Lighthouses

After turning the south-west corner of England we find few existing lighthouses with anything like respectable antiquity; indeed, the voyager along our western shores of a century and a half ago was almost entirely without lights to guide him. At the monastic dissolution, however, matters were probably otherwise; one of the few lighthouses mentioned by Leland as surviving the commencement of the religious changes is at Pendinas, or Cape Cornwall, near St. Just: ‘There is,’ he says, ‘at this point a chapel of St. Nicholas and a pharos for light for shipps sailing by night in those quarters.’ Then we have seen that the monks maintained lights at Ilfracombe[8], and the number of ruined chapels and hermitages along both the southern and northern banks of the Severn, on the islands in its midst, and on the coast of South Wales, leaves us in little doubt that, when these buildings were tenanted, and discharging the functions for which they were intended, the mariners’ path was not unlit.

Before, however, we come to talk of lighthouses to the north of the Bristol Channel, the story of that of Burnham, at the entrance of the port of Bridgewater, must be told. There was no lighthouse there till early in the present century, but the small craft—fishing boats and the like—could, after nightfall, shape their course so as to avoid some treacherous banks by means of a light placed nightly in a fisherman’s cottage on the sandhills close to the sea; it had been first put there, years before, by a fisherman’s wife to show her husband where to anchor his boat on return from fishing. But at the time of which we speak it no longer served that purpose, for the fisherman had ere that found a watery grave. The wife was then a tottering widow, crazed by the grief that her husband’s death had caused her, and one form of her insanity was that he would yet come back, and so, night by night, she trimmed the lamp and placed it in the window that he might find it burning when he brought his boat to shore. Then it pleased God to rest her troubled spirit, and the lamp was lit no more.

No mariner’s chart marked the widow’s light, but the fishermen of Burnham had learnt to know it and to appreciate its benefit in making the port; so when it ceased to burn they set to work to see how a similar or a better light might be maintained there, and the parson of the place, more perhaps out of good-nature than from an eye to business, offered to build a small lighthouse if they and others using the port would contribute some trifling sum towards its support. They consented, the patent was obtained, and the parson duly built his lighthouse. Certainly he can never have regretted doing so, for the trade of Bridgewater increased, the tolls yielded him quite a respectable income, and when, after an existence of some thirty years, it was acquired by the Trinity House he got £13,500 for his rights.

That is the story of Burnham lights: the lighthouse one sees there to-day was put up in 1836, very shortly after the Trinity House had bought out the parson. About the other lighthouses on the Bristol Channel, on either bank, there is not much to say, so we will pass on to consider some of those on the Welsh coast.

Probably one of the first attempts to erect a lighthouse here, as an object of profit, was not made till fully sixty years after such an undertaking had been projected for the east coast. In 1662, and again in 1665, petitions to the crown requested leave to set up lighthouses on St. Anne’s Head, at Milford Haven. A patent was duly granted and the buildings erected, but—likely enough through opposition in the usual quarter—the lights therein were not maintained, and the buildings fell into decay. The scheme was, however, successfully revived in the closing years of Queen Anne’s reign, Joseph Allen, the then projector, paying the Trinity House £10 a year in order to stop opposition—as things went, he got off cheap.

Another sixty years or so after this, ‘the Smalls’—a group of rocks off St. David’s Head—were first marked by a lighthouse. The project to put it there was a bold one, and surely would never have been dreamed of had Winstanley not taught lighthouse projectors that isolated rocks might form a field for their labours. The proposal came from a wealthy Quaker merchant at Liverpool named Phillips, who said it was his mission in life to perform ‘a great and holy good to serve and save humanity.’ How could he better do this than by building a lighthouse, and by building it on the then almost unlit coast of Wales? It was just the kind of profitable philanthropy that a man of his tenets would love to indulge in—there was money to be made and good to be done by it.

Call to mind for a moment the period when this wealthy Quaker set about carrying out his design, in the year 1775, or about that time: there were then plenty of experienced engineers in practice—John Smeaton, to mention one—and Liverpool possessed its share of them. But to these the Quaker did not turn: they would have their own ideas on the subject of lighthouse building, based on practice and scientific principles: he had his, based on economy, and so he went, not to an engineer, but to one Henry Whiteside, a maker of musical instruments; he might not know much about lighthouse building, but he would be ‘cheap,’ and in the construction of his violins, spinettes, and harpsichords he displayed considerable ingenuity.

