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At this point I think I should pay tribute to some of the tender's crew. One most important was the cox'on of the launch. They always had a difficult job in bad weather to make the relief a comfortable one, or even possible. When the local ship was away on a refit, one of our own ships cox'ons would be supplemented to the relief boats crew, for the smooth transitions.
One man I particularly remember at Penzance was Robinson. Although there were others which included Simon Jolly. Down at Cowes I was particularly sorry for one man who knew the waters at the Needles well, but he was later promoted to Quarter Master, which in a way was his undoing.
When he was loaned out to one visiting tender at one period, their own boats crew could not get alongside the Needles, they returned to the vessel and they asked for volunteers. This chap did so and got the relief done under difficult circumstances.
Later, however, he lost his job, not only as quarter Master but within Trinity. Being in such a prominent position, his weakness to being an Epileptic was exposed.
I recall one Christmas being at the station when the Xmas goodies arrived by lifeboat, they made the attempt on their usual day but it was impossible to land. They did like to get publicity from the media, who they brought down with them. Time got on and eventually they conceded to advice as to when to come along.
I managed to get the goodies by wading in the water up to my waist as their little inflatable was rowed in. I had two Supers with me that Christmas. I recall that none of us were inclined to go mad over the booze, so we packed it up and brought it home, except for the beer. We had 4 bottles of spirits each as well as plentiful supplies of cigarettes and cigars.
This as far as I am aware was the best supplied station, later I understand, there was so much supplied they decided to share it out with the Lifeboat itself.
That part reminds me of an incident when I was up at Bardsey. R A.F. Valley with their helicopters visited the Skerries Lighthouse regularly, the purpose was to obtain lobsters and crabs from the keepers. They also had a postal fiddle going on in which they brought out mail and devised a postal stamp and letters had the stamp Skerries.
One Xmas we heard there was to be a delivery of Christmas goodies. The 'chopper' arrived and hoards of cardboard boxes were unloaded. Pictures appeared in the daily papers. Later I discovered that the boxes were empty and that it was purely a publicity stunt and all was reloaded.
Some stations were lucky to be able to do a little fishing as described before, but some were also lucky with having the suitable surrounding for crabbing and lobstering. The Needles was one. There was a small reef of chalk running out to sea from the tower, as well as another small reef parallel to the first cliff which one could reach by spanning a narrow channel. In this chalk, holes would form, possibly by the working out of flints, but they made useful protective shelters for crabs when they were changing their shell and they were weak and vulnerable to attack.
Normally of course these holes were well below water level, but at low water on the Spring tides they became accessible. You could then go along and get yourself a harvest of lovely to eat crabs. My best day was 18 crabs. It so happened that on that particular day we had visit from Uncle Tom and I gave him the choice of two, for which he was grateful although he never showed it.
I referred to the chalk reef that lay in front of one of the Needles. This is interesting, because I could never really see why these rocks were called the Needles, but in recent years I have come across an etching from the 16th century, that shows a pinnacle of rock as high as the present rocks but cylindrical in shape with a point. This makes me think that that was the origin of the name, and some time outside living memory and perhaps un-recorded it fell over and is the reef I refer to for crabbing on.
In the days when they were building the Needles, there was a squad of men who lived on the rocks. For their benefit they build quarters above sea level, which was about 12 feet above the present landing, and balanced on a chalk wall that is still present. No doubt this was constructed of flammable material, for in the end of the first Needle they carved into the chalk for about 6 feet where they must have installed their stove.
The marks of the chimney are still there. When they dismantled this building, the ledge remained and became for us a useful resting place and ideal for sunbathing, at the same time as affording a fairly useful observation point. It could have other uses.
One of the first indication that weather changes are taking place is temperature. I recall one incident where I had been sun bathing one day, noticing a drop of temperature; there being no apparent reason, I had a walk around and found that there was a bank of fog approaching from St. Catherine's.
