The RNLI's logic was reasonable on paper. Whitehaven, thirteen miles north up the Cumbrian coast, already had a lifeboat, but its station could not cover every wind and tide. Captain John Ward, RN, the Inspector of Lifeboats, visited Seascale on 29 August 1874 to look the ground over. The Committee of Management had already agreed in principle that June, contingent on finding a workable site. The village sat on the Irish Sea where the coastline began bending inwards, the trains stopped at the new Furness Railway station, and the Tomlinson gift was in hand. By the end of the year, the order was placed. The plan made sense to everyone except the people who would actually have to crew the boat.

Seascale in 1875 was a village of farms and a fledgling holiday resort - barely a hundred souls when the shop opened, fewer when it didn't. The hard work of running a lifeboat - the late-night drills, the long pulls on the oars, the willingness to row into surf for strangers - needs more bodies than Seascale could spare. Whitehaven was happy to send men down, but raising a crew, getting them onto a train and getting the train to Seascale took time that drowning sailors did not have. Often, by the time the William Tomlinson was ready, the rescue was already over - the casualties either saved by someone closer or beyond saving. So the boat sat in its house. Volunteers drilled and waited. The Tomlinson sisters' gift lay quiet on its carriage.

Then, one day, the Isabella ran aground off Seascale with three men aboard. The Whitehaven volunteers boarded a hastily-arranged special train. The journey took the thirteen miles south, but only five lifeboat men turned up alongside the rocket brigade - the volunteer team trained to fire a rescue line from shore. They arrived at 09:30. The Isabella was too far out for the rockets to reach. The rocket brigade walked down to the boat, joined the five Whitehaven men and some of the train crew, and made up the numbers. They launched the William Tomlinson and got out to the wreck at 11:30 - more than ten hours after the Isabella had grounded. The three men aboard were brought back to shore alive. It was the only successful service in the station's history.

A second boat, the Rescue, was placed at Seascale in 1886 - a 34-foot self-righter, slightly larger than the William Tomlinson, but the staffing problem never resolved. The patterns of Cumbrian coastal shipping shifted; the Whitehaven lifeboat, working from a better-crewed base, handled what came. In 1895, after twenty years, the RNLI closed Seascale Lifeboat Station. There had been very few launches and the one successful rescue. The Tomlinson sisters had been generous, the volunteers willing, but the village too small for the calling. Today the building is gone and the work has long since moved north to the St Bees RNLI station, perched on a higher headland with stronger numbers behind it. The William Tomlinson's name survives in the magazines and committee minutes of an institution that has always been honest about its quieter places.