The Keepers

The History of Lighthouses

Course 8 · Chapter 6 · The Keepers

A lighthouse works only if someone keeps the light burning, the lens clean and the log written, night after night, in all weathers. The keepers were usually ordinary men and their families, working to strict rules in places most people never saw. This chapter describes their working life, the shore and rock stations, the case that led to the rule of three keepers, the rescue by Grace Darling, the disappearance of three keepers from the Flannan Isles in 1900, and the popular idea that the work drove men mad. It treats deaths and disappearances factually. Names, dates and details are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Work

Light and lens

The principal keeper and his assistants trimmed the wicks, filled the lamp with oil, wound the clockwork that turned the lens and polished the brass and glass every day. A dirty lens could cut the range sharply, so cleaning was close to a religious duty (check).

The watch

Keepers took turns on watch through the night, keeping the lamp burning and the machinery turning. They recorded the weather, the passing ships and any event in the log book, which was inspected on visits by the superintendent (check).

The rules

Boards issued detailed regulations on uniform, cleanliness, behaviour and the care of the station. A visit by an inspector could be unannounced, and a poor report could cost a man his post (check).

Two kinds of life A shore station, on a headland with a road, was a village in miniature: keepers' cottages, a school or a teacher, a garden and neighbours. A rock station, on a reef or islet, was a tower in which three or four men lived for weeks at a time with no family and no way of leaving. The two are often confused in popular accounts, and the myths about keepers mostly describe the rock stations (check).

Rock Stations

The rota. On Scottish rock stations the usual crew was three or four keepers, of whom one or two were ashore on leave at any time. Spells on the rock were a number of weeks, followed by weeks ashore (check the pattern for each period).
Relief. The Board's supply ships, called tenders, carried men and stores, and landing on the rock depended on the weather. In bad conditions relief could be delayed by days or weeks. Helicopters took over from boats from the 1970s (check).
Daily life. Off watch, men slept, cooked, read, wrote letters and practised hobbies such as model-making and fishing. Memoirs by former keepers describe boredom, cold and small quarrels, and also companionship and pride in the work (check).
Families. At shore stations families lived beside the tower. The keepers' wives and children appear in the records as sharing the work, for example in keeping the light when a husband was ill (check).

The Smalls, 1801

Point (check each)	Detail
The tower	The Smalls lighthouse stands on a reef off the coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales. It was built in the 1770s by John Phillips, a Liverpool maker of musical instruments, as a wooden hut on stilts.
The story	In 1801 a storm damaged the tower and cut it off. One of the two keepers, Thomas Griffith, died. His colleague, Thomas Howell, feared he would be accused of murder if he threw the body into the sea, and made a coffin from wood from the tower and lashed it to the outside. The body remained there for weeks until relief arrived.
The result	The incident is said to be the reason for the later rule of three keepers, so that one could always bear witness to the death of another (check). It is retold in many histories, and some details may have been improved by tellings.

Grace Darling

On the night of 6 September 1838 the paddle steamer Forfarshire was wrecked on rocks near the Longstone lighthouse in the Farne Islands off Northumberland. At dawn Grace Darling, the 22-year-old daughter of the keeper, William Darling, saw survivors on a rock about a mile away, and she and her father rowed out in a small boat and brought nine people back to the lighthouse (check). The rescue was reported across Britain and Grace became a celebrity, visited by admirers and painted by artists. She died of tuberculosis in 1842 at the age of 26 (check). She was not a keeper herself, and her fame shows how the lighthouse family could be at the centre of events.

Flannan Isles, 1900

Point (check each)	Detail
The station	The lighthouse on Eilean Mor in the Flannan Isles, about 20 miles west of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, was built by David Alan Stevenson and lit in 1899.
The discovery	On 26 December 1900 the relief ship Hesperus reached the island. The three keepers, James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur, were missing, and the station was in order apart from signs of a storm damage at the west landing. A ship had reported that the light was not lit some days earlier.
The inquiry	An inspector for the Board, Robert Muirhead, examined the station. He found that the men had probably been swept away by a large wave while securing equipment at the landing (check). No bodies were found.
The legend	Later retellings added unexplained clocks, a meal left uneaten and log entries about men weeping or praying. Several of these details appear to have been invented in later accounts, and the original log shows nothing of the kind (check). A poem of 1912 by W. W. Gibson helped to fix the legend.

The disappearance is documented as a tragedy: three men lost, the cause most probably the sea. The mystery in the popular version is largely the work of later storytelling. The families of the men are part of the record, and the case should be treated with respect (Exercise 1).

Madness and Isolation

The idea that keepers were driven mad by solitude is common in fiction and films. The evidence is thin. The Boards chose keepers with care, kept them in teams and rotated them, and the logs and memoirs show a working life of routine, and sometimes of conflict between men confined together. Some individuals did suffer, and there are cases of illness and of men leaving the service (check). A careful historian separates the few documented cases from the general claim (Chapter 10).

A British comparison Most of the stories in this chapter are British: Grace Darling in Northumberland, the Smalls in Wales and the Flannan Isles in the Hebrides. The Board's tender ships and its keepers' families belong to the Scottish story, and the shore station at Kinnaird Head, now a museum, shows the cottages in which the keepers lived (check). Edinburgh readers may know the poem and the later opera and film versions of the Flannan Isles story, which show how a documented loss became a legend.

Check the details Keepers' stories are told with great feeling, and the details of the Smalls, the Flannan Isles and Grace Darling's rescue are often changed in the telling. Dates, names and sequences should be checked against the official reports, the logs, newspapers of the time and modern scholarship. The loss of life in these cases should be described only to the extent that it is documented.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Separate what is documented from what was added later in the story of the Flannan Isles, and say what each kind of source adds.

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Exercise 2

Using the evidence in this chapter, describe a day on a rock station in about 150 words, and mark which parts are documented and which are imagined.

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Exercise 3

Explain why a rule of three keepers made sense after the Smalls, and what it did not solve.

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Quick Reference

Work: light, lens, watch, log book, inspection
Stories: the Smalls (1801), Grace Darling (1838), Flannan Isles (1900) (check)
Method: separate the documented loss from the later legend
Myth: "driven mad by loneliness", thinly supported