The Busy Narrow Sea E-Book

Robin Laurance

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 345

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Engagingly written, and brilliantly researched, a treasure trove packed with rich nuggets of information. I loved and devoured it.' – Peter James 'A perfectly timed narrative history … No one who crosses the Channel can fail to learn from, and enjoy, this original and absorbing book.' – Patrick Marnham It was half a million years ago that Britain first parted from Europe. As ice melted, water smashed through the chalky land bridge that separated Britain from the continent of Europe, forming what we now know as the English Channel, and what the French call La Manche. The second parting, far from being a force of nature, was the choice of Britain's islanders disillusioned with continental rule. In The Busy Narrow Sea, Robin Laurance tells the story of the people whose lives have become entwined over the centuries with this iconic seaway, presenting a broad sweep of carefully researched historical fact lightened with a host of colourful anecdotes. This diverse tale covers artists captivated by its light; writers inspired by its power; tunnellers relishing its challenges; entrepreneurs turning fishing villages into smart resorts; smugglers ruling and adventurers conquering the waves; and much more besides, from Napoleon through the Second World War and into the modern day.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Robin Laurance, 2024

The right of Robin Laurance to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 683 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Contents

Introduction

1 When Britain First Left Europe

2 The Long Crawl

3 A Tale of Two Cities

4 Cawsanders and Smugglers

5 The Channel’s Islands

6 The Channel at War

7 Packets, Balloons and Mal de Mer

8 Writers, Poets, Painters and Debussy

9 Just Another Day at the Office

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

The English Channel, or La Manche as it is known in France, from Pergamon World Atlas, 1968. (The Rumsey Collection)

Introduction

Britain first left Europe half a million years ago when a mass of icy water cascaded across the narrow piece of tundra that joined this small island to the continental landmass of Europe. Since then, the English Channel – La Manche to the French – has played host to humankind in all its various guises. For potential invaders, from Julius Caesar and the Normans to the Nazis, it has been the final hurdle, crossed successfully by the Romans and William the Conqueror but defeating Hitler in the twentieth century. Boulogne was where invasions were planned, yet neighbouring Calais was ruled by the British for 200 years from 1360. Dick Whittington was the town’s mayor in 1407.

The Channel’s waters were charted by Edmond Halley after he had tracked his eponymous comet. Henry Winstanley, a no less extraordinary pioneer, built the first Eddystone Lighthouse of wood on a small, slimy piece of rock, 9 miles from the shore.

Brighton and Deauville mirrored each other by growing from small fishing villages into seaside resorts that set the pattern for beach resorts the world over as they entertained the great and the good and not so good. The ever-changing Channel light inspired the birth of Impressionism, with Monet, Boudin and Pissarro leading the way from the Channel coast of France. Writers and poets similarly found inspiration in this narrow seaway – Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Charlotte Smith, John Masefield, Dickens and Matthew Arnold all had cause to turn to the Channel. Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables while living on Guernsey, and on a tiny islet off Saint-Malo lies the body of the French romanticist, Chateaubriand.

Fishing remains an important industry along both sides of the Channel. In the seventeenth century, pilchard fishing off the Devon coast went a long way to finance the famous Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Today, herring fishing sustains the fishermen of Boulogne, and the trawlermen of Brixham put Dover sole on the high tables in London.

The Channel’s islands have, over the years, enjoyed a mixture of fame, fortune and fascism. The Isle of Wight became the summer home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; the meeting place for the world’s finest yachts and yachtsmen; home to the Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and to the outstanding portrait photographer of the Victorian era, Julia Margaret Cameron (Cameron was snubbed by a visiting Giuseppe Garibaldi, who took her for a vagrant). The island’s prison, Parkhurst, held many of the country’s most notorious criminals and suffered one of the British Prison Service’s most shameful breakouts. In 1968, the island became the site of a pop festival that crowned the counter-culture of the sixties and set the trend for festivals of music, mud, sex and drugs that became a rite of passage for teens and twenties-somethings the world over.

Jersey farmers discovered an exceptional and early potato, while their dairy colleagues found a little brown cow that produced an inordinate amount of milk. And the islanders discovered just how attractive the local tax breaks could be. But both Jersey and Guernsey suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazi occupying forces during the Second World War.

