The Lighthouse Keepers

I have decided I would have made an excellent lighthouse keeper. This may come as a surprise after discovering that I would not have lasted ten minutes as a night watchman, but lighthouse keeping is different. Give me a lighthouse somewhere off the Scottish coast, enough food, a pile of books and several weeks in which nobody can unexpectedly turn up at my door, and I think I would settle in rather nicely.

There is, admittedly, the small matter of keeping ships from crashing into rocks, so perhaps we should establish what the job actually involved before I submit my application.

SOMEONE HAD TO KEEP THE LIGHT ON

Lighthouses have existed in various forms for thousands of years, but Scotland’s organised lighthouse story began to take shape properly during the eighteenth century. It was desperately needed. Scotland had islands, reefs, skerries and an impressive collection of rocks that seem almost deliberately positioned to ruin a sailor’s evening.

In 1786, Parliament established the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses, now the Northern Lighthouse Board, and their first lighthouse was at Kinnaird Head in Fraserburgh. The light was first shown on 1 December 1787, from a lantern built into an old castle overlooking the sea. Seventeen whale-oil lamps and reflectors produced what was, at the time, an exceptionally powerful light.

The first keeper was a shipmaster named James Park, who was paid one shilling a night and given the use of some ground. There was one condition: he had to have another person with him every night and teach them how to clean the lantern and attend to the lamps.

Which seems sensible. If the only thing standing between a ship and the Scottish coastline is James and his lamp, we probably want somebody else who knows what to do if James takes ill.

Over the following century, lighthouses appeared around some of the most difficult and exposed parts of the Scottish coast. Some keepers lived with their families at land stations, while others were sent to isolated rocks where the only neighbours were the other keepers, the sea and whichever seabirds had decided to scream outside the window.

I am still not entirely put off.

WHAT DID A LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER ACTUALLY DO?

The obvious answer is to keep the light on, which sounds fairly straightforward until you remember that this was long before somebody could replace a bulb and go back downstairs.

The Principal Lightkeeper and Assistant Lightkeepers were responsible for keeping both the light and fog signal in working order. At night they took turns keeping watch in the lightroom, checking that the light continued to show correctly. Each lighthouse had its own identifying pattern, known as its character, so it was not enough for the light simply to be visible; it had to flash in the right sequence because mariners could use that pattern to identify which lighthouse they were seeing.

During poor visibility, the keepers also had to be ready to operate the fog signal. Then daylight arrived and apparently nobody said, “Well done lads, off to bed.”

There was cleaning. So much cleaning.

The lamps and lenses needed constant attention, the buildings had to be kept in order, equipment maintained, surfaces painted and the premises kept immaculate. A keeper might also need to understand engines, communications equipment and machinery, cook, carry out repairs and generally deal with whatever decided to stop working at a place where calling somebody out was not a simple option.

The Northern Lighthouse Board’s description of the ideal keeper is wonderful. He had to be a “man of parts”, with practical knowledge of engines, radio equipment and the sea, while also being a competent handyman, a useful cook and a good companion.

Basically, if something broke, there was no engineer arriving between nine and one.

You were the engineer.

And falling asleep on watch was not treated lightly. At Corsewall Lighthouse in 1817, the Principal Keeper was suspended after falling asleep while on duty and allowing the revolving mechanism to stop. His punishment was to be sent to Bell Rock as an Assistant Keeper.

Imagine being caught sleeping at work and being told your disciplinary outcome is that you are being transferred to a rock in the North Sea.

I think I would have remained extremely awake after that.

FOUR WEEKS ON A ROCK

Not every lighthouse was particularly lonely. Some stood near towns or villages, and at land stations the keeper’s wife and children could live alongside him. Lighthouse communities grew around the stations, with families sharing an unusual way of life that most people outside the service knew very little about.

Rock stations were another matter.

At places such as Bell Rock and Skerryvore there were six keepers attached to the station, with three on the rock while the other three had their spell ashore. The usual rotation became four weeks on duty followed by four weeks ashore, while their families remained in houses provided at the shore station.

Now we are talking. Four weeks with nobody popping in, nobody expecting you at a birthday dinner on Saturday, no parcel deliveries, no doorbell and no small talk with somebody you vaguely know in Tesco.

Just you, two other people and the Atlantic.

Obviously, the success of this arrangement would depend enormously on who the other two people were. Four weeks with two people you like sounds rather peaceful. Four weeks trapped in a lighthouse with somebody who chews loudly could result in an entirely different Archive article.

BELL ROCK

Then there was Bell Rock.

Around eleven miles off the Angus coast lies a reef that disappears beneath the sea at high water. At its highest tides, the rock is submerged by several metres of water.

Naturally, somebody decided to build a lighthouse on it.

The Bell Rock had been a danger to shipping for centuries, but constructing anything there presented one fairly obvious problem: for much of the day, the place you wanted to build on was not actually available.

Robert Stevenson was the engineer responsible for the lighthouse, with John Rennie acting as consulting engineer. Work on the rock began in 1807 and the light came into service in February 1811. The finished tower rises around thirty-six metres from the reef, with its lower masonry built directly into the rock and constructed to withstand the sea repeatedly breaking over it.

Around sixty men worked on its construction over three years in conditions that I think can safely be described as absolutely ridiculous. More than two hundred years later, the tower is still there.

I struggle to put a shelf up straight.

Bell Rock remains the world’s oldest working sea-washed lighthouse, which becomes increasingly impressive the longer you think about where it is standing.

Building it was one thing.

Then somebody had to live there.

THE LIGHTROOM AT NIGHT

This is the part of lighthouse keeping I think I would have loved.

