Passing southwards from the Farne, the next lighthouse of which there is anything like ancient mention is Tynemouth; probably the monks at this important northern offshoot from St. Alban’s Abbey had shown a light from their priory, and when we first hear of the lighthouse there in the seventeenth century it was in great ruin. At Flamborough Head we have Camden’s authority for saying that the name was derived from a Roman pharos there; but there is no evidence of a mediaeval lighthouse at this spot, and before coming to one of these we must pass on to the Spurn Point, at the mouth of the Humber.
Here a lighthouse was erected in 1427, under circumstances which are in themselves interesting and romantic; so, in accordance with a promise in the first chapter, I will tell the story somewhat in detail.
The coast between Flamborough Head and the Wash has undergone very remarkable changes within historic times: the old chroniclers record very frequent inundations of the low-lying lands, and finally the entire washing away of a thriving port-town which sent a couple of members to Parliament. Its destruction—so the chroniclers say—was due to the extreme ungodliness of the inhabitants, who, such as escaped a watery grave, fled higher up the Humber to the then insignificant village of Hull, and soon raised it into a centre of commercial activity. These folk did very well, and, we will hope, lived to repent of their former wickedness; but how about the poor wretches who had been carried into eternity unrepentant? This was the thought that weighed on the pious mind of a monk at Meaux Abbey, and so strongly did it impress him that he determined to leave his brethren and lead a hermit’s life near the submerged town, spending his days in prayer for the perished souls.
Persons fired with religious enthusiasm sometimes forget to have a due regard for the minor requirements of the law. This is exactly what the pious monk from Meaux Abbey did: he endowed his hermitage with certain property from the profits of which he and his successors could support themselves, but he quite forgot to get the king’s licence for such a gift, which was, of course, a gift in mortmain. Now all this happened in the closing years of Richard II’s luckless reign, and so much were the crown officers busied in other and weightier matters, that no one ever found out what a terrible thing Brother Matthew had done till Henry of Lancaster had been proclaimed king. A heavy pecuniary fine might have been the result of the monk’s hastiness, but for this fortunate circumstance. By an odd coincidence, Henry’s landing in England had taken place in the Humber close to the new hermitage which, small and mean though it was, gave him a comfortable shelter for the night. When the affair came to be looked into, this was remembered, and Brother Matthew was not only speedily forgiven, but he and his successors had bestowed upon them the important privilege of the right to take any wreck cast upon the shore within two leagues of the hermitage.
The monk’s successor was a certain Brother Richard Redbarrow, and a very good and charitable man he seems to have been: the constant wrecks around him, though they yielded him considerable profit, made his heart bleed for those who lost their lives by shipwreck. The possession of a full bag of treasure, or a cask of dainty wine, was no compensation for the sorrow which would fill his heart when the gray morning revealed a dozen or more lifeless bodies stretched upon the beach, and he determined to do what he could to prevent or lessen shipwreck, and beside his hermitage he set to work to build a lighthouse.
Had Brother Richard possessed money enough to finish what he began, we might never have known of his Christian work; but he had not, and in the year 1427 he petitioned Parliament to obtain from the king the grant of a small toll on the shipping entering or leaving the port of Hull towards finishing his ‘beken’ tower; the cost of the light upon it he was ready to bear.
Parliament thought it an excellent plan, and so did the king. Brother Richard got his grant, and no doubt the lighthouse was built and did good service for many a year to come. But in time the sea encroached, acre by acre, till hermitage and lighthouse both disappeared, and in the general survey of monastic property taken at the dissolution, we find no mention of either one or the other.
But these inroads of the sea, these changes in the form of the coast-line, made the entrance to the Humber no safer. In Elizabeth’s days the Spurn was an exceedingly sharp headland, stretching far into the river, and collecting around it a quantity of shifting sand and shingle, so that the sailors of Hull determined to petition the queen in favour of a lighthouse there which one or their own countrymen—the famous navigator, Sir Martin Frobisher—was seeking leave to erect at the Spurn Point, or hard by it. No doubt Sir Martin’s suit was opposed in the usual quarter, and before he could ride down the opposition he had been carried off by wounds from the Frenchmen’s guns, and nothing came of his proposal.
After this, in 1618, his kinsman, Peter Frobisher, put forward the same suggestion, but it was again laughed at as a madman’s scheme, and opposed and finally ‘shelved,’ so that ships got in and out of the Humber as best they could, the traders preferring risk to a settled tax.
The next proposals we hear of for a lighthouse at the Spurn came in the days of the Commonwealth; Sir Harry Vane—from whom the Lord Protector had not yet been delivered—submitted them to the committee for managing the affairs of the Trinity House[2], which committee actually approved the scheme. But the Trinity House of Hull, constituted as before, liked it not at all: a lighthouse at the Spurn, if erected, would not stand ‘three springs,’ and the only persons it could benefit would be an enemy seeking to enter the Humber by night; no native ship would do so mad a thing as that for fifty lighthouses.
