The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
LET THERE BE LIGHT
They loom as large in art and literature as they do in life. But what do most of us really know about our offshore lighthouses, and the keepers who once manned them? Guy Kelly illuminates the history of these lonesome lifesavers. Photographs by Leo Godda
To observers, Perch Rock lighthouse appears a forlorn figure in the 21st century. Standing tall, empty and redundant – just a few sandy yards from New Brighton promenade, off the north-eastern tip of the Wirral peninsula – it is resigned to a fate of simply being kidnapped by the tides, then released again, every few hours of every long day.
Looking across the yawning confluence of the River Mersey and Liverpool Bay, near where the Irish Sea also meets the lesser plumes of the Rivers Alt, Clwyd, Dee and Ribble, the chalk-white tower watches over what is now a remarkably hazard-free patch of Britain’s coastline. Modern vessels fitted with even more modern navigational equipment need only give New Brighton a wide berth, straighten up a touch, check for any oncoming skiffs and then cruise safely upriver: docks lining their port side, the beaches of Egremont on their starboard.
It wasn’t long ago, however, that they needed all the help they could get. And the lighthouse was more than happy to give it. It is somnolent now, but for almost a century and a half, the 95ft granite stalwart at Perch Rock was the potential difference between safety and peril for mariners entering the Mersey. In addition to the menacing crop of dark rocks the tower was built beside, there were once unpredictable sands, thick fog and gushing waves threatening ships of old. While danger lurked, the sentry at New Brighton could always be relied upon. Now, 45 years since it shone its last light, one man is keen to turn the spotlight around.
‘Can you smell that?’ Tom Nancollas asks, as we stand on an escalator at Liverpool Lime Street station on a warm late-summer’s morning. A tall man, with ruddy cheeks and a boyish face, he closes his eyes and wafts a hand under his nose like a Dolmio puppet hovering at the stove. ‘That’s the Mersey. It actually has its own unique scent, you know. And we’re about to pass right under it.’
Nancollas, who is 30, works as a building conservationist in London, having trained with English Heritage before joining the City of London Corporation, where one of his most recent projects was to assess the health of the City’s ancient churchyards. He is a enthusiastic admirer of all buildings – just about every structure, mural or feature we pass over the course of a day on Merseyside seems to prompt some sort of trivia – but it is offshore lighthouses, such as the one on Perch Rock, that thrill him most.
‘I remember lighthouses as a child – I think we all do, don’t we, they’re so embedded in our imaginations – but it wasn’t until I became interested in buildings that I found myself totally drawn to them,’ he says. Today he lives in south London with his wife, but he grew up largely in Gloucestershire, and his surname is Cornish.
‘Lighthouses are less well understood than terrestrial architecture, so if your work is to study buildings and their history, there is really no group that is more unique than our offshore examples. They are inaccessible, unfathomable. They are beyond most people, even experts, yet everyone holds them as an idea.’
Nancollas’s passion meant he chose to focus his master’s dissertation on offshore lighthouses in 2015. That project has become a book, Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet – a personal, lyrical journey exploring the mysterious allure of these isolated pickets.
There are 20 surviving offshore lighthouses in our seas, 18 of which are still in use (albeit automated and visited only intermittently by engineers). Lighthouses in some form have existed since beacons could be lit on hilltops, and certainly since the third century BC, when it is believed the Pharos of Alexandria was constructed. Yet offshore versions were a daring invention that came later. As Britain’s sea trade flourished in the late 18th century, the rates of wrecks and drownings rose accordingly. In an effort to combat that loss of life (and goods), the best inventors of the age were tasked with building warning lights that would sit not only on clifftops – where there remain hundreds of coastal lighthouses around the country – but actually in the most perilous shipping routes themselves. Some were abandoned during construction, a few haven’t stood the test of time, and yet in testament to the skill of those builders, most are as sturdy as they were almost 200 years ago.
On a quest that took him to every corner of the British Isles, Nancollas chose seven significant examples of offshore lighthouses to study, from Eddystone, off the Devon and Cornwall coast, to Bell Rock, near Angus in Scotland, and Fastnet, the most southerly point of Ireland. Perch Rock, the fourth-oldest offshore lighthouse we have, made the cut on account of both its unusual accessibility (thanks to development, it is now reachable on foot at low tide) and its almost entirely untouched late-georgian interior. Nancollas spent a night here in 2016, to research an entertaining book chapter, but we’re just here for the day. Mercifully, it turns out.
