The Loneliness of the Lighthouse Keeper

Pendeen Watch Lighthouse, West Cornwall

If we think we are feeling lonely or isolated during the lockdown, why not try remembering the lot of the lighthouse keepers… That really was loneliness and isolation - especially if you were stuck on one of the many off-shore lights for months on end…

Did the tall cylindrical marvels of Victorian engineering really shake and shudder when mountainous waves hit them? Was it a dangerous job? Was it boring? Were the keepers an odd bunch, as is sometimes suggested by modern myth?

The answers to these and other questions are stranger and more fascinating than I could ever have imaged. I heard tales of waves smashing through windows more than 100 feet above the waves. I learned of the romance between husband and wife which saw them semaphoring one another across the maelstrom. I even got to know about kite-fishing – an exotic sport I’d never heard of before…

To find out about the life and times of the West Country’s lighthouse keepers I once travelled nearly as west as you can get in England – to the village of Pendeen in West Penwith, which of course, has its very own light. 

The Pendeen Watch as its sometimes called was the last posting of an extraordinary man with an extraordinary name. Handel Bluer is named after the composer – all the male members of his clan get the same musical treatment – but Handel is far more used to seeing a symphony of the ocean waves than he is hearing the orchestration of musicians. 

The first thing to say about Handel was that he had a sense of humour. He joked and laughed constantly regardless of the fact that he sometimes struggles to walk when I met him. 

“It’s the nerve-endings in my legs,” he told me. “At first they thought I’d got Lyme’s Disease because.  But it’s not that – for a long time now I’ve been wondering if it’s the result of mercury poisoning.”

Lighthouse keepers were no strangers to mercury, as Handel explained: “The waves do run up the side of the lighthouse and the mercury trough will be vibrated so much that the mercury will splash out. So then you have to go up there with a dustpan and brush cleaning up the mercury - you put it in a jar and then clean it. 

“You put it in a shammy leather, hold it over a container, then squeeze the leather hard as you can - and the mercury will go through the pores of the leather, but the dirt will stay behind.”

This not exactly healthy procedure was only necessary out on the big sea-borne lighthouses such as the Bishop Rock west of Scilly and the Longships, off Land’s End. They are what Handel calls “proper” lighthouses as opposed to the “convalescent homes” attached to large lumps of land. 

Handel has served in all types. After we’d removed ourselves from windy Pendeen Watch the mile or so to the snug bungalow he shares with his wife Joan, he told me something of his long career at Trinity House.

“I was an engineer working in foundries. Things got a bit tight in the early Fifties - newly married, couple of kiddies - talk about recession… I had to have a job which was long lasting and I saw the advert for a lighthouse keeper.  So I went for an interview and passed the examination. ‘Have you got two of everything?’ they asked. ‘Yes’. ‘Well then you can join’.” 

“Then it was a case of going round different lighthouses learning the ropes as you went. Every lighthouse is different - you would think it would be nice if every lighthouse had the same kind of diesel engine and generator, but they don’t. 

“Trinity House didn’t work like that. So you had to go around different lighthouses in order to learn all the different bits and pieces - which was fun. The only problem was in 1953-1956 you could be earning about £20-£25 a week - my wages suddenly went down to about £7.10 shillings – and I had to provide my own food whilst I was out there, but have enough food ashore to keep the wife and kiddies.

“That was a bit of a struggle, but we carried on,” shrugs Handel, who struck me as the kind of man who’d never be particularly fazed by anything. “Eventually I got posted to the Longships at Land’s End where there were cottages just ashore. 

Longships Light, off Land’s End

“Lovely. Cottages facing due west so whenever the wind blew you knew about it - you didn’t have the windows open for too long. Around the door it was all painted white - a big white band - that was for the keepers to stand in with their black flags.”

You have to picture this to even begin to imagine something so bizarre. Back in the days to which Handel refers there wasn’t much in the way of radio and certainly no mobile phones – so the keepers out on the Longships would communicate with their loved ones by semaphore. Joan Handel would stand in her cottage window doing the same. 

“You’d be surprised how fast you can go,” grinned Handel. “There are a lot of abbreviations - if I asked a question I might get the letter ‘y’ for yes and so on. There was one occasion when I upset the lady - I don’t know how I did it - but she just gave the V sign with the flags and shut the window.

“In places like that you’ll do about two months out and one month on shore - if you’re lucky. When I say ‘if your lucky’ - one year on the Longships I only saw the wife for 90 days. That was because - if the weather’s against you - you can’t get off. 

“You've not got to let things worry you too much. I'm laid back - sometimes too laid back,” Handel muttered under his beard. “If it’s going to happen – it’s going to happen. 

“There were always three lighthouse keepers locked up together,” replied Handel when I asked him about personnel numbers. He then told me the rather macabre reason why: “In the earlier days on smaller lighthouses there’d be just two – but there was this occasion when there were two blokes who came from the same village. They were known to always be arguing - and fate had it one day that one of the keepers died.