Whiteside was young and enterprising, he liked the idea of the work proposed to him, and before many months had passed he had laid aside his half-finished musical instruments, and was on the Smalls with a gang of Cornish miners, quarrying sockets in the hard stone into which were to be fastened the iron pillars that the lighthouse was to stand upon.

Perhaps the good folk who lived along the coast gave a no more genial welcome to Whiteside and his workmen than had the men and women of the Lizard and of Scilly to the lighthouse builders of the seventeenth century; perhaps they avowed that a light upon the Smalls which would warn vessels from their doom, would take ‘God’s grace’ from them; any way they do not seem to have given the fiddle-maker many useful hints as to the vagaries of the waves that washed around the Smalls. They told him the rock stood twelve feet above high-water level, and on that assurance he and his men set to work through the calm days of summer, finding but little to hinder them in their labour. From summer they worked into autumn, and on till October winds ruffled the waters of the Atlantic from hillocks into mountains, and drove an occasional wave as many feet above the Smalls as Whiteside and his men had been used to see them wash below it. The first big storm came up somewhat suddenly: the men were at work, and had so far progressed that they were getting into position the first of the iron rods that were to support the structure. To this they clung as shipwrecked sailors cling to the masts of their shattered ships. Their cutter, whose crew had evidently no sympathy with the workmen or their work, made sail on the approach of the danger, and left Whiteside and his men to shift for themselves.

All through that night the storm raged, every hour that passed angering the waves, driving them over the rocks with greater fury and drenching those clinging to the bending iron rod. Only when the tide had ebbed to its lowest dared they relinquish their hold. Escape from the rock was impossible, for no vessel could come near them in such a storm; but Fortune smiled, and before the close of the next day the sea had so far calmed down that their boat came to them and, wonderful to relate, every man was brought safe to shore.

Their experience taught them that some material more elastic than iron would have to be used in the construction of the lighthouse if it was to stand against an Atlantic gale. As soon, therefore, as he got to shore, Whiteside set about obtaining the requisite heart of oak, and with this he and his builders returned to work, but before beginning to set up their supports they soldered into the rock a number of iron rings, to which they could lash themselves for safety should another storm—such as that they had tasted—drive the waves over the surface of the rock. History does not record if this happened or not, but it probably did before the completion of the work, for that was not accomplished till just before August 1776, when the light in the lantern was first lit, and showed at a distance of seven or eight leagues.

Strange and fragile-looking enough, as the reader may see, was this lighthouse built by Whiteside, but it was ‘seaworthy,’ and stood till recently.

The charm of danger weaned Whiteside from his love of the gentle art of fiddle-making, and he practised it no more, but became the Quaker’s lighthouse keeper at the Smalls. He managed it profitably for his master—let us hope he did it efficiently; but he burned in his lamps on the average only 200 gallons of oil during the year.

The dues soon brought the Quaker in a handsome income, and with that he was satisfied: he took no personal interest in the lighthouse or its management, all which he left to a care-taker who lived hard by St. David’s Head. Knowing, as this man must have known, how uncertain was the communication with the Smalls, he should certainly have taken care that his men on the rock were well provided with materials for maintaining the light and with provisions for their own support. But there is evidence that he did neither one nor the other, and that Whiteside and those with him undoubtedly felt the neglect. Still, though the wind might rock their dwelling, and drive the spray far above it, and though they might sometimes regard their lot as hard and complain of it as solitary, they seem, during the first twelve months of their residence, to have been but once in actual alarm for their personal safety. Whiteside’s letter, and his men’s postscript, written on that occasion, will best describe their feelings, their evident anticipation of a fate similar to that which, some seventy years before, had befallen the inmates of the Eddystone:—

Placing their letter in a bottle, Whiteside and his men flung it into the sea, offering up a prayer as they did so that it might reach land and come to those able to help, ere it was too late; let us hope that their prayer was answered. At all events there is no record of the dwellers on the Smalls having perished on their insular home. Let us hope, too, that after this a more generous allowance of food for the keepers and of oil for the lamps was permitted. But all we know for certain about the subsequent management of the lighthouse is that only two keepers were kept there. This, no doubt, was economical, but the system possessed serious drawbacks, as we shall see by the following incident—one of the most exciting and melancholy in lighthouse history.

