When the call finally came, the lifeboat was not where it needed to be. On 17 November 1813, the vessel Brothers of Workington washed ashore at the harbour entrance, and nobody quite knew where the lifeboat had been stored. The harbour boat went out instead, five men aboard, into whatever weather had wrecked the Brothers. They reached the casualty. But Thomas Farrell, one of those five men, was washed overboard and lost. The incident haunted the trustees' next meeting in March 1814, where they agreed to build a proper lifeboat house on the New Quay so the boat would be ready next time. The lesson of Thomas Farrell — that good intentions and the wrong storage place can kill a man — entered the station's institutional memory.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution took over in 1865, prompted by an offer of £300 from a Miss Leicester of London. The boat that arrived for her — a 33-foot self-righting craft built by Forrestt of Limehouse — had served briefly at another station before being deemed too heavy for that station's soft sand. Whitehaven's harbour didn't mind the weight. The new boathouse went up north of the North Pier, on land that is now the Marina Yard, and the boat was renamed Elizabeth in honour of the donor's mother. The service board, for reasons nobody recorded, called her Elizabeth Leicester. Over the next decades, three more Whitehaven lifeboats would carry that name.

On 14 November 1871, the sloop Demetian Lass was abandoned by her crew of four en route from Runcorn to the Isle of Skye. The boat drifted back out to sea after they left her. The Whitehaven lifeboat brought all four men home. On 10 May 1885, the Norwegian barque Thorsbjerg parted both cables in heavy weather while waiting for tide to enter port. She was driven ashore, and Elizabeth Leicester — the second of the name — recovered her crew of nine plus the harbour pilot. Six different lifeboats served Whitehaven across those 121 years. They were called out nineteen times. They saved 33 lives, plus the entire crew of the Thistle in 1819 whose numbers history did not bother to record.

By 1924, the world had changed. Steamships had replaced sail, port traffic had shifted to Bristol and Liverpool, and the Whitehaven station had not been called out since February 1918 — more than six years. On 18 December 1924 the RNLI's Committee of Management voted to close the station with immediate effect. The 1909 boathouse, built on the site of the older one, became a boatyard, and the last Elizabeth Leicester — official number 507 — was sold from service the following year. She was last reported in 2004 as a derelict yacht in Newport, Wales: nearly eighty years past her last rescue, drifting toward a quieter ending than her sister boat the Thistle, but an ending all the same.