That war saw terrible fighting in and over the Channel. And it witnessed acts of extraordinary courage. But there were some awful and unnecessary disasters too, not least at Slapton Sands in the days before the D-Day Landings. Pigeons flew the Channel in the service of MI6, and the State Rooms of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton became chandeliered hospital wards for wounded Indian combatants.

Throughout its existence, and beyond the days of war, crossing the English Channel has proved a challenge for sailors, engineers and not least for adventurers. Jean-Pierre Blanchard was the first to fly the 21 miles across the Channel in his hot-air balloon. In 1909, Louis Blériot was the first to fly a plane across. Its engine was made by a company that produced lawnmowers, its propeller was of varnished walnut, its fuselage and wings used a combination of ash, oak and poplar. And by converting an old coastal collier into the Channel’s first car ferry, in 1928 Stuart Townsend met the challenge set by British tourists who wanted to drive their own cars on the Continent.

Matthew Webb, an officer in the Merchant Navy, was the first to swim the Channel. In 2010, Philippe Croizon crossed in thirteen hours – he had no arms or legs – and Hilary Lister sailed across, controlling her dinghy by blowing through straws – she was paralysed from the neck down.

Today, the English Channel is the world’s busiest seaway – a super maritime highway for tankers, container ships, bulk carriers, cruise liners, ferries, fishing boats and yachts. Deep-sea pilots guide the freighters through the crowded waters, first climbing rope ladders up the sides of huge vessels in what are often rough seas. Trawlermen squabble over fishing grounds in a stretch of water that both links and separates two nations who find it so hard to get along. And it separates an island state, not only from its immediate neighbour but from the wider continent of Europe. A narrow sea that is deep in history but too often mired in conflict.

1

When Britain First Left Europe

When Britain first left Europe half a million years ago there were no politics involved: it did so by the force of nature. Before the parting, you could take a Sunday afternoon stroll from England, across Siberian-like tundra, to the European continent and then walk back again before dark. It would not have been a particularly interesting trek across a land bridge with little vegetation. You would not have met anybody on the way, but you might have encountered mammoths and the occasional elk, and you would have got your feet wet crossing the river that ran through the valley.

And then there was a catastrophic flood – a mega flood created by much greater forces than prolonged and heavy rain. Earth scientists believe that the land bridge that joined Britain to the Continent at what is now the Channel’s eastern end had formed a dam holding back the waters of a huge lake fed by the waters of the rivers Thames, Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, with ice from the mountains of Scandinavia and Scotland forming the lake’s eastern and northern boundary. Evidence for the lake comes from glacial-like sediments found in the coastal areas of south-east England and on the continental coast where Holland meets Germany. The Cambridge Professor Philip Gibbard, an expert on the Channel’s birth, suggests that the water level in the lake was about 30m above current sea levels and was held back by the land bridge that joined England to the Continent.

It was about 450,000 years ago that the waters of the lake began to spill over the land bridge, filling the valleys on its western side and creating what Gibbard calls a ‘channel river’, and a very narrow beginning of the Dover Straits. Erosion caused the river to widen gradually over the next 300,000 years, until the next mega flood occurred when a second ice sheet in the southern North Sea created a new lake which was dammed to the south by a land ridge north of the Dover Straits.

When this weaker dam burst, the flood was catastrophic. Sanjeev Gupta and his colleagues at Imperial College London studied data from the examination of the Channel floor, which showed grooves indicating that it was once exposed to the air and then subjected to an enormous deluge of water. This evidence of vast quantities of water cascading from the southern limits of the North Sea was what scientists had been waiting for.

Land on both the northern and southern sides of this new torrent of water was eroded, and Britain became an island. Its history had been defined by the forces of nature; not until the opening of the Channel Tunnel could you once again walk (in theory) to the continent of Europe from England’s green and pleasant land.

‘Nature has placed England and France in a geographical location which must necessarily set up an eternal rivalry between them,’ wrote Napoleon’s spin doctor, Jean-Louis Dubroca, in 1802. How right he was. The two kingdoms kept apart physically by the waters of the Channel have been kept apart by long-established cultural differences, peppered by outbursts of pique. And when the French decided they had had enough of kings, the Republic proved no better friend to their cross-Channel neighbours.