These arguments are obviously weak, but somehow they managed to have the desired effect, and a lighthouse at the Spurn was once more postponed till some years after the Restoration. Then a private individual, a certain Justinian Angel, built one, lit it, and applied to the king for leave to gather toll for its support. The opponents of the scheme now raved in vain: there was the light, and with it ships did come in and out of the Humber by night, and shipwreck grew to be the exception.
Charles II gave Angel his patent, remarking to Sam Pepys, then Master of the Trinity House, that as the patentee only asked for a voluntary contribution, it could be no hardship to anybody. Sam thought it wise to explain that, in so long opposing the scheme, the Trinity House had only done what it deemed its duty, to which the merry monarch replied that ‘caution’ was ‘always reasonable,’ and with that safe remark passed on.
There was nothing for it now but to influence as much as possible such shipowners as were willing to pay, against the light. The Trinity House seems to have thought the best way to do this was to circulate wild rumours of Angel’s huge profits; we are glad now that these rumours were set afloat, for they drew from Angel a statement as to his expenses and management, which gives us a very vivid picture of his lighthouse; this is what he says:—
At most other lighthouses—he is speaking of the ‘high’ or ‘upper’ lighthouse, they were generally in pairs, a high light and a low light—the grate was fastened to a back like a chimney, and exposed only one way to the wind, namely, ‘that to the seaward,’ whilst in the low light there would be exhibited ‘two or three candles closed in with glass.’ But at the Spurn things were of necessity quite different. Here the fire on the high lighthouse must needs show ‘all round,’ and so it was entirely unscreened, standing upon ‘a swaype’ fourteen feet above the top of the lighthouse tower, and burning a vast amount more coal than a fire partly screened would burn; besides, the fire needed to be specially ‘bright,’ and so only ‘picked’ coal was used, which cost threepence a chaldron more than ordinary coal.
Then the cost of repairs was exceptional; in such an exposed situation the flames, fanned by a winter’s gale, blazed so fiercely that often three or four of the iron bars of the grate would be melted in a single night. Then the consumption of fuel would be enormous, and ‘four pair of hands’ was too little to feed the greedy furnace and keep it up to the requisite height.
If the ‘high’ light was costly to maintain, the ‘low’ light was—as a ‘low’ light—even more so: for at the Spurn this, too, was given by a coal fire instead of by the usual candles, and so cost as much ‘as two such lights elsewhere.’
In addition to all this, the carriage of coal to the Spurn Head was unusually costly, for the way from the nearest spot at which the Newcastle boats could discharge their coals lay, half of it, over soft sand, into which cart wheels sank deeply, and half over ‘a sharp shingle’ that lamed the oxen that drew it.
Light-keepers’ salaries were, too, a heavy item; two men and a competent overseer were always needed at the Spurn, and on rough and boisterous nights much additional help was required.
Altogether, from the first lighting of the lights in November, 1675, to Christmas, 1677, the expenditure had amounted to £905, and the receipts to £948, a profit of £43 in two years and a month.
Charles II thought this was not out-of-the-way; he gave Angel further powers and facilities for gathering his tolls, and at last the grumbling and the moaning died away, not to be renewed till nearly a century later. Then there were worthier grounds for them: the owner was lord of the manor within which the Spurn lighthouses stood, and he would not move them to a position rendered necessary by the continued alteration of the sand banks.
Parliament was applied to, and with an airy disregard of the claims of private property, vested the lighthouse rights in the Trinity House of Deptford Strand—the very body that had for so long fought against the erection of lighthouses at the Spurn at all. Armed with these rights the Trinity House promptly rendered the old lighthouses useless by erecting, in a position where they really assisted navigation, those at present standing, and they called to their aid, as architect and engineer, John Smeaton, who had just then won his laurels by the wonderful stone tower he had built on the Eddystone rocks.
Of the disused lighthouses, as they appeared some twenty years before they were rendered useless by Smeaton’s buildings, we have a curious description, written by the then secretary to the Trinity House: the coals, he says, are placed in ‘a bricket or cradle of iron,’ which is suspended on a beam and hoisted or let down at pleasure. The upper light was then shown on the top of the tower, whilst the lower was placed against the tower on a platform a few feet from the ground. Perhaps it was this somewhat unusual arrangement with the beam that Dr. Johnson had in his mind when he described, in his Dictionary, a lighthouse as ‘a high building at the top of which lights are hung to guide ships at sea’—certainly not a very accurate description of a lighthouse as the thing was then generally constructed and arranged.