The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [125]
Arguments were usually a consequence of boredom, since much of the keepers’ existence was spent cramped up with a colleague idly waiting for the next watch. Locked up together, many keepers developed mortal grudges against each other. At one English light, the assistant keeper’s wife started a lengthy and bitter fight with the principal’s wife because one had a doorstep to her cottage and the other didn’t. Little Ross light, which guards the entrance to the Solway Firth, became infamous for the murder in 1960 of an occasional keeper by the assistant keeper. But when something serious did happen, the keepers would usually drop their quarrels and respond. On particularly dangerous stretches of sea, the keepers had to keep a regular watch for wrecks and groundings. Ships entering the Pentland Firth or the Strait of Corrievreckan could easily be caught by the current and spun out on top of a nearby rock. Yet there was little the keepers could do to stop such accidents happening. The NLB could have lit the coast like Christmas and still not been able to prevent the errors of a novice captain or a neglectful crew. Before the widespread use of radio, the keepers’ only method of averting disaster was to signal to boats in trouble with flags or fire off warning flares.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of their job was that they were never specifically asked to save lives. The lights and their keepers were there as warnings, but those keepers were theoretically expected to do no more than to watch from the lantern windows as a ship ran aground on the rocks below. The original law of 1786 authorising the construction of the first four lights in Scotland never explicitly cited the lights as life-saving devices. The Act proposed only to build necessary beacons for ‘the Security of Navigation and the Fisheries’. A later Act appointing the Commissioners allowed them to do whatever ‘they shall think necessary or convenient for making, erecting, preserving and improving the said Light-houses and Works’. Even the NLB’s motto is unspecific, In Salutem Omnium, ‘for the safety of all’. It is a curious omission. The British Coastguard by contrast has as its primary aim ‘to minimise loss of life amongst seafarers and coastal users’, the RNLI states that it ‘exists to save lives at sea’, and even Trinity House in theory still adheres to its original poetic licence to ‘succour from the dangers of the sea all who are beset upon the coasts of England, to feed them when ahungered and athirst, to bind up their wounds and to build and light proper beacons for the guidance of mariners’.
The Scots Commissioners, as fixedly prudent then as now, set themselves less high-flown goals. As they considered it, the point was to build the lights, fuel their burning, keep the keepers and collect the money, not to squander time and worry on the purpose of those lights. The existence of their sea-towers saved lives, albeit passively, and the Commissioners were never required to do more than build and maintain those towers in the ways they saw fit. In fact, the keepers were actively discouraged from helping victims of shipwreck, since to do so would have meant leaving the light and therefore neglecting their duties. Even now, sporadic acts of courage or selflessness by individual keepers – helping ships avoid trouble, personally warning of dangers, and occasionally risking their own lives to save sailors in distress – run contrary to the letter of the NLB’s rules. The list of keepers’ duties, which by 1850 ran to thirty-seven separate rulings, never included instructions on what to do in the event of shipwreck