Upgang Lifeboat Station opened in 1865. Funds for two lifeboats were donated by the widow of Lieutenant Joseph Sykes, in grateful remembrance of her husband’s rescue from the wreck of HMS Alceste in 1817. 

‍

The first lifeboat stationed at Upgang was the William Watson. The Sykes bequests provided funds for an additional new lifeboat in July 1879. In 1885, a third Lifeboat was transferred to Upgang and renamed ‘Joseph Sykes’. In 1909, the RNLB William Riley of Leamington arrived at Upgang Station was the fourth Lifeboat to be stationed at the Station.

‍

With the arrival of the motorised lifeboat Margaret Harker-Smith at Whitby in July 1919, the RNLI deemed the Upgang Station superfluous due to its proximity to Whitby, and closed the station that same year.

‍

The Upgang Station was lost to sea and cliff erosion in the mid-1920s. All that remains of this once proud Lifeboat Station is the Sykes’s Plaque now displayed in this museum, a few photographs and of course the Upgang’s last lifeboat, the William Riley of Leamington and Birmingham, which is preserved and operated in Whitby by the William Riley Trust. 

‍