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Much of the work to improve lighthouse illumination in Britain was conducted under the watchful eye of Trinity House. The Corporation of Trinity House was not a part of nor never has been part of any government department. It has always had a unique relationship with Crown and State. During the centuries since the fraternity was founded this relationship has been redefined a number of times, but in spite of many pressures Trinity House has remained fiercely independent of fiscal and political pressure. Unlike almost every other country in the world, the UK taxpayer does not contribute to the cost of the aids to navigation around the coast. Trinity House and its fellow members of the UK General Lighthouse Authority, the Northern Lighthouse Board and Commissioners for Irish Lights, are funded by the imposition of light dues on ships arriving in British waters or working on the coasts.

The founding of Trinity House is almost lost in the mists of time but it is thought that a charitable guild for seamen existed in the 12th century, established by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who is better known for his role in forcing King John to sign the Magna Carta. In Hull, a guild was founded in 1369 for the care of sick or needy seamen, and from 1456 a building existed known as their Trinity House. In Newcastle again we find a Trinity House, whose Brethren, from the earliest times, were concerned with the welfare of the seafarer. From 5 October 1536, when it received its first Royal Charter from King Henry VIII, it was allowed to levy dues on ships arriving in the River Tyne, four pence (£5.82 in today’s money) for all foreign ships and two pence (£2.91) for every English ship. This revenue was used for the building of two light towers at the entrance to the River Tyne. One interesting piece of evidence is two graves of ‘Trinity Brethren’ in Leigh-on-Sea Church in Essex, one recorded ‘Richard Haddock, died 1453’, and the other ‘Robert Salmon, died 1471’ – evidently fishing was an important occupation in the district! Both were thought to have been pilots for the Thames estuary. While the Trinity Houses at other ports now exist as local charities, Trinity House, London grew in stature to become the arbiter for pilotage and navigation aids throughout Britain and its colonies. It can certainly trace its formation to the time of Henry VIII who, when not busy with his extensive matrimonial affairs, took time to formalize the English Navy and the pilotage and shipmaster guilds in the major English ports.

In 1514, Henry granted a charter to the Trinity House of Deptford Strond, ‘so that they might regulate the pilotage of ships in the King’s streams’ and provided for a Master, Wardens and Assistants known as Elder Brethren to do so. When chartered, this charitable guild owned a great hall and almshouses, close to the Naval Dockyard at Deptford on the River Thames. Henry also gave them the grandiose title ‘The Guild, Fraternity, or Brotherhood of the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity and of Saint Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond’. As Samuel Pepys commented much later, ‘Why the name of Trinity House is given to those societies of mariners hath been wondered at by many and indeed the name hath given occasion to sundry profane jests in common discourse and even in Parliament.’

Henry chartered the shipmaster guilds in London and other ports to ensure that pilotage was a controlled monopoly, a fact that was to inhibit the building of lighthouses for centuries. Successive monarchs increased the powers of Trinity House. Elizabeth I increased their responsibility for providing beacons with her Seamarks Act of 1566, giving powers to set up ‘So many beacons, marks and signs for the sea … whereby the dangers may be avoided and escaped and ships the better come into their ports without peril.’ Unfortunately no funds were available, and little was done to provide any form of aid to navigation until 1594, when the Lord High Admiral of England surrendered his rights to the sale of dredged ballast to sailing vessels at London. These rights passed to Trinity House, which was then able to dredge stones from the bed of the River Thames and sell it as ballast. This was a very profitable enterprise right up to 1893, by which time water ballast had become the norm with the advent of steamships and iron hulls.

In 1604, James I conferred on Trinity House rights concerning compulsory pilotage of shipping and the exclusive right to license pilots in the River Thames. He issued orders that directed the Corporation to erect lighthouses at Lowestoft and Caister on the East Anglian coast to attempt to prevent the annual loss of ships and seamen on this low lying coast with its treacherous offshore sandbanks. He also allowed the levying of a tax on all ships sailing from east-coast ports to London at the rate of 12 pence (£6.06 in today’s money) per 100 tons, the monies to be collected by customs officers. In 1609, all colliers leaving Newcastle–on–Tyne and bound for London had to pay four pence (£2.20) for each voyage. This established the precedent of light dues that remains almost unchanged to this day. In spite of this revenue Trinity House did not rush into providing seamarks. Most of its revenue was preserved for paying out pensions to retired seamen and the Elder Brethren often came in for criticism for not prioritizing its role as protector of the British coastline. Some beacons and buoys were provided on the east coast, but the Elder Brethren declined to mark the Goodwin Sands between the English and French coasts, as they said that such seamarks would result in shipmasters declining to take pilots on board. Samual Pepys, who was Master of Trinity House, supported their views and advised the Crown against the erection of lighthouses on the grounds that they were a burden on trade! Nevertheless, Trinity House erected new lighthouses at Lowestoft in 1609 and later at St Agnes, Isles of Scilly, and continued buoy and beacon placing on the east coast and its major estuary ports.

