A steady hand at the helm
Next month will be the 25th anniversary of Scotland’s last lightkeeper leaving the lights on.
Given our location on the West Coast and many people’s reliance on our coastal waters for their livelihood and pleasure, it is an important milestone for the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB).
For more than two centuries – since 1786 – the NLB has been guiding mariners safely through Scottish and Manx waters by the light of its 208 lighthouses, situated in some of the most remote and stunning locations.
So this anniversary is no small drop in the ocean then.
As well as operating and maintaining the lighthouses, it is also responsible for the management and maintenance of all marine aids to navigation, including lights, beacons and 174 buoys. It also provides radio aids to navigation as well as making sure that other providers in its area, such as port authorities, are conforming to international standards.
While the NLB works out of a number of shore-based locations, Oban being one of them, it also operates two ships – NLV Pharos and NLV Pole Star. The ships carry out routine buoy work, deliver stores and supplies to lighthouses, and inspect navigation aids on oil and gas rigs in the Scottish sector, as well as emergency wreck response to assess and mark any wrecks which may endanger other shipping.
It is a huge responsibility. So who are the people tasked with ensuring it is all plain sailing?
Alastair Beveridge is one of the key people overseeing the board’s work, and he knows only too well how to navigate the waters in which the NLB has responsibility – both political and actual.
Currently chairperson of the Board of Commissioners, on Friday March 31 Alastair retires from a post he has held since April 2021, although he has been a Commissioner for 10 years.
Perhaps fittingly, I caught up with him aboard Fingal, once one of the NLB’s vessels working out of Oban, now a luxury floating hotel in Edinburgh.
Alastair’s connection with the Northern Lighthouse Board goes back 40 years, but his connection to the sea goes back even further.
He told me: “As a youngster growing up beside the sea I was always very keen on small boats. That’s how I started out, mucking about on small boats, and when the time came to leave school I decided the only reasonable thing I could do was go to sea. Which is what I did.
“I joined my first ship in January 1971 as a deck cadet and was at college for three or four months prior to that. I didn’t join the Northern Lighthouse Board until 1982, making the transition from deep sea, sailing all over the world for six to eight months at a time, to what we would now call a more family friendly, work-life balance. I was very lucky that just when we made the decision to have a family there was an opportunity to join NLB as navigating officer.”
When he joined, his first ship was the Pharos, based in Leith.
“I also did one or two trips with Fingal, but most of the time I was on Pharos, and later the Pole Star, Fingal’s sister ship, based in Stromness, Orkney. In those days, the early 1980s, the transition from manned to automated lighthouses was well under way, and there was also a whole range of new lighthouses being built, particularly around the north west coast of Scotland and the west side of Shetland. This coincided with the introduction of the deep water route, well out to the west of the Western Isle leading up towards the west sides of Orkney and Shetland.
“That’s when there was a lot of oil exploration taking place and the idea was to keep the very large tankers out of the Minch, because if you had one of those running aground it would be very bad news – an environmental and economical catastrophe.
“There was a big programme of work going on to build new lighthouses, along with all the routine business. This included annual storing voyages, going round the lighthouses supplying water and fuel and other stores required to keep the station working efficiently, working with the lighthouse keepers, checking and maintaining buoys, all that sort of thing.
“I was second officer and was responsible for covering the bridge watch, four hours on, eight hours off. On top of that you looked after all the charts, most of the preparation for voyages, pre-work on charts with the Master, maintained all the navigation equipment, and you were also in charge of keeping all the buoy records – the second mate was in charge of keeping the buoy book up to date. Every buoy has a record going back generations, some of these buoys have been in position for a very long time.”
Alastair continued: “Before Fingal opened as a hotel, I found one of the old buoy books. At that time I was also chairperson of the Northern Lighthouse Heritage Trust (www.nlb.org.uk/ heritage-trust), which is very closely aligned to NLB but is a standalone, self-financing trust. It looks after the history and artefacts of NLB, as well as sponsoring various charities and museums with an interest in the maritime sector and the work and history of the Northern Lighthouse Board.
