Peter Hedley on Navigation

Lisa: You mentioned about working for Trinity House. Where were you based when you worked for Trinity House?

At Tower Hill in London, um, Trinity House’s Main Headquarters is at Tower Hill and I was one of 11 in the Surveyor’s Department. We used to go off to the various yards and dry dock the ships and write the specifications and see them right through their overhaul periods. That was very interesting.

I did that for 15, 16 years and then I moved to the Engineering Department who dealt with the Light Vessels, the buoy systems, the Lighthouses and that was another change of career almost. I only dealt with the Light Vessels in as much as when we were solarising the … that was putting solar panels on them, taking crews off and automating them, I was involved with the engineers down here in Cowes when we put all the electronics side of it in.

And all those ships, eventually we took all the five members of crew on each of those ships and we had what, about 30 Light Vessels then, so it was a tremendous automation time and unfortunately a lot of lost jobs to the people who were on board.

Similarly, we were cutting back. We had nine Tenders, that was the ships, when I first joined, and we finished up with just four who seemed to manage to do the work, but it was cutting back all the time.

One of my last jobs I did was automating the buoy system. We took all the gas systems out and put solar systems on and hence that cut down on the requirement for the ships to go and service the buoys etc. and they were all electrified with the solar system.

I also then went round to several of the Lighthouses, automating the Lighthouses. One of the nicest ones was in Sark, I automated that one. Also, on various islands off the Welsh coast and you know, these were places where you could only go if you worked for Trinity House because they had just a little Lighthouse on this island to guide the ships in and out, but Trinity House was, without a doubt, cutting back.

When I first joined I’d guess there were about two and a half thousand people employed by them and now it’s all run from Harwich push button and I think there’s only about 300 people employed doing that so over a 30-year period that I worked for them, that’s how things had changed.