With the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the subject of building lighthouses came to the fore. Trinity House was still reluctant to spend money on them, but King Charles saw them as a way of repaying debts to his supporters. He determined to grant patents to individuals to build private lighthouses, giving them the right to levy light dues on passing vessels. Each potential lighthouse builder submitted his lighthouse plans to the king, who then consulted Trinity House about the advisablility of that particular site. If they agreed, a Crown patent was issued and Trinity House entered into a 101-year lease with the private light owner. It was a system that allowed the building of lighthouses around the coasts of England and Wales without any financial risk to Trinity House. Its decentralized organization was workable when there were only a few lighthouses in commission, but by the early 19th century when Britain had more than 60 lighthouses – more than any other country – it led to in-fighting between the competing interests of private owners and the authorities. It also contributed to Trinity House failing to respond decisively when the French lighthouse authority began its programme of replacing its old apparatus with lenses in the 1820s.

The St Ann’s Head lighthouse on the south-west coast of Wales serves as an example of a private light. There had been beacon fires of some sort or another on this windswept headland at the entrance to Milford Haven since medieval times. In 1661, Charles II gave three privateers – John Man, Jon Morice and Isaac Morgan – the rights to the Dale peninsular, on which St Ann’s Head is situated, as reward for their services to him. A year later they applied for a patent to build and operate a lighthouse on the point of the headland. Trinity House agreed with the siting and a simple lighthouse was quickly erected. King Charles had stipulated that the three men could levy ‘one penny a ton laden’ (47 pence in today’s money) from English ships and two pence per ton from foreign vessels, the dues to be collected only on a ‘voluntary’ basis. After a year had gone by the partnership found a general reluctance among ship masters to volunteer their dues, so they resorted to bullying local merchants and sending out armed boats to intercept passing ships. While these bully tactics worked, word soon reached the court of this ‘illegal taxing of the King’s subjects’. The three ‘pirates’were brought to court where the patent was revoked and orders to extinguish the light were given, though its value to shipping was undisputed.

Though shipping losses increased in the years that the headland was unlit it was 40 years before any action was taken. This changed in 1712 when the rights to the Dale peninsular became part of John Allen’s estate. He petitioned Trinity House who applied to Queen Anne for a patent to operate the much needed light. This was granted on 21 May 1713, allowing John Allen to ‘compulsorily’ raise dues at the rate of ‘one penny a ton laden’ from English ships and two pence per ton from foreign vessels. The dues were to be collected by customs officers. John Allen was required to pay for the erection of two towers with all necessary lights, maintain them and pay £10 (£1,195 in today’s money) per year to Trinity House. In June 1714, the towers with coal lights were lit and could only be said to provide a basic navigational reference point. Regular complaints were sent to Trinity House, who in turn tried to get Allen to improve his lights. There were some years of complicated negotiation between the Elder Brethren and Allen’s lawyers to sort out some problems with the terms of the lease and to secure an Act of Parliament to enable a change from coal to oil lights. At one stage Trinity House even looked at managing the lighthouses themelves and paying Allen a rental, but for financial reasons changed their mind.

Eventually an agreement was reached in November 1796 that Trinity House would loan David Allen (who had succeeded his father) £2,000 (£150,000 in today’s money) to build two new towers and fit them with Wilkins lanterns, complete with Argand lamps and reflectors. The new lighthouses were built and the oil lamps lit in May 1800. This scenario was repeated at many private lights the reliability of which also left much to be desired. This state of affairs lasted until 1836 when an Act of Parliament gave Trinity House the power to purchase all private lights in England, Wales and the Channel Islands and place them under their management. The previous owners were compensated on the basis of their receipts from light dues. Allen had unfortunately given up his lease in 1812 when it expired, ‘without a penny compensation from the Corporation’.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, any lighthouse built on the British coast needed the sanction of Trinity House whether it was a private or port light. In Scotland, after Trinity House had sanctioned the first four lighthouses, the Northern Lighthouse Board was formed in 1786 to supervise and operate them. Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh maker of reflectors, was appointed the first Engineer. This dual role of Commissioner’s employee and businessman was later to get Smith’s successor Robert Stevenson into hot water with the eminent scientist and inventor, Sir David Brewster (see Prologue), who claimed Stevenson’s preference for reflectors over lenses was due to his vested interest in the former. Stevenson denied any conflict of interest, though he admitted in the 1836 Parliamentary Standing Committee hearings that his family did, indeed, have interests in reflector making. It was left to his son Alan, later also the Engineer to the Commissioners of Northern Lights, to rid the family of this stain on its character, when he began to use lenses instead of reflectors in the mid-1830s, at about the time the Standing Committee reported its findings.

