The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [33]
Winstanley’s design for a light showed all the idiosyncrasy of his previous works. It was built from a combination of iron, wood and brick, stood eighty feet high, and strongly resembled one of W. Heath Robinson’s more elaborate contraptions. Above the octagonal brick base, there was an elegant iron balcony, a domed cupola and a glazed lantern, which was to hold ‘sixty candles at a time besides a great hanging lamp’. On top of the lantern, Winstanley placed a large and subtly wrought iron weather vane. Even by the standards of the day, it looked extraordinary. On 14 November 1698, the lantern was lit for the first time, Winstanley noting modestly that ‘it is finished, and it will stand forever as one of the world’s most artistic pieces of work.’ Despite this, when Winstanley returned the following spring he discovered that the tower had been damaged by gales. The original mortaring had not set properly, and the resident keepers said they had felt the tower shake beneath them in bad weather. Winstanley decided that the lighthouse needed reinforcement, and began building a new stone casing around the old tower. He also added iron bands around the girth of the base, increased the height to 120 feet, and doubled the ornamentation. The new Eddystone now boasted a new and enlarged gallery, two cranes, several Latin inscriptions, a State Room (‘very well carved and painted’) and six large candlesticks ‘for ornament’ on the exterior. Inside there was ‘a very fine bedchamber with a chimney and closet, the room being richly gilded and painted and the outside shutters very strongly barred’.
Critics of the lighthouse pointed out that it looked like something from a Chinese mausoleum. Winstanley retorted that he was confident enough of his light to believe it would withstand ‘the greatest storm that ever was’. He should not have tempted fate. During the Great Storm of 26 November 1703, over 17,000 mature trees were felled, buildings were stripped to skeletons, and the Queen was forced to take refuge in a cellar at St James’s Palace. Winstanley had set out from Plymouth on an inspection tour of the light and was on the Eddystone when the storm began. According to observers, the light was visible until midnight, when the mountainous seas and spray obscured it from view. The next morning, the only thing that remained of the tower were the twelve iron foundation bars. Winstanley himself had drowned.
Winstanley’s successors were more pragmatic. John Rudyerd, who came forward in 1706, was a silk merchant who, like Winstanley, had no prior engineering experience. The design he proposed was for a wooden tower, which, he reasoned, would be flexible enough to withstand the force of the waves. His plans show a conical structure like the base of a windmill on which was perched a simple lantern and an umbrella-like cupola. Unlike Winstanley, Rudyerd concentrated hard on anchoring the tower to the rock, dug deep into the gneiss to lay iron support pillars, and weighed down the whole structure with a rubble ballast. The inner walls of the tower were built with alternate layers of granite and timber, and the outer were sheathed with wooden planks. It was a simpler, more practical design that Winstanley’s, and survived for forty-six years despite the constant underminings of woodworm. Unfortunately, it was also flammable. In December 1755, Henry Hall, the oldest keeper on the light, discovered the lantern room on fire. By the time he had roused the other two keepers, the fire had spread downwards through the tower, and the men were forced to scramble out to the slippery shelter of the rock. Eight hours later, they were rescued by a local boatman who had seen the light blazing from the shore. All that was left of the tower was the stump of the base and the metal rods that Rudyerd had used as foundations. Hall, meanwhile, complained urgently that his insides were burning, though his two companions ignored him, believing that the shock of the fire had affected his mind. Twelve days later he died. The postmortem examination discovered a lump