Review: Henry Winstanley and the Eddystone Lighthouse by Adam Hart-Davis and Emily Troscianko

 

Do you remember Adam Hart Davis? He was that jolly, teacherish fellow who made documentaries about Victorians, old engineering and Victorian engineering. Here he goes a little further back, to the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to talk about Stuart engineering, and it’s a fascinating story.

All I had previously known about Henry Winstanley was from Daniel Defoe’s The Storm, that he was the builder of a lighthouse who was washed away with it during the great storm of 1703. It turns out that he did a few other things, and those things show him to be the forerunner of a very eighteenth century figure, the man of projects.

Born in Saffron Walden to a steward of Audley End, he became a porter at that royal palace and rose to become a clerk of works, where he made improvements to the building. He also moonlighted, creating additions to his family church (including a lantern and clock). He taught himself engraving and created a series of pictures of Audley End and his house on the road between it and London, a place called ‘The House of Wonders’, where he showcased automata and other engineering marvels. He also took a show to London, his water theatre, which included a trick barrel that could pour multiple different drinks. This water theatre was a going concern right into the eighteenth century. He also sold merchandise at his House of Wonders, including a set of cards he’d designed with educational facts about different countries round the world. (I don’t know if he sold this there, but I was delighted that his uncle was the original creator of Poor Robin’s Almanac, one of the targets of The Grub Street Journal. 

Getting into shipping, he was devastated when a number of his ships were wrecked on the Eddystone, a slightly submerged, jutting group of rocks just outside Plymouth. This vicious obstacle had sunk many ships in the past and a petition to build a lighthouse had long been granted. It was up to Trinity House (a governor if which was Samuel Pepys) to get this lighthouse built but they couldn’t find anyone to do it. Unlike past lighthouses, the Eddystone lighthouse would have to be built onto one of the jutting rocks, 6 hours rowing from the port, with barely any land to tether it. It would take a very self-confident (possible foolish) person to build it. Winstanley was that man.

It took four years to build. In the first year, all Winstanley and his team managed to do was dig twelve holes in the rock and insert metal rods. The problem was, that even after the 6 hours row, there’d be no way of getting onto the rock or offloading equipment if the sea was even slightly choppy.

A further complication was that Britain was at war with France. The workers were guarded by The Terror, until it went to chase some Frenchies, leaving them exposed. The rock was invaded by a French privateer, the workers stripped naked and Winstanley taken prisoner. He was later returned by Louis XIV who said that he was “at war with the English, not humanity”. Work continued.

In 1698 the lamps were lit. There were definitely some frightening times for the family maintaining the light during the first winter but it stayed up. Winstanley went to check on it, beefing the building up, making it stouter and more comfortable. Despite being a rather overdecorated, whimsical-looking building, it performed its task well and not a single ship was lost to the rocks. There was a sea-shanty written about the keeper of the Eddystone Light marrying a mermaid, and Winstanley was celebrated for his ingenuousness and tenacity.

Winstanley would check it every now and then, patching up weathered parts and making little modifications. He decided to go and do that on the eve of the Great Storm of 1703. It really was a big storm, felling trees, blowing down spires and chimney stacks, rolling the lead of church roofs like icing and - in the morning - there was no trace of Winstanley or his lighthouse.

It’s a great story and Hart-Davis (and co-writer Emily Toscianko, who now has a very interesting-looking body of work about philosophy of exercise) tell it well. What is clear, is that there wasn’t enough detail about Winstanley or his lighthouse for a very long book. This is a generously spaced 200 pages and it frequently goes on little detours which don’t necessarily add to the story. A potted history of Captain Morgan’s privateering adventures didn’t have much to do with the story, nor the details of the private lives of Charles II or William of Orange. Even the discussion of lighthouses themselves, going back to the Pharos of Alexandria, was little but filler, if interesting filler. 

Given the sparse nature of the information, the hints of Winstanley as an interesting and engaging character, and the sheer drama of him swept away with his most famous creation, this would make a fun film. I can picture him cackling and taunting the storm as it batters the lighthouse before pulling him away into the murky waters. Someone get on that. 