In Ireland, the growth of a lighthouse authority can be traced back to a commission appointed by Queen Anne in 1704, though this commission did not have a remit for the whole of Ireland but only for certain lighthouses. The present Commissioners for Irish Lights, which now supervises the lights of the whole Irish coastline, traces its lineage from 1806 when the Ballast Board of Dublin was given jurisdiction over the lights of Ireland. When the 1836 Act was going through the British Parliament the sponsor, John Hume MP, intended that Trinity House be made the central lighthouse organization, but Irish and Scottish MPs were unwilling to see their national boards replaced by an ‘inferior’ English one so the status quo remained. That some commentators regarded Trinity House as inferior was a major bone of contention that led to a wholesale review of the British lighthouse system, with the appointment of a Royal Commission in 1858. It is also an indication that, by then, Trinity House had lost some of its credibility built up over centuries.

The Elder Brethren at Trinity House began to take an interest in lighthouse illumination from the 1770s. The first printed account of the topic is found in William Hutchinson’s Treatise of Practical Seamanship, published in 1777. Hutchinson understood the science of parabolic reflection, which was beginning to be used in some of the French lighthouses. He advocated circular lanterns for lighthouses with large plate-glass windows and narrow vertical bars so as not to obstruct the light. He urged that ‘no pains or expense should be spared to make lighthouses as perfect as possible’. In August 1777, Trinity House made its first foray into improved methods of illumination when it ordered a bizarre apparatus for their Lowestoft lighthouse and put out word that ‘the opinions of persons concerned in navigation be collected’. They discontinued the coal fire and fitted in its place a glass lantern 7ft (2.1m) high by 6ft (1.8m) in diameter, within which was a cylinder covered with 4,000 small mirrors reflecting the light from 126 oil lamps set around the perimeter. But it was totally impractical – there were too many lamps to look after and the sparkling light was dissipated in all directions. In 1787, after visiting the French coast to inspect the new lighthouses using Argand lamps and reflectors, Trinity House erected a temporary beacon at Blackheath in London, and a year later a powerful array was installed at the Portland lighthouse. It was at Portland that the first experiments were made with lenses to direct the light beam, leading to what eventually became the standard technology in lighthouse illumination.

Between 1789 and 1820, Trinity House began a programme of fitting most of its lights as well as privately owned lights with Argand lamps and reflectors, and by the end of this period the south and south-east coasts of England were the best lit in the world. D Alan Stevenson, in his book The World’s Lighthouses from Ancient Times to 1820, hazards a guess that in 1819 there were 254 lighthouses installed throughout the world, up from around 34 in 1600, 66 in 1700 and 175 in 1800. Of these the largest number, 50, were found in the United States, while England with 37 was second. Sweden had 12, France 17, Scotland 15, Ireland 17 and the rest of the world 106. The illuminants varied from open wood and coal fires to the most powerful then available, the Argand-reflector combination, which predominated in Britain. Stevenson estimated that 165 of the 254 lighthouses in 1819 had optical apparatus for concentrating the light, of which 103 were parabolic reflectors, 50 lenses and reflectors (mostly poorly performing Lewis lenses of which more later) and 12 spherical reflectors. Thus, by 1820, Britain could claim with justification not only that she had the most lighthouses but also that they were the most modern and powerful. Trinity House was a respected organization and the Elder Brethren had been quick to investigate new methods and equipment as they appeared. That they did so without the advice of men of science did not matter unduly at a time when most inventions were fairly simple to understand and make. But this situation was to change radically when Augustin Fresnel invented his dioptric lens, and the French undertook a massive lighthouse-construction programme in the 1820s using the new technology, leaving Britain and the rest of the world behind in her wake.