Bella Bathurst

For those in peril on the sea

The story — or rather, stories — of how the British lighthouses were built has already withstood heavy and repeated telling. There’s Henry Winstanley’s first Eddystone light (brick, hexagonal, candles on the outside, en-suite state room) and his Icarus boast to the gods that it would withstand ‘the greatest storm that ever was’, which it didn’t. There’s Henry Hill, the keeper who swallowed a mouthful of molten lead while the second Eddystone burned. There’s John Smeaton’s tree of stone, flawless, tiny, eroded from below, now landbound on Plymouth Hoe.

And there are the old tales. From the early 1800s all lighthouses had three staff to ‘prevent suspicion of murder’ after one keeper on an English light died of natural causes and his deputy hung his body from the lantern-room balcony. When the relief boat finally arrived, the poor man was found to have kept the watches but lost his mind. Then there’s the Flannan Isles mystery (light extinguished, lodgings abandoned, all three keepers vanished), still (to some) unsolved.

There’s foul deeds — the Wolf Rock off Cornwall took its name from a hollow chamber through which the wind howled, alerting sailors to the rock’s existence, so the local wreckers allegedly sailed out to the rock and stopped up the wolf’s mouth in the hope of better plunder. And fairer: Grace Darling, the lightkeeper’s daughter who, with her father William, rowed out from Longstone light to rescue survivors of a wreck and rowed back into Victorian legend.

And that’s without even starting on the Stevensons. The man who became best known for Treasure Island and Jekyll & Hyde began his professional life as an engineer apprenticed to the family trade. Robert Louis Stevenson corrected his American publishers in 1886:

My father is not an ‘inspector’ of lighthouses.

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