LIGHTHOUSES ON THE WESTERN COAST
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.
[Illustration: THE SMALLS LIGHTHOUSE.]
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:—
‘FROM THE SMALLS,
‘_February 1, 1777._
‘SIR,
‘Being now in a most dangerous and distressed condition upon
the Smalls, do hereby trust providence will bring to your mind
this, which prayeth for your immediate assistance to fetch us
off the Smalls, before the next spring [tides], or we fear we
shall perish, our water near all gone, our fire quite gone, and
our house in a most melancholy manner.
‘I doubt not but you will fetch us from here as fast as
possible. We can be got off at some part of the tide, almost
any weather.
I need say no more, but remain your distressed humble servant,
‘HY. WHITESIDE.
‘_Postscript._ We were distressed in a gale of wind upon
January 13, since which we have not been able to keep any
light; but we could not have kept any light above sixteen
nights longer for want of oil and candles, which makes us
murmur and think we are forgotten. We doubt not that whoever
picks up this will be so merciful as to cause it to be sent to
Thos. Williams, Esq. Trelethin, near St. David’s, Wales.’
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.
[Illustration: LIGHTHOUSE AT HOLYHEAD.]
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
FOOTNOTES
[1] See chapter viii.
[2] The acting body of the Trinity House adhering to the late king, its
labours had been transferred to a committee of the Parliament.
[3] This is the incident attributed by Smeaton and others to the building
of the second lighthouse an the Eddystone.
[4] Wright’s _History of Essex_, vol. ii. p. 179, says that Winstanley
was offered a liberal salary by the French king to remain in France, but
refused the offer. This is somewhat inconsistent with the statement that
the old king, Louis XIV, censured the officer of the privateer that had
made the capture, and ordered Winstanley’s immediate return, saying he
was at war with England, but not with humanity, and that a lighthouse on
the Eddystone would be a benefit to mankind at large.
[5] The reader will have noticed that credit for the undertaking did not
lie with the Trinity House.
[6] _The Beaux Stratagem._ By Farquhar, 1707, scene v.
[7] See page 7.
[8] Chap. i. p. 24.