Qualla: Rhyl Lifeboat Station

Rhyl Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Whittaker, CC BY 4.0. On 22 January 1853, the brand-new Rhyl lifeboat Gwylan-y-Mor - Sea Gull - capsized on its way back from a fruitless search off the West Hoyle bank, and did not self-right. Six of her nine crew drowned. The boat was a prize-winning Beeching design, marked with a brass plaque reading 'Northumberland Prize Boat', and it should have righted itself within seconds. It did not. Three months earlier, an identical boat at a different station had capsized and drowned eight men. The post-mortem found that someone had cut storage doors into the airtight boxes that gave the boat its buoyancy, and had failed to plug the water-ballast tanks. The self-righting capability of the most celebrated lifeboat design of the early Victorian era turned out to depend on small details of construction that the prize had not actually guaranteed.

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Image: Martin Whittaker | CC BY 4.0

Rhyl Lifeboat Station: The Prize Boat

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nigel Swales, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1851 the Duke of Northumberland, president of the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, offered one hundred guineas for the best design of self-righting lifeboat. The prize was won by James Beeching of Great Yarmouth. The Shipwrecked Fishermen...

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Image: Nigel Swales | CC BY-SA 2.0

Rhyl Lifeboat Station: The Tubular Lifeboat

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simply south, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the 1853 capsizing, the local committee resolved never to use the Gwylan-y-Mor again, even though the boat was officially in service until 1856. They wanted something genuinely safe. In October 1854 the RNIPLS became the Royal National Lifeboat Institution under the Duke's ...

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Image: Simply south | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rhyl Lifeboat Station: Morgan and the Cheltenham Widow

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Traveler100, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1867 the RNLI committee announced that Miss Ellen Hodgson, executor of the will of the late Mrs Elizabeth Morgan of Cheltenham, had given £650 - the full cost of renovating the Rhyl station - in her memory. The lifeboat, recently damaged and sent for repairs, returned and was ...

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Image: Traveler100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rhyl Lifeboat Station: The Hovercraft, 1962

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. At 01:17 on 17 September 1962, Coxswain Harold Campini took the Rhyl lifeboat Anthony Robert Marshall out into a north-west gale to assist a craft that had broken adrift along the promenade. It was a hovercraft - one of the early experimental commercial machines operating that su...

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Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rhyl Lifeboat Station: Anthony Kenneth Heard

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Redvers, CC BY 3.0. The station today operates the all-weather Shannon-class lifeboat 13-34 Anthony Kenneth Heard (ON 1341), on station since 2019, alongside the inshore D-class boat Geoff Pearce (D-903), on station since 2025. The all-weather boat's coverage stretches from Colwyn Bay to Mostyn alon...

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Image: Redvers | CC BY 3.0