What's in a name?

As I mentioned back in "The Case of the Missing Letterbox", we live on an unnamed road. It's a narrow lane that runs up the hill from Boundary Road to the Lighthouse and Observatory on Bidston Hill.

But we can change that! As long as all the residents and owners agree on the new name, and we pay for the road signs, we can give our road a name. So, what should we call it?

We could name the road after one of the historic buildings to which it leads.

There's been a lighthouse on the site since the 1771, when the first Bidston Lighthouse was built, further from the sea than any other lighthouse in Britain. This was after the Lower Sea Light at Mockbeggar Wharf had been destroyed by storms. The Upper Sea Light (the present Leasowe Lighthouse) became the Lower  Sea Light, and Bidston Lighthouse became the Upper Sea Light. It featured a massive parabolic reflector, 13'6" in diameter, developed on-site by William Hutchinson, which enabled the light to be seen at a distance of 21 miles. The present Bidston Lighthouse was built by Mersey Docks and Harbour Board in 1873, after the original lighthouse was damaged by fire and demolished. Lighthouse Lane might be a good name for our road.

The Observatory was built in 1866, when the Liverpool Observatory relocated to Bidston Hill from what is now Waterloo Dock. It's had many uses over the years, including chronometer calibration, tide prediction, meterological observations, signalling the firing of the One O'Clock Gun at Morpeth Dock, and offices for oceanographic research. The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory was based here until 2004, when it relocated to the University of Liverpool. But it would be confusing to name the road after the Observatory, because there's already an Observatory Road nearby.

Braehead Cottage used to sell teas. It was located outside the boundary wall that surrounds the Observatory and Lighthouse, near to the old coach house. It fell into disrepair after the war, and was demolished.

The Bidston Signals were once a prominent feature along the skyline of Bidston Hill. More than 100 flagpoles along the ridge of Bidston Hill signalled the approach of ships into Liverpool, allowing the merchants time to ready their crews for unloading. The signals service was augmented by a semaphore based telegraph system that connected Anglesey to Liverpool. The original Signals Station predated the first lighthouse. In 1873, the signals function was incorporated into the new lighthouse. Signals Road? Semaphore Lane? Too obscure, perhaps?

Or we could name the road after a historical person.

Richard Wilding was the first lighthouse keeper of Bidston Lighthouse, having served previously at Leasowe. When he died in 1797, his wife, Elizabeth took over as keeper, and served until 1800. Elizabeth Wilding was Liverpool's first female lighthouse keeper. She got the job on the strict condition that "she shall continue to behave properly ... and shall not attempt to employ or use the said Building called the Bidston Lighthouse or any of its Appendages as a Publick House". Wilding Way has a certain ring to it.

Dr. Arthur Thomas Doodson (31 Mar 1890 - 10 Jan 1968) was a British oceanographer. He was Associate Director of the Liverpool Observatory and Tidal Institute when it formed in 1929. He is perhaps best known for the Doodson-Légé Tide Predicting Machine, the mechanical computer that was used to predict the tides for the D-Day landings. He lived and worked for a time at Bidston Observatory, and is buried in Flaybrick Cemetery. Mary Connell remembers him fondly. At Christmas he gave presents to the two Connell girls who lived in the Lighthouse Cottages, saying "here's two-and-six for you and half-a-crown for you". Mary was convinced that she was somehow missing out.  Doodson Drive or Doodson Lane might be good names for our road.

Joseph Proudman (30 Dec 1888 – 26 Jun 1975), CBE, FRS, was Honorary Director of the University of Liverpool Tidal Institute. The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory and the Joseph Proudman Building were named after him. At the moment, there is some controversy about the future of the Joseph Proudman Building. A vocal few want it turned into a drumming school and Grade-II listed. We think it is an eyesore and should be demolished.  But while this is going on, there's no way we'll name our road after Joseph Proudman.

What do you think we should call our road?

Make your suggestion by commenting on this post.

Or click here to take the survey!

Jubilee

Thanks to the efforts of the fearless Dave Parsons, one of only two Flagpole Engineers in the country, the flagpole atop Bidston Lighthouse is back in service.

Yesterday, I hoisted the Union Flag to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

No beacons were lit on Bidston Hill this Jubilee. But a few of us did gather on top of the Lighthouse to watch the lighting of beacons across the region. We saw beacons as far afield as Mount Snowdon and Scafell!

If you go down to the woods today...

