The Lighthouse Stevensons
The extraordinary story ofthe building of the Scottish lighthousesby the ancestors ofRobert Louis Stevenson
Bella Bathurst

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Bella Bathurst 1999; 2020

Cover photograph © Northern Lighthouse Board

Bella Bathust asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007204434

Ebook Edition © November 2009 ISBN: 9780007358977

Version: 2020-07-29

To my mother, and to Lucy and Flora.

There are spaces still to be filled before the map is completed – though these days it’s only in the explored territories that men write, sadly, Here live monsters.

NORMAN MCCAIG, Old Maps and New

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

One Yarmouth

Two Northern Lights

Three Eddystone

Four The Bell Rock

Five Edinburgh

Six Skerryvore

Seven Muckle Flugga

Eight Dhu Heartach

Nine The Keepers

Ten Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Previously Published List

About the Publisher

PREFACE

This is not – nor was it ever intended to be – a definitive biography of the Lighthouse Stevensons. When I began research in January 1996, I realised that any attempt to write a comprehensive biography of all four generations of the Stevensons would be both futile and, given the range and technicality of their work, probably quite wearing as well. And yet to write the history of just one of their lives would be to leave an incomplete picture. The Stevensons were, in the best and worst of senses, a family business and are perhaps most easily understood in that context. The solution I came to was to concentrate on the time between 1786 and 1890 when the first four Lighthouse Stevensons were working around the Scottish coastline, and to focus in detail on those four lights that were most closely associated with their respective engineers. The result of this selection is not quite biography and not quite history. If my selections at times seem arbitrary or incomplete, I can only apologise. The life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson have been the subject of innumerable biographies, studies, critiques and analyses, not to mention his own autobiographical writings. The story of his ancestors, by comparison, remains a relatively unworn path. I would hope therefore that this book would be seen as a kind of taster for the subject, and that anyone wanting to search further would be able to do so. There is more, much more, in the lives and works of the Lighthouse Stevensons than any one book could ever hope to encompass.

FOREWORD

The ferryman has a hangover. I have a hangover. At the hotel last night there was a wedding party which was topped off with a bar-wide debate on whether a man walking at three miles an hour down the deck of a ship travelling at 20 knots would, technically speaking, be doing 23 knots or 20 knots or 17 knots or actually not travelling across the surface of the earth at all. The left side of the bar argued that to arrive at a fair calculation, variables such as tide and current should be taken into account. The right half was trying to dance to Mariah Carey.

It is 7 a.m. and the wind is already slapping at the sides of the jetty. The clouds are filthy grey, and the forecast says there’s a storm coming. The ferryman pulls the cord on the outboard and subsides into the stern, hood down. The boat cuts a raw white line across the Kyle of Durness, and I look out to the weather as a little blue yacht on the far side of the bay vanishes beneath a hill of water before re-emerging at its summit, hull almost clean of water. The Wrath in the Cape is drawn from the old Norse word for turning point, hvarf, but on a day like this there could be no more apt description, particularly since the MoD has turned the whole area into a live firing range. To me this already looks like the middle of a storm. Has the ferryman seen worse?

He looks up. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sakes, yes.’

The Northern Lighthouse Board’s Land Rover is waiting by the mooring on the other side, its windscreen wipers plinking. Wordlessly, the ferryman hands up a couple of boxes, hauls round and heads back in the direction of the bar. The Cape’s last Principal Keeper Iain Roberton has driven the 11 miles along the track partly to collect supplies and partly because he wants to get away from all the building works – people clumping in and out of the cottages, routine all over the place. This light is one of the last to be automated. As part of the process, the old diesel generators need to be removed and replaced with computerised monitoring equipment linked to the NLB’s HQ in Edinburgh. Where necessary the lighting apparatus itself has also been changed: big old lenses replaced with smaller modern alternatives, tungsten bulbs substituted for the first generation of LEDs.

We pass a notice: London 746 Miles. Then a recent bomb crater. The MoD generally leave the keepers in peace, but once in a while pilots find the temptations of a large white tower pinned to a large stone coast overwhelming. The keepers haven’t been shot yet, but they do sometimes get lightly strafed. From the other direction there are different hazards: sea, wind, fog, all the things a lighthouse is designed to stand against. The buildings here are tight-fitted to this treeless, sheep-swept corner of the country, but there’s a cracked window pane in the kitchen from the last gale when the sea reached up 130 feet and tapped out the glass. The previous month a force nine lasted for four days (‘a bit breezy’), during which Iain had to make a grab for the railings to stop himself from going over the cliff. ‘It’s a right funny feeling being lifted off your feet. I lost my glasses, it was blowing that hard.

’The track broadens out to a wide green field, a tower topped with a black diamond lantern and one of the most astounding views in the world; two coasts, two oceans, and the eastward opening to the Pentland Firth. In the foreground a Bond helicopter is suspended just over the edge of the cliff, several reels of electrical cabling swinging from its underside. It has been picking up construction materials from the deck of the NLB ship Pharos in the Firth below and transferring them to the light. These are the last disrupted days before the changeover, the end of a profession, the removal men taking out one era and replacing it with the next.

In November 1996, as the process of de-manning the Scottish lights was reaching its peak, I was 746 miles away on the third floor of the Science Museum. An exhibition of lighthouse optics had been set up and in a corner one of the old threeand-a-half-ton Fresnel lenses was revolving on its brass pivot with a low-watt bulb shining inside. I stood and watched it for a long time, entranced. If you looked directly towards the bulb it would vanish for a second and then reappear, LARGE and small, LARGE and small, its beam tinted with green or haloed with rainbows of prismatic light. If you turned towards the black partition wall, the same light swept round in a smooth circle, strongest in the centre but blurring out towards its edges. Its circuit was broken by three shutters interrupting the beam and making it appear to flash once, twice, three times. Then a long flash, then the same interruption: flash, flash, flash. Then round again, smooth and unperturbed, as sure of itself as any point of science could ever be.

Below was a sign explaining that this particular lens had originally been used at one of the Scottish lights built by Robert Stevenson. I studied the sign for a while. Stevenson with a V, not a PH. A distant half-memory surfaced – hadn’t the writer Robert Louis Stevenson had some sort of connection with engineering or architecture?

Downstairs in the shop I asked if they had any books on the Stevensons. They were helpful – looked up things on the microfiche, found plenty on Robert Stephenson, Rocket scientist, but drew a blank on lighthouses. There seemed to be nothing about the man who had made that light upstairs or how he might be connected to RLS. I walked across Hyde Park possessed by a single, idiotic idea. That lens was a piece of pure magic, as rational as anything the Scottish Enlightenment ever produced but as mythic as Prometheus. Those lights would be difficult to build even now, so how on earth had they managed it two centuries ago? Robert Stevenson – whoever he was – had obviously done something astounding, so why weren’t he and his family better known?

That evening at home I picked through bits of RLS’s autobiographical writing – gleams of history in Kidnapped, forewords and introductions. It wasn’t just Robert who had been an engineer, I discovered, it was all of them, four generations, virtually every male in the family except for a couple of cousins and RLS himself. Though the Stevensons had been general engineers, they had stuck to lighthouses for so long that lighthouses had eventually stuck to them. That was who they were – Lighthouse Stevensons.

Except, of course, for the one who wasn’t. Even in fragments RLS’s ambivalence was audible, sometimes directed at specific individuals and sometimes at – well, who? History? His peers? His wife, Fanny? Himself? My God, I thought, he writes so beautifully, and he sounds so torn. As you would be. If all your family – grandfather, two uncles, father, cousins – were firefighters or paramedics, if what they did was wild and pioneering and every day it made a difference to the lives of others, and if you then decided to turn aside from keeping people alive and become a writer, and if all your stories then ate the fame you knew was due to your family, you’d probably feel ambivalent, too. The more I read, the more astounding I found these four generations who had changed the shape of Scotland and then vanished, occluded by a brighter star. The following morning, I had decided. I might know nothing about engineering or the sea, but so what? I was going to write this.

It was the first book I wrote, and I knew even then that I’d got lucky. It wasn’t just that I arrived at the point when the last of the Scottish lights were being automated, it was all of it. Sitting bowed in the basement of the Northern Lighthouse Board with an elephant folio of Cook’s Voyages splayed on the shelves, or sifting through boxes of Stevenson papers in the National Library of Scotland while the Edinburgh Festival rioted outside. For a few months I went every day. Something about the routine of it made it possible to build up a kind of retrospective intimacy with each Stevenson just through their handwriting – not just the words, but the words behind the words, the way they spoke and wrote: Robert by turns direct, commanding or circumlocutory, the way Alan’s hand could slip from health to sickness to seasickness, writing in bed or from the lighthouse yacht or from some forsaken end-of-the-road croft. Often his writing looks agonised, the drift of ink and its disorder reminding me of Robert Falcon Scott’s final journal entry from the Antarctic: ‘For God’s sake, look after our people.’ Occasionally, too ill even to hold a pen, he dictated through a scribe.

Either way Alan was always more tempered than his father, more tolerant, but somehow further back. Robert was a master both of detail and of the grand design who worked to a hard view of human nature but remained thrilled by the lift of adventure. As RLS noted, ‘What he felt himself, he continued to attribute to all around him.’ RLS’s best known literary character is Jekyll/Hyde, still considered the ultimate delineation of a split personality: public and private, light and shadow, secret and revealed. His grandfather embodied all of those things, a composite of opposites contained within a singular man. In the hush of the library’s manuscript section, this family rose from the page alive and loud again. From the stains of rainwater blots to family squabbles over rent payments and eating habits, the reality of their lives took on form and weather.

Meanwhile, out at the edges, the last of the keepers were packing up and preparing to leave.

The cottages are cosy and the kettle has recently boiled. The Assistant Keepers Kenny and Alan appear, recently woken from the last watch. Interest in the automation process has been increasing and all three have recently grown accustomed to being persons of interest. Most keepers recognise the sense of automation, but they wouldn’t be professionals if they weren’t discomfited by some of its results: drystone dykes patched with remedial fencing, cement bags all over the place, the watched coast now not seen at all.

