Watch and wick
A keeper's day was ordered around the light. It was lit at sunset and extinguished at sunrise, and through the night a keeper stood watch to see that it burned steadily. Wicks had to be trimmed so they did not smoke, which earned American keepers the nickname "wickies". In daylight the lens was cleaned of soot and salt, brass was polished, the lantern glazing wiped inside and out, and the clockwork that turned the lens was checked. Weights had to be wound at intervals through every night.
Keepers also sounded the fog signal when visibility closed in, kept weather records, reported passing ships and wrecks, and maintained the station buildings. Everything was written in the logbook, signed and dated, because the authorities inspected stations and expected the record to match the work.
Rock, island and shore stations
Stations fell broadly into three kinds. On rock stations, towers standing on reefs or offshore stacks, a small crew of men lived inside the tower itself, stacked room upon room: store, kitchen, bedroom, service room, lantern. They worked rotations of several weeks on station and then went ashore, though relief boats were often delayed for days by heavy seas. Island stations offered a little more space, with dwellings beside the tower. Shore stations, on headlands and mainland coasts, housed keepers with their families, with cottages, gardens and children who walked to the nearest school.
Keepers whose names were kept
Most keepers are known only through their signatures in logbooks, but some entered the wider record. On 7 September 1838, Grace Darling and her father William rowed from the Longstone lighthouse in the Farne Islands to rescue survivors of the wrecked steamer Forfarshire; the RNLI's Grace Darling Museum in Bamburgh tells the story. In the United States, Ida Lewis of Lime Rock in Newport, Rhode Island, was credited with many rescues, and in 1856 the teenage Abbie Burgess kept the lights of Matinicus Rock, Maine, burning through weeks of storms while her father was away.
The record also holds mysteries. In December 1900 the relief vessel Hesperus reached the Flannan Isles lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides to find its three keepers, James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur, gone. No trace was found; the most widely accepted explanation is that they were caught by an exceptional wave. The story of the Smalls lighthouse in 1801, where a keeper is said to have kept his dead colleague's body on the station until relief came, is often cited as the reason rock stations moved to crews of three.
The logbook as a source
For a researcher, station logbooks and returns are valuable sources: daily weather, ship movements, repairs and occasional personal notes. Many authority records now sit in national and regional archives, and published histories by the lighthouse services themselves draw on them. When this ledger cites a date from a station's working life, it is usually traceable to such a record.
Automation and the last relief
Electric lamps, automatic lamp changers and remote telemetry made resident keepers unnecessary. Automation proceeded through the later twentieth century. In Ireland, the Baily lighthouse at Howth was the last to be automated, in 1997. In Scotland, the Northern Lighthouse Board withdrew its last keepers from Fair Isle South in 1998, and later that year Trinity House completed its programme at North Foreland in Kent. Lights in Britain are now monitored remotely, Trinity House from its centre at Harwich and the Northern Lighthouse Board from Edinburgh.
What remains
Many keepers' cottages are now let as holiday homes, and several towers are museums. Former keepers and enthusiasts keep the memory alive through groups such as the Association of Lighthouse Keepers, which welcomes anyone with an interest. Chapter Four lists places where the daily life of a station can still be seen.