Granted national heritage status in 2015, the 104-year-old Sheringham Lighthouse near Sooke is among the sites profiled in Peter Johnson and John Walls’ comprehensive guide to the working lighthouses of Vancouver Island and the southern Gulf Islands.
For centuries before first contact, the Ditidaht First Nation called the area around Sheringham Point p’aachiida, or “seafoam-on-rocks.” In 1790, the Spanish gave it their own name, Punta de San Eusebio, until the British firmly established sovereignty in the 19th century. In 1846, Capt. Kellett of the Royal Navy survey ship HMS Herald renamed it again as Sheringham Point after William Sheringham, his vice-admiral back in England. Sheringham never even saw the place.
After British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, settlement began in earnest. By the 1880s, land around Sheringham Point was being pre-empted for farming, finally acquiring the status of a village. But the name Sheringham Point was too long to fit on a postage stamp when, in 1893, the place acquired its own post office. Mrs. Clark, wife of the new postmaster, Edwin Clark, suggested the name Shirley, after her own native village and chapelry near Southampton, Hampshire, England. Edwin Clark believed a boom was coming and bought up 174 acres of surrounding land in 1910 for $174, which amounted to $1 per acre.
By 1900, designer William P. Anderson had become the Arthur Erickson of lighthouse architecture in Canada. Anderson was born in Lévis, Quebec, in 1851 and joined the Canadian Militia at 14. He fought against the Fenians, whose goal during the 1860s was to pressure Britain to withdraw from Ireland by raiding local customs houses and garrisons in “Upper Canada.” At 22, Anderson became a commander with the Ottawa Rifles. A year later, he became a railway surveyor, then joined the Department of Marine and Fisheries. He rose quickly through the ranks to become its chief lighthouse designer. Anderson’s military career deeply influenced his ideas about the construction of secure, coastal structures. In all, he designed about 355 technically advanced, robust and truly beautiful light stations situated on Canada’s two coasts and around the Great Lakes.
Anderson became best known for his striking flying-buttress light towers at Belle Isle (Newfoundland and Labrador), Île-d’Anticosti (Quebec), Lake Superior and Estevan Point. The Sheringham Point Lighthouse takes stylistic inspiration from these sturdy structures.
When the SS Valencia steamed onto a reef about 45 metres from shore between Pachena Bay and Carmanah Point in January 1906, losing 126 lives to the surf, a commission of inquiry determined that more lighthouses were required on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The light station at Sheringham Point was built in response to this tragedy. The term “graveyard of the Pacific” suddenly gained an awful legitimacy.
In 1911, Edwin Clark sold four acres of his land at Sheringham Point to the federal government for $50 per acre. Within a year, Clark had paid off his acreage and made a tidy profit, and Canada gained the ground for a new important light station.
Begun in the spring of 1912, the Sheringham Lighthouse was a hexagonal reinforced-concrete structure 19.5 metres high with six graceful pilaster-like buttresses. Cost of the tower: the fog-alarm building with its diesel, compressed-air generator; the boathouse; and the keeper’s dwelling at the time came to $9,000. Another $12,000 was spent for the purchase, shipping and installation of a large, third-order Fresnel-lens lamp, which shone out into Juan de Fuca Strait for about 24 kilometres.
In order for the five-tonne lamp apparatus to rotate more easily in the lamp room, it was “floated” on liquid mercury to minimize friction. The rotating mechanism with its clockwork weights and pulleys needed winding every three hours from dusk to dawn, each day.
Keeper Eustace Arden lit the lamp for the first time on Sept. 30, 1912, and, in spite of all the winding, he loved the place. There were six noisy keeper’s children and cows roaming free all over the place, and the uptight, business-minded next-door neighbour, Edwin Clark, tried hard to have them removed from the station. He failed, and the Arden family happily remained at Sheringham Point for more than 33 years.
Two world wars left an indelible imprint on the Canadian lighthouse psyche. The alleged enemy attack on Estevan Lighthouse in June 1942 alerted the Department of Marine to get ready to defend the isolated, outer-coast stations. In the early 1960s, when the Cold War threatened to overheat, Ottawa built several bomb shelters at several lighthouses near Victoria (including Sheringham and Discovery). Ostensibly constructed to protect lightkeepers from nuclear fallout, the shelter at Sheringham Point was a very strange affair indeed.
It was little more than a flat-roofed, concrete-block root cellar, half dug into the ground. With half-metre-thick walls, it was smaller inside than a bedroom. It allowed for only two bunk beds and little else — and that was the problem. The Department of Marine and Fisheries demanded that the shelters be used solely by the lightkeeper and his assistant, excluding family members. According on the daughter of a former Sheringham keeper, “The door was to be bolted shut from the inside for that reason.” That was but one of Ottawa’s nonsensical, if not depraved, rules. By the time James Bruton arrived at Sheringham Point in 1968, Cold War paranoia was fading and the edict had been long ignored. James turned his minuscule shelter into a mushroom farm, which failed, and the silly structure was torn down and filled in.
James Bruton served nearly 20 years at Sheringham Point, retiring in 1986 when electrification and de-staffing began in earnest. With his wife and four children, Bruton witnessed the golden age of lightkeeping on this coast. In one year, he welcomed over four thousand curious and respectful visitors. Automation and the de-staffing of the stations in the 1990s killed public awareness of the importance the light stations, so one of James’s daughters, Elanie, set out to teach later generations about life on the manned station by becoming a founding member of the Sheringham Point Lighthouse Preservation Society.
Elanie’s sister, Sharon Kerrigan-Bruton, was married at Sheringham Point Lighthouse on Dec. 4, 1976. That day, they managed to cram 16 family members, friends and the preacher all together in the lamp room at the top of the tower — which was against the rules. Hardly bigger than a closet, the place rocked with laughter. James Bruton further broke regulations by painting the inside of the tower a matrimonial royal blue (instead of regulation grey), just for the wedding. He also had his citizens-band radio hooked up to speakers at ground level and broadcast the whole ceremony to more guests standing and waiting below. Three photographers stopped in at a nearby pub in Sooke to ask directions and never made it to the wedding. What a party!
Along with their other duties, a lightkeeper and his assistant were required, every two years, to paint the exterior roofs of their dwellings, the tower, and other outbuildings on their stations. The colour demanded for the roofs was a brilliant red. The trouble was that in those early years, the paint was lead-based. As the dangers of lead poisoning became known, Ottawa duly passed on that knowledge to the keepers. By then, however, many lightkeepers had been figuratively immersing themselves in the poisonous stuff for decades. When James Bruton got sick, Sharon Kerrigan-Bruton said of her keeper-father, “It was no wonder when he got leukemia.”
Another heavy metal found in abundance on all light stations from 1900 to 1980 was liquid mercury in the form of hundreds of tiny balls that were used to float the Fresnel-lamp apparatus so that it could be rotated more easily by a simple clockwork drive. During those years, an untold number of keepers may have developed Minamata disease — a neurological syndrome caused by mercury poisoning that can lead to mental impairment, paralysis, coma and death. Records of those keepers who caught Minamata disease through their handling of mercury were simply not kept, and Ottawa did not encourage lightkeepers who were ill to take time off to seek medical attention. Without records or a physician tracking an illness, the government escaped responsibility and ultimately the payment of any compensation for keepers’ untimely deaths.
To the Lighthouse: An Explorer’s Guide to the Island Lighthouses of Southern B.C. © 2015 Peter Johnson and John Walls. Heritage House, heritagehouse.ca
