Now let us pass on to the Lizard Point, where the massive whitened lighthouse with its four towers is quite one of the features of the Cornish coast. This excellently ordered building, with its wonderfully powerful light, was erected in 1752, and as the keepers narrate the fact, the majority of sightseers feel that they are in quite an antiquarian atmosphere, and think—even should their minds momentarily revert to the lighthouses of the ancients—that they are at least looking upon one of the oldest English lighthouses. The reader of these pages will not allow such historic errors to possess him; the thought that will cross his mind will be,—Strange that so important a point on the English coast should have remained unlit till 1752, so long after the building of lighthouses—though opposed and hindered in quarters where they should have been welcomed and encouraged—had become general all along our shores.
Certainly it was strange that no lighthouse, that is, none with anything but a most limited existence, was placed on the Lizard till 1752; but a lighthouse was there for a short time, considerably more than a century earlier, and it is the history of that lighthouse, full as it is of incident and romance, that claims our attention here.
Unlike the rest of such buildings erected in post-Reformation times, this lighthouse owed its existence to philanthropy—to a desire on the part of one who well knew the treachery of the coast, the long reefs of rocks (now near the surface, now far below it) that stretched seawards; one who lived within hearing of the breakers’ roar, and the cry of shipwrecked men and women, that so often rose above the howling of a winter’s gale. Many a time he, with such of his servants as were willing to turn out from home and battle with the wind and rain, had spent long hours in aiding as best they could the maimed and helpless victims washed ashore, and had tended to their wants beneath the shelter of his own roof.
This heroic Cornish gentleman was Sir John Killegrew; early in the year 1619 he began to take active measures towards placing a lighthouse on the Lizard Point. He confided his project to a friend, Sir Dudley Carleton, the future Lord Dorchester, then English ambassador at the Hague, and it is likely enough that from him he first learned of the necessity of obtaining a royal charter for the good work he had in hand—that is to say, if he was to gather any toll towards its support. He was not a rich man, and so felt the necessity of doing this; for the expense of a nightly fire was quite beyond his means, though he was willing and able to bear the cost of the actual erection of a tower on which that fire was to burn. So he asked that, for the sum of ‘twenty nobles by the yeare,’ the king would allow him, entirely at his own cost, to erect a lighthouse at the Lizard, and, for a term of thirty years, collect from ships that passed the point such voluntary contribution as the owners, by their captains, might be disposed to offer. This, it will be said, was not a very exorbitant demand; nor indeed was it, but it touched a principle, and, as we shall see, one which in the end proved fatal to success.
The Council considered the petition; then by the king’s command submitted it to the Trinity House for opinion! This opinion, in due course, was delivered. It began by giving our Scotch-born sovereign—who perhaps did not know much of so southerly a part of his dominions as Cornwall—quite a nice little geographical account of the Lizard; and it arrived at the conclusion that it was not ‘necessarie nor convenient on the Lizard to erect a light, but, per contra, inconvenient, both in regard of pirates, or foreign enemys; for the light would serve them as a pilot to conduct and lead them to safe places of landinge; the danger and perill whereof we leave to your majesty’s absolute and profound wisdom.’ Well-chosen words these—‘Absolute and profound wisdom!’ If anything was likely to win a favour from James I, it was an expression of admiration for the mental abilities which—be it said to his credit—he really believed he possessed.
But James I, though he might be pleased, probably knew how much genuine alarm the Trinity House felt at the Lizard and other lighthouse schemes put forward about that time, and he took cum grano what was said, despite the flattery that enwrapped it. That is one reason why, in the face of such a very hostile report, Killegrew got what he wanted; the other is that, following some sage advice which his friend Carleton had given him, and making friends at court, the Cornish knight had become possessed of a share of Buckingham’s friendship, and what ‘Steenie’ said, James did—or, as in this case, what ‘Steenie’ asked to do, James gave him permission. As Lord High Admiral of England, Buckingham, in July, 1619, granted the sought-for patent in the terms of the petition, but with a clause compelling the patentee to immediately extinguish the lights should the approach of an enemy be apprehended.
Killegrew had been in London to press his suit, and he now returned to Cornwall in high spirits with his patent. He must have pushed forward the work with considerable energy, as within a few months of his return he was able to tell his friend at the Hague that the ‘tower or lighthouse’ was already ‘well forward,’ and that he hoped, by God’s assistance, to finish it by the end of September and to light it ere the storms of autumn and winter began. But the task had not been an easy one in many ways, one of them being the difficulty in obtaining labour. The fact was that the Cornish folk round about, born and bred to wrecking—most of the houses near the Lizard were built of ‘the ruins of ships’—were no friends to any project that would rob them of their ill-gotten gains. Says Killegrew, the work had been far more costly than he anticipated, and chiefly because of the difficulty of getting labour. Why? The writer shall tell us:—
‘The inabytants neer by think they suffer by this erection. They affirme I take away God’s grace from them. Their English meaning is that now they shall receve no more benefitt by shipwreck, for this will prevent yt. They have been so long used to repe profitt by the callamyties of the ruin of shipping, that they clayme it heredytarye, and heavely complayne on me.’