Robert Tombs, a Professor of French History at Cambridge University, writes:

Geography comes before history. Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.

There are no marker buoys defining the extent of the Channel, but by general consent the Straits of Dover mark the eastern end, and a line between Land’s End and the Île Vierge, off the Brittany coast, defines the point where the Channel meets the Atlantic Ocean. Altogether, this is a stretch of about 350 miles. The massive granite lighthouse on Vierge rises nearly 100m above the ground and is the tallest in Europe. The first Longships Lighthouse, on the rocks off Land’s End, was also built of granite in 1795. The modernised automatic light now has a helipad on the top.

Known originally as the ‘Narrow Sea’, the British now call this stretch of water the English Channel, although nobody is entirely sure why. Early Dutch sea charts refer to it as the Engelse Kanaal, and English statesmen would, at an early stage, have wanted the French to be in no doubt about who had sovereignty over the water. The French call it La Manche (the sleeve). On days when the sea is angry and giant freighters are crowding the space as they fight to meet ever-more demanding schedules, ferry captains crossing the freighters’ path call it something else altogether. Separation lanes keep the eastbound and westbound traffic apart, with the eastbound, fully laden ships taking the French side. But in the Straits of Dover, where the ferry crossings are at their most prolific, there are just under 22 miles between the chalk cliffs of Dover and Cap Gris-Nez, squeezing the traffic lanes and demanding the unflinching concentration of helmsmen.

That unflinching concentration required of helmsmen was clearly absent when the cargo ship Mont-Louis sank in the Channel in 1984 after colliding with a German vessel in thick mist. The collision raised worrying questions about the cargoes carried through the narrow seaway. The French authorities claimed the ship had left Le Havre with a cargo of medical supplies, but, on persistent questioning from the environmental protection campaigners Greenpeace, admitted the cargo was not medical supplies but barrels of uranium hexafluoride. The Mont-Louis had been heading for Riga in the Soviet Union, where the uranium was to be enriched. There were no fatalities as a result of the collision, and the cylinders of uranium hexafluoride were recovered intact.

The Channel is classed as international waters. The 12-mile Territorial Sea Convention applies until the Dover Straits, where there are less than 24 miles between the French and English coasts. The two countries share responsibility and management for this stretch of the Channel, and for the 500-plus commercial ships that pass through the straits every day. (There was a time when the range of territorial waters was measured by the distance travelled by a shot fired from a cannon on the shore.)

The Channel weather is notoriously fickle. Fog and heavy rain that reduce visibility and winds that regularly reach gale force test the best of seamen. But the shipping forecast, broadcast four times a day by the BBC, does at least provide warnings of what is to come. This forecasting for shipping around the British Isles was conceived after a fatal storm off the Welsh coast in 1859 claimed 130 ships and the lives of 800 sailors. As a result, Robert Fitzroy, who had captained Charles Darwin’s Beagle, was moved to pioneer a system of telegraphed warnings of storms to harbours around the British Isles – a system that grew into today’s Meteorological Office. The Met Office divides the Channel into four regions – Dover, Wight, Portland and Plymouth – advising ships’ captains of predicted wind directions and force, and likely visibility. And BBC Radio 4 broadcasts the information at four precise times during the day on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

Tides are strong in the Channel. High tide at Plymouth comes some seven hours after high tide at Dover. At Calais, high tide comes five hours before Saint-Malo. And as the tide rises and falls it creates tidal currents. Tidal ranges – the difference in height between low and high tide – differ greatly. At Dover it is about 17ft; at Brighton it is nearer 19ft 6in. The Bristol Channel experiences a rise in water levels of some 30ft, while at Saint-Malo it can reach 26ft. (It climbs to just under 40ft in the Minas Basin of the Bay of Fundy on Canada’s Nova Scotia coast.) Just beyond Saint-Malo, the tidal range at the mouth of the Rance river reaches a full 35ft, which prompted the French electricity company EDF to build the world’s first tidal barrage across the estuary. Its twenty-four turbines generate enough tidal power in a year to satisfy the needs of a town the size of Rennes with its population of 217,000.