I therefore had the fog signal going before it reached us. It so happened that the Superintendent was having a day on the beach at Colwell Bay, when he heard the fog signal and wondered why, but a few minutes later could not see the Needles. He remarked on this on his next visit and congratulated me on being on the ball.
Three Supernumerary Keepers I recall spending a period with me are Dave Sleight. He was good keeper, but later resigned, though rejoined. He has since died. Another was Gerry Douglas-Sherwood, who I also found no fault with. He is still in the job and has spent the last 12 years on the Needles, up to the de-manning. One other was a fellow by the name of Peter Lee, the father Paul, who I found to be a good keeper also.
When I found that Peter was coming to me I was told by the Supt. that he was a Cowboy, this was probably the worst insult Uncle Tom could label a person. He went on to say that the man had been in and out of the job three or four times and he wanted him out for good. This indicated to me that I was to give the man a bad report, but I found no reason to do so.
He continued his service till he took advantage of an early retirement scheme when they were reducing staff during the remote control system. This fellow was a bit of a Naturalist and had a grandiose scheme of publishing a book on butterflies at the time.
He spent an immense amount of time doing beautiful paintings of the creatures for this proposed book, which I found to be full of flaws. He was not doing any creative work, only copying work of others, which applied to the written side as well as illustrations.
I think there is only one last story to tell of the Needles. It occurred on the day that I returned and found the station in a mess from the blocked soil pipe. During that period Williams had been In-Charge. There was an S.A.K. Woosnam and Mike.
It was emphasised to me that the S.A.K. was going to resign, which seemed pointless at the time. Later when I had occasion to use the report book, I found a letter in there to the Superintendent, from this chap, expressing his intention to resign, and particularly stating it had nothing to do with his treatment by the other keepers that was influencing his actions.
This immediately indicated to me, that that was precisely what had happened and I felt that they had stood over him whilst he wrote the report.
Not long before I left the station we had featured in a Television series called Worms Eye View of Britain. A film crew came out form the Southern T.V studios and interviewed us. The reporter was a woman.
Shortly after this we had another visit. This time the interviewer was Andrew Harvey, but before that was ready for publishing; all material was supposed to be vetted by Trinity House, the news broke about the Prices and Income Pay Award. Being hot news they put me on screen for sometime talking about the Lighthouse and our work.
Oddly enough since retiring I accidentally Videoed a programme called Scene 2, which re-played part of my interview with Andrew, who was re-calling differences in modern interview techniques.
Having had some experience at electrical work in my life, if anything went wrong it was common sense to find out what the difficulty was. At one period the lights kept fusing in the cave. Perhaps I should explain this. Beneath and dug into the Needle on which we were, there was a cave that acted as our oil store. There was heavy metal door across the entrance. This cave also housed our coal bunker.
It was therefore necessary to visit the cave every day for our coal. The weather did not always permit this even at low water in bad weather. So with the threat of such, we would lay in a stock. However I investigated the light problem and found that there was some chemical action taking place with the chalk that was decomposing the plastic light fitting. In the circumstances it was best to disconnect the service, as it was causing our own tower lights to go out at times.
When an electrician, Dave Wilson arrived on station, and I related the problem, he castigated me for finding the source of the fault, telling me that it was not my job. When I asked him what I should do?, keep fitting new fuses till I ran out of spares, he had no answer to give.
I recall that I got one or two improvements made to the station. One being that because of the awkward shape of the bunks, and them being fitted with Vono sprung bases, it meant unhinging these bases every time we needed to clean out the bunk spaces.
The spring links in consequence were becoming lost, and loosened. I suggested that the springs were removed and the two sections of base be fitted with boards. Then the two sections could be removed separately and not joined together. Andrew Perry a Carpenter came off to do this, he also did a couple of plumbing jobs, one of which was to take a draw off point from our main water pumping pipe to the kitchen so that in the process of pumping the water there, we could top up the engine cooling water tank.
This in turn saved us the dangerous task of setting up a pair of steps near a running engine in order to carry out the task
Harold Taylor's tour of duty at The Needles Lighthouse was completed in October 1969.
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