“The other bloke can’t get rid of the body, otherwise people would say he killed him - so he lashed him to the rails outside the lantern and had him there for about six weeks before somebody noticed the arm wasn’t waving to the boats. It was a dead body flapping about. Eventually they got the man off - who was in a heck of a state and from then onwards it’s always been three keepers on a lighthouse.”

It sounded like a silly kind of question, but I asked Handel about the basic work of a lighthouse keeper.

“The light is there to guide mariners - it’s never there to say: ‘Keep away’.  So our job was to maintain that light as a signal at its full brilliancy - at the correct characteristics - all night long, every night, whatever. 

Hartland Light, North Devon

“We used to work in turns,” said Handel, explaining the basic four hour system of watches. “If you had the morning watch, you were also the cook for the day. You had all morning to do it. The other two were going about doing the polishing, dusting and cleaning and filling up the oil tanks. 

“In the early days there was a clockwork mechanism,” Handel went on. “You had to wind it up every half hour - the Bishop Rock every hour - and there were a very heavy series of weights like a grandfather clock, except the chain went down the length of the tower. 

“That was sometimes useful, because if you had a difference on opinion with one of your colleagues and he just went to bed - this chain tube went down through the bedroom and you could wind up the weights, shall we say noisily.”

Bishop Rock, The Isles of Scilly - one of the loneliest of them all

I asked him about differences of opinion in such an enclosed space… 

“If you weren’t in charge, then you had to put up with what you got. When I became a principal keeper, then I could quite easily recommend that a person went somewhere else. But, yes, you had to learn you get on with each other. 

“Why we have politicians, I don’t know,” mused Handel. “Because when I was on a lighthouse we’d sort out the world in an afternoon.”

Perhaps the best way to any man’s heart is through his belly: “You soon learned how to cook,” smiled Handel. “The first thing you were asked on a lighthouse was: 'How’s your gravy?' It was basically meat and two veg all the year round. We used to look happily in the lady’s magazines for the cookery tips.”

The only real variation to the diet was fish – were lighthouse keepers keen on fishing?

“Lots of fishing and kite-fishing,” he replied. “You would make a rather large kite about the size of a tabletop using cod-line - then you would make a line of feathers for the tailings. Then you would chuck it off the gallery and it would slowly start to come down. But, once the feathers hit the water, it (the kite) became buoyant. 

“So then you could fly it in an ark of about 100 to 150 yards from the tower. Yonks and yonks ago on the Eddystone we came in with a 20 pound pollock. Well, after that we persuaded a visiting mechanic if he could make us a little hand-driven winch on the gallery rail because a pollack 160 feet out the water gets a little hard on the fingers. 

“We used to have what we call a "rubbie-dubbie" bag - a net with rotten fish in it - and we would dangle it over the side. On the ebb the effluvia, shall we say, went along the water line and the fish were attracted to it. So we would fish in that line and you’d be surprised how many fish we caught - mackerel everyday - you could get pollack no problem.

“We would decide we wanted a particular fish for supper - we would have some black bream - so we were chucking fish back until we had half a dozen black bream. We didn’t go hungry.”

And what about the most obvious question of all: storms? Surely, I asked, being somewhere like Bishop Rock must have been terrifying in a maelstrom?

“It’s frightening,” said Handel. “But you are reassured on the Bishop because it is two lighthouses in one really. The early lighthouse which was built in the 1700s - that one was a bit too low and a bit too narrow. So what they did was they encased that in the present lighthouse so the bottom two thirds of the Bishop Rock is actually two lighthouses thick. 

“The waves do run up the side of the lighthouse,” Handel went on. “If you really want bad weather, go to the Longships because that does disappear regularly. 

“Whenever a storm was due somebody had to go up on the roof and turn the valves round so any saltwater landing on the roof would be directed over the side and not into the (fresh) water tank. 

“On the Longships the fog signal was an explosive device which meant you had to 4oz chargers of gun cotton on a jib outside the lantern. Now the jib sometimes would get a bit stiff in operation - this meant going up a ladder, climbing up the roof and then going a quarter the way round the roof. This could be in the middle of the night in a blizzard - and often was. You weren’t sounding for fog - you were sounding for snow.”

Longships from the air

It sounded like an extraordinary existence – both frightening and interesting. I asked Handel to tell me about life after lighthouse keeping…

“I retired at 65 as soon as the age came up. I said: ‘Thank you very much - now can I go?’ I asked if I could have a little bungalow. Fed up with steps you see. Not too big - and not too far from a pub - and here we are about 100 yards from the pub.”

Did he miss being on a lighthouse?

“I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering if the light has gone out,” sighed Handel. “That would be a major thing - if the light went out… You wake up thinking - heck I’m home in bed. No, after 13 years in retirement I don’t miss it.  I’ve got so many other things here I can do.”