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I wiped my computer screen thinking it was a speck of dust. Zooming in on the map of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides the speck eventually took the shape of St Kilda, one of a remote group of islands some 40 miles west in the North Atlantic, whose former inhabitants found it similarly baffling to make contact with the outside world.
A solution to their isolation came unexpectedly from an East Lothian journalist, John Sands, dropped off by a gunboat in June 1876 to study island life, who was stranded for eight months with locals with whom in winter he helped rescue sailors from the troubled Austrian sailing ship, Peti Dubrovacki.
As crew members, pulled to safety on ropes thrown to them, were being looked after, Sands wondered how they could call for help; 13 days later he invented a sailing device using a life-buoy washed up from the ship. On 30 January, he attached it to a small sail and bottle with a message and launched it into the sea “in the hope,” wrote one contemporary writer, “of its reaching some civilised portion of the kingdom.”
This contraption drifted in the Gulf Stream over 200 miles to Birsay, Orkney, where someone forwarded it to a Lloyd’s agent in Stromness, arriving, astonishingly, on 8 February. The wreck survivors woke up on 22 February to the sight of HMS Jackal moored in the bay, the ‘St Kilda mail boat’ – thus nicknamed after this extraordinary feat – soon becoming the locally accepted method of posting mail.
In 1906, The Sketch wrote that during winter months when boats didn’t call at St Kilda letters were still placed “in a waterproof, buoyant case and cast upon the waters. Usually this remarkable mail-packet is picked up on the coast of Norway, to be forwarded to the Foreign Office. Four packages out of six reach their destination.”
The end of ‘St Kilda mail boats’ and the dwindling community of fishermen, sheep farmers and turf cutters, for whom they’d provided a vital link, came in 1930 when the last 36 were evacuated to the mainland, that bittersweet moment captured by The Times on 29 August: “The island postmaster, Mr Neil Ferguson, was engaged all day in trans-shipping the community’s sheep [and was helped by visiting writer] Alasdair MacGregor who stamped for the last time several hundred cards and letters addressed to every part of the world. The post office business did not finish until 2am when he stamped a parcel that a native had almost left behind on the island.”
In an experiment 30 years before, Ferguson wrote three letters to Richard Kearton (later writing With Nature and a Camera) and sent them in mail boats to see if they’d reach him. “I am in good health,” one began, “though some of the friends is very sick with a bad cold they got.” The sealed can was duly picked up a week later by a shepherd in a bay at North Uist, Outer Hebrides and forwarded on. “Soaked with sea water,” wrote Kearton, “they still retained a delightful aroma of peat smoke when they reached my hands, reminding me forcibly of my stay on the island.”
Far-flung places around Britain and Ireland have had their own history of staying in touch with the world they were cut off from, and many posties devised ingenious ways of breaching gaps on their routes. By the River Findhorn, NE Scotland postmen once had to climb a ladder with their mailbag and in a wooden box attached to a makeshift flying fox fling themselves across it. This ‘Bucket Bridge,’ still in use in 1960, according to the Postal Museum & Archive, was used by “four generations of the same family … The last, postwoman Jane Niven, carried gloves for hauling herself and her mail bag over the river.”
‘Noddies,’ to locals in the Beal area of Northumberland, were horse-drawn traps that carried mail across the water from the mainland to Holy Island. The August 1938 Post Office Magazine showed a photograph, captioned: “Guided only by the poles that mark a sandy causeway, the unusually high wheels allowed the vehicle to drive in to the waves.”
Ironically, small islands can be less off the beaten track than city slickers imagine. The Telegraph, in September 2009, quoted a Guardian survey finding that “the 67 inhabitants [now 90-100] of a remote Scottish island [Eigg] are getting a better postal delivery service than...people living in London.” And their mail arrives by ferry! One Inner Hebridean postie told me their service is still pretty good, letters sent within Britain typically arriving in a mere two days.
Naturally, some boats and islands are smaller than others. Mail for the 670-acre (271Ha) Ramsey Island, now an RSPB reserve, off the coast of St. David’s Peninsula in Pembrokeshire, Wales is brought to a local farmhouse by a mainland farmer in a 17 ft (5.2m) aluminium boat. “It’s just over a mile and takes me ten minutes,” Derek Rees told me in March, adding that he sometimes takes sheep across to graze on the island along with mail and islanders’ groceries: “I think some crisps might have been eaten on one trip.”
