Secrets of the Eddystone Reef! - The Secret Life of Lighthouses

The Rock Lighthouse. One of the most heroic feats of engineering in maritime history. You're out there fighting the elements, you're fighting nature on the front line. Built to save the lives of thousands at sea. There was a lot of shipping lost. In the face of catastrophic storms. The day you turn your back on the sea is the day you're going to die. So how did they build them? I'm Rob Bell and I'm going behind closed doors to uncover staggering tales of innovation. Epic adventure. This is over 300 degrees, this lead I've got in here, right? And danger. To reveal the secrets of some of the most extraordinary structures ever built. This time, Britain's unluckiest lighthouse. It was just a disaster waiting to happen. Three towers smashed by the sea, consumed by fire and defeated by jagged rocks. How did one finally stand up to the waves when so many had failed? It's really heroic what those men did. This is a story of audacious engineering and geniuses who achieved the impossible. Fantastic. All in the midst of Britain's most unforgiving seas. The Eddiston Rock Lighthouse. The English Channel off Britain's southwest coast is a graveyard for thousands of shipwrecks. I'm following in the 300-year wake of two ships that set out through these waters in 1695. But neither would ever make it home. These merchant ships, the Snowdrop and the Constant, were to kick-start a chain of events that would save thousands of lives. But they'd pay for it on the area's deadliest hidden secret, the Eddiston Reef. This jagged reef of low-lying rocks rises straight up from the deep. And when these lethal arcs of spikes were all exposed at low tide, sailors have said they looked like crocodile's teeth. And that August, some 300 years ago, the Snowdrop took 60 crew members down with her. And just four months later, the Constant was also claimed by the Eddiston Rocks. An architect who's said to have had shares in these ships had an idea to put a stop to the endless losses on these treacherous rocks. He vowed to build a tower with a warning light on top of these rocks. Out here, nine miles from land. But not only a warning light, his tower would also be able to house people. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. He was talking about the world's first rock lighthouse. And what rocks they are. Being the entrance to Plymouth, the home of British maritime might, they were claiming countless ships, bringing supplies into port, heading out to explore the new world, or sailing into battle. Shipping was booming in the 1600s, but Plymouth's trade, livelihood and even the Royal Navy stood to be crippled by the Eddiston Rocks. The reef had to be tamed. The man who started it all in 1696 was Henry Wynne Stanley. But he wasn't a salty old sea dog, nor was he a calloused engineer. He'd made his name as a showman. A wealthy student of Sir Christopher Wren, he built a water attraction in London's Hyde Park. And he was known for having a particular fondness for playing flamboyant practical jokes. No wonder then, when he first proposed building an inhabitable tower way out at sea, people just laughed. Wynne Stanley would have been perceived as attempting the absolutely impossible. But he was also someone with a flair for wacky ideas, which I think is a very critical qualification for building rock lighthouses. So he had designed playing cards, he had opened a museum of moving robots, and he had to transplant the knowledge that had been gained through centuries of land-based architecture and somehow make it work on a wave-washed reef miles off the coast of Plymouth. By the 1600s, lighthouses had already been built all around the world, on land. The go-to construction material for strong, solid buildings of the age was masonry. Brick or stone held together with a lime mortar. Now, that combination works absolutely brilliantly on land, as many an historic building can testify. But at sea, lime mortar has a fatal weakness. Let me show you. Right then, I've come armed. Now just bear in mind, even if I get in really close to the wall, the water coming out of this high-pressure nozzle still won't match the kind of forces and pressures exerted by the waves crashing from an angry sea. Right, let's see what happens. Just look at that, it takes next to no time at all for this water to start blasting out, that lime mortar, from in between the bricks. Look at it go. It's almost too easy. There goes one. It's like scraping soft butter off of warm toast. Come on, this is going to go. Ah, yeah, and this one, look at that. The whole thing's coming down. You can see my point. If you were relying on traditional masonry like that, with lime mortar, to protect you against Mother Nature, her very angriest, I wouldn't fancy your chances. I have no doubt about the power of waves, the power of the sea, and it's a deadly environment. You cannot imagine the power that a wave has, the power of the weight of water. It really is incredible. It's something you have to be very wary of all the time. So what was Winstanley's solution to stand up to such mighty forces? He proposed building a tower