Film Review: The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford

 Having been seven years between The Favourite and Savage House, I wasn’t expecting my next eighteenth-century tinged cinema trip to be the next week. Although The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford is not set in the eighteenth-century it does deal with how it is memorialised and if it even needs to be.

Confusingly, the main character is called Kenneth, he’s a descendent of Sir Douglas Weatherby, a polymath and a (fictional) figure in the Scottish enlightenment. At various points of the film, Sir Douglas narrates. He opens the film telling of how his importance in the enlightenment has been forgotten and how even “that pervert, Benjamin Franklin” is remembered better than he is. Only Kenneth really holds the flame, dressing as his hero, giving lectures and working in the shonky village visitors centre dedicated to him. In a lovely detail, the shonky museum has a feature beloved of many shonky museums, the off-the-shelf waxwork in poor reproduction clothing and an audio played over it.

Kenneth’s life is turned upside down when a sub-Game of Thrones production called The White Stag of Emberfell comes to film in the village and surrounding countryside. The programme has dragons, war, jewelled swords and a theme tune that cribs very directly off carol of the bells. At first Kenneth plays along, but he’s dismayed by the village museum being filled with fantasy nonsense, dressing up as the ill-fated King Ergon and taking tourists around the filming locations. He snaps when one of the tourists puts chewing gum on one of Weatherford’s relics and some local hoodlums desecrate his grave, deciding to make a documentary to rival the programme. He decides to enlist the lead actor of the programme to be in his documentary, hoping to piggyback on his fame and get the right filming permits. This desire leads him to darker and darker places as he leaves his own enlightenment notions behind and leans into the morality of sword and sorcery. 

While not as much an out-and-out comedy as I was expecting, the film is a surprisingly moving story of loss and holding on to the past. Kenneth has lost his wife the year before the story starts and is clearly not coping as well as he puts on. While he clearly had a Weatherford obsession while she was alive, her humanising and anchoring presence stopped him from descending into the madness he starts to here. 

However, for my purposes on this blog, I’m more interested in the issues surrounding Weatherford, his memory and the telling of history. Kenneth sees him as a combination of “Adam Smith, David Hume, David Livingstone and Walter Scott”, a figure of enormous importance. He reads some of Weatherford’s fourth treatise, which sounds very Mandeville in its celebration of self-interest as a motive. He extoll’s Weatherford’s philosophical legacy, his record as a benevolent landlord and his breakthroughs in medicine. It’s pretty clear to see that he wasn’t as benevolent a figure as he’s being painted as.

The first hint (except the irritable dismissive way his ghost introduces the story) are the boulders dotted around the landscape. Weatherford is often depicted sitting on one of these boulders and meditating, they seem like the ideal image of a natural philosopher but these rocks have brass plaques on them explaining how Weatherford had them moved to different locations, how many people it took to move them and how many days. His seemingly natural seats were the result of the backbreaking work of anonymous people. His epitaph also recalls him as an ‘absent father’.

His shonky mannequin recalls how he loved nature, as can be seen by how many animals he’s shot and stuffed - a claim that can be laid at Thomas Bewick and his birds. There’s a part where Kenneth denies the rumours that Weatherford created his landscape Deserted Village style, by turfing out the inhabitants and burning it down. Kenneth also tells of the story about how Weatherford’s eloquence quelled a strike and brought the strikers back to work. The pub used to be Weatherford’s lab, and Kenneth admits that the experiment to transplant the brain of a lunatic inmate and a goat were not successful. After admitting this, he sees a ghostly apparition of the horrific experiment, as well as the village being burnt down to clear it and redcoats shooting at the strikers. 

It’s clear that Kenneth knows the hidden side of the history he’s been telling, even if he’s hidden it from himself. He says at one point that people such as Weatherford created modern society and that “you might not like it, but you should know where it came from”. Interestingly, Kenneth seems to be one of the people who doesn’t like the modern world, even as he celebrates the people who made it - there’s also the fact that Weatherford seems to have not nearly been as important to it as all that, a petty laird playing science with his tenants.