“I arranged to borrow the book and one of the trustees, who is also a retired NLB master, spent time going through all the individual buoy details and found quite a lot of information that had been lost over the years. This is all now archived with the trust.”
During his time at sea with the NLB, were there any occasions that stick in his memory?
“I do recall, on Fingal, actually, I was on board with Captain Niall Macfarlane – who was a really nice man, very unassuming. He sadly passed away in August 2021 – and we were coming back down towards Oban. I think it must have been about 1984.
“It was a really bad night, north-west gale, stormy, very heavy snow and we had no option but to run down the Sound of Mull and try and get into Oban. There was very low barometric pressure, spring tides, so it was the worst combination.
“Captain Niall left me to take the ship all the way down the Sound of Mull, which was an amazing thing for him to do considering the conditions. Visibility was very poor and snow badly affects radar performance so it was quite challenging feeling our way down the Sound.
“The idea when we reached the bottom of the Sound was to get into Oban but there was absolutely no way we could berth safely in those conditions
“So the next plan was to spend the night dodging in the lee of Lismore. You find a safe space of sheltered water and just go up and down at minimum speed, but in the conditions, there was no way we could do that. It just wasn’t safe. It was too windy to control the ship at slow speed and visibility was very poor.
“So it was decided the safest
option was to anchor in the lee of Lismore until the weather became moderate and because the wind was so strong it would be best to use two anchors. This is a classic seamanship exercise and under normal conditions is relatively easy to carry out. But there was so much wind and snow we could barely see the anchor party on the foc’sle (the deck where the anchors are stowed) and they couldn’t hear the radios because of the wind noise. The wind was causing the ship to shear around quite violently but Captain Niall used this to spread the anchors out and with some imaginative hand signalling from the bridge to the foc’sle the whole exercise went very well all considering. The anchor party were very glad to get back into the shelter of the accommodation and we spent an uncomfortable night with the engines on standby waiting for the weather to moderate.
“By the next morning, the wind had dropped and we made our way towards Oban. The seafront of Oban was just wrecked. The combination of the very high tide and the waves running right into Oban Bay meant the seas had broken over the sea wall and run into the main street and shops.
“But navigating down the Sound of Mull in thick, thick snow and not being able to see a great deal is still one of the highlights of my seagoing career. It was quite a white-knuckle ride!”
Aside from the odd white-knuckle ride, Alastair says even the routine work was enjoyable.
“I guess overall, the things that have stuck in my mind of my time with NLB is the boat work. Supplying the stations all over the West Coast, North Coast, Isle of Man and, of course, Orkney and Shetland was still largely done by boat, and the boat crews were fantastic. Very skilled guys. A lot of the knowledge had been handed down from generation to generation. So the boat work was great, one of the great experiences of my life. The helicopter work was fantastic too.”
Alastair moved on from NLB in 1986 after just four years, but he has kept up his involvement with the Northern Lighthouse Board over the years. He rejoined NLB as a Commissioner in 2013 and he is currently chairperson of its Board of Commissioners.
The Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses was established by an Act of Parliament in 1786, authorising the construction of four lighthouses in Scotland – Kinnaird Head, North Ronaldsay, Scalpay and Mull of Kintyre – with the Commission responsible for their operation.
At the time the Commissioners were made up of the law agents of the Crown, Sheriffs of coastal counties, and the Lord Provosts and Provosts of Scottish cities and towns that had a commercial interest.
Alastair told me: “That worked pretty well for a long
time but there was a realisation about 20 to 25 years ago that first of all the Sheriff Principals were all very, very busy, there was less of them and they had more to do, and there was a skills gap in what was becoming recognised as modern governance.
“The Department for Transport approved our proposal to add a further six co-opted commissioners, and they bring a different level of skillset to the board. There are three master mariners for example, of which I am one, and others who have government, business and financial backgrounds
“Below us sit committees who oversee all aspects of the organisation. A recent addition to our corporate structure is the environmental working group, which is very important as we’re very committed to reducing our environmental footprint in accordance with Government requirements. We also have a people’s committee overseeing our responsibilities on pay and conditions, work life balance, gender balance and now hybrid working.”