comprised mainly of wood. The result was a bizarre creation, fit for the showman he was. In 1698, the light was lit on the world's first rock lighthouse. Standing 59 feet tall, it housed 60 candles behind glass panes to warn sailors away from Eddiston Reef and allow them safe passage into Plymouth Harbour. Winstanley built the first ever stone lighthouse, and it was very beautiful. It was made of timber, it was the perfect architectural construct, if I can put it so. It was a strange and fantastical thing. It had a circular stone base anchored firmly into the rock. He used 12 iron anchors to really root the tower, and then above that rose this really fascinating superstructure of octagonal rooms and then an open gallery above with the lantern at the very top. It was crazily decorated with ornamental ironwork and Latin inscriptions. There was a gilded bedchamber, which must have been amazing. This was a building that could only have been built at the time by this one man. Winstanley had succeeded in raising a light where none should be, and it was instantly successful at saving ships from Eddiston Reef. But in order to survive all year round against ferocious winter storms, an even stronger tower than the first was needed. Winstanley's second reinforced tower basked in glory for more than four years, but one night in 1703, a massive storm, the likes of which no one had ever seen before, was bearing down on Plymouth. The great storm of 1703 was the most destructive storm that Britain had known for centuries. Ships were shoved up estuaries, whole forests were felled. This was no ordinary storm. Winstanley, who was making repairs to his lighthouse as the storm set in, was about to have a long-standing wish granted, to be present in his tower during the greatest storm there ever was. At around midnight, onlookers from the shore reported seeing its candles being blotted out from view in the storm. The next day, the tower, its lighthouse keepers and Winstanley were all gone. So who would be next to attempt the seemingly impossible, and how would they do it? In the late 1600s, the sharp-toothed reef that was devastating Plymouth's shipping brought about the world's first rock lighthouse. Henry Winstanley's tower saved lives for five years, but in 1703 it was swallowed by the worst storm to hit Britain in centuries. Eddiston Reef was once again free to claim more victims. So far, the construction materials of 300 years ago had failed to produce a suitable solution. Masonry was great for building on land, but would be torn apart by the sea. Wood was excellent for building ships, but too weak for a tall tower. But then a man called John Rudyard had a new idea. What about a tower that was half building, half ship? Rudyard thought that if he could build a tower that was designed to bend when waves hit it, it could roll with the punches instead of being uprooted or smashed to bits. The bottom half of the tower was constructed with masonry, but sandwiched between layers of timber that would flex like a ship when waves hit it. John Rudyard's was everything that Winstanley's tower was not. It was a circular structure instead of octagonal at the top, and that gave the waves no hard edges or straight flat surfaces to handle their impact upon. That became a principle that was used in all subsequent lighthouses. The smooth, circular exterior was achieved by hiring boat builders to encase the whole tower in timber. It was more like a ship than a tower in the sense that it was formed of overlapping planks like a ship's hull, and was caulked with moss and tar to make it watertight. But like every good ship, it needed an anchor. Rudyard had to do better than Winstanley if his tower were to stay fixed to the rock. The foundations holding Winstanley's tower in place were iron rods that slotted down into holes chipped out of the rock. These rods were then set in position by pouring molten lead in the holes, which then solidified. But in the eye of that catastrophic storm, these were simply plucked out by the waves. Rudyard used the same principle of setting iron rods in the rock using lead, but added an ingenious twist. To illustrate what he did, I've come to a traditional forge at Mount Edgecombe in Cornwall. Here, a mould replicates X-shaped holes that Rudyard cut down into Eddiston Rock. It is the dovetail shape. It's that bowtie kind of thing that you see in woodwork. But it's great to see what the shape is underneath the rock, because I guess out on the rock here, you know, you didn't split it open. They'd have had to have done that from the top. Yep, drilled them out, ready for the lead to be poured in. The two halves of the mould are clamped together, while the lead to fill it is melted on the forge. Oh, it leaves you with a beautiful shimmering surface, doesn't it? Pretty, isn't it? The crucial difference with Rudyard's foundation rods is that they could be crossed tightly inside the rock to form an X. Now, I mean, this is over 300 degrees, this lead I've got in here, right? I'm all right walking on this relatively flat floor inside the forge here, but just think about out on Eddiston Rock. Slippery rocks walking around