Kenny opens a packet of Rich Tea from the stores and pulls the milk out of the new fridge. Beside him in one of the cupboards are the dry stores, the 1990s equivalent of ship’s biscuit, designed to prevent the keepers from starving in the event that the relief cannot be made. When circumstances permit, fresh veg or meat can be brought over from Durness. Alcohol is not permitted, and from the beginning of the service all the lights were supposed to be dry, though like everything else this was occasionally subject to interpretation. Some time later, one of the last keepers at the Bell Rock, sends me a picture of a Hogmanay celebration which included twenty-one cans of McEwan’s Export, eight bottles of whisky, one of Drambuie, a wall of lager and a Tennent’s Special extension. No food at all.

Outside, the backdraft from the helicopter’s rotors rattles the double glazing. Iain Roberton has been with the NLB for thirty years and cannot bring himself to think beyond the moment of ‘closure’. None of the keepers have begun to look for other jobs since they say there’s no point this far in advance. ‘I’ll miss it’, says Alan, even though the Cape was seen as one of the worst postings. ‘I hate people saying you must be lonely out here. I’ve never been lonely.’ He looks out towards the space where Orkney should be. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘I wish I was coming with you.’

A couple of hours later the Scotsman’s photographer and I are on the helicopter. He is harnessed to the seat with the door open, taking photographs of the sea and the slabby coast while the pilot does wheelies round the light, running tight to the north walls of Scotland and then pulling up so hard that the controls spark red in alarm and the rotors chop at the air. The wind is already strengthening. Below us the surface of the Firth now wears wrackish strands of white and the helicopter prances from side to side while all the air I had in my lungs disappears in an almost-scream of exhilaration.

Several hours later on the Pharos, the weather has worsened. The ship was scheduled to take further supplies up to Fair Isle, but instead we are running for shelter in Scapa Flow. From the ship’s bridge the Pentland Firth rises and rises. The wind speed is now at 50 knots and the forecast is severe gale force 9 or 10. The captain Bryce Henderson finds a spot near St Margaret’s Hope close by three lights and lowers both anchors. The helicopter stopped being able to fly once the wind speed exceeded 40 knots, so there’s now no question of us leaving until this is over.

Opening the steel door out onto deck has become increasingly difficult. The wind pitches from a song to a shriek and the division between sea and air softens and dissolves. Water appears from above in gouts, or sideways as projectiles, or from below as sudden rearing mountains lifting over the bow and smashing towards us over the decks. Sea has become sky, and the sky has vanished. A kind of darkness falls, broken by the beams of lighthouses. Beside us or behind us or abruptly in front the high-up, squared-off lights of oil tankers loom, implacable as office blocks, sliding past us on their way out of the Flotta terminal. For long moments the ships just seem to stand there, the tankers’ engines insisting they are doing 15, 20 knots but the force of the water holding them almost stationary.

The forecast is now at force 11, the wind at between 55 to 60 knots, and though there are two anchors down the one at the stern is dragging. Henderson has been an NLB man for a long time and in between the urgent punctuations of Mayday calls he stares out of the window, listening. Beneath his uniform, in through his feet and his fingertips, he is tuned to the sound of the ship so acutely he could trace it down to the last semitone. In the silences the rest of us can pick up the faint gravelly scuffle as the back anchor drags. Below us is foul ground, bits of seabed which haven’t been surveyed since the Stevensons’ day. Henderson thinks the anchor is snagged on something and isn’t holding ground. He’d like to move the ship to a more secure anchorage but Scapa Flow is strewn with old ship and submarine carcasses, and there’s no guarantee he wouldn’t just catch on another wreck. Beneath the bridge the cable of the bow anchor is pulled so tight we can feel a hard, high thrum sounding through the ship’s steel plates. Behind there are other sounds, bangs and wrenches, the discordance of metal played out to the end of its tether.

Later that evening I go in search of a view that doesn’t include bits of diagonal sea. Sitting chatting in the canteen, I’m struck by the almost naval divisions on board. In total there are twenty-four crew, all male, but three separate dining areas – one for crew, one for officers and one for the NLB’s Commissioners. Is it a military culture, I ask Jake, at thirty-six the youngest person on board. ‘No,’ he says, ‘more like prison.’ In the commissioners’ dining room a portrait of the NLB’s patron Princess Anne looks down from her wood-panelled wall, over a grand dining table and a set of old photo albums stuck with pictures of past inspection voyages – sunlit games of deck quoits, tall men with moustaches handing up guns and fishing rods. The bookshelf downstairs is not stocked for reassurance. All I can find are commentaries on Job and Isaiah, and a couple of books on lobbying Parliament. Behind me, the glass decanters clink within their silver-fenced tray.

This – the storm – is bad, but it’s not unusual. This is the Pentland Firth, this is the weather, here is what happens when you pass the end of Scotland. Two hundred years ago when there were no roads or ferries or oil terminals or hundred-horsepower engines or anything much except real horsepower, the Stevensons came and built lights. They built them for this, and frequently they built them in this. Marooned at the Bell Rock in 1824, the superintending artificer MacDonald wrote to Robert Stevenson: ‘While at work on the rock the water came upon the house in an unbroken state to the height of the kitchen windows (64ft above the rock) and green seas as high as the bedroom windows (76ft). At times, seas, for I cannot call them sprays … came above the library windows and struck the cornice (90ft) with such force that on separating they darted to leeward of the house, which was left, if I may so express it, at one end of an avenue of water. Indeed the appearance in all directions around us was at times more dreadful and terrific than I have ever seen it before.’ Robert was unimpressed. This was mere business as usual.

It is a reminder that when the Stevensons started, they really did start from scratch. This wasn’t just arriving by a coast and building a lighthouse to an established template. This was making roads, bridges, wharves, moorings – all the civilisaton to get the materials there in the first place. It was drawing maps, or surveying the seabed, or changing coloured glass, or advancing the technology of optics. It was finding ways of landing stone dressed to within millimetres from a tipping boat to a jaggedy rock without breaking it or any of the men who made it. It was building a tiny nation state to form a structure around a structure. It was doing all that and more – always more – to build something which represented in stone the best of both the 18th century and all the ages after.

In the time since this book was published I’ve been lucky enough to speak to many people who know about the Stevenson lights either because they served in them, or because they grew up around them, or because as sailors they had cause to be thankful for them. Lighthouses still fascinate. But the Stevensons didn’t build them to be admired – the reverse, in fact. A lighthouse’s true job is to warn you to go away. The only people who ever see the Bell or Skerryvore close up are maintenance engineers and shipwreck victims. All of those lights, every single one of them, were miracles, built to be avoided.

It was three days before the wind dropped enough for us to leave and a further three days before the Pharos resumed her journey towards Fair Isle: a force 11 fairly ordinary hurricane.

Back in Edinburgh the debate had started then and still rumbles on now: in the age of satellites, why do we need these things, these expensive lights with their dues and their maintenance issues? But as we sat swinging in the Pharos by one overstrained chain, watching for the false lights and the true, all any of us felt was an absolute gratitude for the fact that someone – not just someone, but a Stevenson – had gone out in seas like this and reached out over the centuries to raise a light in the dark.

INTRODUCTION

‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880. ‘The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan; and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father.’ Louis might have been the most famous of the Stevensons, but he was not the most productive. Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of the Stevenson family planned, designed and constructed the ninety-seven manned lighthouses that still speckle the Scottish coast, working in conditions and places that would be daunting even for modern engineers. The same driven energy that Louis put into writing, his ancestors put into lighting the darkness of the seas. The Lighthouse Stevensons, as they became known, were also responsible for a slew of inventions in both construction and optics and for an extraordinary series of developments in architecture, design and mechanics. As well as lighthouses, they built harbours, roads, railways, docks and canals all over Scotland and beyond. They, as much as anyone, are responsible for their country’s appearance today.

But the Lighthouse Stevensons have gone down in history for a very different profession. Robert, the first of the Stevenson dynasty, despised literature; his grandson perpetuated his family’s name with it. The author of Kidnapped, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde initially trained as an engineer. To his father’s dismay, Louis escaped aged twenty-one, first into law and then into writing. As he later confessed in The Education of an Engineer, his training had not been used in quite the way his father intended. ‘What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but in deed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of the string course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary.’

With age and distance, Louis recovered pride and affection in the Stevenson trade. He wrote with awe of his grandfather’s work on the Bell Rock lighthouse, and of his father’s melancholic genius for design and experimentation. He wrote about almost every aspect of his own brief and unhappy time as an apprentice, in essays, letters, introductions and memoirs. Most importantly, Louis alchemised his experiences around the ragged coasts of the north into the gold of his best fiction. Treasure Island and Kidnapped both contain salvaged traces of his early career. The further he grew away from engineering, the more he felt towards it. He was sea-marked, and he knew it. He also recognised, with some discomfiture, that his own fame was swallowing up the recognition his family deserved. In 1886, far from Edinburgh, he wrote crossly to his American publishers,

My father is not an ‘inspector’ of lighthouses; he, two of my uncles, my grandfather, and my great grandfather in succession, have been engineers to the Scotch Lighthouse service; all the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name; and my father’s services to lighthouse optics have been distinguished indeed. I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward.

Louis was being only a little disingenuous. He liked recognition and, to an extent, courted it. But his plaintive belief that his family deserved the same acknowledgement seems farsighted now. Even at the height of the Victorian engineering boom, great men went unnoticed and exceptional feats unacknowledged. Louis did his best to remedy the injustice, but also recognised that the Stevensons hardly helped themselves. Not one member of the family ever took out a patent on any of their inventions in design, optics or architecture. All of them believed that their works were for the benefit of the nation as a whole and therefore unworthy of private gain. They were only engineers, after all; they worked to order or conscience, and were only rarely disposed to flightier moments of reflection. What pride they had in their creations they put down to the advantages of forward planning and the benevolence of the Almighty. And Louis, the tricky, charming black sheep of the family, stole all the fame that posterity had to give.

