Legend of the lighthouse builder: how a British engineer in China helped connect East and West, while living life to the full
- A Scot, David Marr Henderson spent most of his working life in China, where he built lighthouses that made it into a trading nation. But it wasn’t all work and no play.
Felicity Somers Eve was unaware of her great-grandfather’s achievements until she found a cardboard box in a damp corner of the loft at her mother’s house in 2009. And so from West Sussex, England, thanks to hundreds of objects, photographs, letters, technical drawings and other documents, she pieced together the work of David Marr Henderson and his colourful life, with much of his adulthood spent in China.
Marr Henderson was a controversial, uncompromising civil engineer who worked for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in Shanghai for nearly 30 years in the late 19th century. He designed and constructed 34 lighthouses across Greater China, most of which, including the Waglan Lighthouse in Hong Kong, still guide vessels from sampans to giant container ships and cruise liners approaching the harbour. His lighthouses connected East and West, his life’s work reflecting an affinity for and sensitivity to the cultural traditions of East Asia.
“My grandmother was born and christened in Shanghai,” says Somers Eve, showing me a photo of her grandmother as a young child, sitting on the knee of her amah. “She used to tell us about it.”
Within a canvas money bag marked “£1000 in sovereigns”, Somers Eve found not gold coins but boxes of drawing instruments with which Marr Henderson created his immaculate scaled drawings of lighthouse designs, now safely stored at the Institution of Civil Engineers archive, in London.
“These are beautiful and rigorous building drawings, showing high-class skill even compared with today’s use of computer software,” says Poon Sun-wah, adjunct professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Architecture.
One of the few Marr Henderson lighthouse drawings seen in public is of Waglan Lighthouse, now a declared a monument in Hong Kong. The drawing was used by student researchers at City University’s Lighthouse Heritage Research Connections group to create 3D printed models of his original design, displayed recently at an exhibition held at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum called “Seeing in the Dark: Stories of Hong Kong Harbour and Lighthouse”.