The resolution to this part of the plot (though not the film entire) is when Kenneth sees the documentary. He’s enlisted the help of an ornithologically obsessed young man to film and edit it for him. There’s a running joke about how he keeps getting distracted by birds, especially geese. His edit is all about the geese, who were introduced as a breeding pair by Weatherford and have become a unique feature of the local ecosystem. As such, these living, breathing, breeding creatures are the real legacy when the dead words and dodgy deeds are forgotten. It feels a satisfying conclusion to this aspect of the film, even as Kenneth’s redemption seems a little less secure.

One of the jokes in the beginning is about how few people come to celebrate Douglas Weatherford, Kenneth’s reading of the fourth treatise only has nine people in it, that is three more than were sitting in the cinema with me. It’s a good film and worth a watch, and I’d probably recommend it over last week’s Savage House. Write down the title though, it is peculiarly unmemorable. 

Film Review: Savage House

 I was compelled to see Savage House at the cinema because I think The Favourite was the last time a proper eighteenth-century ‘thing’ was on the big screen. The trailer was certainly very striking, all grime, bad make-up and Richard E Grant in a seriously big wig. It’s an accurate trailer, it sets up pretty much the whole plot (the Devonshires plan to visit a low-scramble noble family) and it conveyed the tone well.

Savage House is clearly in dialogue with Downtown Abbey and The Crown, especially by hiring Claire Foy. As Lady Savage, she’s a sharp, witty and peculiarly layered character, someone who chose the unsettled and uncertain marriage to Chauncey because it seemed more fun than being “a rug on the drawing room floor.” She also gets her bum licked - I’ve never actually seen The Crown but I don’t think her Maj was depicted doing that. 

Richard E Grant is having a ball as Sir Chauncey Savage, a poor Welshman who has conned, tricked and married his way into the nobility but is always aware that he can never carry the air of nobility, no matter how tall his wig. Chauncey starts off the film with hideous bleeding gums and degenerates from there; his gout flairs up, he fights a duel and gets a gangrenous arm that needs removing. He’s clearly a piece of work, but he’d oddly sympathetic in his desperation, seeing hallucinatory pigs wandering the corridors, reminding him of his past.

They have three servants at first, a cook, a maid and a valet. The maid, played by Bel Powling, lends Sir Chauncey a sympathetic ear and willing thighs, but is secretly plotting with the valet to steal as much as possible. She also has a vendetta against the Savage’s daughter’s pet mice. The valet, called Reginald Halifax, is played by Jack Farthing - a pretty great name for an eighteenth century character in itself. He’s a highwayman, a skilled duelist and Sir Chauncey’s best friend. So, of course they find themselves in a duel - with all the characters bribing him to either kill or spare Sir Chauncey.

There are a number of other characters, emergency servants, nosy neighbours (of course called the Bennetts) and bilked business partners. They are all broadly drawn, and exists to pull the Savages further down into the abyss as they try and keep up appearances.

One of the interesting elements of the film is how it uses historical fiction cliches. There are the beauty shots of the great house, which is falling to pieces and tracking shots down long galleries with missing pictures. The film starts with some obligatory harpsichord and occasional bursts of familiar classic opera themes, but for much of the middle of the film the soundtrack consists of anxious drones and hums. As the film progresses, the tension about the oncoming visit of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire grows, until it becomes a source of tension for the audience. Even the dramatic events in the film pale in comparison to this possible dinner party.

The film shows a nobility as ungracious and disgusting as we suspect they probably are, this is no heritage depiction of the ‘stately homes of England’. However, it does fall into many anti-cliches, with people treading in animal dung, gout and leeches, full chamberpots - it’s a very Horrible Histories take on ‘Gorgeous Georgians”. 

