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At the time I was appointed lighthouse keeper at Smalls, around 1960, there had been quite an upheaval, and included the involvement of a fellow called Bob Humphreys, who was appointed as P.K. to the Smalls, wrote Harold Taylor.
He had a nasty injury whilst there. It came about in the following fashion. For want of space they had constructed coal bunkers in the rocks that were washed by the sea at high water. These bunkers were covered by very heavy bronze lids which were quite heavy for one man to handle.
Not only that, they were not counter balanced and when in the upright position could quite easily be knocked forward by a fresh breeze. By virtue of this it always needed two to get coal out and would be safer with three. One to hold the lid, one to dig the coal and pass up the full buckets and another to take out the bucket.
I do not know exactly what happened on the day in question, the upshot of it was that the lid fell down and crushed Bobby's big toe. Altogether he was off for about 18 months. He was fortunate on the day it occurred, for his senior hand was Bill Roddy, a Northern Irelander, who had been in the Ambulance service I believe.
The weather was also favourable and they had managed to get him ashore for treatment. The reason I mention this episode is because of the situation, I was sent down to the station for the first month of one of my 'turn off'. According to the dates on my photo's this was 1959, and I guess either July or August.
I went as K.I.C. Bill was of course ashore, but also I think he was on transfer to the Hanois.
I went off with Pat Nice, a pleasant enough Londoner, who had had a spot of bother. The circumstances as I understand them was, earlier in the year when a fishing trawler went ashore near their lighthouse, St. Bees. The local fishermen had ransacked the boat for all serviceable gear, nets, chronometers, propellers etc. When the salvers came along there was very little worth salving, with the result they called in the police.
It seems that the keepers were the last to go to the scene, and picked up a few odds and ends strewn about, all of little value. When the pace got too hot, on enquiries to the local fishermen, they put in the word that the keepers had been seen there. The result was that a search was made, and I believe each keeper had one tool, a small amount of lead was found which was intended for use as fishing weights.
All three keepers were prosecuted, the only persons to be so, and theirs was the only property recovered. In order to safeguard his pension, the P.K.; Tom Pay, was advised to retire early. I seem to think they were fined and got a suspended gaol sentence. Pat was one of these, who had also been transferred, an appointment he did not reckon much of. The other keeper was Davy Jones. A very immature young man, married to a girl who was a nurse, and I believe worked in London, although he was a fairly local South Walian.
The landing at the Smalls was not a very comfortable affair, being on the inside of the reef. Other reefs formed this landing area into a narrow funnel shaped gut, at which there was no escape after mid tide, and through which the tide was apt to surge. Having got aboard, I found that Davy, the keeper remaining on station was in his second month as A.K, being newly promoted and having little idea about the station at all.
I found it very similar in construction to the Hanois, although having more steps to get in the front door. I was eventually to find that the station was in a very run down condition, whether as the result of having no permanent P.K. I am not sure.
I soon found out why the coal bunker had been made on the rocks outside, it was to make way for extra fuel tanks that had been placed all over the lower tower area. There was also an electric winch for lifting aboard stores. I cannot remember an engine, but there must have been if only to charge batteries.
I seem to think the winch must have worked from batteries. The water storage capacity was very small, only 835 gallons, and the bottom tank of this smelt rather foul. The food storage area was essentially untouched yet by any modernisation schemes, but in this same room was the Magazine, where all the charges for the explosive fog signal were kept with accompanying detonators.
Above this floor was the kitchen, where the usual and un-modified 'Cornish Range' stood, black and threatening. I do not remember for why, but there was some shortage of space for food. As the result, the window across the landing from the kitchen door was utilised for storage and shelves had been placed in the space between the storm shutters and the windows.
A feature I noticed about the kitchen range was that instead of having a copper chimney all the way up, the chimney entered the wall by means of a flange, that indicated that within the wall the chimney went to the top of the building. I had heard stories of this chimney becoming blocked but did not know at that point how. Of course it worked out to be neglect of cleaning.
The bedroom was a rabbit hutch affair. There were wooden bunks built in, of dark oak, making it very gloomy, I think the bunks were flat fronted, like the Needles, but because the room was a lot smaller, looked very cramped. One thing I did notice, was a mirror, it was inscribed in gold lettering to the effect that it was presented to the lighthouse crew for saving the lives of nine people, the occupants of a Spanish vessel wrecked on the rock, in about 1870 as I recall.
The next floor was the Low Light. This was a small incandescent Hood burner, I think 50 mm. which shone out through a window to provide a fixed white light over the Hats and Barrel. There was also a nice writing desk with all the station records. Because of the nature of the room with the bright light, and the short wind up of the clock, the keepers chose to keep their watch in this room. It gave them plenty of scope to read.
At the foot of the next flight of steps up to the main lantern, was where the internal chimney came out of the wall into a copper one up to and through the roof. This I was to find was the place where the chimney got blocked but could be kept clear if cleaned out weekly.
