These facilities were updated in both World War I and World War II. From 1915 to 1919 the island was requisitioned by the Admiralty as a coastguard station. After the war the Sleemans returned to carry out farming and fishing and played host to occasional tourists. In World War II, search light batteries were built on Steep Holm. In 1940 the island's warden, Harry Cox, who had developed the island into a bird sanctuary since 1931, was appointed as a coastguard and was supported by Local Defence Volunteers from Weston-super-Mare. In 1940 and 1941 the battery was refortified by soldiers from the Indian Army Service Corps using mules to transport guns and equipment up the steep cliffs. The armament included MarkVII6-inch breech-loading guns taken from World War I naval vessels which had been scrapped, and also included Lewis automatic machine guns against air attack. The Garden Battery was built over two Victorian stone gun emplacements. Engineers from the Royal Pioneer Corps improved the infrastructure including importing sheep to feed the soldiers and, after a case of typhoid fever, shipping drinking water from south Wales. To enable the movement of equipment, the engineers built a new jetty. This was linked to the plateau with a cable-operated winched switchback railway using prefabricated gauge lines which had been captured from the Germans in World War I. The Steep Holm batteries were also connected, by underwater telegraph cable, to the Brean Down Fort batteries, but parts of the cable were stolen for scrap after the end of World War II.