Spring tides, which have nothing to do with the seasons, occur when the earth, sun and moon are in alignment and the gravitational pull of the sun adds to the pull of the moon. The oceans bulge more than usual and tidal heights increase. Seven days later, when the three are out of alignment, the high tides are a little lower and the low tides a little higher. These are referred to as neap tides. In the Channel during spring tides, tidal currents flow at terrifying speeds through the Alderney Race – the funnel between the island and Cap de la Hague on the north-western tip of the Cherbourg Peninsula. Yachtsmen have logged the current at 12 knots (22km/hour), which is fine if you are going with the tide but to be avoided at all costs if you are coming the other way.

The Channel tides proved too much for Julius Caesar. Coming from a part of the world that sees very little tidal movement, the tides in the Channel confused him. After his failed first crossing, he made a base for himself at Boulogne, where he ordered the building of hundreds of landing craft. In all, he had gathered 800 ships, which were made ready at their moorings on the River Liane, just upstream from Boulogne. With some 17,000 men and 2,000 horses, he set sail at sunset one summer evening in 54 BCE. But the tidal currents in the Dover Straits drove him way off course up the Kent coast towards the Thames Estuary. He had failed to add those tidal currents into his calculations. His own account claims he made landfall 7 miles along the coast but he fails to say in which direction.

In Rome, there was already apprehension about the seas around Britain, not least about the tides. Marcus Cicero wrote about his misgivings, ‘I was afraid of the ocean, afraid of the coast of the island.’ And the historian Cornelius Tacitus, writing about the exploits of his father-in-law Agricola, noted:

Nowhere has the sea a wider dominion, that it has many currents running in every direction, that it does not flow and ebb within the limits of the shore but penetrates and winds far inland and finds a home among hills and mountains as though in its own domain.

The tidal problems that faced Caesar in the Channel were recorded by the Greek historian Strabo:

The deified Caesar crossed over to the island [Britain] twice, although he came back in haste, without accomplishing anything great or proceeding far into the island, not only on account of the quarrels that took place in the land of the Celti among the barbarians and his own soldiers as well, but also on account of the fact that many of his ships had been lost at the time of the full moon, since the ebb-tides and the flood-tides got their increase at that time.

Strabo also remarked that while the Britons were taller than the Celts, their bodies were of ‘looser build’. He also recalled that it rained a lot and that fog often hung over the Channel.

Ten years previously, the Chinese had produced tide tables that research suggests were extraordinarily accurate. ‘Time and tide,’ observed Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘wait for no man.’ (See Edmond Halley below.)

Unlike Julius Caesar, William I – William the Conqueror – was provided with a good tidal understanding from his seamen, many of whom had been working in cross-Channel trade. Tidal conditions were decisive in the choice of his departure date and time from Saint-Valery. The optimum time for departure was sunset on 27 September 1066. The crossing to Pevensey was 127km. William had amassed 10,000 men and 3,000 horses at Cabourg, and had gathered 300 ships to put them all in. The Norman Conquest was under way, recalled in pictures created with wool thread on 70m of linen cloth.

Who commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry is unclear, but recent research at the University of York adds weight to the long-held assumption that it was intended to decorate the nave of the cathedral at Bayeux. The city’s Bishop Odo was alongside William at the Battle of Hastings (and is portrayed in the tapestry), prompting some historians to suggest that the tapestry was commissioned by the bishop himself. For a time, it appeared in the cathedral on an annual basis, but the tapestry now rests permanently in a purpose-built museum in the city. There is a copy in the museum at Reading.

Six centuries later, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, it was an astronomer who set about charting the tides in the English Channel. The fact that it took an astronomer to do the work is not as surprising as it might seem. After all, the tides were all about the pull of the sun and the moon, so when Their Lordships at the Admiralty – not least Josiah Burchett, the Secretary to the Admiralty – sanctioned astronomer Edmond Halley’s trip into the English Channel, Halley, who already had a comet to his name, was eager to be on his way.

Halley was a man of immense learning. The son of a wealthy soap-maker, he went first to St Paul’s school and then to Oxford, where he gained entry to Queen’s College when he was just 16. But rather than complete his degree, he took off for St Helena with a friend, a sextant and some telescopes, and spent a year looking at the stars. He recorded the celestial longitude and latitude of 341 of them.