Two hundred years ago, when the first lights were built around the Scottish coast, no one talked much of security. The first beacons for mariners were either coal fires or high coastal towers in which candles burned through the night. Only a few of these fires were ever constructed in Scotland, since they consumed fuel at a voracious pace and were usually extinguished by bad weather. Thus by the mid-eighteenth century, the Scottish coast had become notorious for shipwrecks. In 1799, seventy vessels were lost in the Firth of Tay alone. Along with the physical dangers, there were also the human ones. Bands of wreckers would lie in wait for beached ships, hoping for chances of loot. Something, it was becoming obvious, would have to be done. Those engineers who did come forward were more like pioneers than bureaucrats. To place a building on a rock in the Atlantic ocean was, after all, a formidable endeavour. The pressures of wind, wave, tide and weather on a lighthouse were exceptional. No other building, not even a harbour, had to have quite the same mixture of tenacity and flexibility as the sea-towers did. Any construction in mid-ocean had to be capable of resisting waves which, when roused, could hurl several hundred tons of water at anything in their way. Every one of the rock lighthouses in Scotland was built with stone walls at least nine feet thick at the base; anything less, and they would not have lasted the first gale of winter. To build something under such pressures at a time when the only materials available were stone, wood, glass and metal was nothing short of miraculous. There was no concrete, or cranes, or hydraulic lifting equipment; there were no helicopters or pneumatic drills. Dynamite was a new and fickle builder’s tool to be treated with extreme caution. Mortar was strong but unpredictable, requiring expert mixing and split-second timing. Haulage, in many cases, was provided by horses, who did not take kindly to precipitous cliffs and needed as much tending as any of the workmen. Equipment and materials were brought by sailboat, which ran exactly the same risks as any other ship. As the early engineers discovered, building 130-foot pillars in the middle of a hostile ocean required skills and tools that had not yet been invented. As often as not, they had to make it up as they went along.

From its slow beginnings, the organisation of lights was divided by nation: the English, the Scots and the Irish all had, and still have, separate administrations. The English service, which was founded in 1514 as the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity of St Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent (later foreshortened to Trinity House), developed in piecemeal fashion. For a period of 300 years or so, most of its lights were built and maintained by individuals who had been granted charters. Although it did mean that the most hazardous parts of the English coast were lit, the lights’ construction was erratic and their maintenance wayward. Pepys, who was Master of Trinity House from 1676 to 1689, found private charters disgraceful. While still at the Admiralty, he wrote critically of ‘the evil of having lights raised for the profit of private men, not for the good of the public seamen, their widows and orphans’. In theory, the private owners could build, light and staff the towers in any way they chose in return for a small annual rent. Several were taken over by Trinity House once the lease had expired or had become suitably profitable. By 1800, the combination of extortionate private dues and inconsistent public ones was causing uproar among shipowners plying the English coastline. The situation had, in effect, become a form of legalised extortion: by 1818, Trinity House was reaping an annual profit of around £50,000. The few attempts to reform the situation usually resulted in an undignified tussle between Trinity House, the Crown and the landowners for a portion of the money. It was not until 1836 that Trinity House bought back all the lighthouses in private hands, an undertaking which cost them over £1 million.

The Scottish lights, by contrast, were almost all built within the space of a century. The archetypal lighthouse on its lonely rock in a lonely sea is largely the product of a Scottish imagination and a Scottish sense of endeavour. Augustin Fresnel’s nineteenth-century refinements to oil lighting and high-powered lenses were matched by equally significant developments in lighthouse construction and marine technology. The Stevenson family took up the challenge of their times, blended it with the scientific breakthroughs of their day and brought both to a point of near-perfection. As Louis later noted, engineering ‘was not a science then. It was a living art, and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its practitioners.’

In 1786 Louis’s grandfather, Robert, went into partnership with his stepfather Thomas Smith, then the Engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses. The two began replacing the flickering and unreliable fires first with oil lamps and later with a system of fixed lights using either gas or oil. In 1807, Robert started work on the Bell Rock, a vicious granite reef off the coast of Arbroath. The reef was submerged at high tide and only partially exposed at low tide, so Robert and his staff were forced to play a nervous game of waiting with the sea and the weather. Lighthouses were not Robert’s only preoccupation, however. ‘Scotland itself,’ as a biographer of his grandson later remarked, ‘was his drawing board.’ He was also responsible for the construction of the east side of Edinburgh, driving a route from Prince’s Street to the Calton Hill and constructing the Georgian order of Waterloo Place and Regent Road. Robert was also a man of a most particular mood and time, a self-made bootstrap businessman who, like many of his engineering contemporaries, used the opportunities of the post-Enlightenment world to haul himself out of poverty and into society. He placed his faith in improvement and industry, and remained to the end a devout believer in the most conservative of virtues. He was, according to Louis, ‘a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of self-improvement.’ Louis, it would seem, was not the only person to be daunted by him.

Robert had three sons who became engineers, Alan, David and Thomas. Alan was a classical scholar, musical, gifted and noted for his early championing of Wordsworth. Nevertheless, he suppressed the artistic side of himself to go into the family firm, becoming, like his father before him, the Commissioner of the Board of Northern Lights. He is remembered as a shrewd and brilliant engineer, whose greatest professional triumph was the construction of Skerryvore lighthouse on a ragged clump of rocks twelve miles west of Tiree. As Sir Walter Scott noted when he visited the site, ‘It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse – the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it.’ The light took five years to build, and, despite a fire in the 1950s, still stands today. Louis considered it ‘the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights’.

David Stevenson took up Alan’s position on his retirement. His greatest achievement was the construction of the light at Muckle Flugga, the most northerly of all the Scottish lighthouses. Constructed as a temporary light to aid British naval convoys on their way to the Crimea, it was placed on the summit of a wave-washed miniature Matterhorn. Westminster insisted that the light should be working within six months; David’s exceptional skill as an engineer ensured that, even with winter seas crashing 200 feet over the rock, it was finished in time.

Thomas Stevenson, Louis’s father, was responsible for the construction of twenty-seven on-shore and twenty-five offshore lighthouses. He built the light at Dhu Heartach, an isolated mass of rock off the coast of Mull, which Louis later used as source material for Kidnapped. At one point during its construction, fourteen men were trapped for five days in a temporary barracks while a ferocious gale pounded the rock. Louis records the foreman desperately playing his fiddle to quell the sound of the sea’s rage. Thomas is also remembered for having taken Fresnel’s optical developments several stages further, harnessing the strange new science of electricity and building a series of revolving lights in a bright and sturdy circuit which finally enclosed the whole of Scotland. Thomas was ‘a man of somewhat antique strain’, recalled Louis after his death, ‘with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.’ For much of the time, he was working in conjunction with David. The two brothers complemented each other well; David tended towards details, Thomas towards inventiveness. Both were also preoccupied with more prosaic matters, including the establishment of precise and reliable systems for constructing, surveying, lighting, supplying and staffing their fast-growing constellation of lights. Thomas’s weakest point, of course, was Louis, his only child, sickly, contrary and a source of constant worry. Thomas’s wistful attempts to entice Louis into the family firm were fruitless. The rest is literary history.

David had two sons, David A. and Charles. Both are mainly now known for their refinements to the existing systems and their shrewd maintenance of the NLB. Most of the gaudier feats of engineering had been completed by Robert, Alan, David and Thomas. There seemed little for the grandchildren to do but tinker with what already existed. But the Stevensons’ achievements in engineering, science and optics have lasted far beyond their lifespan. Anyone who has ever travelled the coast of Scotland has probably had cause to thank them. Their lights, built into the rocks of the most inhospitable land in Britain, have gone on shining for almost two centuries. Listen to the Shipping News today, and you are listening to part of the legacy of the Lighthouse Stevensons.

ONE Yarmouth

Captain George Manby had reached the age of forty without having contributed significantly to life. His childhood in Yarmouth had been undistinguished, his military career nondescript, and by early middle age he had sunk deeply into debt. Apart from an incident in 1800 when he appeared wild-eyed at the Secretary at War’s door offering to assassinate Napoleon – an offer which the Secretary politely declined – Manby seemed an unlikely candidate for immortality. His naval colleagues also noted cynically that the only battle scar he had yet earned was a gunshot wound, allegedly sustained while running away from a duel.

The death of Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 changed all that. Manby had been at school with Nelson, and although the two had not been friends, Manby still regarded the admiral with affection. When Nelson died, Manby was spurred into action. Inspired by his hero’s example and impressed by the public grief over his loss, Manby concluded that his best chance of fame lay in saving lives; in particular, saving lives at sea. It was a startling choice. Manby’s only marine experience until then had been an unsuccessful spell as a naval lay captain on a frigate heading for Dublin. The ship had foundered off the Irish coast, and, once embedded upon the lee shore, began sinking fast. Manby wrote later that ‘the striking of the ship was the most awful and momentous period I had hitherto experienced. The immediate hallooing of all hands on deck; to the pumps, plumb the well, cut away the masts, throw the guns overboard. And amid all this activity, the dismal moans of some, the screams of the women.’ The crew hurled everything moveable over the sides and the rising tide finally pulled the ship back to the sea’s uneasy safety. Once back in Portsmouth, Manby reflected on his experience and concluded that the sea and he were not well suited to each other. Instead, he applied for a post as barrack master, a position which allowed him to keep his military honours while staying safely on dry land.

Manby did admittedly have good reason to be cautious. Two centuries ago, almost a third of all British seamen died pursuing their trade, being either killed by the punishment of life on board ship or sacrificed to storms and drownings. Nearly everything the modern mariner relies upon – competent maps, accurate instruments and adequate communication – was either unreliable or non-existent. The major sea lanes around Britain were crowded and collisions were frequent. What is now fixed and understood was then debatable, and navigation was more a matter of art than science. Sailors depended on experience or luck to avoid danger, and when they did run into trouble there was no kindly lifeboat service to deliver them. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was made harder to assist victims than it was to collect the proceeds from wrecks. Previous legislation had defended the salvagers, not the mariners, and neither government nor shipowners devoted much attention to the consequences of nautical disaster. Most efforts were aimed at protecting cargo rather than ensuring that the crew returned intact with the goods. For several long centuries, lives lost at sea were regarded by much of Europe as so much natural wastage. Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack-handed from the gunwhales while one of their colleagues drowned. Once a person had fallen overboard, so the thinking went, he had been claimed by the sea, and it was not for mankind to challenge that claim. Such superstition was only an ideological response to an uncomfortable fact; the sea did kill people in great numbers, year after year. And, short of refusing to leave the safe shores of Britain, there was almost nothing that could be done about it.

