Edward Sandle on Navigation

Lisa: Was the location of the Station important? Why was it in the south part of the Isle of Wight?

It was very important because if you look at the map and look at St Catherine’s Point and it’s near St Catherine’s Point, it sticks out and Marconi for instance used that for signalling because he could communicate between there and Alum Bay and things like that so it was a very good geographical point, and also because ships coming up they passed that point, I mean St Catherine’s going up to London and anywhere else coming into the Channel and that’s why the Lloyd’s Base was there originally because when ships passed the Lloyd’s Signal Station, they’d communicate and then Lloyd’s Signal Station passes the signal to Lloyd’s in London and that’s how they … there was a newspaper called ‘Lloyd’s List’ which records all the movements of ships all over the World, and that’s how they gathered, in the old days, they gathered information from these sites. 

There was one at Gibraltar for instance, one at Niton, St Catherine’s they probably called it then I think, and that’s how they kept in touch with the ships in those days before they had radio.

We carried on that tradition in many ways because ships passing us used to communicate with us where they were going and we used to pass that information to our headquarters.