He explained that his son was a diver who builds aluminium boats and checks mooring chains. Asked of any problems he’d experienced with these maritime deliveries, Derek bravely unburdened himself. “Last September I inadvertently left three letters in my son’s dive bag and forgot all about them. A few days ago he says, ‘Is this yours?’ So I posted them. A few days later I felt guilty and told the sender. What I didn’t realise was that in that six months the sender’s banking arrangements had been changed by phone, so this letter arriving confused everything! I was slightly embarrassed; the warden thought it was funny.”
Like small islands, lighthouses always received the full force of storms. Some early flimsier designs would inspire the ‘Beacon Air Mail Stamp’ in America which, Tim Harrison, Editor of Lighthouse Digest, told me “features a U.S. Lighthouse Services, Airways Division tower that was used to light the way for the early mail pilots…On August 1, 1928, the new lower five cent air mail postage stamp was issued to encourage more people to send mail via air mail.”
Communications were as vital for lighthouses as they were for islanders. By 1998 the hundreds of lighthouses around Britain and Ireland had become automated; before then they were idyllic and occasionally precarious homes for lightkeepers and their families. One 21-year-old newlywed farewelled husband Cyril after their honeymoon when he left in September 1925 to become assistant keeper on South Bishop Island, a few miles out past Ramsey Island, a bare rock with lighthouse and adjoining house.
Aurelie Trezise’s memories appear on the Trinity House website: “I had to visit the wives … to collect letters and parcels for their husbands [three men usually manned lighthouses, often one on duty while the other two slept] on the rock.” Stuck in a depot in Neyland, Pembrokeshire she could only look out to sea and wait. She expected a two-month wait, but the winter was so rough Aurelie saw Cyril for 17 days in five months.
Aurelie was excited to hear that Cyril was being transferred to a land lighthouse (Flatholm), until she discovered it was an island in the Bristol Channel. At least they’d be together. The Cardiff boatman visited weekly, but after dropping them off on 16 November Christmas passed with no sign of him. With food running out, on the night of 22 January the trapped families nearly sent an SOS.
In the morning Aurelie heard a keeper shout, and they saw something struggling through the waves towards them: “You can imagine how it did our eyes good to see all the provisions, parcels and mail.” While this small community had plenty of fun, Aurelie recalls the isolation. “Sometimes I would look across the channel to the mainland rather pensively watching the trains and cars travelling to and fro along the coastline.”
Fetching supplies and mail for mainland lighthouses could also involve quite a trek. Aurelie was 17 at Hartland Point Lighthouse in North Devon, where she walked to a village butcher five miles away to catch the bus 13 miles to Bideford until her parents bought her a bicycle. Taught to ride by (guess who?), she rode with Cyril and got drenched in a storm: “the wind in our faces and blowing with such force,” wrote Aurelie, “when we got home, we were utterly exhausted and to make things worse some of the small parcels were missing … we braved the elements again … and found [them] blown to the top of the road.”
Beyond South Bishop Island, across St George’s Channel to the south-east of Ireland, stands the world’s oldest operational lighthouse at Hook Head, County Wexford. With 13th century monks its first custodians, a poignant ‘Gathering’ was held there last September when 100 former lighthouse keepers from around the world came with stories from this dashing era, joining three ex-Hook keepers – co-organiser Martin Murphy, Nicholas Tweedy and his brother ‘Tux,’ Hook’s present attendant.
“It was quite lonely,” the Irish Examiner reported Murphy as saying. “You had to be fairly easy-going…the job made people a bit eccentric because you spent a lot of time on your own…You would have to have hobbies…to keep their sanity. People became very good artists, rug-makers… Most of us played chess…between two lighthouses.” Murphy misses the sounds of the sea and during a storm being inside “a very, very well-built tower.”