With the world changing so fast these days, what does the future hold for the NLB?
Alastair said: “The future is very interesting and challenging. The obvious question is why we still have fixed base navigation aids and the simple answer is the shipping industry, who pay for our services, want us there.
“But there’s a new dimension to this and that is as a society we are increasingly reliant on global satellite navigation systems for all sorts of activities, other than navigation. That has been the case in shipping for quite some time, but now it includes things like car navigation systems, satellite communications, mobile phone networks and even aircraft to some extent. Your mobile phone, for example, won’t work without a signal from a global navigation system. The banking sector would collapse without it. Many aspects of our lives now rely on some form of global satellite navigation system and the reality is that these systems are not secure.
“They can be deactivated or spoofed by people who wish to do so, and obviously the situation in Ukraine and the Black Sea has brought this to a very big head.
“There are all sorts of things going on that have attracted a lot of interest in providing some form of terrestrial navigation system but, of course, at present there are no realistic alternatives, apart from what we do. Undoubtedly change is coming. We’re very proactive in that – a range of alternatives are being looked at. Some could happen quite quickly, others will take longer. And this adds to our responsibility to make sure we keep on doing what we do.”
And what about the people who will carry out the work of the NLB in the future, who have been so critical to the Northern Lighthouse Board down the years?
Alastair continued: “The NLB has always been a slightly unique organisation, right back to the days of the Stevensons, the family of engineers who were responsible for creating these wonders of engineering that have withstood the test of time. They were terrific engineers and project managers, and had a very strong social conscience. When you think back 200 to 250 years, the working conditions for most people were dramatically different to what they are now. If you were recruited as a lighthouse keeper in those days, pay wasn’t great, but what they did do was provide a social structure for those people.
“So for example, if someone was posted to the Isle of May, depending on the circumstances, the keeper would be provided with accommodation on the station, or if they were on a rock station, accommodation in a nearby town. They’d be given uniforms, their children would be provided with schooling, they would get coal for their fires, and if necessary they would be given a cow or a sheep, that sort of thing, because at many of the places they were stationed, they had to be self-sufficient.
“I was out at Barra Head Lighthouse recently, and the footprint of our station is 32 acres. That supported three families and it even has a graveyard!
“So the Stevensons had a strong social ethos and realised that if you didn’t treat people properly then you wouldn’t keep them, especially when you were putting them into a harsh environment. And that ethos remains to this day. It’s very strong within the organisation. It’s changed, it’s developed, and it’s incorporated all the modern facets of social responsibility, but that’s still how we try to treat our people.
“Our team are offered a package that includes a decent work-life balance with flexible working for office-based staff and a four week on four week off rota for the ships’ crew. We have a family friendly policy, great pension scheme, and we try and support our staff as best as we possibly can. Working for the Northern Lighthouse Board is certainly a unique and worthwhile job.
“We would love to encourage more women into technical, engineering and seafarer roles which traditionally have always attracted more male applicants. But we hope our outreach work with community groups and schools will highlight opportunities available and see more women taking up roles within the
STEM and maritime sector. We are really proud of our Deck Rating and Engineering apprenticeship scheme which launched in 2017. By the end of their training, the young people have the combination of specialist skills and knowledge that are bespoke to NLB’s requirements. This includes deck work, buoy maintenance, helicopter operations and lighthouse storing operations. So far we have been able to offer all our qualified apprentices full-time jobs.
“I think working for the NLB is a cultural thing, an awareness of the environment along coastal routes. A lot of young people joined because, like me, that’s what they did, they mucked about on boats. We recently took on an apprentice whose father worked on the boats. There are a number of people who joined because their parent or grandparent worked for the NLB at some stage. So there is a generational thing.”
Alastair has been one of the many steady hands steering the NLB over the years, often through uncharted waters. As he looks to his retirement from the Board on March 31, I asked what he will most miss most. Alastair says: “I’m going to miss the people and being so closely involved in something which is so important for the safety of the maritime community around the coasts of Scotland and the Isle of Man.”