Manby seized on the belief that something more must be done to prevent the deaths of shipwreck victims beached on the indifferent shores of Britain, if not for compassionate reasons, then certainly for civilised ones. The destruction of the gun-brig Snipe off the coast of Yarmouth in 1807 only confirmed his views. One hundred and forty-four lives were lost after the ship ran aground during a gale less than one hundred yards from the shore. Manby watched the ship beat itself to death on the rocks, and listened impotently to the cries of those still on board as they died. Over the next few months, he began experimenting with possible solutions. He concentrated his efforts on the idea of throwing a line from the shore to a distressed ship, using a rope fixed to the end of a canon ball. Several early versions failed spectacularly: the rope was either burned through by the gunpowder, or, in those rare instances when the ball and rope successfully reached their target, only managed to set what remained of the ship on fire. At the same time, he tinkered with the notion of an unsinkable boat. During a storm, small row-boats which were used to ferry survivors from the wreck to the shore almost invariably sank, either capsized by the seas or flooded by waves. Manby sealed several small wooden barrels with pitch and fixed them to the sides of a small, undecked boat, providing primitive but workable buoyancy chambers.

By the summer of 1807, his prototype mortar line was ready for testing. Until then, his colleagues and neighbours had watched Manby’s eccentric experiments with derision. But once he produced something that threatened the wreckers, who took their livelihoods from the plunder of injured ships, he became a more serious danger. As the wreckers saw it, he was not only removing their prized source of income, he was also directly contradicting the will of God. God, they reasoned, had sent the storm that had wrecked the ship which they took as their reward. Any interference was therefore a form of devilish meddling. And so, helped by the knowledge that Manby could not swim, the wreckers tried to drown him. Several local sailors volunteered to help Manby demonstrate his boat and mortar line, and, when the boat was a good way from the shore, deliberately capsized it. Manby, just managing to keep afloat, was finally saved by his own efforts and two conscience-stricken spectators.

His determination was, if anything, increased. In 1808, the small brig Elizabeth, carrying a crew of seven sailors, became snared on the sandbanks near Yarmouth during a storm. Manby, seizing his opportunity, positioned himself and his mortar line on the shore and managed to fire the line successfully onto the ship. To do so required accurate calculation, since visibility was minimal and the mortar risked being damaged by both rain and salt water. Manby fired; the rope coiled outwards to sea. There was a pause, and then, slowly, the rope tautened. Someone, it seemed, was still alive and had taken up the line. Once he was confident that the link from ship to shore was secure, Manby sent out one of his ballasted row-boats. When it finally groped its way back to shore, seven sodden survivors crawled exhausted onto the beach. As they later testified, all of them would have almost certainly drowned without the help of the mortar line. Manby, all his heroic intentions vindicated, knelt on the sand and wept.

During the next forty years, it was later calculated, upwards of 1,000 people were rescued from disabled ships by the mortar line. But if Manby thought that his battles had ended there on the darkened beach, he was wrong. His inventions did not meet with the esteem he had hoped for. Despite his energetic lobbying in Parliament, the Admiralty remained suspicious, and the local sailors agitated loudly for his removal. Other, more credible competitors came forward, claiming either to have invented the line before Manby or to have improved it far beyond his original designs. Even his later attempts to establish a lifeboat service to rescue those victims of shipwreck who were stranded farther out to sea met with disapproval or silence. Manby was present at the inaugural meeting of the Royal Society for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck in 1824, at which the first decision was to award five gold medals: one to the King, one to the Duke of York, one to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and one each to Manby and Sir William Hillary. Manby took the medal, but not the credit. Hillary, a boastful but enterprising Yorkshireman whose career bore a strong resemblance to Manby’s, is now generally honoured as the founding father of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Admittedly, Manby did not always help his own cause. He could be pompous and grasping, and was hopelessly vain. His journals and letters are littered with moments when he ‘considered his fortune made’ by the platitudes of a minister or the flattery of a courtier. His efforts often had more to do with his own self-advancement than they did with more generous motives. But for all his deluded grandeur, Manby did achieve great things. After the invention of the mortar line, he spent the rest of his life searching for the recognition he felt he deserved. Just before his death aged eighty-nine, he decided to build a monument commemorating both himself and the mortar line. When completed, he offered it to the town of Yarmouth, which had already built and paid for a statue of Nelson in the town centre. Manby’s memorial was rejected; he was left with nowhere to put it but his own front garden.

From Berwick to the Solway, including the sea lochs of the west, the Scottish coast runs for 4,467 nautical miles. By the late eighteenth century, that coast had gained an ominous reputation. Most mariners stayed well clear, and those who sailed there often chose to continue travelling all night instead of looking for landfall after dark. Not only is Scotland girdled by two opposing seas – the North Sea and the Atlantic – but her ragged island archipelago provides a major obstacle course for the best of sailors, even now. In the past, the sea was considered so dangerous in winter that one early Act had forbidden ships stocked with essential goods from leaving Scottish ports between the end of October and the beginning of February. The reasoning was obvious. As well as the sandbanks and treachery of the English coast, Scotland is moated by an awkward brew of conflicting tides and currents. The North Sea, which in the eighteenth century gave the only access to the Continent, Scandinavia and Russia, is a dark place of streams and sudden climatic switches. In the Pentland Firth, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic, sailors face riptides, cross winds and breakwaters on the water, and sandbanks, skerries and reefs underneath. Often, the competing tides set up currents that run at ten knots or more, each of which is troublesome enough to have earned its own title: Duncansby Bore, the Merry Men of Mey or the Swilkie. The Pentland Firth itself is still known simply as ‘Hell’s Mouth’. The names that still speckle marine maps represent more than just picturesque history. The Black Deeps and Blackstone Banks took their percentage of dead, year after year. Farther south, the Solway Firth is riddled with quicksands and the Firths of Tay and Forth are notorious for rocks. In the 1870s, Thomas Stevenson, a man not given to hyperbole, calculated the pressure of the breakers on the coast at up to 6,000 pounds per square foot.

Even when captains were confident they were clear of the cross-currents near the isles, there were reefs and rocks – Sule Skerry off Cape Wrath, the Torran Rocks off the coast of Iona and Skerryvore beyond Tiree. The entrance to the Forth is guarded by three separate obstacles – the Isle of May, the Bass Rock and Inchkeith – all of which stick directly in the path of shipping on its way to the port of Leith. A little farther northeast, there is the infamous Bell Rock, submerged at high tide and a confusion of serrated rocks at low tide. Round on the west coast, the entrance to the Clyde is calmer but prone to shallows and awkward weather patterns thrown off by the surrounding islands. Where the placid Gulf Stream soaks into the Atlantic, the area is notorious for races, currents and ‘standing waves’ (water flowing over submerged objects which gives the impression of immobility), while the whirlpool of Corrievreckan between Jura and Scarba is considered the most dangerous tide in Europe. Even on a clear day, crossing Corrievreckan involves careful calculation. Boats making the passage cling nervously to the shoreline only to find themselves speeding through at fifteen knots or more. In a dirty sea, the gully resembles Scylla and Charybdis, sucking boats down into the eddy or spitting them out to the shores on either side. Sailors who know the area well enough to avoid the centre frequently wreck themselves on the nearby coasts trying to escape.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, navigation remained a ramshackle skill. Sailors within sight of the shore depended on being able to recognise the coastline. A church roof, a solitary copice or a coastal hamlet were reference points as dependable as any more thorough knowledge of the sea’s geography. In England, Elizabeth I had made altering or dismantling the most significant coastal landmarks a criminal offence. The law had little effect. After dark, without lights, landmarks were of only the most limited help. Many accounts of shipwrecks from the time note laconically that the pilot had mistaken one bay or harbour for another, and ended up paying for it. Even when the first primitive fires were lit on headlands to mark the way, they could easily be confused with stubble fires or temporary beacons. Nor was it possible to rely on written evidence. Even now, with the benefits of sonar and satellite surveying, there is no such thing as a definitive chart. Some parts of the Scottish coastline have not been surveyed for 150 years or more; others could be surveyed till the end of time and still not keep pace with the shiftiness of the sea. In the late eighteenth century, charts, maps and pilot books were drawn up by trial and painful error, and they were as often produced by merchants or traders as by any regularised state system. It was not until 1750 that Murdoch Mackenzie published a sea chart of Orkney and Lewis based on a rigid triangulation framework. Farther south, the situation remained poor for several more decades. In 1788, Murdo Downie, the Master of HM Champion at Leith, was complaining to the government that he could find ‘no chart published of the East Coast of Scotland that could in any degree be relied upon’. The old cherub-covered maps, with their foreshortened coasts and squint-eyed headlands, might look endearing now, but for several long centuries they were the only detailed information on the British coast available. When Daniel Defoe made his tour of Scotland in the 1720s, he discovered that the Forth and Clyde did not, in fact, run into one another, as his map suggested. ‘When I came more critically to survey the ground,’ he complained, ‘I found the map-makers greatly mistaken, and that they had not only given the situation and courses of the rivers wrong, but the distances also.’ Farther north, in ‘that mountainous, barren and frightful country’, the Highlands, things were even worse. ‘Our geographers seem to be almost as much at a loss in the description of this north part of Scotland, as the Romans were to conquer it,’ Defoe noted disconsolately, ‘and they are obliged to fill it up with hills and mountains, as they do the inner parts of Africa with lions and elephants, for want of knowing what else to place there.’

Matters improved erratically, if at all, in the nineteenth century. In 1837, an indignant committee of Edinburgh societies complained to the Treasury that even the best maps and charts of Scotland were so inaccurate that ‘in some charts, the large island of Arran is laid down as six miles from Bute, in others as nine miles, and in a third as 12 miles distant from the island. Pladda Island light in charts is placed at 16° north of Ailsa Craig, where its true distance is only 10°20’. These last are serious errors at the entrance of so important a river as the Clyde.’ Many of the roughest hazards remained unmarked, those that were noted were often wrongly placed, and the pilotage rules, with their ‘Fifty fathoms black ooze and black fishey stones among’, could often be more poetic than practical. Areas given as ‘safe anchoring’ were revealed to be notorious shipwreck spots; ports and harbours were awkward to approach and littered with the bones of old ships.

