Posted by Peter Hyland on March 01, 2012 at 00:50:27 user Peter_H.
I find the lighting situation in Beckfoot and other lake houses much more intriguing. How was the house lit at night? Admittedly, it is not a problem we come across very often. Most of the stories take place in mid-summer when, in the English Lake District, it is broad daylight until about 10.15 pm and from 5.00 am onwards. In addition, the S& As are rarely at Beckfoot at night, preferring to be in camp somewhere.
Methods of lighting: we can surely rule out gas lighting. A house as remote as Beckfoot would not have been connected to a gas main (and still wouldn’t today). Electricity? It doesn’t look like it. The illustration in Chapter 1 of PM (‘Not what I call homely’) shows most of the bedroom ceiling and there is no sign of a ceiling rose or a dangling flex. When Dick rigged up the pigeon bell in PP he used batteries to energise it rather than a transformer. So we are left with oil lamps and candles. The strange thing is that AR, usually very specific in his details, is vague about lighting. In that illustration, there is no sign of a candle or lamp by the bed, which would surely be needed at night to enable a visit to, er, another room in the house.
I can only find two occasions on which the ‘action’ takes place at Beckfoot at night (there may be more, in which case Tarboarders will no doubt point them out). The first is at the start of PP, when a temporary camp is set up in the Beckfoot garden. Just before the explorers fall asleep “a sudden light showed through the bushes”. It was Mrs Blackett, but we are not told what she was carrying. Surely not a candle, when everything was tinder-dry? Probably a hurricane lantern, but why didn’t AR say? A few lines further on, AR is specific about the lighting in the tents – “Lanterns were lit for each tent”.
The second Beckfoot night occasion is the famous one in PM when the ‘burglary’ takes place. Dick uses a torch, of course (AR is also quite specific about torches). When he hides from the Great Aunt, “through a chink in his hiding place he could see that there was light in the room”. What sort of light was the GA holding? I can’t see the GA using a hurricane lamp somehow and it seems from the action taking place that the GA was moving swiftly so it can’t have been a naked candle. It was probably a domestic oil lamp, mounted on a brass column and with a glass chimney. This would have to be lit, and this could take about half a minute. A match must be struck, and the glass chimney taken off to expose the wick. The wick needs a few seconds to flare into a proper flame. Then the chimney is replaced and the wick adjusted. This must have been the point at which Dorothea whispered “Someone’s lit a light upstairs”. But Dick still had time to find the scales and then look for ‘Duncan’s Quantitative Analysis Vol II’ – what was the GA doing? Perhaps Dorothea saw the light of the match being struck, and the GA’s delay was caused by waiting for the flame to take hold of the wick? When Dick rejoins Dorothea, she says “She (the GA) had a lamp”. All this rules out mains electricity.
One final point. In the ‘signalling to Mars’ in WH, how were the Swallows replying to the Ds from Holly Howe? “The upper light shone out again” . . . . “there was that answering light, flashing out in the farm far away”. Were the Swallows showing then hiding an oil lamp? We are not told. Later they use a torch but the battery is “worn out” as Dick notices, so the signalling flashes must have been with something else. These are later resumed, when farewell flashes are sent. “Flash” indicates a fairly large light source. I would have thought that a medium-sized oil lamp, seen through a window, from what must have been about half a mile away, would not really create a “flash”. Perhaps it was a large double-wick lamp with the wicks turned full up, but is it likely that the children would have had one of those in the bedroom?