The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [51]
Before the lantern could be fitted and the light displayed, the weather flung one final challenge at the Bell Rock. A storm blew up and lasted for four days, pounding the reef and making the building tremble. The waves reached well over the top of the tower (now 110 feet high) and cascaded down through the roofless apartments, shifting tools and terrifying the remaining workmen. Several mortar tubs and the smith’s anvil were flung from the barracks down onto the rock, while the remaining men in the barracks huddled in corners as the rain seethed in on them. Once the storm abated, Robert, anxious to avoid a repeat in future, dismantled the bridge between the barracks and the tower and hastily completed the fitting of the light room. Glass, stone and water were an uneasy mixture, and Robert spent much of the next two months in a state of near panic waiting for the new lantern glass to be fitted up and ready. In this, as in many other aspects of the works, Robert designed according to circumstance. He had to find a new kind of glass, built to withstand heavy seas and sizeable enough to be seen from a distance. In front of the rotating reflectors, Robert intended to place panes of red glass which, when turned, would give the Bell Rock an alternately red and white beam. Up until then, no red glass of the right size yet existed. Robert, as usual, made it exist.
The final task was to appoint light-keepers. Robert chose two familiar hands: John Reid, who had worked on the floating light, and according to Robert’s approving verdict, was ‘a person possessed of the strictest notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on board of a man-of-war’; and Peter Fortune, appointed as assistant keeper, who ‘had one of the most happy and contented dispositions imaginable’. Soon after, Robert added a third keeper, since, as he explained to the Commissioners,
Two keepers are being considered for each of the other lighthouses, but on such a station as the Bell Rock there cannot be fewer than four keepers – three always in the house and one ashore at liberty – the third keeper is not so necessary on the actual duty to be performed but in the case of sickness or death – as happened at the Eddystone when there were only two keepers there. One died and the other, for fear of being suspected for murder, kept the corpse of his companion for about four weeks. When the state of the weather permitted the attending boat to go off to the lighthouse, the poor man was found sitting upon the Rock. The body of the deceased was in such a state of putrefaction that it was long before the effect of it left the apartment of the lighthouse.
The abandoned keeper had apparently maintained the light, the records and the watches perfectly, but when he was eventually brought off the rock, he was found to have gone completely insane. Until the 1990s, when all the lighthouses were automated by the Northern Lighthouse Board, each lighthouse therefore had three keepers ‘to prevent suspicion of murder’.
The first Bell Rock keepers were less bothered by homicide than bad weather. The two lasted the winter alone on the rock, more in waiting than in usefulness,