Not that adversity deterred Scotland’s swelling population from turning away from the land and onto the sea. Like the rest of Britain, Scotland needed it, fed off it, took employment from it and profited by it. From the sixteenth century onwards, the nautical traffic around Britain increased steadily, while the numbers of shipwrecks and groundings rose in tandem. Aside from farming and manufactures, the sea provided one of the principal sources of employment for a large swathe of the population until well into the nineteenth century. Directly, it provided subsistence, fish and ™ indirectly, it provided strength, funds and political muscle. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was also spending a significant amount of her time and money waging wars across it. The navy grew threefold, and with it grew the pirates, privateers and press gangs of legend. Though the end of the Napoleonic wars meant the dwindling or abolition of all three, for the moment they remained a constant threat. The escalation of trade meant the escalation in war to protect that trade. In the century between 1650 and 1750, England was engaged in six major European wars. Old routes were travelled more frequently; new ones were marked out. By the 1750s, Scotland and England had separately built up a regular trade in subsistence goods – corn, coal, livestock – with France, Scandinavia and the Baltic. The French, meanwhile, were involved in so many wars at the time that they were forced to scale down their navy and resort to privateers instead, many of whom spent their time raiding the British coast. At the same time, Scotland in particular depended on the Scandinavian countries as trading partners and maritime allies. The traffic between the two places, always constant, escalated with the growth of industry and the spread of free trade. From the Clyde ports there was the journey to the New World, which by the 1750s was providing a useful new source of tobacco, sugar, manufactured goods and slaves. To the north and south, there were the whaling grounds and beyond the Continent there were the exotic dangers of a new empire. In each direction, there were prizes to be taken and claims to be staked.

Scotland contributed her own heavy percentages to the traffic in other ways. Union with England had brought benefits, albeit slowly. Immediately after 1707, the changes were mainly internal: cattle sales to English markets, corn to English mills or men to English employment. But after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Scotland’s trade with Europe accelerated and the age of the Great Improvers began. Landlords in the Highlands cleared the straths for sheep, packed off the protesting population to stony coastal settlements, taught them how to fish and left them to make a life for themselves. Some of the settlements died quietly, others took root and became export centres for wool, flax or fish. The subjugated regiments joined English wars and British battles or went south to the new shipbuilding yards in Glasgow or Greenock. Several thousand Highlanders left for the New World on leaky ships, some of which did not last the journey. Edinburgh functioned as both Continental trading post and garrison town, providing goods for export and men for war. When the press gangs sought fodder for their frigates, they looked first to the Scottish capital. For whatever cause, the population of Scotland was on the move in a way that it had not been before, and much of that movement was by sea.

And as the sea cluttered up with shipping, so it accumulated shipwrecks. In the 1790s, an average of 550 ships were wrecked every year on British shores; by the 1830s, the numbers had risen to well over two a day. The vast increase in nautical traffic around Europe had not yet been matched by any improvement in safety. There was no regulated distress code and only the most clumsy and primitive of aids: heavy leather lifejackets or inadequate row-boats. By 1800, Lloyds of London estimated that one ship was lost or wrecked every day around Britain; between 1854 and 1879, almost 50,000 wrecks were registered. The figure is probably ludicrously low. Many wrecks never reached the attention of the local Admiralty officer, either through difficulties in communication or, more likely, through deliberate concealment. Both the navy and the merchant shipowners learned through bitter experience to expect a certain percentage of their ships to sink every year they sailed. With the mortality rate so high and conditions so bad, the sailors themselves could only cultivate a brutal fatalism about their work. They lived in a twilit world, with their own jargon and codes; most did not expect to live beyond the age of forty. They regarded the government with suspicion, the law with indifference, and their landlubber compatriots with derision. They were accustomed to shipwreck or injury, they accepted that the sea was unsafe, and they remained suspicious of men who promised salvation.

Given such an ominous background, it was evident that changes would have to be made. By the 1780s, the swell of public agitation had become too strong for the government to ignore any longer. But it is notable that the pressure for lighthouses did not emerge from the sailors most at risk or indeed the organisations best equipped to provide lights. The pressure came from the shipowners and the naval captains, both of whom were keen to minimise the risks in sending precious cargo to sea. Their crews, the men who did the dying, seemed either so pessimistic about their chances for survival or so sceptical of innovation that it took several decades to convince them of the need for lights. It was the captains, the money men and the merchants who agitated most fiercely for action. Finance, as usual, took precedence over compassion. But out of such necessity came something more exceptional than the usual desultory efforts to mark the places between the sea and the land. Though the drive to build the Scottish lights was commonplace enough, the men who came to fill that role were made of rarer stuff.

TWO Northern Lights

For a short while, it seemed as if Robert Louis Stevenson might fulfil his parents’ ambitions. For nearly twenty years, he had been a worry to them. Now, when it came to settling down, he alarmed them even more. First there had been the sickliness, then the lack of schooling, then the whispers of midnight societies and shady liaisons. Worst of all was Louis’s terrible wandering mind. He seemed not to stick at anything, and spent most of his time aimlessly pacing the streets of Edinburgh or dabbling in books. His mother pleaded, and his father, Tom, grew neurotic with worry. Louis, guilty and cross, avoided home. Finally, in the spring of 1868, Tom persuaded his son that it was time he applied himself properly to the family business. Louis was to be enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study civil engineering, and would spend his summer vacations serving his apprenticeship at his father’s projects around the country. First he was to go to the harbourworks at Anstruther and Wick, then on the lighthouse steamer’s journey round Orkney and Shetland and finally he would supervise the Dhu Heartach lighthouse works on the Isle of Earraid. Whether he liked it or not, he would follow in his father’s footsteps, just as Tom had followed in Robert’s. Louis capitulated and for a while his parents stopped fretting.

It did not last long. For three long summers around the northern shores of Scotland, Louis tried to bend his mind to the disciplines of engineering. Tom received erratic reports of progress, the news of an underwater trip in a diving bell, and occasional muffled cursings at the intransigence of the weather or the incompetence of the workmen. Louis experimented with waves, fussed over the slowness of his drawing and tried without conviction to improve his mathematics. ‘My daily life,’ he told his cousin Bob gloomily, ‘is one repression from beginning to end.’ While Tom continued to receive news of the slow progress of building at Dhu Heartach, Louis spent the rest of his leisure time wistfully discussing metrical narratives and small beer in letters to friends. In the spring of 1871, back in Edinburgh, Louis presented a paper, ‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses’, at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts. The essay showed the accumulated knowledge of three obedient years following the Stevenson grail: it was workmanlike, efficient, and showed no spark of initiative whatsoever.

Tom was among the audience and watched Louis being awarded the Society’s silver medal. For him, it was a proud and vindicating moment; Louis, it seemed, had finally submitted to good sense. A week later, the two walked out to Cramond. ‘On being tightly cross-questioned,’ wrote Louis later, ‘I owned that I cared for nothing but literature. My father said that was no profession.’ Angry and desperate, Tom suggested something else instead, ‘and so, at the age of 21, I began to study law.’ It was small consolation for both of them since Louis was no more interested in advocacy than he was in engineering. Tom was left to blame his son’s fall from grace on a surfeit of imagination and too many books. Later, the two fell out even more dramatically over Louis’s agnosticism, but even then never completely separated. For years, Tom continued to send his son corrective notes on his fiction; a little more Scripture here, a little sermonising there. Sensibly, Louis ignored him. But it was a measure of Tom’s affection that he abandoned his engineering ambitions for Louis with so little resistance. As Maggie Stevenson, Louis’s mother, later noted, ‘it was a cutting-short of his own life, as he had looked forward to its being continued in his son’s career.’

Louis, it seemed, had been quick to recognise both the benefits and drawbacks of his family’s profession. As he wrote in The Education of an Engineer,

It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour sides, which is the richest sort of idling; it carries him to wild islands, it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so it carries him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

Later, still smitten with guilt over his exile from Scotland and his family, he wrote a revealing poem.

Say not of me that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we built and the lamps we lit, To play at home with paper like a child. But rather say: In the afternoon of time A strenuous family dusted from its hands The sand of granite, and beholding far Along the sounding coast its pyramids And tall memorials catch the dying sun, Smiled well content, and to this childish task Around the fire addressed its evening hours.

In practice, the idea of Louis as an engineer was absurd; he was far too physically frail to have lived the working life of his father and grandfather. But he remained haunted by the notion that his writer’s life was somehow less noble or worthy than the rest of his family’s more practical achievements.

One of Louis’s many attempts to redress the balance was in an unfinished Stevenson biography, Records of a Family of Engineers. The early Stevensons, he discovered, had supplied nothing but generation upon generation of tenant farmers, with the exception of John, a seventeenth-century ancestor and ‘eminently pious man’ who seemed determined on Protestant martyrdom. John spent ‘four months in the coldest season of the year in a haystack in my father’s garden’ and sleeping in Carrick fields under a blanket of snow. Though he did contract scrofula, he was spared persecution, to his apparent disappointment, in the religious purges of the 1680s. With the exception of John, however, Louis’s genealogy was one of stolid mediocrity. ‘On the whole,’ he wrote, ‘the Stevensons may be described as decent reputable folk, following honest trades – millers, maltsters and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction, and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory.’ In the absence of glamorous fact, Louis felt himself forced to resort to speculation. He considered the possibility of a Scandinavian connection, evidence of a French alliance and, more imaginatively, the link with a Jacobite past. By the time Louis had completed his history, the family had acquired a smattering of Highland credibility and a link with that most glamorous of cattle-rustlers, Rob Roy MacGregor. Later biographers noted crushingly that none of this wishful thinking was true. The Stevensons were descended from quiet Lowland Whigs, none of whom ever had a dangerous political thought in their lives.

Louis’s real interest in the Stevensons began with the birth of his paternal grandfather, Robert Stevenson. Robert’s father, Alan, was a Glasgow maltster who married the daughter of a builder, Jean Lillie, in 1771. On 8 June 1772, their only son was born. Alan was still a young man, barely twenty, and with his brother Hugh had become involved in the Glasgow trade with the West Indies. When Robert was two, his father and uncle sailed south to look after their business interests, leaving Jean and Robert behind in Glasgow. Once in the Caribbean, the Stevensons found themselves the victims of a swindle. One dark night, two local merchants – possibly business competitors – arrived at their house on St Kitts, and robbed them of the contents. As soon as they heard of the burglary, Hugh set sail in pursuit of the robbers, while Alan remained behind to deal with the business. ‘What with anxiety of mind,’ Robert later recorded, ‘being such very young men – and exposure to night dews of that climate, the two brothers were seized with fever and died in 1774, my uncle at Tobago on 16 April and my father at St Christopher on 26 May.’