Back home, he was something of a star himself. But there was little time to bask in any glory for he was soon off again, this time into the Atlantic, charged with ‘improving the knowledge of the Longitude and variations of the compass, with all the accuracy you can’. His masters at the Admiralty had no idea whether his findings were accurate but appeared delighted with the work.

When Halley wrote his next Admiralty assignment for himself, Their Lordships were perfectly happy to give him the go-ahead, but to save any loss of face, published the instructions under their name.

A pink (after the Dutch pinke, meaning pinched) was a type of sailing vessel, flat-bottomed with a narrow pinched stern, and the Paramour was the one chosen for this research:

Whereas his Majesties Pink the Paramour is particularly fitted out and Putt under your Command that you may proceed with her, and observe the Course of the Tydes in the Channell of England, and other things remarkable.

You are therefore hereby required and directed to proceed with the Said Vessel, and use your utmost care and Diligence in observing the Course of the Tydes accordingly, as well in the Midsea as on both shores; As alsoe the Precise times of High and Low Water of the Sett and Strength of the Flood and Ebb, and how many feet it flows, in as many, and at such certaine places, as may Suffice to describe the whole. And whereas in many places in the Channell there are irregular and halfe Tydes you are in a particular Manner to be very carefull in observing them.

And you are alsoe to take the true bearings of the Principal head Lands on the English Coast one from another and to continue the Meridian as often as conveniently you can from side to side of the Channell in order to lay downe both Coast truly against one another.

And in case dureing your being employed on this Service, any other Matters may Occur unto you, the observing and Publishing whereof may tend towards the Security of the Navigation of the Subjects of his Majestie or other Princes trading into the Channell You are to be very careful in the takeing notice thereof: And when you Shall have performed what Service you can, with relation to the particulars before mentioned you are to returne with the Ship you Command into the River of Thames, giving Us from time to time an Account of your Proceedings. Dated this June 12th 1701.

He sailed the three-masted, six-gun naval pink for five months in the summer and early autumn of 1701, cruising the Channel shores of both England and France, observing the tides’ rise and fall. To feed themselves, the crew caught fish using lines over the side of the boat, providing Halley with the only soft food he could manage – he was only 45 but had lost all his teeth.

From the Channel, he dutifully informed his masters in the Admiralty of his progress, writing from various ports of call as he made his way along the British coast before crossing from the Lizard to Ushant, a tiny island off the Brittany coast. He would address his letters to the Admiralty, ‘Honoured Sr’ and close with ‘Your Honrs most obedt: servt’.

From Spit Head (sic) on 29 July 1701, he wrote:

I have … endeavoured to get as exact an account of the Tides in the Channell as possible, and have ankered all over it … and have been particularly curious in this part between the Isle of Wight and Portland … where I find the Course of the Tides very extraordinary.

He had witnessed the notorious tidal race at Portland Bill.

He got into the habit of referring to Their Lordships at the Admiralty as ‘Lopps’ – as in, ‘In obedience to their Lopps orders …’, ‘If their Lopps have any further orders for me …’ or ‘As their Lopps shall direct…’

With the job done, he was back at Deptford by the second week in October. He had already sent a note to Josiah Burchett, the Admiralty Secretary, saying he had ‘discovered beyond my expectation the general rule of the Tydes in the Channell; and in many things corrected the charts thereof’. He would publish his findings in the form of a chart, which he first presented to a meeting of the Royal Society and then had published under the title ‘A new and Correct Chart of the Channell between England and France: with considerable improvements not extant in any Draughts hitherto Publish’d; shewing the Sands, shoals, depths of water and Anchorage, with ye flowing of the Tydes, and the setting of the Current’.

The chart records depths in fathoms. ‘Ye Hour of High-water, or rather ye End of the stream that setts to ye Eastward on ye Day of ye New & Full Moon’ was expressed in plain Roman numerals. The tide tables produced more than three centuries later do not differ greatly from Halley’s findings.

