Cape Foulwind’s fifty years of hand-lit nights
On the night of 4 September 1913, the principal lighthouse keeper at Cape Foulwind, Mr MacIvor, was on duty in the tower when a storm broke over the headland. Just before one in the morning, lightning struck the telephone wires outside his house.
The current followed the wires inside. It smashed the front door, tore another door from its hinges and set the wiring alight. Mrs MacIvor was alone in the house. She put the fire out herself.
The strike travelled on to the lighthouse and the assistant keeper’s house, where an explosion filled a room with smoke. At the signal house, fifty yards away, it ran down an iron flagstaff, split the floorboards and burst the walls open at the corners. No one was hurt.
A newspaper report recorded the damage building by building. It also left us this glimpse of the people who lived there: one keeper at the light, his wife dealing with a fire at home, and another household close enough to be caught in the same strike.
The first light at Cape Foulwind had been lit thirty-seven years earlier, in 1876. Its white timber tower stood above the coast west of Westport, warning ships away from a difficult stretch of shore. The light flashed every half-minute and, in clear weather, could be seen from nineteen and a half nautical miles away.
It needed people to keep it working. The lamp had to be fuelled, the lens cleaned and the mechanism wound. Keepers and their families lived beside the tower, making their homes on the headland while the light did its work out at sea.
The first keeper named in the records I have found was a man called Hand. So far, I have found only his surname. Fitzroy Montague Smith succeeded him in 1881, but was soon transferred to the Nuggets Lighthouse in Otago. When the Westport Times reported the move, it said that summer visitors to Cape Foulwind would miss the welcome Smith had given them. Among all the dates and postings, that small detail is one of the few that tells us what a keeper was like to meet.
A keeper named Nelson came from Puysegur Point to replace Smith. By 1894, Hansen was in charge. A correspondent visiting New Zealand’s lighthouses that year described Cape Foulwind as a favourite posting because it was less isolated than some stations further south. Even so, the keepers did not necessarily stay long. Hansen was transferred to Portland Island in 1897, and Richard Tregurtha arrived from Pencarrow Head.
Five months later, Tregurtha’s name appeared in a marriage notice. His son Frederick Albert married Edith Maud Boyd in Wellington, and the notice identified his father as being “of Cape Foulwind Lighthouse.” It is a passing reference to the station, but a reminder that the people posted there had family lives reaching well beyond it.
Other names turn up in transfer notices. Partington left Cape Foulwind in 1898 to become principal keeper at Mokohinau; Reeves arrived from Cape Saunders. Later notices name Thwaites, Fletcher and Leighton, though I have not yet been able to piece together exactly how their postings followed one another. These men moved between lighthouses around the country, taking their families, or leaving them behind for a time, as the work required. The notices rarely say which.
Frank Dennehy also served at Cape Foulwind before going on to Cape Maria van Diemen and Godley Head. He later farmed in several parts of the country and died at Barrytown in 1947. His obituary named four sons and three daughters. It is one of the few records I have found that gives a lead into a keeper’s family after his time at the cape.
In 1926, the old timber tower was replaced by a concrete one. The new light ran automatically and needed refuelling only twice a year. The last keeper left that same year. For fifty years, someone had been responsible for tending the Cape Foulwind light by hand. Then that work ended.
The light is still there. It was converted to electricity in the 1950s and is now monitored from Wellington. On the headland, the foundations of the first tower and the keepers’ houses remain in the grass. They are easy to pass on the way to the seal colony if you do not know what once stood there.
The records can tell us when a keeper arrived, when he left and where he was sent next. They tell us much less about the families who lived beside the tower, or what they remembered of those years. Mrs MacIvor’s night in the storm is vivid because someone wrote it down. There must have been many ordinary days that no one thought to record.
We would like to hear more of them. If Hand, Smith, Nelson, Hansen, Tregurtha, Partington, Reeves, Thwaites, Fletcher, Leighton, MacIvor or Dennehy appears in your family history, or you know of another keeper who served at Cape Foulwind before 1926, please get in touch with Sense & Wander. A photograph, a letter or a story passed down at home could help us learn who lived on that headland, beyond the names in the records.
