Qualla: St Ives Lifeboat Station

St Ives Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Balon Greyjoy, CC0. The 23rd of January 1939 was not the kind of storm anyone remembers in degrees of severity. A Force 10 was blowing across the western approaches with gusts touching a hundred miles an hour, and at three in the morning a coxswain named Thomas Cocking gave the order to launch the John and Sarah Eliza Stych into the dark. A large steamship had been reported in trouble off Cape Cornwall. He took seven men with him. Four of them had survived a different lifeboat wreck the year before. By dawn only one of the eight would still be alive, and the rolling tradition of the St Ives lifeboat — first established in 1840, almost ninety years older than the RNLI itself was old in 1939 — would carry the family name forward into the next century anyway.

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Image: Balon Greyjoy | CC0

St Ives Lifeboat Station: Building the first boat

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Johnson [1], CC BY-SA 3.0. On Christmas Eve 1838 the schooner Rival tried to enter St Ives harbour in a gale and broke up on one of its piers. Five people were pulled out by people ashore who had no proper rescue gear and only their courage. The town held a meeting. They decided that St Ives, the busiest f...

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Image: David Johnson [1] | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Ives Lifeboat Station: The Alba and the Caroline Parsons

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 31 January 1938 the motor lifeboat Caroline Parsons launched in heavy weather to assist the SS Alba, aground on the rocks. The crew got twenty-three men off the steamer and turned for home. A wave caught them broadside. The lifeboat capsized, righted itself, and then ran onto ...

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

St Ives Lifeboat Station: Three capsizes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit asands from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the John and Sarah Eliza Stych rounded The Island in the small hours of 23 January 1939, it met the storm head-on. The boat was crewed by Cocking, his son John, Matthew and William Barber and John Thomas — four men who had been in the Caroline Parsons the year before — and E...

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Image: asands from London, UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Ives Lifeboat Station: Three Tommy Cockings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two more generations of the family stepped forward. Thomas Cocking's son and grandson both served as coxswain of the St Ives lifeboat in the decades after their father and grandfather drowned. The pattern is not unusual along this coast: lifeboat crews here are families, not appo...

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Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Ives Lifeboat Station: Range and reach

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Rowe, CC BY-SA 2.0. The St Ives boat now covers 250 nautical miles of coast at a top speed of 27 knots, with sister stations at Padstow to the east and Sennen Cove to the west. The Hayle lifeboat station closed in 1920, doubling St Ives's working area; the boat goes out for fishing vessels, pleasure...

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Image: Steve Rowe | CC BY-SA 2.0