Lighthouses’ darkest hour
QUESTION
Did Britain’s lighthouses remain operational during World War II? The lights on many lighthouses were extinguished during World War II, some were left on intermittently, and many were merely dimmed.
Lights nearer population centres were viewed with suspicion by local communities and the RAF. Not only were the lights believed to guide the Luftwaffe, but during the day, distinctive white towers could be used as markers.
Consequently, many lighthouses had to be camouflaged, such as St Anthony’s, South Foreland, Start Point in Devon, hurst Point in hampshire and Gorleston in Norfolk. At hunstanton in Norfolk and Winterton in Lincolnshire the lights were turned into lookout posts.
A number of lighthouses were demolished, such as in Littlehampton in West Sussex in 1940. The Formby lighthouse on Merseyside was demolished in 1940, because it could direct German bombers heading for Liverpool.
The poor lighthouse keeper at Scurdie Ness, a famous lighthouse near Montrose, had personally to paint the whole tower black so that it would not also provide a daytime marker for the enemy.
Trinity house, the General Lighthouse Authority for england, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, played an important role during World War II, keeping sea lanes marked and lighted for Allied convoys. The Pilotage Service guided ships to their ports under hazardous conditions, notably at Dunkirk.
Trinity house laid 73 lighted buoys and two lightvessels to indicate a safe route for the DDay landings, with Trinity house pilots responsible for all commercial vessels and many of the service vessels. Those who lost their lives are commemorated on a memorial in Trinity Square in London.
Ken Wilson, Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
QUESTION Can the strong contrast in accents between northern and southern American states be explained by which counties in Britain the seed population came from?
The many thousands of AngloSaxons who sailed to America from east Anglia in the 17th century and settled in Virginia, Georgia and North and South Carolina, took their accents with them. In the South, you often hear ‘boy john’ and ‘girl jane’, both pure Suffolk dialect, as is ‘move up a tad’.
The Mayflower, which took the 102 Pilgrim Fathers to America in 1620, set sail from harwich, before finally leaving england from Plymouth. The Mayflower was heading for Virginia when it was blown off course to Cape Cod, in what is now Massachusetts, where the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and discovered, among other things, turkeys.
The typically American vowels in ‘dook’ (duke) and ‘noo’ (new) are how they are sounded in east Anglia to this day. Who could forget Bernard Matthews and his ‘Bootiful’ turkeys?
Michael Cole, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
The United States began as colonies of Great Britain, the settlers coming over in a series of waves that have left their mark on the American accent. The second wave of english emigrants, after the Pilgrim Fathers, were ‘distressed Cavaliers’ and indentured servants, who’d left following defeat in the english Civil War to establish plantations in Virginia. So the Virginia accent developed from a cluster of rural dialects in the south and west of england.
The next wave were the Quakers. Led by William Penn, they came from Buckingham and hertfordshire and established Pennsylvania in 1682. Their speech patterns, characterised by shorter vowel sounds formed the basis for the flat Midwestern American accent. The 18th century saw a great emigration of the socalled Scots-Irish, who fled poverty and religious persecution to America’s mid-Atlantic, and their distinctive accent can still be heard in many Southern regions, such as ‘far’ for fire, and ‘winder’ for window.
After achieving independence in 1776, the United States expanded westward, and fresh waves of immigrants arrived in New York, New Orleans and other port cities, adding German, Russian, Polish and African elements to the language.
William Jewel, Belfast.
QUESTION Which bacteria are the key offenders in causing smelly feet?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, which discussed the cheesy gases produced by Brevibacterium and other microbes, my late husband suffered from smelly feet, and an old exnavy uncle told us that a chap on one of the ships he sailed in had the problem. however this was cured by soaking his feet in a bowl of water containing permanganate of potash.
I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately my uncle had failed to tell me how much to use and the length of time required.
By the end my poor victim looked as though he was wearing purple socks for several days. It did work, however, and he never suffered from foot odour again.
Y. Cox, Maidstone, Kent.
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