Lighthouse waiting for its ship to come in

scotto

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The Beach Strip
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Posted with permission from the Hamilton Spectator
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Hamilton, June 20, 2011 -
Sandy Thomson is a bit like a lighthouse himself.

A sturdy mixture of sea and sky, land and light, he rises solidly from the ground toward a bright white top. I don’t know how this works, but his hair, the colour of table linen, actually makes him look young. Maybe because it’s still plentiful, and a bit recklessly set, as though a shore wind had gotten into it, summoning him to sea and fresh adventure.

Sandy has captained ships, piloted planes and directed films. His whole richly barnacled biography, everything he’s taken on — including the care of a big ocean-going Russian steam tug which once limped into a Polish port with no food and no fuel — seems salted onto his skin and ingrained in his voice.

Sandy’s his nickname (his hair started out blond). He’s actually George.

George the fifth.

He takes his place in a long maritime line, a quintet, of George Thomsons. Over the generations, they’ve started a ship company, lost it, crossed oceans, run lighthouses, fought in wars, started ship component companies, and now, in the person of Sandy, been helping save the Hamilton-Burlington lighthouse that the original George kept from 1846 to 1875.

“My great-great grandfather was a shipowner in Scotland, but when the railways killed the coastal ship business, he came to Canada where he worked as a captain on the Great Lakes, then as keeper of the lighthouse,” says Sandy, vice-chair of the Beach Canal Lighthouse Group.

“He lived in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage all week and had a fascination with the weather.”

The handwritten accounts that he so fastidiously kept now form the official weather record of that time, for this region.

The original lighthouse, built in the 1830s, was made of wood and destroyed by fire in 1856. It was replaced by the current structure (white dolomite limestone) in 1858.

Since being decommissioned in 1961, it has languished. The windows are boarded up. The lamphouse is rusted. Until recently, the interior was caked with pigeon guano.

“I would love to see it saved. Otherwise, it’ll be demolished by neglect,” says Sandy.

Even in its present state, and as obscured as it is by the lift bridge, the lighthouse remains impressive. It is the last one left on Lake Ontario, says Sandy.

Yet many Hamiltonians hardly know of it. For Sandy, it’s a special place, not just because of the history. He cherishes high hopes for it. As with almost everything in his life, Sandy has a foot in the past and one in the future.

His company, for instance. The Thomson-Gordon Group in Burlington was started by his grandfather and while steeped in tradition, under Sandy’s stewardship it has also become environmentally forward. At considerable market sacrifice, the company, which makes ship components, won’t sell shaft bearings that need oil because the oil leaks into the sea. The company produces a non-oil lubricant for bearings and has been nominated for an award for it.

Sandy, who started his own documentary film company named Cinema 16 in 1970 (he revived it several years ago), has always gone his own way. In 1989, he bought the Russian steam tug mentioned above and ran Thomson-Gordon from it as it sailed from port to port, for several months at a time. One time the ship ran out of food and fuel.

“We were down to tea bags,” he says. “We were a sorry lot. We would stop cargo ships and beg them for oil but they’d say, ‘Too bad.’”

They managed to make it to Poland. Maybe it was fate, for he ended up marrying the woman they hired there to clean the ship: not a pleasant job.

Now Sandy is passing the company torch to his stepdaughter Anna Galoni, formerly Jarzynowska. He has a son, named Andrew, not George.

One foot in the past, one in the future. So, like others in the Beach Canal Lighthouse Group, he is hoping not only to see the lighthouse and the cottage restored but to see them become the focal points of a larger interpretive centre around which there could be restaurants and other attractions.

But for now, he’d settle for the restoration.

How you can help

Stop by to support the Lighthouse Lane Street Sale, put on by the BCLG, on July 10 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 871 Beach Boulevard.

For more information on the lighthouse, call 905-549-4090.

jmahoney@thespec.com

905-526-3306
 
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