with this stuff. There we go. Nice and slow. It's covering our rods there. So we go to the top. All the way to the top, yeah? Yep, that's him. Perfect. How about that? That's it. There we go. Super stuff. And this design for our foundation rods here, with the dovetail-shaped cavity and the crossing rods within the rock, this is Rudyard's design for his lighthouse to improve on what Winstanley had, which were, I mean, a similar kind of thing, you know, the iron rods into the rock, but a difference in geometry and the difference that can make structurally when it came down to it. With the lead set around the rods, they form one solid X-shaped plug inside the rock. So can they be forced out? Let's see how strong these bars feel. Would you like a hammer? Yes. Please. Would I like a hammer? Of course I'd like a hammer. If I come across it. I mean, I'm bending the bar. Yep. You know, the plug's not the issue here at all. The plug isn't moving. That is rooted solidly into our rock here now. And these are the kind of forces that were difficult to protect against. Those transversal forces coming across. With these kind of foundations, at that angle, you'd be absolutely confident whatever you could connect onto here was going to be held down onto that rock. It's pretty clever, really, isn't it? I mean, it's a genius, because it's not a big difference from what Winstanley had done. It's just about the geometry and looking at it structurally. Yep. Using his impressive, and at the time, groundbreaking innovations, Rudyard's lighthouse was finished in 1709. Once more, ships had safe passage into Plymouth Harbour. Rudyard's tower was a resounding success. Ports and shipping routes around Britain were desperate to build their own. But that would come at a daunting price. It had taken a small army of skilled craftsmen three years to complete Rudyard's lighthouse, working in dangerous conditions. And the financial outlay was massive. Gambling almost two million pounds in today's money. But if Rudyard's tower stood for long enough, it could be a real money spinner. Since the time of Henry VIII, all lighthouses had permission to charge ships a fee for passing them. Once you had a lighthouse, you got lighthouse dues, so every ship that passed your lighthouse at the next port it docked at, your collector would be there and you would be charged, so that's where the revenue came from. Charging a penny per tonne, Rudyard's tower would eventually make £1,000 a year, a small fortune at the time. But after almost 50 years of success, his achievement was about to go up in smoke. It seems crazy to us now, but the lighthouse was lit by candles, and 60 of them burning simultaneously. And there was a dark and stormy night, and one of the candles had tipped and set fire to something. One of the three lighthouse keepers, Henry Hall, was 94 years old. I mean, it just seems he was doing very well to get up and about, let alone go up and down stairs of a lighthouse. So there's all three of them trying to bring buckets of water up. But it gets to a point where it starts to melt the lead that's casing the cupola, and the worst bit for Henry Hall was that he was looking up and went, and of course with his head back and his mouth wide open, this loop of lead sort of went down his throat. But eventually the fire becomes really devastating, and they decide to retreat to a bit of the rock outside until somebody comes to rescue them. Sadly, he died ten days later, and not of old age, but obviously of the lead in his gullet. On 2 December 1755, Rudyard's entire wood-encased tower was destroyed by the fire. So far, the battle to gain a foothold on Eddystone Rock stood at Mother Nature 3, man-made structures nil. But then a new contender stepped up to the challenge. In 1759, a gifted engineer named John Smeaton had an idea for a radical new shape with a daring choice of building materials. He wanted to build a tower completely in stone, and would neutralise the threats of the crashing waves by playing Mother Nature at her own game. This is something I'm quite looking forward to seeing that you've got here. Amazingly, Smeaton produced a book cataloguing the whole design and build of his lighthouse. How common is it for someone like John Smeaton to do something like this, to record all of the work and all of his findings and thoughts as he went through? In these days, engineering was a very primitive profession, and for a guy like Smeaton, who was fundamentally an instrument maker, he wasn't a civil engineer. And to record what he did meticulously was part of his nature. Now, this is a lovely page, because... That's right. Smeaton chose the English oak as his model, his inspiration, for something that could withstand the forces of nature over hundreds of years. So he deliberately modelled the shape of the tower on the shape of the oak tree. And so you see this very beautiful curvature up the outside of the tower. So the idea was that the waves would run up the tower and then be diverted away from the lantern at the top. So it was all about trying to disperse the energy, wasn't it? The energy in the water. Dispersing it away. To find its own course, rather