After passing the Goodwins the pilot of the southward-bound ship can sail on with little to trouble him till he gets near Dungeness. That was a very ‘nasty’ spot till marked by a lighthouse; the surrounding flatness added to the dangers, for over the long stretches of shingle and sand the steeple of Lydd Church rose up clear and distinct, looking in the twilight to those at sea like ‘the forme of the saile of some talle shippe’—so said the mariner of James I’s reign,—which led the steersman to shape his course ‘confidently’ that way, with a result that, darkness closing in, his ship would run upon the far-stretching sands with but slender chance of getting off again in safety.
What light, if any, charity had maintained at or near Dungeness before the dissolution of the monasteries we know not; but certainly for long after it none was placed there, and shipwreck to an enormous extent happened each winter; in one over a thousand lifeless bodies of shipwrecked victims were collected at and near the ‘nesse,’ and merchandise to the value of £100,000 perished there.
No wonder, then, that when, in the very early years of the seventeenth century, lighthouse building began as a financial speculation, the speculators hit upon Dungeness as a spot at which a lighthouse was necessary and expedient. And it is wonderful to find that arguments were seriously put forward against this project.
A little prior to the year 1616 Sir Edward Howard, one of the king’s cup-bearers, built a lighthouse at Dungeness, and petitioned the crown for leave to gather toll for its support. The Trinity House offered an uncompromising opposition; nevertheless James I gave Sir Edward the licence he sought. But Sir Edward found that the dues were paid with reluctance, and was glad, ere long, to part with his interest in the lighthouse to one William Lamplough, Clerk of the King’s Kitchen, on whose behalf the crown, by its customs officers, interfered, directing that the tolls should be paid.
That was too much for the shipowners and the Trinity House. They were, in 1621, eagerly promoting a bill in Parliament for the ‘suppression’ of the lighthouse, which they described as a nuisance to navigation; but Parliament would not interfere with the king’s grantee, and the end of it was that Lamplough was told by the crown that he must keep a better light at Dungeness than he had lately done. The remonstrance was, no doubt, needed; for it seems that the coal fire which at first had illuminated the lighthouse had been replaced by a few candles, which were kept badly ‘snuffed’ and gave a wretchedly poor light.
But the opponents of lighthouses did not rest with the improvement in the lights. The Trinity House continued to excite opposition, and the corporation of Rye—quaint, sleepy old Rye, then very wide awake to its own interests—seems to have considered it a favourable opportunity for possessing itself of some one else’s property without paying for it. It remembered that the first idea of a lighthouse at Dungeness emanated from a townsman of Rye, and begged the gentleman at Lincoln’s Inn who fought their legal battles for them, to draft a Bill to be prosecuted in Parliament for vesting the title to the lighthouse in the mayor and jurats of Rye, who promised to bestow the profits on the repair of their much decayed harbour. That man of law was also a man of the world. In acknowledging their instructions, he advised the jurats to ‘make Mr. Speaker’ their ‘friend’; he evidently thought that so doing assisted Parliamentary procedure considerably!
Perhaps the jurats neglected this sage advice: perhaps the price of friendship was too high. The Bill was drafted, the man of law did his part, but there the matter ended: the Bill remained a bud, it never blossomed into an Act, and Lamplough’s patent again resisted attack; he, in 1635, pulling down the then existing tower, and building one altogether more substantial, that stood till a century ago, when the lighthouse now there was erected.
We hear no more of the ‘hindrance’ and ‘inconveniency’ of Dungeness lighthouse after this; its popularity was general, so much so that when, in Cromwell’s time, the Earl of Thanet, who was the ground-landlord, threatened the then owner, whose rent was in arrear, ‘to pull downe’ the structure, the latter did not pay, he only appealed to England’s Protector, who held that it was not a fitting state of affairs that ‘the safety of many lives and of the State’s ships should be left to the will of the Earl of Thanet’—and he granted the owner protection.
After the Restoration there was a deal of squabbling over, and confusion about, the title to Dungeness light. The former owner had forfeited his right to it for adhering to the crown, and now the crown was once again a power in the land, and the ‘Parliament man,’ to whom the lighthouse land been given, would not quit, alleging a title by purchase; but into all that the reader need not go. The only point in it that will interest him is that at least one, probably more, of the Winstanley family had an interest in the title. Can these Winstanleys have been ancestors of Henry of Eddystone fame? If so, then we have, perhaps, a clue to what gave him the idea of erecting a lighthouse as an object of profit.
A coal fire continued to light Dungeness till the completion of the now existing lighthouse, 110 feet high, in 1792. Then eighteen sperm-oil lamps took the place of the flickering fire, and shone steadily out to sea. This third lighthouse at Dungeness was built under the direction of Wyat, after the model of Smeaton’s lighthouse on the Eddystone. It now stands more than five hundred yards from the high-water mark, though when first it was built, it was barely a hundred, so rapidly has the neck of shingle grown.
This increased distance was becoming somewhat misleading to passing ships, so the Trinity House has placed a small revolving light nearer the sea, and in connection with it a siren fog-horn, which latter was a present from America. The utility of the fog-horn is great, though it renders a foggy night spent in the neighbourhood of Dungeness anything but tranquil.
But then, not many people—that is, people unused to the songs of the modern sea siren—are likely to spend a night at or near Dungeness. True, there is now a railway to it, and there are a few houses built around the lighthouse. These are tenanted by people whose work is in some way connected with it, with the coastguard duty, with Lloyds’ signalling station, with the new lifeboat, or with the Dutch ‘Consulate,’ an ambitious title bestowed upon a grocer’s shop whose fortunate owner happens to have a patent from the Netherlands Government in connection with signalling vessels of that nationality that pass the ‘Ness.’ These people are, probably, pretty well used to the siren’s cries, which are particularly frequent during autumn and winter nights, when fogs hang in the Channel.
Some twenty years after the present lighthouse was built, a violent storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, swept round it, and the lightning, striking it, cracked it in such a way that it was at first thought necessary to pull down the whole structure and set up a fresh building in its stead. But the cracks were carefully filled up with cement, the tower was bound round with iron hoops, barrel fashion, and now it stands as firm as ever. If it is taken away, it will be because Nature’s work in lengthening the shingle banks renders it useless where it is.