A large and attentive audience came to hear David Collin share his knowledge of some aspects of life and death on Little Ross Island based on his extensive research over many years; his talk followed the Stewartry U3A AGM held on Tuesday 22 November.
The island’s benign aspect facing into Kirkcudbright Bay provides a safe anchorage, but gives no clue to the forbidding and dangerous southern side which has cost the lives of many sailors over the centuries. A long campaign was waged beginning in 1792, when Robert Muter proposed a lighthouse be built at public expense as Little Ross provided the best harbour in the area, provided the narrow entrance could be navigated safely. A further call was made by Nicholas Carlisle in 1813, again to no avail.
James Skelly took a more proactive approach, living on the island in 1819 to supervise the building of two beacon towers to guide ships through the narrow channel. The beacons were unlit so only of use in daylight and good visibility. Shipwrecks continued at a steady pace as it was a busy seaway and navigation methods basic. In 1822 five ships were wrecked in one storm with a great loss of life.
Following Skelly’s death, his nephew John C Mackenzie took up the cause, which had a lot of prominent backers. However, it was opposed by Joseph Hume MP, who wanted to cut spending and felt lighthouses were a waste of money, and the leading lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson doubted the value of the site believing the channel was dry at low tide, and that another site would provide a better anchorage. In time it was proved that Hume was wrong, the Northern Lighthouse Board was well run and effective, and in 1838 the Admiralty commissioned a survey which proved the anchorage had a depth of 3.5 fathoms and was therefore viable.
The Stevenson family, Robert and son Alan, were asked to design a lighthouse. They were responsible for 10 others in Scotland between 1821 and 1833 and used basically the same design for the tower; it is an elegant building. They also designed two small houses for the keeper and the assistant keeper and their families and a range of byers, a pig sty and a forge for their use. They each had a garden too. Following a tender process, Robert Hume of Gatehouse secured the contract to do the work which began in 1841. Thomas Stevenson, a young man of 23, was to supervise the work but he received little guidance from his father and there were a number of disputes. It is clear from his letters that he had a difficult time living on the island, but the work was completed on time.
The lighthouse went into service on 1 January 1843, with an experience keeper, Thomas Ritson in charge. 61 keepers, plus reliefs, minded the light between then and 1960. Some of their families were, as was the norm at the time, large and at one time there were 14 people living in these two tiny cottages. It was a life of isolation and they needed to be resilient and self sufficient; the keepers’ diaries were surprisingly uneventful! Highlights included a visit by the Minister to baptize a baby, and of a doctor to take out a tooth.
Some of the children themselves became lighthouse keepers. Joseph Dick went to Japan with Richard Brunton in the 1860s to set up a lighthouse there, and died there in 1914. Whereas Robert Burnett emigrated to America and became a very successful farmer.
In the 1920s Margaret Stitt often visited the island when her father brought supplies, in due course romance bloomed with the keeper Peter Gow, they married and made Little Ross their first home.
In 1944 Charles Gifford alerted the lifeboat when he saw a schooner adrift and apparently unmanned, the boat was wrecked but the crew saved thanks to his intervention.
The most infamous event in the history of the lighthouse station also marked the end of resident lighthouse keepers on the island. Our speaker visited the island with his father on 18th August 1960 to discover the relief keeper dead in his bed with a head injury. The assistant keeper Robert Dickson had shot him as he slept. Dickson had twice been certified insane, yet the judge at his trial condemned him to death; he was reprieved 5 days before the penalty was to be imposed only for him to take his own life two years later.
A representative of the Northern Lighthouse Board arrived at Little Ross on the same day as the murder, by coincidence he had come to inform the keepers that the light was to be automated. The light was then gas fired, with Norman Parker the last boatman to replace the cylinders until solar power was installed in 2005.
The houses and associated buildings fell into decay, the roofs were removed from the outbuildings for ‘safety reasons’, until the cottages were restored and modernised in recent years.