than to bash sideways into the tower. It's so clever and inspired by nature. It's a very sensible shape, very effective. And it did, of course, produce the shape of lighthouses that we're all so used to. At Plymouth University, their 21st century wave tank can test how Smeaton's oak tree shape will stand up to the biggest waves in the future. A scale model is subjected to extreme waves, the likes of which are only seen once every 50 years. But even in these conditions, Smeaton's design effectively directs the force of the wave up and around the tower. To see this in the real world, they put cameras and sensors in the current Eddystone lighthouse. We're looking here at the four cameras that were on the Eddystone lighthouse. And we can see some footage of the wave run-up. And you'll see the waves coming in here and then moving up the tower. Some of these wave run-ups were sufficient to completely obscure the camera and they had a run-up of up to 40 metres. The most surprising thing they discovered was just how powerful the waves were that shook the sensors on the tower. Some of the maximum impacts were a fraction of a G and that's equivalent to perhaps a very strong earthquake. A classic oak tree curved lighthouse that was pioneered on the Eddystone rock over 250 years ago has been copied around the world again and again and again. But how did they manage to build a stone tower out at sea in the first place? Previous bold experiments in lighthouse building on the Eddystone reef had either been uprooted by the sea or burned to the ground. In 1759, John Smeaton created a new shape that let the waves slip around it. But attempting to construct this mainly from stone would introduce a whole new challenge. Smeaton had pioneered the tapering curves that were to become the classic lighthouse design. But previous experiments with masonry at sea had needed an extra layer of protection to stop the waves from getting in between the blocks and pulling them apart. So how did Smeaton's stone tower defeat Mother Nature? He came up with this notion of stonework that dovetailed, so it wasn't just mortar connecting them. It was very substantial bits of stonework that interlocked. What better place to illustrate Smeaton's game-changing stonework than a traditional mason's quarry near Bodmin Moor in Cornwall? I've got here some conventionally cut rectangular stone blocks or bricks, and they're not too dissimilar in shape to house bricks really. And they are very good at withstanding a vertical pressure, but they're not so good at withstanding horizontal forces. I can move these around quite easily here. There's nothing to stop them sliding around against each other. By the very nature of where lighthouses are built, they're subjected to some fairly extreme horizontal forces. We're talking gale force winds and waves crashing sideways into the lighthouse. The secret is not to cut rectangular blocks, but instead cut something a bit more like this. Like a large bow tie shape. It's a technique that's borrowed from woodworking. It's called dovetailing. When you look at this pattern laid out here, there's no single straight line in any one direction for very long. If I try and push along this here, you can see that it's very difficult. They don't want to move because there's no one plane, there's no one line for them to move and to shear alongside each other. That's the secret. It was all in the shape of the blocks. For Smeaton's stonework to stand up to the waves, he chose some of the hardest granite available. But for dovetailed stones to lock tightly together, they had to be cut with utmost precision. So how did stonemasons achieve such crisp lines over 200 years ago? At Birator Quarry, the masons still use traditional techniques. One of the best properties about granite is how hard it is. And that's great for when it's out in situ, but I'm assuming there's a kind of flip side of it. It makes it quite difficult to work, does it? It's hard to work, but if you've got the right gear, you can make it a bit easier for yourself. We were talking about tons and tons and tons of stone that went into building these lighthouses. Would all of that have been cut and shaped using hand tools at the time, I'm guessing? Yeah, nearly all of it. We've got a block here, Peter. Can you show me the kind of things that they might have been doing then? To start, to get the waste off. So we're going to try and get rid of this? Yep, we're going to get rid of that. So they would have done that on a three-ton stone. Wow. I'm quite surprised at how much comes off with one blow there. Look at that. I'm amazed at how that's come away. I mean, that's done fairly quickly, but we're on a smaller scale here to the kind of blocks they would have been using. They would have been days on one piece of stone. When construction of the tower began in 1756, the huge stones were taken by ship to the reef, manhandled into place. It took three years to cut, transport and place over a thousand stones on the remote and unforgiving site, constantly at the mercy of the sea. Can I have a go, just to see what it's like chiselling away at granite? Now it's quite sharp