Here is a vivid and a terrible picture of life amongst the dwellers on the Cornish coast. Killegrew felt that the lighthouse would rob these people of their gruesome harvest, and if it did, then he saw better times ahead. ‘I hope,’ he went on in the same letter, ‘they will now husband their land, which their former idell lyfe hath omitted in the assurance of theyr gayne by shipwrack.’
The lighthouse, a substantial structure, built of lime and stone, was completed well before Christmas, 1619, a supply of coal laid in, and a fire nightly kindled, which, wrote Killegrew, ‘I presume speaks for yt selfe to the most part of Christendom.’ The cost of maintenance came to about 10s. a night, and that, added to the expense of building, had by the next January put him out of pocket £500; so that his limited funds were nearly exhausted. Yet the ‘voluntary contribution’ he had asked had not brought him in a single farthing; shipwreck had materially decreased, but not a vessel putting into Plymouth or Falmouth had given anything towards the support of the Lizard lights; the thank-offerings for safe deliverance, which his sanguine imagination pictured being offered by grateful mariners, came not at all.
There was now nothing for it, since sailors would not, or rather could not, pay out of gratitude, but to seek for a compulsory levy. He sent in his petition for this to the king, who in turn sent it to the Trinity House, which body answered much as before, save that the condemnation of the absurdity of a lighthouse at the Lizard was more vehement and emphatic on the suggestion of compulsory payment! But against this manifestly insincere condemnation, Killegrew received, thanks no doubt to Carleton, very influential testimonials from Holland, and these decided the king to grant the requisite patent. He had, it may be said, additional grounds for so doing, since, besides the favour of the Dutch navigators, English seamen came forward and spoke to the benefit of the light; contribute they could not—their masters, hostile to every lighthouse scheme, would not allow that—but speak they could, and they did so, fearlessly and without reserve.
Thus, when Killegrew’s pockets were nearly empty, he, in conjunction with a certain William Mynne, Secretary Calvert’s brother-in-law, obtained from James I licence to gather a halfpenny a ton from all passing vessels towards the maintenance of the Lizard lights.
Killegrew’s patent did him very little good; the shipowners refused point-blank to pay, and they, with the Trinity House at their backs, cried so loudly and so much, and stirred up such powerful interest, that James cancelled his grant, the Lizard lights were extinguished, and Killegrew ended his days considerably the poorer for his philanthropic venture.
But the official extinguisher was not applied to the lights without a protest, an indignant protest, from many who, when they spoke of the utility of Killegrew’s work, knew of what they were speaking. Our naval sea-dogs, as fearless of the threats of wealthy traders and powerful corporations as they were of an enemy’s broadside, spoke up manfully for the Lizard lights. Sir William Monson, good seaman as ever sailed, who had won his laurels fighting the Spaniard, admitted that ‘in time of war’ such a light might be dangerous, but ‘in time of peace’ held it most necessary. ‘The art of navigation,’ he said, was not so certain that a man might assume to himself what land ‘he should fall withall, nor the time,’ and so ‘it were fit men should be furnished with as many helps as can be devised’; and he vouched for it that he himself, ‘in his return from the southward,’ had oftener ‘fallen with the Lizard’ than with any other point.
Then, speaking as one who had too often tasted the weariness of a lengthy voyage, he continued that there was no man who had been long at sea, but would be glad to ‘make’ the land of his destination as quickly as he might; and, said he, men would be bolder to ‘bear in’ with the shore of England if they knew that ‘a light upon the Lizard could be seen by them seven or eight leagues off’—the distance he was informed Killegrew’s light had been seen at sea. So much for the ‘comfort’ of the light to vessels that had met with no mishap: how much more it would be appreciated in case of accident may, he says, be gauged by example of some wounded traveller on land, losing his way on a dark cold night, and espying a light in a cottage or hearing a ring of bells, by either of which he may be directed to a haven of rest.
Then he tells of some of his personal adventures when off the Lizard Point in the Armada days, thirty years before. Many a good prize could then have been secured, and many a sound English ship saved, had light shone forth from that perilous headland. It had been said, too, that the light would help pirates in the Channel; that, says Monson, need not stand, for ‘I say the tenth of ten thousand ships that sail that way is not a pirate’; and he asks the king and his advisers to consider, ‘after that,’ if it were fit ‘to take away a light by which men receive so much good.’
