The Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy
The Smalls Reef
Eighteen miles west-south-west of the Pembrokeshire coast, a cluster of low-lying rocks breaks the surface of the Celtic Sea. The Smalls — the name is thought to derive from an old Norse word for a narrow channel — presented one of the most consistent hazards on the passage between Britain and the ports of southern Ireland. Ships rounding the corner of Wales into St George's Channel, or running north from the Bristol Channel, frequently came to grief on the reef in poor visibility or driving westerly weather.
The first lighthouse on the Smalls was an eccentric timber structure built by Henry Whiteside, a musician and instrument-maker from Liverpool, who leased the rights to the rocks in 1773 and erected a wooden dwelling on cast-iron piles — an octopod of legs that he hoped would let waves pass through without demolishing the platform above. Whiteside's design was unconventional to the point of recklessness, and the structure flexed and vibrated terribly in heavy seas, but it survived long enough to be occupied and to earn lighthouse dues for its proprietor.
The Two Keepers
In the winter of 1801, the Smalls was crewed by two men: Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith. The keeper system at the time assigned two keepers to isolated stations — a watch-and-watch arrangement that allowed one man to tend the light while the other slept, and that seemed adequate under ordinary circumstances. The practice reflected a concern for economy as much as safety; a third keeper would triple the supply requirements and treble the wages.
At some point during the early weeks of 1801 — the precise date is unrecorded in the surviving documents — Thomas Griffith became seriously ill and died. Thomas Howell was now alone on the Smalls reef in midwinter, with a corpse, no means of summoning relief, and the obligation to keep the light burning. Supply and relief voyages to the Smalls were undertaken by vessel from the Welsh coast, but winter weather could prevent any boat from reaching the reef for weeks at a time.
The Ordeal
Howell faced an immediate practical dilemma of horrifying proportions. He could not simply remain in the living quarters with Griffith's body as it decomposed; the small, enclosed platform afforded no way to distance himself from the dead man. Nor could he push Griffith's body into the sea without risking accusations that he had murdered his colleague. When a ship passed close enough to observe the Smalls lighthouse, its crew could not know whether Griffith's death had been natural or violent; for Howell to be seen to dispose of the body overboard would have been enormously suspicious when he eventually reached shore.
Howell's reported solution was to construct a rough wooden coffin from the timber materials available on the platform and to lash it to the outside railing of the lighthouse, in plain view of any passing vessel. This meant that any ship coming close to the Smalls would be able to see that there was a body present — evidence that Howell had not disposed of it furtively — while keeping Griffith's remains away from the interior of the living space.
The wait for relief was long. Accounts vary, but Howell is believed to have kept his vigil for somewhere between several weeks and a few months — exactly how long remains a matter of some historical dispute, but all versions agree it was an extended period during which the decomposing coffin was his constant companion and the light continued to function. When a relief vessel finally reached the Smalls and Howell was brought ashore at Solva on the Pembrokeshire coast, witnesses described him as virtually unrecognisable: haggard, with his beard grown wild, barely able to speak coherently. Some accounts say he never fully recovered mentally from the experience.
The Aftermath and the Rule of Three
The story of Thomas Howell's ordeal on the Smalls became widely known in maritime circles within months of his return to shore. The lighthouse authorities — the station was then managed under a private patent, eventually passing to Trinity House in 1836 — drew the obvious operational lesson: that a crew of two was insufficient for any isolated light station where a death could leave a single keeper alone for an extended period.
The outcome was the formal adoption of a minimum crew of three keepers at any fully isolated lighthouse. This rule — the 'rule of three' as it became informally known, though it was never encoded in precisely those words in the Trinity House regulations — became standard practice for offshore and rock stations throughout the United Kingdom and was adopted by other national lighthouse authorities as the century progressed. A second keeper could die or be incapacitated and the third could maintain the light while the second signalled for relief; no keeper would ever again be left alone with a dead colleague and no means of communication.
The rule of three added substantially to the operational cost of running isolated stations, but it also transformed the social character of lighthouse life. Three men, rotating watches, created a small community rather than an isolated pair; there was always a third perspective, a third voice in disputes, a third set of hands in an emergency. Many keepers who wrote memoirs of their service in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described three-man crews as fundamental to the psychological survival of the station, as important as the rations or the fog signal.
The Smalls Today
The current lighthouse on the Smalls is a granite tower built by James Walker and first lit in 1861, replacing Whiteside's wooden structure, which had become increasingly dangerous. Walker's tower stands 41 metres tall and was designed along the lines of the Eddystone and Wolf Rock towers — a solid masonry column that could withstand the full force of Atlantic swells. Its light character is Fl(3) W 15s, showing three white flashes every fifteen seconds, with a range of 18 nautical miles.
Trinity House automated the Smalls in 1987, removing the last of its keepers after a continuous crewed history stretching back to 1776. The automation was part of the broader national programme that eliminated rock-station crews throughout British waters between the 1980s and the late 1990s. Remote monitoring from Trinity House Operations Control in Harwich now keeps watch on the lamp, the fog signal, and the structural sensors.
For the historically minded, the Smalls remains significant not merely as a dramatic reef lighthouse in its own right but as the site whose operational failure produced one of the most consequential safety rules in lighthouse history. The rule of three kept hundreds of keepers sane — and possibly alive — at wave-swept stations for the better part of two centuries.
The lighthouse is plotted on the Open the map, where its precise position on the Smalls reef, its current light character, and its full history are available alongside the other Trinity House offshore stations.