His seafaring days ended with his appointment to the Chair of Geometry at the University of Oxford. He lived in a small house in New College Lane, where he had an observatory built into the roof. He entertained his friend Isaac Newton here and was alone responsible for encouraging Newton to publish his Principa (some would say his encouragement of Newton was the most valuable thing he ever did). Yet Halley’s career was crowned with his appointment as Astronomer Royal in 1720, when he already held the post of Secretary to the Royal Society. He died in 1740 aged 86.

Newton and Halley were working in an age of increasing scientific knowledge into which stepped a mildly eccentric engineer/inventor from Saffron Walden in Essex called Henry Winstanley, the son of the estate manager at the Earl of Suffolk’s Audley End House. Henry went to Saffron Walden Grammar School, and then briefly into service at Audley End. When still in his late twenties, he took himself off on a tour of Europe, and on his return gathered together some of his whimsical engineering apparatus and put it on show in Piccadilly as a visitor attraction. He called it the Water Theatre, and much to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, it proved an outstanding success. Children were entranced and their parents enthralled.

His prosperity grew and Henry and his parents enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. Alison Barnes, in her book about Henry, says the family ‘ate roast swan at New Year, pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, leeks and fish during Lent, tansies [a yellow-flowered perennial] in June, pheasants, partridge and oysters in September and turkey, geese, ducks, frumenty [wheat boiled in milk and flavoured with cinnamon], plum pudding and marzipan sweetmeats at Christmas’. Clearly a man of substance, Henry took for his bride Elizabeth Taylor, from Little Munden in Hertfordshire, shortly before his 40th birthday. He then did something remarkable: he built a lighthouse on a small slippery piece of rock, 9 miles out in the middle of the Channel.

Winstanley’s business had expanded, and he invested in a cargo ship called the Constant. Shortly after he added this new addition to his business, the ship was wrecked on rocks off Plymouth on Christmas Eve in 1695, with the loss of all on board. The Constant wasn’t the only casualty of what became known as the Eddystone Rocks. This reef was just visible above the surface when the sea was calm but disappeared under even moderate waves. Trinity House had given the go-ahead for a lighthouse on the rocks in 1692 to one Walter Whitfield, a Plymouth businessman, but it proved too much for him, and after more wrecks and more loss of life, Mr Winstanley took up the challenge.

As a starting base, he had a small, uneven, slippery piece of rock on which he could work when the sea was calm. It was hard to get a foothold at the best of times, yet in two years he had a solid stone base 12ft high and 14ft in diameter, bound with copper and iron. Waves would unexpectedly and periodically wash over the rock, taking with them his tools and his lunch. Twelve iron stanchions anchored the structure to the rock, each stanchion fixed in a man-made hole with molten lead.

He enlarged the base and on it constructed a tower of wood, which he bound with iron straps, the work being interrupted when French corsairs (privateers) kidnapped him and shipped him off to France demanding a ransom. The Admiralty made urgent representations to the French authorities, and the king himself, Louis XIV, ordered the lighthouse builder’s immediate release, saying that while France was at war with England, she was not at war with humanity.

Undaunted by his French sojourn, Winstanley went back to work on the tower, adapting it from its original octagonal shape to an improved and strengthened twelve-sided design and taking it to 115ft. In the base there was a windowless storeroom, above which was a bedroom. On top of that was a grand visitor’s room with sash windows and two closets.

Pipes from the roof channelled rainwater into a cistern. The kitchen had a domed roof and access to an alfresco platform. The eight-sided glass lantern with sixty candles was first lit on 14 November 1698. For three years, not a single vessel came to grief on the Eddystone Rocks, with Winstanley boasting that his lighthouse would withstand anything that nature could throw at it. He was an optimist – and anyway, he had faith in the work his team had done.

Yet, bad weather engulfed the Channel in November 1703, with the vicious tail of an American hurricane bringing ever-increasing winds as the month progressed. By the night of 26–27 November the wind had reached gale force, and the western Channel was experiencing the worst storm anyone could remember. Winstanley and some of his builders were in the lighthouse.

Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe and a very able reporter, relates what happened that night in his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. He begins at Plymouth:

In the entrance to this bay, lyes a large and most dangerous rock, which at high-water is covered, but at low-tide lyes bare, where many a good ship has been lost, even in the view of safety, and many a ships crew drown’d in the night, before help could be had for them.

