When the 1927-built Spurn lightship had finished its decades of faithful service in the Humber Estuary it was saved from scrap in 1983 by Hull City Council – becoming its first exhibit of floating maritime history – writes John Hobbs.

The 1927-built Spurn lightship at her moorings in the marina in Hull. JOHN HOBBS

In September 1935 a remarkable relationship was established between Trinity House of London and Philip & Son Ltd, shipbuilders of Dartmouth, Devon, that was to last for almost 30 years, during which time the firm built 29 lightships for Trinity.
In the same period, Philips also built five lightships for the Commissioners of Irish Lights, Dublin and one for the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board, Liverpool: quite an impressive output for an equally impressive trio of owners!
I lived with my parents in Dartmouth in the 1950s, where my late father became very friendly with the Trinity House surveyor who had to spend much time there, as there always seemed to be a lightship under construction. To improve communications with London, my father, a keen amateur photographer, suggested that he should photograph various construction phases, the surveyor then using those photographs to support his written reports. Father’s visits to the builders’ Noss Yard, across and up-river from their floating-dock and offices that our house overlooked, presented opportunities for me to visit the yard to watch the launch of several of Trinity House’s new vessels. I disappointingly never did manage to board a lightship, it would have been interesting to see exactly how the crew were accommodated in a vessel that was actually going nowhere after it had been towed to its station and ‘secured’ to the seabed.

The deck cabins and light mast, looking aft.

It took me some 50 years to achieve that particular ambition, and that was during a visit to Hull last May to view the Spurn lightship, now moored in the city centre marina. This lightship was delivered to the Humber Conservancy Board (HCB) from the yard of the Goole Shipbuilding and Repairing Co (1927) Ltd, one of some 21 shipbuilders – no doubt Philips would have been in that number - that tendered for the contract, on 31 October 1927, its Lloyds Certificate of Class being dated the following day. The HCB was formed in 1907 to take over and assume responsibility for the provision and management of safe channels of navigation in both the lower and upper Humber, relieving the Hull Trinity House (not to be confused with the Trinity House of London) of those obligations. HCB itself ceased to function in July 1968 when its responsibilities, assets and liabilities were transferred to the British Transport Docks Board which, on privatisation, gave way to Associated British Ports Ltd.

With a length of 100ft and a beam of 24ft, the lightship – identified as No 12 in the HCB ‘fleet’ - was of a similar size to those built in the late 1930s by Philip & Son Ltd of Dartmouth for Trinity House, and was destined for a station some four-and-a-half miles to the south east of the lighthouse located at Spurn Head, a desolate spit of land on the eastern side of the entrance to the Humber Estuary, thus replacing the New Sand Light and Whistle Buoy. Indeed, it was initially indicated that the vessel would be identified as Newsand, but Spurn was the chosen identity and the name was painted in white on its black-painted hull.
The chosen colour of black was itself a little unusual for red is the usual colour for the UK’s coastal lightships. Black was seemingly selected for Spurn because it enabled the vessel to be more visible against the background of the land. Technically, it should have been green, being on the starboard side of the deepwater channel. However, all markers on the starboard of the channel were black with white markings and lights. From 1924, at the request of Trinity House in London, green was the colour chosen for wreck-marking vessels.

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