On Saturday afternoon, the body of a teenage girl was found in the woods on Bidston Hill. Police have cordoned off a large area of the hill, including parts of the woods between Penny-a-day Dyke and Eleanor Road, the Witches' Steps, and the nearby Observatory, Lighthouse, and Joseph Proudman Building. Here's a bird's eye view of the police presence by the Observatory and Lighthouse.

The news is still breaking in the press. You can find a little information, some dis-information and much speculation there.

Contrary to press reports, the Observatory is not abandoned. The Observatory and the Joseph Proudman Building are occupied by live-in guardians, an arrangement which is working well. The Lighthouse and Cottages are occupied by their owners.

As the investigation is still on-going, I shall refrain from saying any more for the moment.

Our thoughts are with the family of the deceased.

Beacons on Bidston Hill

I recently acquired an old wages bill from 1805, which begins:

“Account of wages of three Men employed in the charge of taking care of the Alarm Beacon at Bidston Lighthouse in the County of Chester from the 1^st to the 31^st of May 1805, boath days Inclusive.”

The three men were William Urmson, Richard Urmson & William Corfe. They were paid 2 shillings per day each, and shared a fuel allowance of 9 pence per day. The bill was signed by John Oky Lt. at the Signal Station, and approved by William Frederick Lt. Gen.

I assumed at first that this was just the normal wages of the lighthouse keepers on Bidston Hill. But why did the bill talk about the Alarm Beacon? The lamp in Bidston Lighthouse might well be called a beacon, but its purpose, when lined up with Leasowe Lighthouse, was to light a safe passage through the channels of Liverpool Bay, not to warn off approaching shipping. And why were the men being paid through the army? Was this another kind of beacon altogether?

I already knew that William Urmson was the keeper of Bidston Lighthouse from 1797 until 1835. The Corfe family have long been associated with farming on Bidston Hill. It turns out that William Frederick, who then had the rank of Lieutenant General in the Army, was none other than the great-grandson of King George II, soon to inherit the duchies of Gloucester and Edinburgh, and later to be known as “Silly Billy”.

In May 1805, Britain was at war with Napoleon, George III was on the throne, and Nelson was an Admiral in the Royal Navy. The French fleet had just broken the British blockade at Toulon in April, and were at large in the Atlantic. The Battle of Trafalgar (21 Oct 1805) was yet to be fought. There were real fears of a French invasion, and preparations had been made throughout the land, including an extensive network of alarm beacons.

This wasn’t the first time that beacons had been erected on Bidston Hill. In 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, beacons were readied all along the coast of Britain, including one on the summit of Bidston Hill, and another at the top of Everton Ridge, overlooking the then small but important port of Liverpool.

Beacons have often been lit across Britain to celebrate historical events, including Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (1897), the 400^th anniversary of the Spanish Armada (1988), the Millennium, the Queen’s Golden Jubilee (2002), and the 200^th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar (2005).

As I write this, preparations are being made for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Already, more than 2600 sites have signed up to light a beacon between 22:00 and 22:30 on the evening of 4^th June 2012.

Will Bidston Hill join in? The possibility is still being discussed.  At first it sounds like a lot of fun, but what if the fire gets out of control? Fire has always been a problem on Bidston Hill. In the summer, the gorse dries out, catches fire easily and spreads rapidly when fanned by the stronger-than-average winds that Bidston Hill is exposed to. A fire, apparently extinguished, can smoulder in the peat deposits, travel underground and break out somewhere else. It is difficult, sometimes impossible, to bring fire engines close to the blaze, and the water pressure at the few hydrants on the hill is low. So as much as I’d like to see a beacon lit on Bidston Hill this jubilee, I’ll understand if caution prevails.

Wages Bill, Alarm Beacon at Bidston Lighthouse, 1805

Fire on Bidston Hill, 1904

Where am I?

I live at Ordnance Survey Grid Reference SJ 2866 8990, at an elevation of 58.9727 metres (or thereabouts) relative to mean sea level at Newlyn, Cornwall.

I know this because there is an Ordnance Survey benchmark cut into the stone at the front door of the Lighthouse, and I managed to look it up using the Ordnance Survey Bench marks locator.

Doing this was surprisingly difficult. Or perhaps I should say unsurprisingly difficult, given my earlier adventures with Royal Mail.

To use the Ordnance Survey bench marks locator, you need to type an Ordnance Survey grid reference (the 2-letter, 4-digit version) into the box labelled "Km square" and press the Go button. It should come back with a table of information about known bench marks at that grid reference.

