A real-life light­house keep­er breaks down The Lighthouse

I was in the navy for nine years, and between 1969 – 71 I was post­ed out in the Far East. One time in Penang we went ashore for the night, and as we were going back on board we passed a light­house. There was a bloke in there hang­ing up cur­tains in the lantern – you do that so the sun­light doesn’t come in and dam­age the equip­ment dur­ing the day – and I thought, ​‘What a steady lit­tle job he’s got there.’ A few weeks lat­er we were com­ing out of Hong Kong and passed a lit­tle island and there was a light­house on there, and the fog sig­nal was grunt­ing away just as it does in the film. That real­ly made an impact on me. When I got home I came out of the navy and applied for a job as a light­house keeper.

In 25-and-a-half years I was post­ed to 32 dif­fer­ent loca­tions around Britain, dif­fer­ent light­hous­es. Blink­ing bril­liant it was. To begin with you did two months on, then you got a month off; then it became month on, month off. So you were get­ting six months hol­i­day a year. And if you got the right sort of post­ing it was great, because a lot of the light­hous­es were out on islands like Bard­sey, which is at the end of the Llŷn Penin­su­la, and if you’re off-duty you can walk around the island. The best one for me was South Stack in Holy­head: we called it the Holy­head Hilton, you had your own bed­room and everything.

Then there was the Smalls Light­house, which is 25 miles off the coat of Pem­brokeshire in Wales. In the ear­ly 1800s there were two keep­ers on the pre­vi­ous light­house, which was a struc­ture on wood­en posts – the remains of it are still there – and one of them died. So the oth­er hung the corpse out on the gallery rail, but nobody got to him for ages. He’d gone out of his skull by the time they res­cued him. You’d hear these old sea sto­ries from time to time. Anoth­er was South Bish­op, again off the Pem­brokeshire coast. In the ​’60s there was a keep­er there who was gath­er­ing some old wire, and a bit of it took off over the cliff – it had wrapped around his leg, so away he went. They nev­er did find him.

There’s a lot of things in the film that are rel­e­vant to my expe­ri­ences. One bloke over on Amble Pier Light­house off the North East coast – ​“Fat Fred” we called him – he had a piss pot in his bed­room and the dirty bug­ger wouldn’t emp­ty it on a reg­u­lar basis. You’d hold your nose when­ev­er you had to go and fetch him. And blokes on the Smalls were famous for mak­ing their own hooch, muck­ing about with pota­toes try­ing to make vodka.

But the film doesn’t get every­thing right. When the two fel­las first come ashore and they pass the out­go­ing keep­ers, there’s no way you’d get keep­ers not acknowl­edg­ing each oth­er like that. They’ve got infor­ma­tion to pass over, and they’d also be land­ing with coal and oil and all sorts of things. And, even though it’s set in the 1890s, so it’s hard to say how things might have been, no light­house author­i­ty would let a sta­tion be in such shit order as that. A lot of the keep­ers would be ex-sea­far­ers, they’d be very tidy, metic­u­lous peo­ple. The engine was unre­al­is­tic, too: if you had a big coal-fired engine like that for run­ning the fog sig­nal, you’d need three men work­ing shifts to keep that going for sev­er­al days at a time.

Of course, you have to allow for some artis­tic license, and a lot of it added some­thing to the film. I thought the uni­forms were bril­liant, and the black-and-white mono­chrome was a fan­tas­tic idea – far more dra­mat­ic than colour. Also the actors them­selves, the two keep­ers, they real­ly under­stood the char­ac­ter­is­tics and psy­chol­o­gy of being a light­house keep­er, espe­cial­ly the iso­la­tion. And when they get on to the booze and start going a bit sil­ly, that was very convincing.

I thought the cam­er­a­work was fan­tas­tic, the close-ups of their faces and how it cre­at­ed the atmos­pher­ic feel of these dingy rooms. And then there’s the inci­dents with the seag­ull. I remem­ber this one keep­er who came back one day and a gull had drawn blood div­ing at him. Scoured his scalp. Oth­er birds like terns could be nasty, but seag­ulls would dive-bomb you and crap on you and all sorts. But we used to col­lect seag­ulls’ eggs and make omelettes. They were a bit of a delicacy.

I’d def­i­nite­ly give the film a high score, prob­a­bly five out of five. The sto­ry­line is okay, but the act­ing and the pho­tog­ra­phy, that’ll always be with me. If you’re inter­est­ed in psy­chol­o­gy, the work­ings of the human mind, it’s just bril­liant. I was so relieved it wasn’t a Hollywood‑y sort of thing where you’ve got zom­bies com­ing out the ground and so on. Because you’d see peo­ple with cab­in fever hal­lu­ci­nat­ing and imag­in­ing all sorts of things. I knew blokes who went a bit psy­cho, or they used to play mind games. You had to watch how you han­dled them.

The Light­house is in cin­e­mas now. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.