‘The lighthouse,’ Nancollas says, striding from New Brighton train station, ‘is just behind that huge cinema.’ We pass a shopping mall, coffee shops and chain restaurants on one side of the road, and boarded-up pubs, an amusement arcade and empty fish and chip shops on the other. And then, there it is: the lonely old lighthouse.
Once called Rock Point – until a merchant purchased it, intending to turn it into a desirable seaside spot in the mould of its Sussex brother – there has been a light on the tip of New Brighton since the 1600s. At the time (and indeed for centuries afterwards) the area was not only dangerous but strategically vital, being the first lookout for any unwanted vessels approaching the Mersey, and as such, a vast coastal defence battery was built in the 1820s. It was designed to house a light, but the separate tower followed.
Today, a man named Doug Darroch owns the fort, operating it as a local museum filled with bits and bobs – from Beatles memorabilia to a reconstruction of the Titanic’s radio room. He also looks after the lighthouse for the Kinghams, a local family who bought it from the city for £100 after it was decommissioned in 1973. There have been various plans to turn it into holiday accommodation since, but none has come to long-term fruition. ‘I think when they bought it, they just wanted to own a lighthouse,’ Darroch, 57, shrugs. ‘Not everybody has one of those, eh?’ As we stand by the fort and squeeze into waders, he plods over to the now colossal-looking tower, ladder under an arm.
The deep foundations of Perch Rock lighthouse mean that even at low tide it is still wreathed by a small amount of water – a feature that acts as a handy security measure, along with the fact the broken-down door is 30ft above the ground. Darroch has arranged for a friend to sit on the beach in a camping chair, staring upwards for two hours to make sure his ladder isn’t stolen while we are inside, but he hasn’t been into the lighthouse to clean it in more than six months. And it would be reasonable to say it shows.
‘I just tried to get them out with a broom for you, but there’s a few pigeons up there,’ he says, giving a helping hand up the ladder. A Scouse ‘few’ must mean something different. The pigeons are there in their hundreds: every ceiling houses dozens, every floor contains carcases, every nook has a terrified chick in it, every surface wears an inch of excrement. And the stench; oh, the stench.
Perch Rock lighthouse, as we see it today, was built between 1827 and 1830. The company in charge used roughly the same construction techniques as John Smeaton’s pioneering design for the third and most famous Eddystone lighthouse, built 70 years earlier (that tower was later replaced, but Smeaton’s was rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe), meaning granite slabs from Anglesey were
‘These are extraordinary, they’re pretty much the strongest structures we’ve ever created’
interlocked using dovetail joints and clever dowels. Smeaton based his creation on nature’s formation of an oak tree, and the result was something just as sturdy. It became the blueprint, and Perch Rock is proof that it lasts.
‘These are really extraordinary, they’re pretty much the strongest structures we’ve ever created,’ says Nancollas, ‘and that design went around the world. They were born to resist. They withstood enormous elements, but being round, these inventors almost created a way that allowed wind and water to roll around.
‘The British Empire was hugely rich when these were built, but assembling thousands of tons of granite miles from the shore is one of the most profound acts of building there can be. People often look at them as just that, lighthouses, and focus on their function or attach meaning. But in the case of the offshore lighthouses just as astonishing is the sheer achievement involved in getting them up in the first place. Tools, lives and boats were lost, but they managed it.’
Pigeon squatters aside, the interior of the lighthouse is a strangely beautiful time capsule. We make our way up a narrow ladder through a trapdoor, finding the first of a series of circular rooms. There is, in very basic terms, everything you could need: a stove, a bathroom and storage. Each item of furniture is wooden and designed to fit snugly against curved walls, and each lick of paint is thick. Shutters cover the windows, floral curtains behind them.
‘It is signs of life, pure domesticity,’ Nancollas says, as we try not to touch anything. ‘This is the finest example we have of just how the interior looked when these were built. Most were updated and renovated when they were fitted with newer light sources over the decades. Not this.’
