Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Your Obedient Servant,
James Murdoch
Secretary
10
Not even a year had passed since the incident with the crane and the associated cor-
respondence and rebuke from headquarters at George Street. The Flannans had exper-
ienced one of the most severe storms since the men had taken up station there and it
is possibly with this background in mind that James Ducat and Thomas Marshall must
have mulled over their decision to try and get down to the west landing as soon as they
couldtoseewhatstateitwasinandwhethertheboxofropesandothertacklewerestill
secure.AsecondincidentinvolvingdamageorlosstoNLBpropertywasnotsomething
that either Ducat or Marshall would have wished to see as it would be both of their
names involved in a second incident within a year, with almost certain penalties for a
second bout of supposed negligence. The penalties could be fines and or demotions. As
the lowest ranked lightkeeper and with less than a year in service, Donald Macarthur
may have been less concerned about whatever his more senior and more experienced
colleagues proposed to do about the equipment on the west landing. Muirhead noted in
his report of 8 January 1901:
When the accident occurred, Ducat was wearing sea boots and a waterproof, and Mar-
shall sea boots and oilskins, and as Moore assures me that the men only wore those
articles when going down to the landings, they must have intended, when they left the
station, either to go down to the landing or the proximity of it.
11
Some accounts of the reason the men may have ventured to the west landing in such
atrocious weather and conditions mention a fine of 5
s
that had been imposed on James
Ducat some eight months beforehand. This was for damage to unsecured tackle on
the Flannan Isles; the NLB had felt that he had been negligent and had fined him ac-
cordingly. The source for this account is most likely the interview with James Ducat's
daughter who was 98 at the time of her interview in 1990 with
The Times
newspaper.
12
(
See
Chapter 9)
Ducat, Marshall and Macarthur are certainly not the only lightkeepers to have been
washed away by a large wave. An NLB lightkeeper at Hyskeir was swept to his death
from a bridge and drowned by a freak large wave, while a second lightkeeper sur-
includes an interview with a PLK who relates the story of a supernumary lightkeeper
who took his fishing rod to go fishing from the door of the tower lighthouse at sea and
was never seen again, presumably washed away by a freak wave.
