Qualla: Eyemouth Lifeboat Station

Eyemouth Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Taras Young, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eyemouth is a fishing harbour cut into cliffs north of the English border, and on the 14th of October 1881 a sudden October storm caught the local fleet at sea and killed 189 men in a single afternoon - the disaster Berwickshire still calls Black Friday. Five years earlier, in October 1876, the town had hauled its first lifeboat through the streets behind six horses on the way to a christening on the beach. The pattern of working coastal towns repeated itself here: the danger came first, then the deaths, then the lifeboat. At Eyemouth the danger was the daily weather and the lifeboat would still be needed nearly a century and a half later.

Image: Taras Young | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eyemouth Lifeboat Station: The First Boat

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0. Captain Gray-Jones, RNLI Assistant Inspector, came to Eyemouth in December 1875 to assess the case for a station. The town had over 350 active fishermen, which meant the case was obvious and a shortage of volunteer crew unlikely. An order went to Woolfe of Shadwell for a 30-foot ...

Image: Walter Baxter | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eyemouth Lifeboat Station: Frank and William Oates

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Eyemouth got its first motor lifeboat in 1937, a £3,835 boat with a top speed of 7.66 knots. At the naming ceremony on 21 August 1937 it was christened Frank and William Oates, funded by their brother Charles George Oates of Leeds. Frank Oates was a Victorian naturalist who had e...

Image: Public domain

Eyemouth Lifeboat Station: Moored Afloat

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ojsyork, CC BY 4.0. The Eyemouth lifeboat launch ramp was demolished as part of harbour reconstruction in 1963. The station closed temporarily and the Clara and Emily Barwell was withdrawn. When the station reopened in 1964 with a larger boat, Swn-Y-Mor - one of the Civil Service-funded lifeboats - ...

Image: Ojsyork | CC BY 4.0

Eyemouth Lifeboat Station: The Sea They Work

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. Eyemouth Bay opens directly to the North Sea. The cliffs behind the town climb to St. Abbs Head, where the seabird colonies wheel and scream and the waters offshore have been the grave of more wrecks than any plaque can record. HMS Pathfinder went down nine miles south of here in...

Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eyemouth Lifeboat Station: Gunsgreen Quay

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The current station sits at Gunsgreen Quay, looking out across the small harbour and the cliffs that frame it. Gunsgreen House itself, the white 18th-century mansion on the opposite quay, was a centre of organised smuggling in its day and is now a heritage museum. The town is qui...

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0