A disaster in the English towns of Southport and St Anne's-on-the-Sea occurred on the evening of the 9th December 1886, when 27 lifeboat men lost their lives trying to save the crew of the German barque Mexico.

On 9 December 1886, Mexico, a Hamburg-registered barque bound for Guayaquil from Liverpool went aground near Southport, in a full west north westerly gale.

Between fifteen and twenty minutes after the Southport boat launched, the neighbouring St Annes lifeboat—Laura Janet—was also called out.

All that is known is that at quarter past eleven the next morning the life–boat was found ashore, bottom up, with three dead bodies hanging on the thwarts with their heads downwards.

In the process, the crew shattered three of her oars, and the small craft was filled numerous times with water.

The bodies of the unfortunate lifeboatmen (who were fishermen by trade) were removed from the beaches and laid out in the coaching house of the nearby Birkdale Palace Hotel.

[6] However, in the late 1980s, after a series of unfortunate tragedies, local families from Southport started to raise funds and eventually bought a new lifeboat[7] for the town stationed at the old RNLI boathouse.

An appeal was launched to raise money to provide a memorial to those killed, and the organisation by Sir Charles Macara of the first street collections in Manchester in 1891[8][9] led to the first flag days.