The Royal National Lifeboat Institution's committee resolved on 2 July 1874 to establish a station at Watchet. The trade in coal, iron ore and timber through the harbour was growing every year, the report noted, "while wrecks are occasionally taking place in the neighbourhood," and the nearest lifeboats were too far away to do any good. The £1,000 needed to build and equip the station was donated by Maria Somes of Devon, in memory of her late husband Joseph - a former Member of Parliament for Dartmouth and a successful shipowner. The boat that came to Watchet in 1875 was named in his honour. The town turned out for her arrival on 29 July, decked in flags and flowers, with the Foresters and the Odd Fellows marching alongside the band of the North Somerset Rifle Corps. The Joseph Somes was blessed by Reverend Noble at the slipway and launched for a demonstration to the assembled crowd.

In 1883 a remarkable thing happened. The readers of a boys' magazine called The Union Jack - then edited by G. A. Henty, the prolific author of historical adventure stories for Victorian boys - collected £230 17 shillings and 7 pence and gave it to the RNLI. The money was assigned to Watchet, and in 1884 the lifeboat there was renamed W. H. G. Kingston, after the magazine's previous editor, another popular adventure writer. Two further Watchet lifeboats also bore the Kingston name. There is something quietly touching about it: a generation of boys, paying their pennies into a magazine that filled their imaginations with shipwrecks and ocean rescues, ending up funding a real lifeboat in a real Somerset harbour, with their own hero's name across her stern.

Service records at Watchet are thin, and one suspects the calls were uneventful enough not to require a published account. The same boats served for very long stretches; in 1919 the John Lingard Ross was replaced not by a new vessel but by one already nineteen years old, the Sarah Pilkington, which then served at Watchet for another twenty-five years. The town had argued hard to keep its station when a 1900 proposal suggested closing it in favour of a new one at Minehead. Watchet residents pointed out, somewhat tartly, that they had been called many places along the coast but had never once been called to assist a vessel at Minehead. The argument won them time. Minehead opened anyway in 1901, with its modern carriage and slipway. But Watchet held on, oars and sail, for another four decades.

By 1944 the world had moved on. Minehead had a motor lifeboat that could cover the same waters faster than any pulling-and-sailing boat ever could; the Watchet station was closed. The Sarah Pilkington was sold out of service in 1945 and embarked on a quiet second life as a private yacht. She is still afloat as of February 2024, under the name Manvana, on the River Great Ouse at Downham Market. The boathouse on The Esplanade was given to the town in 1951 and opened as Watchet Public Library two years later. In 2019 Somerset County Council transferred ownership to Watchet Town Council, ensuring the library will remain. A small bronze plaque inside the door records what the building used to be. The volunteers are gone but the harbour they served still has the same shape, the same tides, the same Bristol Channel beyond - and now a place where children come to borrow stories, including, in due course, the adventure novels of W. H. G. Kingston.