The engine was unrealistic, too: if you had a big coal-fired engine like that for running the fog signal, youвЂ™d need three men working shifts to keep that going for several days at a time. A lot of the keepers would be ex-seafarers, theyвЂ™d be very tidy, meticulous people.

And, even though itвЂ™s set in the 1890s, so itвЂ™s hard to say how things might have been, no lighthouse authority would let a station be in such shit order as that. TheyвЂ™ve got information to pass over, and theyвЂ™d also be landing with coal and oil and all sorts of things. When the two fellas first come ashore and they pass the outgoing keepers, thereвЂ™s no way youвЂ™d get keepers not acknowledging each other like that. And blokes on the Smalls were famous for making their own hooch, mucking about with potatoes trying to make vodka.Д«ut the film doesnвЂ™t get everything right. YouвЂ™d hold your nose whenever you had to go and fetch him. One bloke over on Amble Pier Lighthouse off the North East coast вЂ“ вЂњFat FredвЂќ we called him вЂ“ he had a piss pot in his bedroom and the dirty bugger wouldnвЂ™t empty it on a regular basis. ThereвЂ™s a lot of things in the film that are relevant to my experiences. In the вЂ™60s there was a keeper there who was gathering some old wire, and a bit of it took off over the cliff вЂ“ it had wrapped around his leg, so away he went. Another was South Bishop, again off the Pembrokeshire coast. YouвЂ™d hear these old sea stories from time to time.

HeвЂ™d gone out of his skull by the time they rescued him. So the other hung the corpse out on the gallery rail, but nobody got to him for ages. In the early 1800s there were two keepers on the previous lighthouse, which was a structure on wooden posts вЂ“ the remains of it are still there вЂ“ and one of them died. Then there was the Smalls Lighthouse, which is 25 miles off the coat of Pembrokeshire in Wales. The best one for me was South Stack in Holyhead: we called it the Holyhead Hilton, you had your own bedroom and everything. And if you got the right sort of posting it was great, because a lot of the lighthouses were out on islands like Bardsey, which is at the end of the LlЕ·n Peninsula, and if youвЂ™re off-duty you can walk around the island. So you were getting six months holiday a year. To begin with you did two months on, then you got a month off then it became month on, month off. In 25-and-a-half years I was posted to 32 different locations around Britain, different lighthouses. When I got home I came out of the navy and applied for a job as a lighthouse keeper. There was a bloke in there hanging up curtains in the lantern вЂ“ you do that so the sunlight doesnвЂ™t come in and damage the equipment during the day вЂ“ and I thought, вЂWhat a steady little job heвЂ™s got there.вЂ™ A few weeks later we were coming out of Hong Kong and passed a little island and there was a lighthouse on there, and the fog signal was grunting away just as it does in the film. One time in Penang we went ashore for the night, and as we were going back on board we passed a lighthouse.

I was in the navy for nine years, and between 1969-71 I was posted out in the Far East.

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