Marianne Catherine Cabrera, Countess of Morella. She was the English widow of a Spanish Carlist general, Ramon Cabrera y Grino, who had fought in the brutal civil wars of nineteenth-century Spain on the losing side and then died i...

Image: Jeff Buck | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rhoscolyn Lifeboat Station: The Timbo

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Parkes, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 3 December 1920 the small coaster Timbo, bound for Ireland from Holyhead, was caught in a storm off South Stack and began to drift down the coast. The Rhoscolyn lifeboat went out to her in heavy seas, made repeated attempts to get a line aboard the ship, and could not. The cox...

Image: Anthony Parkes | CC BY-SA 2.0