‘Night dews’ was then the catch-all diagnosis for any tropical disease that British science had not yet explained or cured. Malaria, cholera and tuberculosis were rife, as was sleeping sickness and influenza. Whatever the cause, the consequences of Alan’s death were, for Jean Lillie, terrible. While still young, she was left a widow with a small child, short of money and dependent on her mother for subsistence. But despite her sudden poverty, she showed a fierce loyalty to her only child. If she could not improve her own circumstances, she reasoned, at least she could improve Robert’s. Her father had sent her to an Edinburgh boarding school and Jean clearly felt the benefits of an Edinburgh education, so taking her six-year-old son, she moved the forty miles eastwards to the capital. When the time came, she tried to enrol Robert at the High School (where Walter Scott and Henry Cockburn were being educated), but found she could not afford the fees. So she enrolled him at an endowed school and kept aside a little money to pay for extra tuition in the classics. Robert’s upbringing therefore became a stern apprenticeship in scrimping interspersed with plenty of Latin and God. In the mercantile freedom of the 1780s, Robert was taught the essential details: to put his faith in hard work, meritocracy and the middle-class world. For a while, his mother hoped that Robert would make a minister of the Church of Scotland. Fortunately, his lack of Greek and hopelessness at Latin put paid to the idea.

Once established in Edinburgh, Jean Lillie began attending church in the New Town. Among the congregation was another family, the Smiths. In early middle age, Thomas Smith was a stout man, tall, plain and pragmatic. He had come originally from Broughty Ferry – then a briny little suburb of Dundee – and, like Jean, had been forced to learn self-reliance early. When Thomas was still young, his father was drowned in Dundee harbour. His mother, left with a small child, brought him up herself as best she could, gave him a good and pious education and insisted that whatever trade he took, it should at least be safely on land. Thomas took his mother’s instructions to heart and found an apprenticeship with a Dundee metal worker where he spent the next five years learning ironmongery before moving down to Edinburgh. After a few years on the staff of a metalworking company, he established his own business in Bristo Street as an ironsmith, providing grates, lamps and intricate trinkets for the New Town. The business throve and Thomas prospered. He was the creature of a most particular time, a high Tory and a businessman of talent and ambition. Louis considered him ‘ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average’. His first wife was a farmer’s daughter who bore him five children. Despite Edinburgh’s reputation for medicine, surviving the rigours of childhood in the eighteenth century was still a matter of good fortune. Thomas’s first children were not lucky. Three of the five babies died; only Jane and James survived. His wife too finally succumbed to whooping cough, and Thomas was left a widower with two small children. He was married again, in 1787, to the daughter of a Stirling builder who bore him one daughter, Mary Anne, and then promptly expired of consumption. Thomas, now well accustomed to mortality, started looking for another wife.

Jean Lillie, with her small, well-disciplined son and her belief in similar ideals, was a willing match. In June 1787, the two were married. It was a pragmatic partnership, based as much on the benefits of uniting two incomplete families as on affection or companionship. It was also a marriage of equals. Jean was a strong-minded soul, who earned the devoted respect of her new husband in return for security and a stable upbringing for his children. The arrangement also served Robert well. By now, it was evident that he had infinitely more talent, and greater patience, for the practicalities of mechanics than he had for Latin. When Thomas took him on a guided tour of his ironworks, Robert was beguiled by the blend of craftsmanship and usefulness. By 1790, Thomas had taken Robert on as an apprentice, and the boy’s efforts at Greek, French and theology were forgotten.

Thomas’s main business at the time was in lamp-making and in designing street lighting for the New Town. The lamps at the time used oil, which silted up quickly with grime and gave out only a weak and smoggy light. Thomas, experimenting with methods of improving the standard design, began devising a system of reflectors placed behind the light to strengthen and focus the beam. The idea, he knew, had been used successfully elsewhere in Europe but had not yet been introduced to Scotland. At first, he made the reflectors out of concave circles of copper, the size and shape of scooped-out melons and polished to a high sheen. Later, he varied the design, welding small slivers of mirror to the back of a concave lead circle. Seen now, his reflectors look like an inside-out antique mirrored ball, but in 1780s Edinburgh, they were revolutionary. All light sources were measured in units of candela (or candlepower), one medium-sized tallow candle producing roughly two units of power. Thomas’s designs quadrupled the strength of the light and produced something closer to a concentrated beam than a lamp on its own could ever achieve.

Thomas fitted several of his parabolic reflector lights around the New Town and then, mindful of the need for more business, contacted the Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland. His reflectors, it seemed, had practical applications beyond mere street lighting; would they, enquired Thomas, be useful for lighthouses? As Thomas explained it to them,

Lamps being Inclosed are preserved from the Violence of the wind and weather but Coal lights cannot bereflector of proper power transcends it ixceedingly and is seen at a inclosed…Lamp light of itself has a more pure and bright flame than Coal light and when Conjoined with a reflector of proper power transcends it exceedingly and is seen at a much greater distance…Lamps take less attendance…Lamp lights with reflectors can be distinguished from every Other light in Such a manner as to make it Impossible to mistake them for a light on shore or on board any Other Ship…Coal lights are not capable of this Improvement.

He had, he declared, already prepared a sample reflector and was happy to demonstrate it to ‘any gentleman concerned’. The Trustees inspected his work, and agreed that Thomas’s designs would indeed be useful. Beguiled by his enthusiasm, they sent him south to gain experience from an English lighthouse builder. Once returned, he was made first engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Trust.

The title might have been imposing; the organisation itself was not. The Trust (now the Northern Lighthouse Board, or NLB) had been established after complaints about the state of the Scottish coast had reached boiling point. Several evil-tempered storms during the winter of 1782 had crippled both the naval and the merchant fleets, both of whom urgently petitioned Parliament to remedy the existing situation. Parliament set up a committee which recommended the construction of at least four lighthouses, scattered at vital points around the Scottish coast. In 1786, the bill was passed and the NLB was born. The Act for Erecting Certain Lighthouses in the Northern Parts of Great Britain provided for a management committee and a few officials to collect revenue, stipulated the sites of each light and then left the Board to its own devices. With its leaden cargo of sheriffs, judges and public goodbodies, the committee had only the most feeble knowledge of the sea and none at all about lighthouse construction. The Lighthouse Commissioners, as they were known, had been selected with the intention of providing political and financial canniness to the Board; as public officials, they were accustomed to question the cost of everything and trust the value of nothing. Their appointment was also partly political. Since the lighthouses would be built within the sheriffs’ fiefdoms, it was easier to give each one a place on the Board than to woo them anew every time a light was to be built on their land.

From the beginning, therefore, there was a strict division of roles. The Commissioners figured and the Engineer built. The Commissioners respected the experience and integrity of the Engineer; the Engineer lived within the Commissioner’s restrictions. ‘I beg leave to acquaint you that I am willing to do every thing in my power to bring to perfection the plan proposed,’ wrote Thomas in September, ‘and to superintend the erection of the lights, teach the people how to manage them and to do every thing necessary to put and keep them in a proper state…It is impossible at present to form any judgement of the trouble attending this business as I hope it will turn out a benefit to the Country.’ His first job, they announced, would be to construct four new lights: one at Kinnaird Head just beyond Fraserburgh, one at Mull of Kintyre overlooking the Firth of Clyde, one at Eilean Glas off the edge of Harris, and one on North Ronaldsay, a small island above the Orkney mainland. He could build them, staff them and light them in any way that he wished, they promised, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. The Commissioners, meanwhile, stayed in Edinburgh, counting the costs and squabbling politely with London.

Thomas could have been forgiven for wondering what exactly he had got himself into. For a start, he had no architectural experience, let alone the kind of experience necessary to build a sea-tower exposed to the hardest conditions wind and wave could hurl at it. Lighthouse construction was, to say the least, a specialist subject in the 1780s, although the idea of a lighted tower for mariners’ guidance had existed in some form or another since the Pharos of Alexandria was built by the Egyptians in 300 BC. The Pharos was an immense and ornate tower 450 feet high, topped with an open fire, and considered so splendid that it was usually listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Later attempts were less glamorous. Since there was no state control of lighthouses in Britain until well into the eighteenth century, their design was left to the individuals who built them. Far from being the trim marine spires of popular image, the English lights developed endless exotic variants. Most were coastal towers with large braziers of coal fixed to their roof. Some were church steeples loosely adapted for the purpose. Disused castles and priories were occasionally put to use, and in Ireland, there were several lights built in stone-vaulted cottages. Even those built specifically as lighthouses did not follow any definite pattern. Some looked like stumpy medieval rockets, some like upright coffins, others not much different from the average cow byre. One or two followed the design of fortified keeps, sturdy enough for the hardest gale. Others were no more than an iron basket filled with coal and suspended on a pulley. A number of owners built their lights in wood. Unsurprisingly, not many examples of these survive.

Until the 1780s, the only permanent light in Scotland was on the Isle of May which had been alternately saving and exasperating mariners for a century or more. The lighthouse had been built in 1636 on a small, low-lying islet at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. The mouth of the river was filled with snags for unwary shipping; rocks, sandbanks and awkward reefs on the surface and a graveyard of dead ships underneath. The islet was the first and the largest of these rocks and had gained a vicious reputation for shipwreck and destruction. In 1635, the Scottish Privy Council had given the task of constructing a light to three of Charles I’s favoured Scottish courtiers, who designed it, built it and maintained it at their own expense and then charged local shipping for its use.

Even by the make-do standards of the age, conditions for the lone keeper were unusually grim. The isle, a mile long by a third of a mile wide, was barren except for a little pasturage and a low, squat tower like a medieval keep with a brazier on the roof. The owners hired a local man, George Anderson, to tend and supervise the fire, and arranged for a boatman to appear every few days to drop a new delivery of coal into the shallow waters by the island’s rocky shore. Anderson would pick the coal out of the waters, haul it along to the tower on his back and winch it up in a bucket to the roof. For this, he was given a salary of £7 a year, 30 bushels of meal for his family and all the fishing rights he could want. Since he therefore spent most of his time away from the island looking for fish, the fire stayed untended and usually went out at the crucial moment. It was several years before someone took pity on the poor man and offered him the assistance of a second keeper and a horse.

