Qualla: Tobermory Lifeboat Station

Tobermory Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0. In May 1938, a brand-new lifeboat sat on display at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park, gleaming under the lights of an event that drew thirteen million visitors. When the exhibition closed in October, the boat was loaded onto its trailer and dispatched on a strange voyage west: out into the Clyde, north up Loch Gilp to Ardrishaig, where three hundred more people came to see her, then through the Crinan Canal and up the Sound of Mull to the bright-coloured harbour at Tobermory. On 28 November 1938, at a ceremony beside Main Street, she was named Sir Arthur Rose. A lifeboat had arrived on the Isle of Mull, and the long hard work of pulling sailors off rocks could begin.

Image: Ian S | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tobermory Lifeboat Station: Western Isles and the Terror

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0. The lifeboat's first big call came on a Sunday morning, 31 March 1940. The steamship Nydalen, running from Runcorn to Methil via Kirkwall, slammed at full speed onto a reef at Arinagour on the Isle of Coll. She was driven so hard aground that her own lifeboats could not be launch...

Image: Ian S | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tobermory Lifeboat Station: Forty-Three Years of Silence

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the war ended and the Navy left Tobermory, the lifeboat crew thinned out. By December 1947 the station could not find enough volunteers and was closed. The lifeboat was transferred to a new station at Mallaig on the mainland. With her went a small silver cross, a replica of ...

Image: Ian S | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tobermory Lifeboat Station: Bobby MacLeod and the Reopening

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Basher Eyre, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1990, leisure sailing in the Hebrides had exploded. Yachts crowded the Sound of Mull. Mishaps multiplied. A local campaign argued that Tobermory needed its own lifeboat again, and the RNLI agreed. The first replacement boat, Ralph and Joy Swan, went on service that year, repla...

Image: Basher Eyre | CC BY-SA 2.0

Tobermory Lifeboat Station: Eleven Hours West of Coll

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leslie Barrie, CC BY-SA 2.0. The current lifeboat, the all-weather 17-39 Elizabeth Fairlie Ramsey, has been on station since 2003. On 27 January 2013 she answered a call from a fishing boat with a failed gearbox seven miles west of Coll. The lifeboat hauled the boat toward Tiree, where another vessel was wai...

Image: Leslie Barrie | CC BY-SA 2.0