Qualla: Sennen Cove Lifeboat Station

Sennen Cove Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. In January 1851 a brig called the New Commercial drove onto the Brisons, a pair of rocky islets a mile offshore from Cape Cornwall, and broke up in heavy weather. The local fishermen tried to reach her. They could not. Most of her crew drowned within sight of land. The disaster persuaded the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to put a boat at the village of Sennen Cove, just north of Land's End, and in 1853 they did. The boathouse they built that year still stands on the beach. Volunteers have been launching from it ever since, into the same Atlantic that took the New Commercial, on call twenty-four hours a day for one hundred and seventy-three years.

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sennen Cove Lifeboat Station: The Boathouse and the Slipway

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. The current station is the third boathouse on roughly the same patch of sand. The masonry walls date from 1929. The shallow curved roof was added in 2001. Inside, two slipways descend through the building to the beach: one for the All-Weather Boat, one for the Inshore Lifeboat. I...

Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sennen Cove Lifeboat Station: The Nicholases

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Terry Walsh, CC BY-SA 2.0. Read the medal roll at Sennen Cove and one name dominates. Matthew Nichols, coxswain, was awarded the RNLI Silver Medal in 1868. Henry Nicholas, coxswain, won the Silver Medal in 1909. Thomas Henry Nicholas, coxswain, won it in 1920, and Thomas Pender as second coxswain that same...

Image: Terry Walsh | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sennen Cove Lifeboat Station: Posthumous

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 23 December 1981 the Iceland Air Force pilot of a Boeing 737 found himself navigating fog and limited fuel toward Sumburgh in Shetland and asked the British coastguard for any help available. Eight months earlier, in April 1981, the Sennen crew had earned a different kind of r...

Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sennen Cove Lifeboat Station: Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Bone from Weymouth, England, CC BY 2.0. Since 2010 the station has operated a Tamar-class All-Weather Boat, capable of sustained operation in storm conditions, and a D-class Inshore Lifeboat for the surf zone and the rock-bound coves where the larger boat cannot go. Both run on donations. The crew, twenty-four people i...

Image: Andrew Bone from Weymouth, England | CC BY 2.0