Some five-and-twenty years after the erection of the lighthouse at the Smalls, there came about, one autumn, a spell of exceptionally stormy weather, and no communication was had with the rock for four months. People on shore grew naturally anxious, and the lighting of the light was eagerly watched for as each day closed in. Would the stock of oil hold out another night? or would the food supplies for the unhappy men enable them to keep body and soul together, so that they might discharge their duties? These were the questions on every one’s lips, and the safety of the lighthouse keepers at the Smalls was the talk of every town and village in the neighbourhood. Time after time efforts were made to carry relief to the lighthouse, but all were fruitless; for miles round the rock the sea ran so high that no boat could possibly have lived in it. All that could be learnt was that crouched in the corner of the gallery running round the lantern was one of the keepers; despite the blinding snow and bitter cold, there he was whenever a boat got within sight of the building.

What could it mean? Had the wretched man lost his reason, and been driven by privation and the ceaseless cry of the tempest into a hopeless lunatic who refused to quit the station he had taken up? It was idle to speculate; all that was certain was that at least one whole and sane man remained upon the rock, for the light was regularly lit at nightfall, as could be seen from the shore, and those that brought news of the crouching figure seen in the lighthouse gallery declared that no light was burning in the lantern by day.

At last came a lull in the storm, the cutter reached the lighthouse, and brought from it the two men—one alive the other dead. Sickness had seized the dead man almost at the outset of the tempest, and despite the care of his companion his illness terminated fatally, and left the living soul that now returned to shore to endure a loneliness a thousand times more lonely and more horrible from the fact that it was passed with a lifeless body. He dared not commit that body to the waves; had he done so, the suspicion of murder must infallibly have rested on him; and who could then have lifted from him the mantle of suspicion? There was nothing for it but to live with the corpse till help arrived from shore, and so he did the best thing he could under the circumstances, and lashed his dead mate to the ironwork of the gallery that ran outside the lantern—this was the crouching figure that had been seen through the sleet and snow by those who got within sight of the lighthouse.

Subsequent isolations of the Smalls have taken place—some for lengthy periods; but no such gruesome incident has attended them. Nor, indeed, could it well do so, for a rule was soon afterwards put in force for this lighthouse, by which three persons were always on duty there. The wisdom and charity of this arrangement—which was soon afterwards generally adopted at isolated lighthouse stations—has been since constantly demonstrated, and most of us will recollect that within the last two or three years illness seized one of the keepers at the very lighthouse of which we have been speaking, during a storm that precluded communication with the rock for a considerable time: the sick man’s lot was, of course, far less hard from the fact that whilst one of his companions was on duty, the other could minister to his wants.

Not long before the acquirement of this lighthouse by the Trinity House it was almost demolished during the fury of a storm; the boards of the floor of the living room, beneath the lantern, being forced up so close to the ceiling that one of the men was almost crushed between the two before he could extricate himself from his perilous position. After this, the erection of a lighthouse at the Smalls more stable and more fitted for the comfort of its inmates was undertaken: a granite tower was completed in 1885, and it is certainly quaint to compare the accounts of the building of this lighthouse—directed by the Trinity House engineer and carried out by a band of from fifty to sixty skilled workmen—with the primitive arrangements and appliances with which, a century before, the Liverpool fiddle-maker and his half-dozen Cornish miners had set up the first lighthouse there. But this comparison must not create in our minds any contempt for the earlier enterprise so pluckily carried out.

Leaving the Smalls, we pass on to the coast of North Wales, where a lighthouse was proposed early in the reign of Charles II. There is amongst the State Papers of that reign a petition, dated in June, 1665, to erect ‘a double lighthouse,’ i.e. a high light and a low light, at Holyhead; but there is no record of this petition being granted, or of any lighthouse being then established there. Legend tells us that the ancients had a pharos at this point, but within historic times the headland was unlit until, comparatively speaking, recently.

Seven miles NNE. of Holyhead lie the Skerries, and the dangers, the treachery, of this far-stretching shoal attracted the attention of the lighthouse builder at a very much earlier date than the erection of the lighthouse at Holyhead; indeed, we first hear of lighting the Skerries in a scheme brought before Cromwell’s Council of State in 1658, for rendering possible the nocturnal navigation of St. George’s Channel. The scheme emanated from a certain Henry Hascard, who spoke from experience of the need of what he proposed, as he had been ‘for long employed in the Irish trade.’ The Council admitted the necessity of the scheme, but nothing appears to have been done to carry it into effect.

