CHOPPY CHOPPER TALES

The short answer to David Blythe’s letter in Autumn 2019 regarding my article about English lighthouses (Summer 2019) is I don’t know whether his risky flight to rescue an injured workman from Longships lighthouse (at Land’s End) was the first instance of a helicopter being used to rescue someone in an “emergency” from a lighthouse at night.

Despite quite a bit of research on the internet a definitive answer eludes me! However, it sounds a plausible claim – because it happened at night.

I do know that Trinity House started using helicopters to relieve keepers and deliver stores at their remotest lighthouses from 1969 onwards, but these only happened during daylight hours and were done by a commercial helicopter operator.

I’ve no doubt that some of these flights would be what are termed “medevac” (medical evacuations) when a keeper was taken ill and required hospital treatment, but again only during daylight hours, I would imagine. Not all commercial helicopters in those days had the appropriate equipment for night flying.

I also know that they were used as early as 1948 to deliver food and supplies to lighthouses when long periods of bad weather had prevented the relief of remote lighthouse keepers by boat. Above, left, is a 1948 image of a Christmas hamper being delivered to Eddystone lighthouse.

Look how desperate the keepers are to ensure the package doesn’t end up in the sea, with two of them clinging to the lantern roof in an attempt to catch the turkey being lowered from a helicopter!

By coincidence, I also have an image of the same type of helicopter used by David Blythe hovering over the same lighthouse that he rescued the injured man from (Longships), but during a daylight flight to deliver what is probably supplies for keepers whose reliefs had been delayed. There would be no chance of a boat relief in seas like those in this image!

Christopher Nicholson, Somerset