Rhosneigr Lifeboat Station was established by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1872, after a series of shipwrecks in Rhosneigr Bay convinced local residents to petition for a boat. Mrs Selina Lingham of Lower Norwood in south London donated 680 pounds to fund the station, in memory of her husband Thomas. The assistant Inspector of Lifeboats came up to assess, found enough volunteers willing to crew, and the application was approved on 4 April 1872. A 30-foot self-righting Pulling and Sailing boat - ten oars and a small sail rig - was ordered for 238 pounds 15 shillings. The boathouse cost 254 pounds. On 19 September 1872, the boat was paraded down to the beach and formally handed over. Mrs Lingham named her the Thomas Lingham, after her late husband, and the Rev R Williams blessed the work.

The most extraordinary service the Rhosneigr boat ever attempted was on 30 March 1883, called out to the Greenock vessel Norman Court aground in heavy weather. The Rhosneigr crew launched into impossible conditions and lost one of their own washed overboard. A steam tug towed them out to the wreck; they could not reach it. The Rocket Brigade ashore tried to fire a line; they could not reach it either. The Rhosneigr crew launched a second time and were again beaten back, returning utterly spent. The Holyhead railway company arranged a special engine to bring fresh Holyhead crewmen down to Rhosneigr. In the same Rhosneigr boat, but with rested arms, the Holyhead men finally got alongside and took twenty men off the Norman Court. Coxswain Thomas Roberts of Holyhead was awarded the RNLI Silver Medal.

Rhosneigr saved forty-five lives in its first thirteen years, ten more in 1890 alone, and thirteen in the thirteen years following. Then the calls dried up. Improvements in ship construction, the gradual fading of sailing-vessel coastal trade, and the proximity of other stations meant that by the early 1900s Rhosneigr was launching rarely. In the twenty years before 1924, the boat had gone out just seven times and saved only two lives. The RNLI closed the station. A tragedy unrelated to wreck-rescue had also marked the station: on 28 December 1894 a young man named William Roberts was run over by the lifeboat carriage during a launch and died of his injuries days later.

The Blackburn Botha was one of the most unloved aircraft of the Second World War. Underpowered, unstable in some configurations, withdrawn from front-line use, it was nevertheless still in service for training in 1942. On 28 August one came down off Rhosneigr. The crew were Polish airmen attached to a unit training in north Wales. Stewart Wood and Derek Baynham were schoolboys on the beach. They rowed out, reached the wreckage, pulled the pilot aboard and capsized. Nine other men launched a boat after them and that boat capsized too. Some who tried to swim out drowned. The names on the RNLI Bronze Medal list read like a cross-section of wartime coastal life - gunners of the Royal Artillery, an aircraftman, a policeman, a coastguard boatman, a battery sergeant major, a merchant navy officer. A memorial outside Rhosneigr fire station was placed in 1991 to record the eleven who died trying. The lifeboat station that might have saved them had been gone for eighteen years.