Upon this rock, which was call’d the Edystone, from its situation, the famous Mr. Winstanley undertook to build a light-house for the direction of sailors, and with great art, and expedition finished it; which work considering its height, the magnitude of its building, and the little hold there was, by which it was possible to fasten it to the rock, stood to admiration, and bore out many a bitter storm.

Mr. Winstanly [sic] often visited, and frequently strengthened the building, by new works, and was so confident of its firmness, and stability, that he usually said, he only desir’d to be in it when a storm should happen, for many people had told him, it would certainly fall, if it came to blow a little harder than ordinary.

But he happen’d at last to be in it once too often; Namely, when that dreadful tempest blew, Nov. the 27, 1703. This tempest began on the Wednesday before, and blew with such violence, and shook the light-house so much, that as they told me there, Mr. Winstanly [sic] would fain have been on shoar, and made signals for help, but no boats durst go off to him; and to finish the tragedy, on the Friday, Nov. 26, when the tempest was so redoubled, that it became a terror to the whole nation; the first sight there seaward, that the people of Plymouth, were presented with in the morning after the storm, was the bare Eddystone, the light-house being gone; in which Mr. Winstanly [sic], and all that were with him perish’d, and were never seen, or heard of since: But that which was a worse loss still, was, that a few days after a merchant’s ship call’d the Winchelsea homeward bound from Virginia, not knowing the Eddystone lighthouse was down; for want of the light that should have been seen run foul of the rock itself, and was lost with all her lading, and most of her men, but there is now another light-house built on the same rock.

What other disasters happen’d at the same time, in the Sound, and in the roads about Plymouth, is not my business: They are also publish’d in other books, to which I refer.

One thing, which I was a witness too, on a former journey to this place, I cannot omit: It was the next year after that great storm, and but a little sooner in the year, being in August, I was at Plymouth, and walking on the Hoo, which is a plain on the edge of the sea, looking to the road, I observed the evening so serene, so calm, so bright, and the sea so smooth, that a finer sight, I think, I never saw; there was very little wind, but what was, seem’d to be westerly; and, about an hour after, it blew a little breeze at south west, with which wind there came into the Sound, that night, and the next morning, a fleet of fourteen sail of ships, from Barbadoes; richly loaden, for London: Having been long at sea, most of the captains and passengers came on shore to refresh themselves, as is usual, after such tedious voyages, and the ships rode all in the Sound on that side next to Catwater: As is customary, upon safe arriving to their native country, there was a general joy and melanchol, both on board and on shore.

The next day the wind began to freshen, especially in the afternoon, and the sea to be disturbed, and very hard it blew at night, but all was well for that time; but the night after it blew a dreadful storm, not much inferior, for the time it lasted, to the storm mentioned above, which blew down the light-house on the Eddy Stone; about midnight the noise indeed was very dreadful, what with the roaring of the sea, and of the wind, intermixed with the firing of guns for help from the ships, the cries of the seamen and people on shore, and, which was worse, the cries of those, which were driven on shore by the tempest, and dash’d in pieces.

In a word, all the fleet, except three, or thereabouts, were dash’d to pieces against the rocks, and sunk in the sea, most of the men being drowned: Those three, who were sav’d, received so much damage, that their lading was almost all spoil’d: One ship in the dark of the night, the men not knowing where they were, run into Catwater, and run on shore there, by which she was however sav’d from shipwreck, and the lives of her crew were saved also.

This was a melancholy morning indeed; nothing was to be seen but wrecks of the ships, and a foaming furious sea, hi that very place where they rode all in joy and triumph, but the evening before: The captains, passengers and officers who were, as I have said, gone on shoar, between the joy of saving their lives, and the affliction of having lost their ships, their cargoes, and their friends, were objects indeed worth our compassion and observation; and there was a great variety of the passions to be observed in them: Now lamenting their losses, then giving thanks for their deliverance, many of the passengers had lost their all, and were, as they expressed themselves, utterly undone; they were, I say, now lamenting their losses, with violent excesses of grief; then giving thanks for their lives, and that they should be brought on shore, as it were, on purpose to be sav’d from death; then again in tears for such as were drowned; the various cases were indeed very affecting, and, in many things, very instructing.

