John Rudyard

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John Rudyerd (sometimes seen as Rudyard) was the man chosen to build the second Eddystone Lighthouse, following the destruction of the original building in the Great Storm of 1703. For the second time the choice had fallen on someone who was neither architect nor professional engineer. Rudyerd was a silk merchant with a shop on Ludgate Hill in London.

Rudyerd was born in Cornwall and spent his childhood in circumstances of extreme degradation and misery. He was one of a large family described by a clergyman who knew them as "a worthless set of ragged beggars whom almost nobody would employ, on account of the badness of their characters". The young son John was the one white sheep of this black flock, and was made to suffer accordingly. He had to endure constant ill-treatment by a brutish father and bullying brothers because he tried to avoid taking part in their squalid activities. Eventually he could stand it no longer and, running away to Plymouth, found employment as a domestic servant. His employer sent him to school, where he did very well - and then started him off on a business career. Within a few years John Rudyerd had set up on his own account in London as a silk merchant.

This brief view of his early life show that he was a man of great character, ability, and personality. The fact that he was singled out to build the lighthouse, and the way he set about it, also show that he must have had gifts beyond those allied to the marketing of silk. In those days, science and engineering were largely in the hands of gentlemen with enquiring and thoughtful minds and Rudyerd, self-made man and prosperous merchant, was one of them. He approached the construction of the lighthouse not from the point of view of a house, as Winstanley had done, but looked at it as a sort of conical ship. Consequently he chose as his assistants two Master Shipwrights from the Naval dockyard at Woolwich. His tower would be encased in timbers of the finest Devon oak (like the hull of a ship), and those timbers would be caulked and treated with pitch, again just as if it was a ship - all the better to withstand the constant battering of the ocean.

His lighthouse was the very opposite of Winstanley's first effort. Ornamentation was replaced by simplicity, flat octagonal faces by smooth timber-cased uprights, stone by timber and granite layers permanently joined by trenails. Having finished this major project successfully, John Rudyerd vanished without trace.

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