However, despite this testimony, and more like it, Killegrew’s light was put out—the tax for its support was a burden, and so it must go. The accounts of the Plymouth corporation record the expenditure of money For ‘pulling down’ the Lizard lighthouse, which the shipowners considered ‘burthensome to all ye countrie.’ Ten years later, Sir William Killegrew, of Pendennis Castle, a kinsman of Sir John, applied to the king for a renewal of the patent in his favour. ‘I am so bold,’ he writes, ‘as to desire the king to grant the patent to me.... ’Tis a thing all seamen desire,’ and they wondered by what unjust complaints so great a benefit was lost. ‘Every year many ships are [now] wrecked for want of it, and I am,’ wrote Sir William, ‘at the entreaty of all men, desired to set it up again.’
But no answer was returned to that petition, and when, some thirty years later, Sir John Coryton proposed a lighthouse at the Lizard, the Trinity House, in condemning the suggestion, wrote triumphantly that a former lighthouse there had been found altogether useless and very quickly ‘discontinued.’
So it was that no lighthouse was established at the Lizard till after the middle of the last century, when that we now see was erected. It was proposed in 1748 by a certain Captain Farrish, who suggested building a lighthouse there which should show four lights. These proposals were made to the Trinity House, not to the crown, and that body—after arranging that the speculator should, when the lighthouse was built, hold it of them for a term of sixty-one years at a rent of £80 a year—offered no opposition to the scheme. The patent was applied for in the corporation’s name, and granted.
What became of Captain Farrish, we do not know; but he figures no more, after this, in the negotiations with the Trinity House—a Mr. Thomas Fonnereau taking his place. He built the lighthouse and took the profits for the sixty-one years.
As agreed, the petition to the crown for the patent was made by the Trinity House, and it is strange to note how, by the irony of fate, that corporation is forced to make therein the most of every point on which Sir John Killegrew had relied, and which it had so uncompromisingly condemned!
By the close of 1751 the four towers of the lighthouse were nearly completed, and early in the following year the size of the grates in which the four fires were to blaze, and of the lanterns which were to envelop them, were being actively considered by Fonnereau and the Trinity House. The lighthouse and its final completion were quite the talk of the day in the West of England, and the kindling of the fires on the evening of August 22, 1752, was watched by thousands of spectators, who had flocked to the Lizard from the adjacent towns and villages. Though it was the middle of the eighteenth century, there were doubtless many in that Cornish crowd who did not regard this establishment of a lighthouse with quite as much satisfaction as those who had our sailors’ welfare at heart; wrecking, and the love of it, had yet a place in the heart of Cornishmen—and of the Cornishwomen too, for that matter: the keenest searchers after the harvest of the sea were not, by any means, all of the sterner sex!
Coal fires, shut in by glass, did no better at the Lizard than elsewhere, and very soon came complaints from all sides of the feebleness of the Lizard lights; yet Fonnereau made no change. The plan worked economically, and that is probably all he cared about. But better days for the mariner were at hand. The Trinity House, by the end of the century, was growing into something very different from what it had been; public-spirited men sat at its council-board, and so soon as Fonnereau’s term expired the corporation took over the control of the lighthouse, substituting oil lamps for the shut-in coal fires. A great deal of structural alteration was needed for this, and whilst it was being carried out no better light was given than that of ordinary lanterns lit by oil and fastened on poles or masts.
Such lights were, of course, entirely inadequate, and to minimize as much as possible the inconvenience, the Trinity House bade its labourers work their hardest, week-day and Sunday alike. This was too much for the piety of the neighbouring clergy, magistrates, and villagers. To them the safety of numberless sea-borne souls was as nought to the evil example set by the wicked carpenters and stonemasons who worked at the lighthouse on the Lord’s day. The parson of Lizard Town called these men into his study, read them a serious lecture, and with threats of legal prosecution frightened them out of doing another stroke of work that Sunday. Before the next a happy compromise was arrived at: considering the urgency of the case, the parson and magistrates would say nothing so long as operations were suspended during service-time!
So, in due course, the alterations were made, the new lanterns completed, lit with oil, and a better and steadier light given than had been obtained before—a light so good and so steady that, as they saw it, some of the inhabitants were heard actually to complain of it. The light given by Fonnereau’s coal fire was so fitful that it had not really spoiled business very much; but with the new lights—why, a wreck would never happen at all! It was the Trinity House now, and not Sir John Killegrew, that took God’s grace from these simple Cornish fisher-folk!
Oil was burned at the Lizard till the spring of the year 1878, when—after numerous experiments had been made—the complete system of electric lighting now in use was introduced at a cost of very nearly £15,000, and a fog-horn erected equalling, if not exceeding, in the discordancy of its note, that at Dungeness.