For 21 years, Peter Halil, has helped provide a guiding light to sailors at sea; in a sense, Brother Halil found his own guiding light in 1981 when he accepted the gospel and was baptized.
Brother Halil, English by birth, lives on Anglesey Island in North Wales and is a member of the Gaerwen Ward, Chester England Stake.As a lighthouse keeper, he belongs to a vanishing species.
"My employer, Trinity House, is presently in the midst of the total automation of all the lighthouses in England and Wales," he said. "This will very soon mean the demise of the lighthouse keeper."
Anxious to preserve the memory of a tradition with roots dating back to ancient Rome, Brother Halil undertook a unique project in 1990.
"I started to record this fast-passing way of life onto videotape," he explained. "This evolved into the project, `Our Lighthouse Heritage.' "
The endeavor mainly has involved visits to the remaining, non-automatic lighthouses in England and Wales, shooting video pictures inside and out, and interviewing the keepers, past and present.
It has been undertaken with the approval of Trinity House, the lighthouse authority for England and Wales. But the work has been accomplished mainly on Brother Halil's free time, using his own resources. In 1992, however, he did win the Heritage Section of the Ford Motor Co.'s European Conservation Awards for his project. That brought a prize of 3,000 British pounds.
The project has been helped along as he has managed to get special postings to substitute for lighthouse keepers who are ill.
"I even volunteered to go offshore on the Needles Lighthouse last Christmas, just to videotape the Christmas festivities on a wave-washed lighthouse in the sea," he said. "Father Christmas even managed to find me out there, so I didn't go short of presents!"
Last March, Brother Halil went to Buckingham Palace, where he conducted a taped interview with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in the prince's capacity as master of Trinity House.
"He gave the project his full support and showed a keen interest," Brother Halil related.
With less than a dozen lighthouses to go, the taping will probably take until the end of this year. Next March, Brother Halil will be laid off - or in British parlance, made redundant - from his lighthouse keeper position.
The finished production will follow the English and Welsh coastline, touring each lighthouse in sequence, including interviews with keepers, and will show wave-washed towers and keepers telling stories.
"For instance," Brother Halil recounted, "on many of the towers the keepers devised a way of fishing using a kite! The tail of the kite had the hook attached and was flown away from the lighthouse, then either hovered or landed into the sea until a fish took the bait. The bite of the fish tugged the kite where it caught the wind, so the fish almost caught itself. It was then a matter of flying the kite back to the lighthouse before the seagulls could `pinch' the fish off the hook."
The intent of Brother Halil's video production is to make the tapes available to schools and colleges for their use. "Also, they will become valuable archive material for future generations to see what we lighthouse keepers were up to," he added.
He is also making audiotapes of his interviews and taking lots of photographs with the intent of one day writing a book about lighthouse keepers.
Brother Halil, who has served as Young Men president, ward financial clerk and bishop's counselor, currently attends the Holyhead Branch on Anglesey, with his wife, Isla, and their three children.
He met Isla while visiting friends who owned a ballroom dance studio.
"I was roped in to help by partnering this lovely young lady." She was Isla Daviess, a returned missionary who served in the England Birmingham Mission from 1978-1979.
"She was learning basic dancing to enable her to shine at a Young Adult convention."
Through her influence - and after reading all the volumes of History of the Church by Joseph Smith "plus loads of accounts of the pioneers' trek west to Salt Lake City" - he was motivated to seek and obtain a testimony of the gospel and join the Church.
In 1981, he and Isla went with about 30 Church members on a tour of the western United States. In Salt Lake City, they met President Spencer W. Kimball.
"It was meant to be a quick hello," he recalled, "but he took us into his inner office and chatted and chatted to us all for a long time. It was his worried counselor that eventually called it to a halt. I can remember having one of my inner struggles with Church doctrine on that day. The closer we got to the meeting with the prophet, the worse I got. I was really quite obnoxious! But the moment I took his hand it was like a wave of love overpowered me, and I was suddenly my nice, normal self again. A truly wonderful man of God was my impression of Spencer W. Kimball."
It was on that trip that he proposed to Isla, at sunrise on the lip of the Grand Canyon. They had been friends for about a year. "It was her love and quiet dignity, plus her teachings, that won me over," he said. "I trusted her implicitly (and still do) and let her lead me the correct way to Heavenly Father."
He sees the handiwork of God in his profession. "When I'm at work on a lighthouse," he said, "living so close to nature as I do in all its phases from calm seas to horrendous waves, then is the time one sees the hand of God at work.
"I've been on wave-washed towers with two other keepers (there are three on our lighthouses) when storms have sent waves right up and over the lighthouse. These are great towers built in granite and fitted together like some giant jigsaw of blocks many feet thick. They quiver and shake when a big wave hits, with a noise like a train approaching, then the wave passes the windows (which hopefully you have remembered to shut!)."
The wave compresses air in the tower, causing one's ears to pop, he said, and for an instant, nothing can be seen through the window but solid green water.
"For an instant, your lighthouse is a submarine. Then it all cascades away, one last quiver, and you wait for the next big one to come. All this on a tower that is maybe 145 feet to the top, and the water can go all the way over it."
Recently, he shot some videotape at Wolf Rock Tower off the Lands End coast in Cornwall, renowned for its big waves.
"I got the storm I prayed for," he said, "and during it I went onto the top, on the helicopter platform. (All our tower lights out to sea have a helicopter landing pad on top.)"
The pad is about 15 feet across and is surrounded by a safety net. He lay on his stomach with his camera aimed upside down to get the proper view of the waves hitting the tower below. Suddenly, a big one came.
"The shake on the finished video isn't me; it is the quiver of the whole tower," he said. "I had my eye glued to the viewfinder. The tower vanished beneath me in a mass of white, seething foam and wave!"
That footage, plus other video he shot of foggy weather, was used by England's Pinewood Studios in a production they are making for American television, "Wonders of Weather." The program will eventually come back to Great Britain by satellite TV.
The Halils plan another visit to the West Coast of the United States in the near future.
"I am hoping to visit and video some lighthouses there, and it would be very interesting to see if there are any other LDS lighthouse keepers around the world," he said.
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