blows you were giving it with that hammer. Chris, you want to show it who's boss? Right, good. Let's just get a feel for this hammer before I start going anywhere near my hand with it. So I'll place that on there. Ah, I wimped it. That's all right. Let's go again. I wimped it with that hammer. There you go. All right. How's that? It comes away well. Right. Come on, you wimp. You can see it, can't you? I'm a little over the line there. That's all right. Not quite as sharp as the edge you created, Peter, but we're getting there. That's OK. We'll take you on as an apprentice. If it was a big block, a three-tonne block, which would be more than a cubic metre. Yeah. And you've got to take all that. God, the amount of work that went into that masonry was unbelievable. Unbelievable. And times thousands of blocks. You've got to have a lot of respect for them, haven't you? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. On the 16th of October, 1759, the light was lit on Smeaton's Tower. After over 60 years of trial and error, heroism and tragedy, Eddiston Reef had finally been claimed by an outstanding man-made structure. Smeaton had been the big breakthrough in lighthouse design, and all the others have followed on from him. The success of Smeaton's Tower can be measured by the number of rock lighthouses that sprang up around the British Isles throughout the 19th century, every one made to the same shape and design. All lighthouses are overseen by Trinity House, an authority set up by Henry VIII in 1514 that still operates today. This is the operations and planning centre for Trinity House in Harwich, and from here we monitor all the lighthouses and the major buoys around our coastline. Rock lighthouses are no longer manned, so this control room operates the 65 lighthouses in UK waters remotely. 95% of goods come into and out of the UK by ships, so it's really important to us as an island nation that shipping moves safely around our shores. The economy depends on it. Even though sophisticated GPS navigation is now common on even the smallest vessels, Trinity House still maintains and keeps the lighthouses going as a navigational aid. Lighthouses and all of our visual aids navigation are still really important today. The professional navigator is a little like a detective. They should use all available means to work out where they are and where they're going, and that their navigation is safe. So if satellite systems are not working correctly, and they're all vulnerable to either space weather or jamming or something similar, then actually our systems have to fall back to get them safely into port. Whenever you are in a boat on the water, you're at the mercy of the winds and the tides and the swell and the sea, and that puts you off position, and the most important thing on any passage is to know where you are, and the channel markers, navigation buoys, lighthouses, transit bearings from land, they're all vital to safe navigation. But back in 1877, after protecting mariners for well over a century, Smeaton's Tower came under threat. Smeaton's Tower wasn't to be the last structure to be built on Eddestone Rock. Mother Nature was about to find a way to reclaim the reef. But this time, it wasn't the tower that was at fault. It was the rock it was built on. In the latter part of the Victorian era, the Trinity House people had concerns about the reef itself, and they were worried that if the reef were to give way, that Smeaton's lighthouse might just fall into the sea, through no fault of its own, but through the rocks underneath. So they couldn't risk that, so they commissioned James Douglas to build a taller lighthouse on another part of the reef. In 1878, James Douglas began construction of the current Eddestone Lighthouse. Smeaton's Tower was supposed to be dismantled before it risked collapse, but as any passing boat can see today, it put up a hell of a fight. It is remarkable that the stump of Smeaton's original tower is still here, after more than 260 years. Ultimately, the lighthouse structure proved stronger than the rock upon which it was built. It's no wonder lighthouses like this have remained a mystery for so long. Built to shrug off the sea, they're impenetrable to us too. Just look at its smooth walls tapering out of reach, and the top is often quite literally in the clouds. Even the entrance door is way up above ground level, if you can call it ground level. Who can say they've never looked out at these stoic monoliths and not wondered what goes on inside those walls? Rock lighthouses are now sealed shut and unmanned, but there's one that still gives a glimpse of this secret other world, and I've been granted special access to explore it for myself. Oh, this is brilliant to see! Now that Britain's rock lighthouses are automated, the keepers are long gone. Inaccessible at the best of times, it now seems impossible to see for ourselves how those brave men lived and worked inside these fortress-like structures, except at Plymouth Hoe. Here, the dovetailed stones that the Victorians recovered from Smeaton's Tower could be slotted back together so it stood proud again. Restoration expert Jason Hull