Going into the lantern I am completely at a loss now. I cannot remember if there was the old Fresneau lens going round on rollers, or the more modern mercury flotation. The former I think. There was the Fog signal gib winding mechanism, with an air regulator. Above the lantern roof was a platform on which there was an Anemometer, readings of which were sent back to Paris every month.
I believe at some time or other there had also been a wind generator for charging batteries. The Smalls had been a Lloyds signalling station which used to report all movements of shipping for that organisation. This requirement had since ceased but the large telescope and its stand were still on station. I think at one time there had also been a telephone link which had got washed away and not replaced.
As I said Davy did not know a lot about the place, rather than say so he was likely to tell you all manner of mis-information. I soon found out that there was something wrong with the chimney, when the fire smoked badly. I found the cause of this to be that the weather had eaten away all of one side of the chimney above the roof platform, with the result that when the wind blew from that direction, it went straight down the chimney. I corrected this when I found some old linoleum and tied it round the chimney.
Then there was the hand pump for pumping air into the IOB's. It took far too long, so I overhauled the pump, finding that the spares were extremely low, and having to make do the best I could with the old, which meant frequently attending to it. When it came to my turn to attend to the Elsan bucket, I found that it leaked and had done so for a long time. There was a spare on station, but no one had seen fit to replace it.
When we had fog I also discovered that the Fog Gib winding mechanism was in a bad state, and spent many hours sitting on the roof trying to correct it, but it had been badly neglected for so long that the worm gear was virtually worn away, however I was able to do something with the contact side for the electrical circuit to be carried to the charges.
This fault had become known to me because I had had to start the Fog signal one day, but what I was not to know, was that the station had their own small practice to save them cleaning time as result of the fog signal. I came down from sounding to find the kitchen smothered in soot from the chimney, the vibration having sent it cascading down to it lowest point. The fire nearly was out because of its suffocation.
The whole kitchen had to be cleaned from top to bottom. I discovered afterwards that a practice at this station was; before sounding for fog, one first of all went round and covered the two flange joints in the chimney with wet cloths, to trap the fine powdered soot, then opened both windows in the kitchen. This allowed the wind coming in from one window to blow the soot out of the other before it had time to settle, and thus saved a lot of work.
The only other place I had been that had an explosive fog signal, had not had this problem. This Fog signal gave me another head ache. Having gone through the stores sometime after boarding I discovered that we had something like 700 charges too many.
One day having heard that the ship was coming to store up I went to the magazine with the intention of dumping the surplus in the sea. When I started to get the charges out I had an odd feeling that they were not as I had left them. I had a re-count and found the number to be correct. This puzzled me, but it did not for long, because when I went to the gallery to raise the flag on sighting the relief vessel, I glanced down on the rocks, where there was a large pool towards the northern end of the reef. In this pool I could see numerous charges and detonators.
Another thing caught my eye also, it was a Gannet which I took to be dead. On going down to the rocks to empty the ash bucket and put out the ropes for the launch, I was walking along, bucket in one hand and picked up the Gannet by the neck to throw it in the water with the other. I then discovered that the Gannet was not dead, having both hands full I was uncertain what to do, so I tossed the Gannet in the water, assuming that it would get up and fly, but having done this I then saw why it had been where it was.
One wing was almost completely severed and it could only swim dragging the wing behind it. I tipped the ashes and removed all the most visible signs of the charges. Later when I raised the question about them, I discovered that Jones had been aware of the surplus and been told to dispose of them as soon as possible. He had only just done so, during the night before, hoping that the sea would wash them away.
When the ships crew landed with the object of helping land the stores, every time the ships officer headed in the direction of the pool I found some excuse for directing him away from the area. That day they landed paraffin in 45gallon drums. They had to be hauled out of the boat by our winch which had a 5 cwt weight limit.
As the rig we were using through two pulley blocks caused two acute angles, the weight we could pick up was considerably reduced. I had noticed several times that the winch had stopped, so went up to the winch man, who was Jones, and discovered that he was holding in the overload switch every time it cut out. I had discovered him performing another stupid practice the week-end earlier.
He came to me on the Saturday morning and informed me that the winch had broken. I went to find out what had happened and found that a bicycle chain type drive from the motor had snapped. When I enquired into how it had happened, I discovered that he had been attempting to lubricate the winch wire.
He probably had not done it before and may only have been told about it, and not even seen it done. The practice would have been to lower the weight, then using a handful of graphite grease clasp the wire as it re-wound. What he had done was to do it in reverse, with the result that he had caused slack to be created round the drum, the loose coils had caught under the chain and sprockets.
Here I had a problem because when I went to the spares box I found that all these spares had been used up, but using a bit of ingenuity from my bicycling days I managed to split a link and make a rough job of riveting the chain together. The trouble being that these chain pins are of very brittle material, and likely to disintegrate.
Continued in part 2.
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