Even when the fire was maintained, one light was hardly satisfactory for all Scotland. As the Isle of May proved, coal lights were inefficient, gobbled fuel and expired just when they were most needed, in gales or heavy rain. They required constant supervision, were usually clogged by smoke and could easily be mistaken for fires inland. Thomas was evidently going to have to start from scratch, devising new buildings, new fuels and new solutions if he was to succeed in improving the current situation. But if lighthouses came without templates, so too did their architects. There was, as yet, no such thing as an archetypal engineer, let alone a civil or marine specialist. The qualifications and bureaucracy of the modern profession did not exist 200 years ago. When Samuel Johnson published his famous Dictionary in 1755, he described an engineer as ‘an officer in the army or fortified place, whose business is to inspect attacks, defences, works’. As Louis later pointed out, ‘the engineer of today is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables, and formulae to the value of folios-full have been calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the footprints of the pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field was unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and adventures. ’ If he was to design, build, supervise, and maintain each of the NLB’s new lights, Thomas therefore needed to become an inventor in his own right. Much of his work was without precedent, and where tested methods did not already exist, Thomas had to improvise as best he could.

Trudging around the rim of Scotland, he soon realised that his new role entailed far more than merely fitting reflectors. Initially, he used the English lighthouses as his template, but was forced almost immediately to adapt to Scotland’s particular rigours. Most English lights of the time were built safely inland out of dependable local stone. Any building on the stormy coast of Scotland needed to withstand all that the elements could hurl at it; a lighthouse, with its flimsy glass and curlicues of ironwork, required a particular kind of strength. The first four lights were, according to Robert Stevenson, ‘on the smallest, plainest and most simple plan that could be devised, and with such materials as could be easily transported and most speedily erected’. All were built of unembellished stone, with walls thick enough to resist the strongest assaults of water or wind, and with plain lanterns bound with a tight corsetry of metal stanchions. The light at Kinnaird Head was adapted from an old fortified tower, and did just as well withstanding the elements as it had done withstanding invasion.

Despite the economy of the designs, Thomas soon discovered that his workload doubled. His assistants were untrained and his experience was suited more to the refinements of New Town ironwork than it was to designing weather-beaten coastal buildings. Two of the four planned lighthouses were on remote islands, which meant long, dangerous sea journeys and difficulties with supervision. Even on the Mull of Kintyre, which was at least on the mainland, materials could not be landed on the coast and therefore had to be carried over twelve miles of stark moorland to the site. Every slate, every block of stone, every fragment of lens and gallon of fuel, had to be taken on horseback and even then the journey was considered so difficult that only one trip could be made each day. Moreover, many of the materials for the lighthouses were new and untried. It was difficult for instance to manufacture glass large and strong enough for the storm-stressed lanterns, since reinforced glass had not yet been invented and metal supports would only have obscured the light.

Many of Thomas’s experiments worked well in his Edinburgh workshop, but when transported out to the edges of Scotland were found to be impractical or unusable. Where possible, he used local building materials, with the trusted Scottish combination of granite, slate and wood as the basis of the buildings. The delicate mirrored reflectors, however, had to be transported from his Bristo Street workshop by sea to the site, and were sometimes found to be ill-fitted for their purpose. The numbers of reflectors in each light had to be varied, and each one brought its own difficulties of transportation and installation. For a long while the task of constructing the lights seemed so impossible that Thomas had considerable difficulty persuading the incredulous local builders to work for him.

Appointing the first lighthouse keepers also presented unexpected difficulties. In the early years, Thomas looked mainly for retired shipmasters and mariners, either hired locally or brought to him by word of mouth. They too had to be pioneers of a kind; much of their role could only be resolved through experience, and a precise definition of their duties only emerged over time. But they were also responsible for a great deal of delicate and expensive equipment, and Thomas left little to chance. James Park, the first keeper at Kinnaird Head, was instructed to

clean the Reflectors and the panes in the windows every day the proper manner of cleaning the Reflectors is to take off any Oil or Smoke that may be found upon them with soft tow and then rub them with a soft linnen rag and Spanish white or finely pounded Chalk till they are perfectly bright this must be strictly attended to or else a great part of the effect of the lights will be lost…You will light the lamps half an hour after Sun-seting and keep them burning till half an hour before Sunrising every day for which purpose you must attend them every two or three hours throughout the night to help any of the lights that may be turning dim but you must take care not to stand before the lights any longer than is necessary of that purpose and you are to observe that in stormy weather you must not leave the light room the whole night.

In return, Park was given a shilling per night, free lodging, and pasturage for a cow. He remained contentedly in the job for a decade, before retiring aged almost eighty.

There were also some staffing difficulties Thomas could not have foreseen. At North Ronaldsay, the keeper took good relations with his neighbours too far, and had started his own local black market in lighthouse fuel. ‘The keeper,’ Smith wrote indignantly in his report to the NLB, ‘has acted the most dishonest and infamous part that can be imagined. He has by his own confessions before a number of witnesses sold the oil sent him in very great quantities throughout North Ronaldsay and the neighbouring island of Sanday, so that his conduct is notorious in the whole country.’ Smith rapidly discovered that, despite all his efforts, the keepers themselves kept introducing an unwelcome dose of chaos.

Perhaps most striking of all was his pained discovery that not everyone wanted or encouraged the lighthouses. Thomas and his Stevenson successors found that they did not merely have to compete with primitive materials and impossible geography, they also found themselves at war with inertia, hostility, superstition and disbelief. They had to do battle with landowners and government to get the lights built, and they found themselves challenging the prejudices of those whom those lights were supposed to save. Many people did not believe that lighthouses would work; many believed they were too expensive, many saw them as a form of religious defiance. Many people simply did not see the need for them. During the original inquiry into the need for a light on the Isle of May back in 1635, all the predictable excuses had arisen: the light would be too weak to be seen, the shipowners would be financially broken by the charges, there was no need for a light, the rock itself was not dangerous.

There were also more imaginative protestations. John Cowtrey, a skipper from Largs, complained that a light on the Isle of May would only guide ships to destruction on the nearby Inchcape and Carr rocks. George Scot, another skipper from Dysart, complained that since the light would not be visible in a snowstorm, there was no point in having one. Richard Ross, a merchant in Bruntisland, thought that boats would always be wrecked on the isle, and that a light would make no difference. James Lochoir, a skipper from Kinghorn, believed that ships which ran aground on the isle were stupid, and no light on earth would save them from their own imbecility. Exactly the same crop of complaints arose with subsequent lights; even when the benefits were there for all to see, there were plenty of souls who resolutely refused to acknowledge their usefulness.

Down in England, the protests were even more elaborate. Curiously, many of those complaints came from the lighthouse service itself. Like the NLB, Trinity House was impoverished for much of its early existence, since the Crown had originally given it the authority to build lights, but not to charge for them. It therefore spent much of its life finding ingenious new ways to wriggle out of its duties. During the seventeenth-century debate over the construction of the lights at North and South Foreland near Dover, Trinity House objected on the grounds that lights would only alert foreign ships to the British coast. They complained bitterly of ‘such costly follies as lighthouses…The Goodwins [the notorious Goodwin Sands] are no more dangerous now than time out of mind they were, and lighthouses would never lull tempests, the real cause of shipwreck.’ And, as they concluded with a final, divine flourish of illogic, ‘If lighthouses had been of any service at the Forelands the Trinity House as guardians of the interests of the shipping would have put them there.’

The most serious threat to the lighthouses, and one which was to bother both Thomas and Robert for far longer, were the wreckers. They, unlike the shipowners, the skippers or even Trinity House, had a vested interest in ensuring that ships were destroyed. Many coastal villages staked their livelihoods on the exotic plunder to be found in dead and dying ships; the wreckers saw their lootings as a perk of nautical life and bitterly resented any attempts to interfere. As Thomas discovered, the wreckers were furious at the prospect of a safer sea.

The increase in shipping, and the consequent increase in shipwrecks, meant that by the late eighteenth century, they were thriving on salvage and theft. Wrecks were so frequent that many coastal populations had come to regard the cargo as their right. Sailors who survived gales and destruction were often murdered by locals within sight of the shore, and certain areas of the country became notorious for wreckers’ exploits. In the south, it was claimed by one early historian that

If a wreck happened to occur in Cornwall while Divine Service was being held, notice of it was given out from the pulpit by the parson. It is said of the wreckers, I know not with what truth, that the strongest among them would swim out through the breakers and drown the exhausted survivors by thrusting them under water as the poor wretches struggled, with failing strength, to reach the shore. There were even pious fanatics who went so far as to admonish the people that it was sinful to succour a vessel in distress upon the Sabbath; that it was, in fact, sinful to save life. On the other hand, refusal to do so was a proof of true religiousness since it showed that they realised it was God’s will that the ship should sink and the crew perish.

Some shipwreck survivors would be saved by a stray compassionate soul; more often they were regarded as a dangerous inconvenience and left to die. The wreckers worked furtively, away from the censorship of officialdom, and did what they could to prevent the local customs officers from becoming too curious. In many cases, those officials were either easily corruptible or practised at turning a blind eye. Their leniency was perhaps understandable, since in many areas of Britain the population desperately needed the sea’s harvest. The Hebrides in particular included islands naked of a single tree, and their islanders were forced to import even the most basic materials for life. They thus relied heavily on driftwood and wreck to build their houses, make their boats, warm their families and cultivate their food, and they regarded Thomas and his mirror-lamps as a mortal threat not just to their livelihood but to their lives.

More awkwardly, the wreckers could, with some justification, claim salvage from a ship as a legal right. Until 1852 and the Customs Consolidation Act which appointed official Receivers of Wreck, the law remained confused and uneasy, and little could be done to prevent thefts. Previously, all wrecks in British waters came under the jurisdiction of the Lord Admiral whose role was to take ‘cognisance of the death of man, and mayhem done in great ships’, and who delegated responsibility to lord lieutenants in each county. All cargo was divided into four categories: flotsam – cargo that floated; jetsam – jettisoned cargo abandoned by the crew in their attempts to save the ship; ligan – cargo that sank and was marked with a buoy for later retrieval, and wreck – the cargo that was washed ashore. For many years, all four types became the subject of an undignified wrestle between the finder, the landowner, and the Crown. If the rightful owner did not claim his cargo within a year and a day, it was forfeit to the Crown, although the finder was entitled to a reward proportionate to the value of the goods.

