David Burdett on Navigation

It started while I was there. In order to become …because Trinity House was funded by the ship owners. This was built up over the centuries providing a Light House was basically a business going back two or three hundred years. If you were wealthy enough you would get a licence from the government to build a Lighthouse. You would then charge the ships as they entered port. Any ship that had passed that Lighthouse was charged a fee, so it was a business, you build a Lighthouse and then got paid for providing the light.

But the ship owners were always saying, “Trinity House, you charge too much.” I mean, the ship owners were always trying to maximise their profit. So, Trinity House in trying to placate the ship owners said, “Well, we’ll see what we can automate” and the Americans had developed a large navigation buoy, the prefix is a land beam, not a prefix, an abbreviated title is a ‘land beam’.

They had designed it for the Gulf of Mexico which has different sea conditions to what we have here. Anyway, when I joined the first one was being tested at Portland and that was a start of the automation. I think they still have one or two land beams but the vibration to the land be….they were like a dish, like a saucer with a flat deck and this forty foot tower sticking up in the middle and a lot of electronic equipment inside, because not only did it operate the light and change generators automatically and change lamps if the lamp failed, it also was remote controlled by radio.

So, there was a lot of electronic equipment and the vibration quite often upset things and Mechanics were frequently being taken out there to jump on this forty-foot-wide dish to do the repairs and most of them were sea sick trying to do their job.

They’ve gone, now the Stations are converted Light Vessels. The Light Ships had served their purpose for hundreds of years and it made sense just to automate the Light Ship and take a crew off. So, it was another phase of the automation.