One way of finding out the grid reference for the location you're interested in is to use the  Ordnance Survey's Get-A-Map thing. You'll probably need to register, and you may need to install Microsoft Silverlight as well. You might need to use a different browser (it didn't work for me using Firefox 9.0.1 on my Mac, but Safari was OK). You should be able to get a map for your postcode, pan and zoom if necessary, and see the grid reference for the point the map is centred on. This will be the 2-letter, 6-digit version, of which the first three digits are the Easting, and the last three are the Northing. Translate to the Km-square reference by truncating the Easting and Northing to two digits each. Example: the postcode CH43 7RA gives a map; centre this on the lighthouse and note down the grid reference SJ 288 899, and feed SJ2889 into the Km-square box on the bench marks locator.

Here is the full entry for the benchmark on Bidston Lighthouse:

Square: SJ
Easting: 2866
Northing: 8990
Mark type: CUT MARK
Description: BIDSTON L HO W FACE S SIDE ENT
Height: 58.9727
Order: 3
Datum: N
Verified year: 1966
Levelling year:
Metres above ground: 0.3

Maybe I'll post a photograph of the bench mark soon.

Happy Christmas from Bidston Lighthouse

Illustration (c) Vilja Gatrell, 2011

Episode 2 of the letterbox trilogy

Much has happened since my last post.

Our application to change the use of the cottage to residential was finally approved. This was after a disconcertingly long wait, while the planning committee deliberated on the difficult question of whether allowing us to live in our one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old, continuously occupied cottage would count as approving a new residence, which would have breached the council's self-inflicted Interim Planning Policy.

With a lot of help from our friends, we've made good progress with re-decoration and minor repairs, and the cottage is feeling much more homely. We've replaced several window sashes, re-pointed the lamp-room platform with lime mortar (curing all but one of the leaks), had two ceilings re-skimmed, and some carpet laid. We've stripped the ugly cheap cladding off our doors, which turn out to be rather beautiful four-paneled hardwood affairs, and planed and re-hung them all. We removed countless telephone, printer and token-ring cables and thousands of cable clips from the walls and skirting boards (some of which are made of plaster instead of wood). We've painted one bedroom with buttermilk, defiled another with willow-green, and splashed our hall with dragon's blood and terracotta. The lighthouse oil-room now has fifteen white Billy bookcases of the narrowest sort that Ikea make (wide book-cases just don't work when your walls are round). Anyway, the effect is surprisingly good, and we're very pleased with our library.

In the process, we learned some interesting things about the lighthouse cottages. The building was designed to accommodate three keepers, two with families. The three cottages each had their own front door, and were connected to each other and to the lighthouse via a common hallway, which was lined with Ruabon tiles (sadly concreted over during the NERC interregnum). The hallway was illuminated by natural light which was admitted through skylights along the ridge of the roof, as was the bedroom of Number 2, which had no external walls. You can still see the panes of the glass from the roof void, and you can make out the skylights on the original architects' drawings from 1872, which are held in the archives of the Merseyside Maritime Museum. It would appear that at some point in the building's history, a new roof was built on top of the old one. When electricity and water came to the building in the 1950's, a dividing wall was erected bisecting Number 2 Lighthouse Cottages, to create bathrooms and utility rooms for Numbers 1 and 3. Sad, really.

We have engaged an architect and filed an application for listed buildings consent. We're applying for permission to fit a letter box and cat flap in the front door, re-purpose one of the rooms as a kitchen, remove barbed wire from the building, replace perspex window panes with glass, and re-open access between the cottage and the lighthouse (which was bricked up many years ago). Yes, all these things do require listed buildings consent.

Worse, as we were informed yesterday, they also require building regulations approval and a bat survey!

You see, there are bats in the area. Some roost in the Windmill over winter.

So, today we had an initial bat inspection done. Fortunately, there are no signs of any bats occupying the cottage, not even in the roof void or the disused porch of Number 2 (which would make an ideal bat roost). Nor are there any signs of bats occupying the lighthouse. However, we didn't inspect the void inside the copper roof of the lighthouse, just in case. This is because if bats were using the space as a hibernaculum, the body heat from the inspector could be enough to rouse the little beasties from their torpor, which can so easily prove fatal. So we'll have an "emergence inspection" in the spring.

Nonetheless, the likelihood of there being any bats in the lighthouse roof is minimal. It's too windy for one thing. For another, we know that pigeons use it from time to time (we've heard their cooings and found their droppings), and bats don't usually cohabit with pigeons.

Anyway, we've finally found the letterbox of our desire.