As for the history itself, there are great mentions of pox, Jacobites and an eclipse. The pox is treated like covid, with people self isolating. I think they probably meant plague more than pox, as pox is generally meant to represent venereal disease, definitely a problem but not something with a season. There really was an eclipse in 1715 and there were pamphlets about its cosmological and prognostic effects, but there were also detailed predictions by former astronomer royal, Edmund Halley, which the Savage’s daughter, Fanny, recites. 

As for Jacobites, the ’15 rebellion had been a pretty damp squib (especially compared to the later ’45). Sir Chauncey is a whig, supportive of the new German King, as opposed to his neighbours, the Bennett, who declare their support for the Stuarts. Their reasons are because they don’t want a German and find his name to be weak, definitely a comment on the weaksauce political discussions we have nowadays. Jacobites themselves are represented as a different breed, an illness like the pox, which sneaks into the house.

I think the most interesting element of the film is the narration. Despite the very filmic shots and lighting (actual lighting! Real locations!) the cinematic nature of Savage House is undermined by the narration, but its eighteenth-century-ness is bumped up by it. The narration is a little too obvious, we are frequently told about things we can see, it has a slight whiff of ‘second screen viewing’ to it. We can see there are pictures missing and that they are buying replacements, we can see that Lady Savage is selling her jewels, we can see that the family are walking a risky tightrope. The moral of the piece is as blatant as obvious as much of the narration, it turns out that sacrificing everything to the possibility of social clout is a bad idea. However, this is not a “Rake’s Progress” or a moral tale, it’s doing what much Grub Street stuff did, pretending to hold a moral tale so the reader/audience can enjoy the humiliation of the main characters. This makes Savage House very eighteenth century and very Grub Street. I can’t imagine the audience for this film though.  

The Guardian 100 Best Novels of all Time

 The Guardian recently(ish) published a list of ‘The 100 Best Novels’. The way they compiled it was quite interesting, they asked 170 writers and literary types to list their top ten novels and then assigned the ranking by how many times they appeared on these authors lists, weighted by how high the person had listed them.

Of course these lists aren’t worth taking seriously, but they are fun for a bit of a chat.. which I will now do.
The eighteenth century is not highly represented. Poor ol’ Defoe, sometimes called ‘father of the novel’ doesn’t get a mention. Nor did Eliza Haywood or Samuel Richardson. My personal favourite novel, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones doesn’t make the list either. Jane Austen has four, but she’s more long-eighteenth century. The only actual eighteenth century book represented is The Lives and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which got into the top twenty, with seventeen of the writers putting it on their list.

One of the things most fascinating about the list is to look at who voted for a book, and also to look at their lists to see what else they picked. Jennifer Egan, writer of Visit from the Goon Squad puts Tristram Shandy as her 9th pick and actually has Clarissa as her third, I presume not many others picked it. Nina Stibb put it 5th (and put Ducks, Newburyport as her first, she’s obviously a bit of a masochist). Sandra Newman, the author of Julia, a retelling of 1984, puts Tristram Shandy as her first, many of the other authors had it between 5th and 8th. The editor of The Scotsman put it at 2. 

The overall winner is Middlemarch, and it seems by quite a high margin, with a third of the people asked putting it on their list, many in the top 5. There’s been a mini outcry about it, with some people claiming to have not even heard of it. To be honest, it makes sense to me, and it also makes sense why Tristram Shandy does so well against its eighteenth century brothers and sisters - this is a list created by writers.

Middlemarch is not quite the page-turner, but it is truly experimental, telling the reader off for becoming too invested in any particular character over an investment in the general network of people. Although Middlemarch’s writing is not as experimental and flashy as Tristram Shandy, its purpose is far more daring. The books on this list are ones enjoyed by people who have read many books and written a few, they want things that go off the beaten path and succeed - they are after something a bit odder, possibly less satisfying but more challenging than the average. 

I enjoyed the list, I’ve read 39 of them, and all but 1 of the top 20. Of course I’d have loved Tom Jones to have got in, had Catch 22 do much better and In Search of Lost Time do much worse, but I like the idiosyncrasies of this list, 3 Sebalds, 4 Austens, reams of Woolf. It’s a strange list.