You are on watch while the other keepers are below and the lighthouse has settled around you. Outside, there is sea and darkness; inside the lightroom, the machinery continues doing the same job it has done night after night, sending the beam out across the water.

Every few seconds it passes the windows again: light, darkness, then light again.

Somewhere beyond what you can see, there are ships. The people aboard may never see the lighthouse itself, know your name or have the slightest idea who is sitting inside the tower. They see the light, recognise its pattern and know where they are.

Your job that night is simply to make sure they keep seeing it.

I could get on board with that.

BUT YOU REALLY WERE ISOLATED

The romantic version of lighthouse keeping becomes considerably less romantic when something goes wrong.

At remote stations, weather could prevent relief crews from arriving when expected, and supplies did not necessarily appear simply because the calendar said they should.

Hyskeir Lighthouse in the Inner Hebrides gives a good example of how long that problem survived. By 1980, the keepers themselves travelled between Oban and the lighthouse by helicopter, but heavy supplies still had to arrive by lighthouse vessel.

During the winter of that year, bad weather repeatedly prevented ten barrels of oil from being delivered. Attempts were made between September and January, but the vessel could not get the supplies ashore. When the oil finally arrived, the lighthouse had two days’ supply left.

Two days.

I imagine everybody was watching the gauge rather closely by then, and that was 1980.

Go back another hundred years and the separation could be far greater. There were no helicopters coming if somebody became seriously ill, no mobile phone and, at many stations, no immediate means of contacting the mainland.

You waited for the relief vessel.

If the weather allowed it.

YOU HAD TO GET ALONG

The Northern Lighthouse Board’s description of a good keeper includes something I had not really considered when I first started reading about the job: he needed to be a good companion.

Of course he did.

Technical ability mattered, but temperament mattered as well. At an isolated station, you could not finish a shift annoyed with your colleague and go home because he was still going to be there at breakfast. He would also be there at lunch, dinner, tomorrow morning, next Tuesday and probably the Tuesday after that.

Keepers cooked for one another, worked together, maintained the station together and shared a space from which nobody could simply wander off when they had had enough.

There must have been friendships that lasted decades, and I am equally certain there were arguments of spectacular pettiness.

I desperately want to find an old lighthouse log containing something along the lines of: MacDonald used my good mug again.

This is one of the parts of lighthouse life that interests me most because isolation is often described in terms of being alone, yet at many of these stations the problem was almost the opposite. You were isolated from everybody else while living extraordinarily close to the same very small group of people.

There is nowhere to flounce off to on Bell Rock.

THE FAMILIES ON SHORE

The lighthouse story was not only about the men in the towers.

At mainland stations, wives and children could live beside the keepers, sometimes in houses built as part of the lighthouse complex. At rock stations, families remained at shore stations while the keepers completed their weeks away.

That meant lighthouse life developed its own rhythm of departures, returns and periods of separation. A keeper might spend four weeks living with two colleagues on an isolated rock and then return ashore to his family for the next four.

The wives and children were therefore part of the lighthouse service too, even when they were not the ones keeping the lamp. Whole communities existed around the keepers, engineers, lighthouse ships and the families who moved from station to station with them.

For many, it was not simply employment. It was the shape of family life.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE FLANNAN ISLES

You cannot spend very long reading about Scottish lighthouse keepers without eventually arriving here.

In December 1900, three men were stationed at the Flannan Isles Lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, around eighteen miles west of Lewis: Principal Keeper James Ducat, Second Assistant Thomas Marshall and Occasional Keeper Donald McArthur, who was covering for another keeper on sick leave.

On 15 December, something happened.

A passing vessel later reported that the light had not been visible that night, although this information did not reach the Northern Lighthouse Board until after the disappearance was discovered. There was no radio communication between the lighthouse and Lewis at the time.

The relief vessel Hesperus reached the island on 26 December. Nobody appeared to meet it, and there was no response when a rocket was fired from the ship. Relieving keeper Joseph Moore went ashore and climbed towards the lighthouse.

The three men were gone.

The last completed entries in the lighthouse log were dated 13 December, but readings and other information for the following days had been written on a slate ready to be transferred later. The work of the morning of 15 December appeared to have been completed, and the lamp was prepared for lighting that evening.

The official investigation found serious storm damage around one of the landing areas and concluded that the men had probably gone outside to secure equipment or inspect damage before being caught by an unexpectedly large wave and swept into the sea.

Their bodies were never recovered.

This is where I think we should leave the story itself because all sorts of additions have attached themselves to the Flannan mystery over the years. Some are repeated so often that they now sound like established facts, but the Northern Lighthouse Board itself is careful to distinguish what was actually recorded from what came later.

The reality is sad enough without embellishment. Three experienced lighthouse keepers went to work on an isolated Scottish island and never came home.

Their families never knew precisely what happened.

ALL THOSE NIGHTS

Scotland’s lighthouses gradually changed. Oil was replaced by newer forms of lighting, communications improved and automation steadily removed the need for someone to sit beside the light throughout the night.

On 31 March 1998, the keepers left Fair Isle South for the final time. It was the last manned Scottish lighthouse to be automated, bringing more than two hundred years of Northern Lighthouse Board light keeping to an end.

The lights did not go out. They simply stopped needing somebody there to watch them.

Perhaps that is why I like the lighthouse keepers so much. Most of their nights were probably not dramatic, and that was exactly the point. The light came on when it should, flashed the correct pattern and continued working while ships passed somewhere out in the darkness.

Morning arrived, the keeper cleaned everything, maintained whatever needed attention, probably painted something that had already been painted seventeen times and eventually did it all again.

Most sailors never knew who was keeping the light, and they did not need to.

They just needed to see it.