Carrying on past an ancient Bible the size of an Argos catalogue, the next ladder leads to the sleeping quarters. There were keepers inhabiting Perch Rock for almost a century, until it was deemed there was no need for a permanent engineer in 1924. Today, there are no lighthouse keepers in Britain (the last lighthouse was automated 20 years ago), but it was once a prestigious job. In the 19th century, the man in charge of Perch Rock received a salary equivalent to £60,000.
We find three tiny bunks stacked atop one another. They are more like cupboards without doors than beds, but they look safe enough. ‘Do you know why there are always three?’ Nancollas asks. ‘It’s said that at the Smalls lighthouse, which is off Wales, there were two keepers and one fell ill and died. The other was terrified people would think he killed him, since there were no witnesses, so he kept the body there for the next supply ship. The ship couldn’t reach them, so he was stuck with this body for months.’
Rising one more floor, we reach the light, housed in a largely glass room the pigeons have done their best to destroy. It is vast. Looking up at a lighthouse from the ground, one can appreciate that it must be an enormous light to create such a strong beam, yet only up close does that scale
truly become apparent. It really is an entire room for one light, and would once have been filled with candles (Smeaton’s was, anyway), then gas-powered, then eventually by electricity, always aided by reflectors and later by a Fresnel lens. The latter is a 19th-century invention capturing more oblique light from a source, meaning the beam can be seen from further away. It may have had the power of up to a million candles in the 20th century, but no more. Today, Phare du Créac’h off Brittany, one of the most powerful lights in Europe, has 500 times that.
There is no bulb in Perch Rock lighthouse these days, so we step out on to the balcony, which runs around the circumference of the tower. Looking down to the beach, our ladder watchman has curiously disappeared, but fortunately the ladder hasn’t. In the distance, meanwhile, the sight of the Three Graces – that magnificent waterside triumvirate of the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building – towers over the Mersey. It gives Nancollas a chance to ponder Western culture’s peculiar fascination with the lighthouse.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Hardly anyone will have been up close to one, let alone been inside or up to the top, but they’re everywhere in our children’s stories, literature, paintings. I think it’s that sense of it being an unknowable, unreachable light,’ he says. ‘Perhaps it’s that thing Virginia Woolf was getting at [in To the Lighthouse] – that they mean something different to everybody.’
The lighthouse is certainly an artist’s friend: a distant symbol composed of light and strength, which can at once relieve and menace, act as an omen or as a friend. Woolf was not the only one to notice that versatility as a metaphor. Edgar Allan Poe’s final work was called The Light-house. Robert Louis Stevenson’s family constructed them, inspiring his stories. JMW Turner painted Bell Rock lighthouse in a storm as early as 1819. Film directors have turned to them countless times. And don’t get F Scott Fitzgerald started on the ambiguous beauty of a distant, blinking bulb.
‘They mean so many things, and they have been used in such different ways over the years. There’s a sense of longing attached, but also of loneliness. As a child learning about lighthouse keepers, you can’t think of anybody more isolated, but then they are doing something largely altruistic,’ Nancollas says. ‘I suppose it’s a little like what Churchill said: we shape our buildings, and then they shape us.’
He looks overwhelmed with sheer symbolism, so we decide to climb back down, though not until Darroch has given us a thorough history of the area, and of his life as an amateur historian and electrician, and father-of-two, and the proudest man on the Wirral. New Brighton, he tells me when we bid farewell, ‘is hands-down the greatest place on the planet. I’m not even joking.’
When we reach the ground, Liverpool Bay looks busy as ever. All over the mouth of the Mersey there are wrecks, now enjoyed by divers, fish and maritime archaeologists. Yet there would be a lot more if it weren’t for New Brighton’s lonely granite sentry, just as the number of lives lost in our seas all around these islands would be far greater every year without the ingenious lighthouses illuminating ships’ journeys.
With us back on the promenade, Perch Rock lighthouse is empty and solitary again. Soon the tides will come and claim it once more, but it’s ready. It’s always ready.
Seashaken Houses: A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet (Particular Books, £16.99) is published on Thursday. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
‘One of the two keepers fell ill and died. The other was terrified people would think he killed him’