“The Truest friend to music and musicians”, as Sir George Grove has been felicitously designated, lives in an old wooden house not very far from the great glass palace [Crystal Palace] with which his name was so long and so eminently associated.

—>The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular 1897<$>

$>ERMUDA has a cast-iron reputation, at least as far has heritage monuments go. You may think that other local reputations are not as solid, but as the Prime Minister of House Cards<$> film fame oft stated: “I could not possibly comment.” Of local monuments in stone, their reputation has been more firmly cast, as the Town of St. George’s and the forts of the east end have recently been “felicitously designated” as a World Heritage Site, if one may so say of UNESCO.

The monumental reputation in cast iron could not be more solid, even if its representatives are a bit rusty from time to time. By the 1870s, Bermuda had scored several firsts in the worlds of architecture, shipping and technology with three massive iron creations of the second Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century.

In the 1820s, the grand Commissioner’s House was erected, like a great Meccano set, with a structural framework of cast- and wrought-iron members, including all the roof trusses. It was the first pre-fabricated home ever built and is now one of the grandest public buildings in Bermuda.

In the early 1870s, the massive Admiralty Floating Dock, Bermuda, joined the Commissioner’s House in the Dockyard as one of the outstanding technological constructions of its day. It was the first iron floating dock ever built and thousands in London turned out for its launch into the Thames in 1868.

One of the vessels that towed the dock to Bermuda was also a first in the iron class, being the world’s first iron-hulled warship. We should also remember the extraordinary escarpments of Fort Cunningham, built in the 1880s, possibly the first fort in the Americas to have walls of iron, rather than stone.

The monument perhaps most well known in the island for its cast-iron reputation is the signal station on Mount Hill in Southampton, that is to say “Gibbs Hill Lighthouse̶In the days when “word of mouth” provided most of the telephonic communication about the island, the flags of the signal stations at Fort George, Mount Langton, Gibbs Hill and the Dockyard provided a daily newsprint to be visually interpreted and communicated to one and all. A combination of flags spelt out all manner of news, including, according to Michael Dolding, author of Bermuda Light: the story of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, the Sunday morning “Church Flag”, which was run up to remind the faithful and heathen alike to get to the church on time.

The Gibbs Hill lighthouse was not first to be made of prefabricated cast iron in the Americas, for that honour belongs to the light at Morant Point at the eastern end of Jamaica. It was constructed in 1841 and stands to a height of 100 feet.

In 1852, a similar lighthouse (60 feet tall) was erected on Grand Turk, also in the West Indies, and Alexander Gordon designed all three. Constructed in 1844-46, Gibbs Hill Lighthouse is, however, the tallest at 117 feet and occupies the most spectacular site of all.

Given the height of the hill and the lighthouse, the top of the structure approaches 370 feet above sea level. Lest we take too heavenly a view of the exalted height of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, take note that the Great Pyramid of Giza originally topped out at 480 feet: for four millennia, it was the tallest building in the world!

The gentleman who supervised the construction of the Morant Point and Gibbs Hill lighthouses was George Grove, later known for his monumental encyclopaa, the Dictionary of Museum and Musicians, and as the first director of the Royal School of Music in London.

Before turning to musical pursuits, he was articled to the engineer Alexander Gordon, and was sent to Jamaica and Bermuda to construct Gordon’s prefabricated lighthos. To make sure it all fitted, the Bermuda lighthouse was erected by the Cromwell Road in London, much to the interest of the local population who witnessed its composition. To the engineer of the day, a construction like Gibbs Hill Lighthouse must have had a symphonic coherency, a great architectural composition in a new sounding material.The lighthouse is formed of 136 plates of cast iron, each comprising 56 square feet in area. Each plate had flanges on the interior side, by which the plates were bolted together. There are ten vertical rows of plates and each plate was numbered.

The numbers may have been cast with the plate, or were applied after casting. They are at present heavily painted, so it is difficult to determine which is the case.

It seems clear from the numbers that can be discerned that the lighthouse was erected by placing the numbers in a vertical series. Thus Plate 4 at the bottom would be followed in the column by Plates 14, 24, 34, 44, 54, 64, and so on.

The plates are offset horizontally, so that to complete the work to a level course, some half plates would be needed at the top. At least that is how it presently appears: a full architectural study should eventually be made of the construction of this rare work of prefabricated iron, now in its 162nd year.

The present lens was installed in 1904 by Chance Bros. of Birmingham, England and was said to give off one of the finest lights in the world. A “Mr. F.J. Tickle has been employed by the Crown Agents for the Colony to assist in its erection”.

The lens floated on a sea of mercury and was driven by a clock mechanism, the weights for which were housed within the central column of the lighthouse.

The lighthouse keeper had to wind up the weights, in order that the mechanism could turn the lens. That makes Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, in a manner of speaking, the tallest turret clock in Bermuda.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments can be sent to drris@logic.bm or by telephone to 799-5480.