TV delivery to the Eddystone Lighthouse

Lighthouse keepers receive new watch instructions with TV delivery

Lighthouse keepers at the Eddystone Lighthouse are renting a television from Rumbelows just in time for Christmas. Electric power was introduced to the Eddystone in 1959 and a keeper would stay on watch for eight hours at a time and a shift would last two months or more. Two years after this film the lighthouse became fully automatic bringing an end to 284 years of keepers of the Eddystone Light. Hopefully they were not tied into longer than a two-year contract.

Rumbelows was the electronics high street retailer of choice in the seventies. TV sets were expensive so people rented on a monthly basis for affordability. The keepers would have been up for the Closedown when terrestrial TV logged off and the BBC left the now iconic Test Card F or child playing noughts and crosses, colour bars and constant tone into musak. In 1980 a helipad was installed on this, the fourth lighthouse which was built by civil engineer James Douglass and inaugurated in 1882. The third lighthouse, Smeaton's Tower was removed to Plymouth Hoe with only its stump remaining on Eddystone Rock. In 1999 the Eddystone Lighthouse had solar panels fitted to run the light in the lantern.