Beyond the Six String Nation #4: Newfoundland Lighthouses
One figurative, one literal.
I had promised that this Substack would deliver a couple of entries each month, balanced between stuff about Six String Nation and stuff about…well, other stuff.
But with the shocking death of my dear friend, collaborator and mentor Chris Brookes in St. John’s (I can’t believe it’s already over a week ago), I can’t stop thinking about him and his partner Christina – what warm and welcoming people they are and what creative beacons they have been not only in their own community but in the wider world as well. This sense of them has been echoed in so many of the reflections posted on the obituary site and on social media. One quote really stood out for me:
"Some people are lighthouses. They are far away across the ocean and although you may not see them often, you know they are there, making the world bigger."
~ Rikke Houd, Danish radio producer.
As I described in my last post, Chris and Christina’s house is in the Battery – a small neighbourhood in St. John’s clinging to the side of Signal Hill and sloping steeply down to the north side of the opening of St. John’s Harbour. Signal Hill itself is far too high for a lighthouse (lighthouses need to be a lot closer to sea level to be useful to ships). And there are two great lighthouses nearby: one, Fort Amherst, is visible from the Battery looking across the Narrows to the south side of the harbour opening; the other, Cape Spear – about a 20 minute drive southeast, is the eastern-most tip of North America. But Signal Hill proved to be a more potent symbol of communication than even those critical lighthouses. It was first a place where flag communications (like semaphore) communicated both with ships at sea (for war and for commerce) dating back to the early 1700s and with the city tucked into the western edge of the harbour. Then, on December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic, wireless signal there – the letter “S” transmitted over 3500km from Cornwall, England. Voice communication followed in 1920. Few who have written appreciations of Chris Brookes – since his passing, certainly, but also for many decades previous – have failed to make mention of this wonderful symmetry: the great modern day radio innovator and communicator working in the literal shadow of the site of Marconi’s wireless proof-of-concept.
But my goal today was to bring together my thoughts about Chris with my mission to write about some of the behind-the-scenes stories of Voyageur, and that requires a longer drive down the Avalon peninsula to another lighthouse and another Marconi connection.
Cape Spear is on the map of our consciousness because of its place… on the map – that little protrusion near St. John’s that makes it the very eastern tip of the continent. Cape Race, at the southern end of the Peninsula, is famous because of its place in history. On April 14th, 1912, the morse radio signal “CQD, CQD. MGY. Struck iceberg. Send help right away” was received at the Marconi Wireless station across from the base of the Cape Race lighthouse. It would have sounded something like this:
This was before “SOS” became the standard distress call. “CQ” stood for “sécu”, from the French “sécurité” and “D” was for “distress”. “MGY” were the call letters for the Titanic. The radio operator on board was Jack Phillips. For whatever reason, the man on duty at the Marconi station, Jack Goodwin, was not at his station at that moment. Instead, 14 year old Jimmy Myrick heard the call and went to fetch Goodwin and Chief Wireless Operator William Gray (an old colleague of Phillips’), who relayed the message to the emergency fleets and the rest of the world. Phillips did not survive.
Through 2005, I’d been corresponding with Jimmy’s great-nephew, Dave Myrick – who ran the Myrick Wireless Interpretation Centre at Cape Race, a working replica of the original Marconi station . He was also the keeper of the Myrick family history at the lighthouse going back to Patrick Myrick in 1872. I’d been introduced to Dave by Sam Whiffen – a folk and traditional music radio show host who just happened to work at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. They were both amazing. Dave was keen to include something from the lighthouse in the project and Sam was keen to help however he could. Dave was hilarious and – perhaps not surprisingly for a HAM radio operator – very talkative. We needed to claim whatever material we were going to get before construction of the guitar had to ramp up in the spring of 2006. We set a date for March to go down to Cape Race but Sam warned that there was a serious risk involved: there was one road from Trepassey – inland and due west from the Cape – and it was only passable in the right conditions, which certainly weren’t year round. If the road wasn’t usable, the lighthouse was only accessible by helicopter and there was no way we could afford that.
On Sunday March 12th, 2006, my videographer Geoff Siskind and I picked up Dave in St. John’s and drove down to Trepassey to meet the then-current lighthouse-keeper, his cousin Noel Myrick and apprentice-keeper Shawn Myrick, Noel’s son. Sunday was their day off. The road was not really passable at that point but the weather was …mmmm… not terrible. Noel and Dave recruited a few neighbours with ATVs and, for a small fee, they loaded me and Dave and Geoff on the back and we set off for Cape Race. I will never forget that ride. To our left as we headed east: an absolute moonscape of rock and patchy scrub. To our right: a roiling grey-green sea that – if you continued due south – wouldn’t find land until French Guinea, spotted with heaving flocks of what must have been murres or puffins. Birds that made seagulls look like sparrows just rising and falling on the surface of the waves just off the steep, rocky shore. Geoff told me he wished he could have filmed the journey but it was like being on a roller coaster and even if he could have steadied the camera his hands would have frozen trying to operate the thing.
We arrived at the lighthouse and Dave gave us the grand tour. The Marconi station is right out of a Fritz Lang movie – all bakelite and art deco graphics on the knobs and dials. We’d come with the contribution Noel and Shawn had secured for us – one panel of a wood-framed glass door housing the winch mechanism turning the massive hyperradiant Fresnel lenses around the single lamp that beams 24 nautical miles to ships at sea. You can see the all that detail (and meet Dave, Noel and Shawn) in this video shot by Geoff.
Dave Myrick died on May 18th, 2021 at the age of 82. Like Chris Brookes, he was a pillar of a way of being in Newfoundland that is unlike anywhere else in Canada. I was glad I got to meet him. Shawn did not end up continuing the Myrick tradition at Cape Race. As of 2020, the current lighthouse keeper is Clifford Doran.
By coincidence, today’s entry of Shaun Usher’s Diaries of Note recounts the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic. It’s a great newsletter, which I highly recommend.