Again, in 1662, a lighthouse on the Skerries was proposed independently; but the difficulties of the undertaking and the opposition of Trinity House crushed the proposal. Then, thirty years later—after the Eddystone lighthouse had been set up—the proposal was renewed; but the Trinity House still opposed the suggestion, though it offered itself to erect a lighthouse on the Skerries if the ‘Irish trade’ would give a definite promise of contributing. This the traders would not do, and the scheme was not finally carried through till the year 1714, when a wealthy and enterprising merchant named Trench, who was the leaseholder of the islands, built a lighthouse there at a cost of fully £3,000, saying that the thing was needful, and that he would take the risk of loss. Poor man, it was a bad speculation for him: his son lost his life in its construction, the traders managed in different ways to evade the payment of the lighthouse dues which his patent authorized, and ten years later he went to his grave a ruined man. After his death, the patent passed to a married daughter, whose husband tried in vain to get enough toll to support his light, and then sold the rights for a mere song.

But the purchase was a fortunate one for the purchaser, or for his descendants or assigns; increase in traffic to Ireland, and a better machinery for gathering the lighthouse dues, turned the Skerries light into a very profitable possession: and one cannot read of the vast sum of £445,000, paid by the Trinity House to the owners in 1835, without a sigh of regret for the ill-luck of the original builder of the lighthouse.

There is, as the reader will see on looking at the map, hardly a more useful lighthouse for the Irish navigation than the Skerries; but it did not do all that was needed to make safe nocturnal passages in St. George’s Channel. The Isle of Man, girt round as it is with innumerable rocks and islets, must have formed a serious obstacle to safety in crossing to Ireland before any lighthouse was placed there; and it is not strange to find a warning light on the Gulf of Man, forming part of the scheme of 1658 already mentioned; though it is remarkable that Hascard only suggested its being illuminated during ‘the six fairest months of the year.’ Probably the meaning of this is that during the winter season communication between England and Ireland was then regarded as practically impossible—no vessel would attempt it.

Hascard’s scheme was supported by the mariners of Chester, Liverpool, and other ports in the north and west, but opposed, as we have said, by the Trinity House on the old grounds that its maintenance would add to the already too heavy burdens put upon the shipowners, though it must be said that, in 1664, the ‘brethren’ were induced to admit its utility, if a proper check was put on the amount of the contribution demanded! However, nothing came of the suggestion for a lighthouse on ‘the Calf,’ and none was put there till the last century; in fact, the only assistance that sailors of the eighteenth century received in their passage to Ireland by night was the benefit of two or three lighthouses at the entrance of the port of Dublin.

We have now gone nearly round the coast of England in the survey of our lighthouses, and the part that we have yet to travel—that north of the Skerries—possesses exceedingly few about which there is much to say. Indeed, the almost entire absence of any lighthouses on the west coast, set up during the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, is a noteworthy feature in the history of the subject with which we have been dealing. It certainly points very strongly to the smallness of the west coast trade in those days. What lights the religious houses of Wales, and of Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, may have supported, out of charity, we do not know; but, whatever they were, or wherever they were situated, no early attempt was made to re-erect them after the religious changes had snuffed them out.

Late in the seventeenth century, as the trade of Chester and Liverpool rapidly increased, some attempts seem to have been made to place lights at certain points along the shores of the Dee and the Mersey; but the majority of lighthouses that we now see north of the Skerries have barely a century of history of which to boast: the most northerly in England, on the west coast, St. Bees, was established in 1714 as an open coal fire, and this form of light was continued there till within a hundred years ago.

So ends the present attempt at giving a history of coast lighting in this country, by recalling incidents connected with the erection and existence of some of our more famous lighthouses. The subject is an interesting and, in a sense, a romantic one; moreover, it has hitherto received but scant attention, save from a purely scientific point of view, and from that we have not ventured to regard it. The picture of the coast of England lighted by charity, and of its being for many years hardly lit at all, is a novel one, and becomes the more curious as we realize what must have been the effect of such a condition of affairs.

Again, the picture which reveals every obstacle being thrown in the way of assisting navigation by means of nocturnal lights, appears strange to modern eyes, whilst the harsh and selfish condemnation as useless of lighthouses, which experience has taught us to regard as essential to the safety of shipping, falls somewhat discordantly on modern ears. That these obstacles and prejudices were, in most instances, successfully overcome is to the credit of those who overcame them, whether the particular project was undertaken out of charity or in the hope of private gain. Indeed, it may be safely said that the history of many of our English lighthouses reveals what pluck, and skill, and perseverance will accomplish, and is, for that reason if for no other, well worthy of careful study and full record.

THE END.

OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY