Jim Roberts on Saving Lives at Sea

There was three Keepers I think at St Catherine’s, the Principle Keeper and two Keepers and they did a night watch.

So, there was one on duty every night and they had various tasks to perform during the night but their main thing, probably was that the lighting-up at sunset and shutting down at sunrise.

And they always used to go through a … quite a routine of cleaning in the mornings and you know the whole lot would be cleaned every day.

And that includes all the mirrors, the windows on the outside and things like that. 

They also had to be aware of what the visibility was because in those days a lot of Lighthouses had foghorns and it was up to them to decide when visibility … I think our criteria was always one mile. I think the Trinity House had a similar criteria.

When visibility dropped down to that distance then the fog horn was sounded much to the dismay of all the local residents, it would continue to blast at least once a minute, for a large number of hours. I mean, although I heard the fog horn at St Catherine’s, living in Bembridge we had the same thing on the Nab Tower lighthouse.

Now that was quite intrusive and that carries five miles away, but you could hear when it started up and one rather long blast once every minute.