Winstanley’s lighthouse was replaced by one designed by John Rudyard. It had a base of solid wood, laid on flattened pieces of the rocks. Wood and stone were used to form a conical tower that rose to 92ft and was topped with an octagonal lantern with twenty-four candles.

The lighthouse lasted almost fifty years before a fire in the lantern burnt it down on a winter’s night in 1755. As the fire took hold, the keeper, Henry Hall, who was reportedly in his nineties at the time, was joined by his two colleagues who threw buckets of water up into the lantern. But their efforts were to no avail and the fire spread down through the building, forcing the three men to scramble for their lives out onto the rocks. There they huddled together, helplessly watching the flames work their way down through their circular living quarters and their circular kitchen until the whole tower had been consumed.

The blaze had been seen from the shore and a dozen fishermen jumped into small boats and rowed furiously out to the reef. All three men were rescued, but Mr Hall complained of terrible stomach pains. He died some days later, having somehow ingested molten lead from the lantern’s roof. Speculation suggests the poor man gazed upwards open-mouthed at the flames at the very moment the molten lead fell from the burning roof.

Just two months later, in February 1756, Robert Weston, who held the lease to the rocky reef, was introduced to one John Smeaton, a civil engineer and instrument-maker, who suggested the new lighthouse be made of stone. He used granite brought from Cornwall and lined the inside with limestone from nearby Portland. And in the process, Smeaton pioneered the use of ‘hydraulic lime’, a mortar that cured under water and led to the development of today’s concrete. He also cut his stone so that the pieces dove-tailed into each other, and he made sure that when the pieces were assembled, the gaps between them did not form a continuous straight line – a technique that made the walls stronger.

His overall design for the tower reflected the shape of an oak tree, broad at the base and gradually narrowing towards the top. It had a diameter of 28ft at the base and 17ft at the top. When heavy seas pounded the structure, the waves rolled up the column and were then deflected back into the angry sea. The lighthouse rose to just 59ft and was topped with a lantern consisting of a chandelier with twenty-four very large tallow candles. It was lit for the first time on a moonless night in 1759.

The candles were later replaced with oil lamps and a series of reflectors. Smeaton’s lighthouse served Channel sailors for more than 100 years, until the rock on which it was built began to erode and Trinity House built the present lighthouse to replace it. Smeaton’s contribution to maritime engineering had equalled that of Henry Winstanley, making a very significant improvement to the safety of seafarers in the Channel.

It was the renowned Smeaton who Charles Rashleigh turned to for designs for a harbour at West Polmear on Cornwall’s Channel coast. Charles was the tenth child of Jonathan and Mary Rashleigh, Cornish landowners, who lived in gracious style at Menabilly, the grand house that Daphne du Maurier was to live in a century and a half later and on which she modelled Manderley in her novel Rebecca. Jonathan Rashleigh was the Member of Parliament for Fowey, but his son Charles chose law rather than politics. When Rashleigh senior died, Charles returned to Cornwall to manage the family estate. He bought an elegant townhouse in St Austell and two years later, married Grace Tremayne, a young woman from Heligan. He also bought land at West Polmear.

It was here on the beach that ships collected the copper extracted from local mines. But running ships up onto the sand was not safe nor an efficient way to load the minerals onto the freighters. So in 1791, Charles Rashleigh took it upon himself to build West Polmear a port. The man he engaged to design and construct it was lighthouse builder John Smeaton.

The key to the plans was a dock that would remain full of water when the tide went out. Cornish miners, who had made an extra penny working on Smeaton’s lighthouse, now did some moonlighting digging Smeaton’s new harbour. Lock gates were constructed and fitted to the inner dock. To keep the water within the lock topped up, a leat – a narrow, open waterway – was dug from the pleasant, wooded valley of the Par river, 7 miles away.

As he did for the Eddystone Light, Smeaton used local granite. A larger, outer tidal dock was created and protected by a breakwater. The new harbour served the export of copper, and when the copper mines ran dry, it was the turn of china clay. And the local pilchard fishermen rejoiced in having a safe and convenient quayside on which to land their catch. Shipbuilding and rope-making, as well as pilchard curing, all took advantage of the new facility, which finally opened in 1800.