has been charged with refurbishing it over the winter. This isn't exactly how I'd hoped to come and see Smeaton's Tower, because it's an iconic part of Plymouth skyline, really, isn't it? It's basically Plymouth. When you talk about Plymouth, you talk about Smeaton's Tower. You know, that's it. So what exactly is the work that you've got going on here at the moment? We're just doing a basic spruce top, giving it a refurb, basically. And structurally, how is it? Is there anything that needed doing structurally? It's absolutely solid. Is it, really? When you consider where it's located and the amount of weather it gets. When we put the scaffold up, we looked under the dome, and to be honest, it's in perfect condition. Properly built to last. Yeah, exactly. It's quite tight up through there, Jason. Look at this here. Yeah, you can see where it's worn. Look how that's worn. There's a number of people come up through here. Oh, right then. I wasn't expecting masses of space inside, but it's really poky, and you get that feel all the way coming up, don't you, as well? Yeah, claustrophobic, isn't it? So whereabouts are we here? We're a couple of floors up. This is the second storage area. Yeah, OK. The thing you notice about all the furniture in here, it's all rounded. Yeah. So it's all been designed and built to fit into the round space that you've got here. All right. So here, Rob, we have the kitchen. Fairly basic. You've got the wood burner, you've got a basic sink. You have to think that the keepers were out at sea for weeks at a time. Months, I think, yeah. But they'd have to take everything they needed with them. All the provisions. All the provisions for fuel, food, water. Yeah, everything, cooking, you know, everything. Because once the boat had left, I suppose... That could be it for weeks, possibly months, before anyone could come and see you again. But it must have been an anxious time out there. I would have thought so. I think it took a certain calibre of person to come out here and be a lighthouse keeper, I think. Keepers were different. Other lighthouse keepers, when they got onto the lighthouse, that was their own little world. It was like living in a vertical submarine. Personal hygiene was just sort of... Well, I did. I got a bucket of salt water out of the sea and poured it over my head. I'll tell you what, Jackson, you wouldn't want to be too much taller... Well, I think you're taller than I am, even. So we're still in living quarters here. Oh, here we go. It says it on the wall. We're in the bedroom. And these cabinets, are these...? They slide. These are the beds? These are the actual beds, yeah. You wouldn't be able to stretch out. There's no starfishing in a big bed here. No, you just literally snuggle up, I think. Can I try and...? I'm sure there's a technique to this. I won't be mastering it on the first go. Oh, yeah. Actually, I'll take that back. I bet it's quite cosy in there. That's all right. I can't... I can fully stretch out. It's a little bit coffin-like, but we'll give it a shot. Night-night. Oh, wow. No problem with being awoken by the sunrise in here. The only privacy you had was in bed, and a curtain you drew along to separate you from the other people in the bedroom. It was so small that when you did get out of bed to dress yourself, I personally, myself, had to open the door to put my hand out the door to get the jumper on and then turn round and do the same thing again. Oh, yes. This is the lantern, yeah. Oh, this is brilliant to see. Oh, this is fantastic. This is the highest point of the tower. This is where all the action would be with the lighting. So this... Is this the... These rings were for the candles? Yeah, for the candles, yeah. Candelabras. So, obviously, the lighthouse keeper would light the candles every night? He'd be lighting them, replacing them, checking them, making sure they were still lit. And that's a job, isn't it? Big responsibility on your shoulders being out there, I should imagine, keeping those candles burning. The lighthouse has got a place in every sailor's heart, and when you're coming home, there's nothing nicer than seeing the lamp fall and the light looking at you. You can check your position, you can take bearings off it. Beautiful. Mariners have been guided by a light coming from this one tower night after night for over 130 years. And it's good for at least another 50 years, even with rising sea levels. But it wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for the astonishingly bold and groundbreaking innovations of its predecessors out here on Eddestone Rock. These structures had to withstand the hardest possible weather. They had to keep safe the men who stoically lived and worked inside them. The fact that these towers are still surviving is truly remarkable and a real testament to the skill of their builders. What is extraordinary about all these people is that it's really heroic what those men did. It truly stands on the shoulders of giants. The lights of Eddestone Rock have not just inspired countless copies around the world, they've given us one of the most iconic monuments to human endeavour, the Rock Lighthouse.