It is hard to contemplate Scottish lighthouses without imagining Dad’s Army’s Scotsman, Private Fraser, his eyes rolling like the surf, starting a story, “It was a wild and lonely night!” He’d have told the (true) one of The Flannan Isles Lighthouse, 20 miles west of the Outer Hebrides (far north-east of St Kilda) from which three keepers mysteriously disappeared without a trace in December 1900. The lighthouse was found spotless, an upturned chair one of few clues of disturbance, and it’s generally assumed the men had been checking or tying down equipment in a gale when an unnoticed wave washed them away. “We had an old box halfway up the railway for holding landing mooring ropes and tackle, and it has gone,” wrote relief keeper J. Moore in a letter.
It could happen at any rock station. At this same landing in 1911 a mail bag was swept away during a changeover of keepers. “According to the Master of the Pole Star, the men were almost swept away with all the baggage when ‘unexpectedly overwhelmed’ by the sea,” writes the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses. “In a rebuke from the Secretary to the Northern Lighthouse Board, “the mail bag should be kept in a place of undoubted safety until taken charge of by the Keeper coming ashore” – easy to say from a desk.
Hazards were even more acute when they built lighthouses, especially rock stations and “tower lighthouses.” Legendary Scottish lighthouse designer, Robert Stevenson, was on a reef with a 32-man construction party in 1807 when work began on the Bell Rock Lighthouse – its base submerged at high tide and proclaimed by its website as “the oldest sea-washed tower in existence” – 11 miles off the east coast of Scotland. After transferring rocks from a boat no one noticed the Smeaton break free from its mooring and drift three miles away. They had two 8-man boats and Stevenson knew they couldn’t retrieve the Smeaton before the tide came in. They were saved by the postie. Reported the Scots Magazine: “It was the timely… arrival of James Spink, the Bell Rock pilot with some letters from Arbroath.”
Warning flags were used on rock lighthouses when pilot boats came with supplies and mail. They’d anchor some distance away and lower a rowing boat to come ashore. A white flag with black cross signalled high tide and that a landing was safe. A yellow flag (low tide or bad weather) meant it wasn’t safe to cross.
If postal messages had to be “personally dealt with by the Principal Keeper, who at the time was doing his stint on the lighthouse,” explained Frank Pelly, Consultant Curator & Archivist for the Commissioners of Irish Lights, “communication … would have been carried out by semaphore or morse lamps”, each hand-held semaphore flag position corresponding to certain letters or numbers. The Lighthouse Signal Code Book lists dozens of possible messages, including ‘2QZ’ which meant “Bring letters, telegrams or newspapers to landing.”
Lighthouses didn’t have to be out in the sea to be tricky to deliver to. The most awe-inspiring route a postman ever took was the 403 steps down to the South Stack Lighthouse (and back), undertaken by Mr. R.G. Rees (shown in a 1935 Associated Press photograph) on Holyhead Mountain in Anglesey, NW Wales, which he did six days a week for six years. When asked about these 1½ million steps he’d climbed Mr. Rees said he could see nothing noteworthy about it.
While manning a lighthouse must to some have seemed a passive existence it was invariably far from that. One of Rees’s successors would have met Gordon Medlicott, author of An Illuminating Experience, who at 68 in 2009, talked to The Independent about his 32 years as a keeper and how one day he was at the South Stack Lighthouse when two kids ran down for help after their climbing instructor had fallen down a cliff. “I climbed down the 80ft drop and held on to him for 45 minutes while we waited for the rescue team,” said Gordon. “By the time they came we were up to our chests in water. The helicopter pulled us up one at a time. There is not much you can say to calm a man in that situation, you just try and quiet his screams.”
Helipads and automation has replaced all this. The absence of these men and their families may mean that occasional complexity of getting supplies and mail to them on isolated rocks is a thing of the past. But with them will go knowledge of the common touch and resourcefulness of keepers like Gerald Butler, author of The Lightkeeper: A Memoir.
Gerald’s grandfather worked out how to get messages even faster than the post. “When he joined the lightship,” he told me, “he would take with him homing pigeons and send them home to my father in Wexford town with notes attached. When my twin brother and I were going to school we used to take homing pigeons and release them … with notes for my father at the Galley Head Lighthouse in West Cork.” But when Gerald was a lightkeeper: “we were relieved by helicopter and the mail was usually delivered on time albeit a fortnight late!”
Maybe lighthouse keepers shouldn’t go too far away, just in case someone decides it would be better all round if they all came back.
This story appeared in the
Sep/Oct 2014 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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