Landowners could claim the ‘privilege of right’ to anything washed up on their foreshores. Their tenants then adapted that privilege to suit themselves. Wreckers took advantage of the silences in legislation to justify their lootings either under civil law, or under a shrewd interpretation of divine justice. Eventually, the impasse developed into a very British truce, part opportunism, part Queensberry Rules, and part amateur criminality. With the increase in customs and smuggling patrols during the early nineteenth century, wreckers realised that their safest chance lay in staying within the law; if they came across a stricken ship, they must rescue the crew first, but, having done so, the ship became theirs to plunder or sell as they pleased. The practice still exists to this day; any ship (other than those of the coastguard or RNLI) that assists another ship in distress is entitled to claim a portion of the value of that ship in return for saving the lives of the crew. Given that a captain therefore risks forfeiting his ship, this also gives rise to the reluctance of many crews to issue Mayday calls, even in extremis.

The early wreckers also brought a certain grim ingenuity to their tasks. Many locals in areas in which ships were regularly wrecked did not just wait for disaster; they created it. Luring ships onto the rocks was a particular favourite. The Scilly Isles, the West Country and the Hebrides were all rumoured to have wreckers who put up false lights to guide the mariner onto the rocks. It was easy enough to light a bonfire on a dangerous coastline, or tie a lantern to a horse’s tail so it imitated the swinging of a ship’s light. For a while, the first lighthouses only made the situation worse. The local wreckers, aware that ships relied on the towers to know their position near land, set up rival lights nearby in order to beguile the pilots away from their true course and onto the nearby coast. There were other methods as well. The Wolf Rock, eight miles south-west of Land’s End, was a notorious hazard for shipping, and was regarded by the local Cornish wreckers as an excellent source of plunder. Within the rock, however, there was a cavern hollowed out over centuries by the movement of the tides. When the waves crashed through it, trapping and then releasing the air within, the cavern made a sound eerily similar to a wolf’s howl. The wreckers, worried that the lonely baying of the rock would alert ships to the Wolf’s existence, stopped up the cavern with stones to silence it.

Unfortunately, the Scots were no kinder. Compton Mackenzie’s amiable fable of the SS Politician in Whisky Galore was based on a less amiable truth; the Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland were enthusiastic wreckers. Legends and rumours seeded themselves with suspicious frequency; the local minister on the Isle of Sanday was reputed to pray devotedly every Sunday for those in peril on the sea, to ask God politely if he intended to sink any ships soon and, if so, whether He couldn’t organise it so they were wrecked on Sanday. When Robert Stevenson started work on the island in 1806, he noted that wrecks were so frequent in the area that the islanders fenced their fields with ship-timbers instead of stone. Wrecking also produced another curious inequality; rents on the sides of the island that produced most wrecks were higher than on the more hospitable side. Living in a wreck zone had kept the northerners rich, and the southerners poor. Robert was also astonished to discover ‘a park paled round, chiefly with cedar wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras built ship; and in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley meal porridge, instead of their usual beverage.’ Thomas – and Robert in his turn – had a hard task in selling their lights to the islanders before they had even begun to build them.

But for all the predictable and unpredictable human difficulties, Smith’s early efforts with the Scottish lighthouses provided a useful guide for all his professional successors. He was, after all, not a trained engineer in the modern sense, but an imaginative man who did his best with the materials available. The Commissioners had only a vague idea of what the work would entail, and expected Smith to complete most of the supervision on his own and unpaid. For almost ten years, Thomas took no salary at all from the NLB (who were, in any case, broke) and relied entirely on his income from the Edinburgh work. There was some method in his madness.

Thomas worked for the Commissioners because he believed implicitly in the need for guidance at sea, not because he thought it might profit him. He had been reared with a strong notion of public duty, and was quite prepared, despite the lack of money and the spartan conditions, to live up to his promises. Despite the improvised nature of the work, his reports show a good-natured stoicism for the endless hardships he put up with. He noted everything, from the supply of window putty to the problems the keepers had with grazing for their cows. Where routine could be imposed, Thomas tried; he wrote reports, revised instructions, built relationships and imposed discipline. Once it became evident that lighthouse work would demand an ever-increasing amount of time and attention, Thomas resigned himself to regular annual voyages around the coast inspecting existing lights and assessing the necessity for new ones. The voyages were usually hard and often frustrating; Thomas settled into a familiar pattern of remaining storm-stayed in port or being delayed by the unwelcome attention of press gangs.

When back in Edinburgh, Thomas spent much of his time planning improvements to the lights. There were also the demands of Edinburgh society; Thomas, as entrepreneur and public servant, slid happily into the comforts of the New Town bourgeoisie. He trusted implicitly in the Edinburgh virtues of thrift, hard work, humanity and humbug. In middle age, he grew a little stout, but never idle. He worked hard for his business, looked after his family, and took to holding dinner parties. His make-do background had some influence on his later character; once the business was healthy enough, he became the most conservative of men, joined the Edinburgh Spearmen (a volunteer regiment ostensibly called up to fight the revolutionary French but actually dedicated to suppressing domestic riots) and became a captain. The discipline of his public life coincided nicely with his professional existence. He did well from the New Town, which provided an almost inexhaustible demand for brassware, grates and fittings of all kinds, and fitted into the new middle-class world of salons and afternoon teas with ease.

Thomas had been able both to exploit the new, hubristic mood of the city, and to appropriate many of its values. And, having earned his place in society, he was a contented man. He had overcome great insecurity to establish himself in a role which demanded exceptional effort, but rewarded him with both position and respect. His marriage to Jean Lillie had given him a warm and stable family life, and the lighthouses provided the means to keep it. By 1803, he had been confident enough to buy himself a patch of land in Baxter’s Place in the lee of Calton Hill, and to build on it a grand new family house in delightfully fashionable style. It was large enough, indeed, to allow both for a warehouse in which he could experiment with designs, and for a separate flat in which the older children would later be installed. Inside its newfangled elegances, the Smith and Stevenson children lived in disciplined harmony, apparently quite content with the splicing together of the two families. And, it was rapidly becoming evident, his marriage had also gained him an apprentice who seemed to have every intention of continuing his connection with the Northern Lights.

By the age of sixteen, Robert Stevenson had already become an adult. In youth, he appeared a sturdy, rounded young man, with a complexion ruddied by outdoor work and with a deceptive spark of humour in his eyes. He remained uneasy with books and culture, but was completely at home with the practicalities of stone, iron, brass and wood. While at home, he became the model of a conscientious gentleman, attentive to his mother and devoted to his stepbrothers and sisters. He was also becoming a plausible successor to Thomas as head of the family. Even then, he had already shouldered all the adult responsibilities of his future life and was busily developing an ambition to move on in the world. He, like the rest of the Smith-Stevenson brood, felt the need ‘to gather wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families’, as his grandson Louis later put it. Above all, Robert wanted to be useful.

Much of Robert’s later attitude to life was marked by the experience of his childhood. His early years had shown him first the impoverishment caused by his father’s early death, and then, through the move to Edinburgh and his mother’s marriage to Thomas, the evidence that merit and enterprise earned their rewards. Above all, they had taught him to trust in himself. He also remained mindful of the sacrifices Jean Lillie had made for him, acknowledging many years later that ‘My mother’s ingenuous and gentle spirit amidst all her difficulties never failed her. She still relied on the providence of God, though sometimes, in the recollection of her father’s house and her younger days, she remarked that the ways of Providence were often dark to us.’ The move to Edinburgh and the uniting of the two households had also proved helpful. Thomas’s example in ironmongery and lighthouses had not only settled Robert in his chosen vocation but allowed him to repay what he felt were some of his early debts in life. He was also lucky in his choice. Engineering suited him, drawing out both his fondness for adventure and his talent for mathematical abstractions. It allowed him to be creative, and to contribute something of worth to posterity. Above all, it was a useful, manly sort of trade, requiring both solidity and self-confidence.

For the moment, however, Robert was still preoccupied with the slow climb up the foothills of his profession. During the 1790s, he was despatched to Glasgow University to learn civil engineering under the supervision of Professor John Anderson. ‘Jolly Jack Phosphorous’, as Anderson was known, was rare among eighteenth-century tutors for being as enthusiastic about the practical applications of engineering as he was about its theory. It was said that Anderson had first interested James Watt in steam power, and, scandalously, that his university classes were based as much on fieldwork as they were on black-board studies. He later bequeathed money to a separate technical college in Glasgow staffed with tutors who would not ‘be permitted, as in some other Colleges, to be Drones or Triflers, Drunkards or negligent in any manner of way’. The college flourished, and was eventually to become Strathclyde University.

In addition to his classes in mathematics, natural philosophy (physics), drawing, and mechanics, Robert learned much of direct value to Thomas’s business, and in later years became an ardent supporter of Anderson’s methods. ‘It was the practice of Professor Anderson kindly to befriend and forward the views of his pupils,’ he wrote later, ‘and his attention to me during the few years I had the pleasure of being known to him was of a very marked kind, for he directed my attention to various pursuits with the view to my coming forward as an engineer.’ Having discovered the attractions of a subject he wanted to learn, Robert had also become a keen preacher for the benefits of a sound education. The first fees he earned for his engineering work were passed on almost instantly to his old school, and his letters home are peppered with references to the usefulness of his university classes. Once converted to anything, Robert was always the most fanatic of believers.

Robert also showed an enthusiastic interest in the lighthouses. The mutable quality of the work suited him and after accompanying Thomas on a couple of his regular inspection tours, Robert began to appropriate small patches of lighthouse territory for himself. Thomas introduced him to the Commissioners, allowed him to fit lenses or supervise building work and encouraged him to develop his interest as warmly as possible. By the mid 1790s, Robert appears often in the NLB’s Minute books, first as understudy, and then in more significant roles. He already had a sound grasp of all aspects of the business from the sizing of lamps to the sculpting of reflectors. His chief fault, if any, was a forcefulness in his dealings that did not always endear him to potential customers. Within six years of joining Thomas’s workshop he was regarded as an equal in almost all aspects of the work, and by 1800 had been made a full partner in the firm.

And so, in the pattern that was to become settled for the next three Stevenson generations, Robert spent his winters at home in the south studying and his summers in the north supervising the details of work on the lights. Much of his education was also completed in Thomas’s workshops first at Bristo Street and then at Baxter’s Place, making grates for the gentry and lamplights for the Corporation. As master and pupil, Thomas and he were well suited to each other. It was in some ways an odd partnership; Thomas was, after all, not only Robert’s employer, but also his stepfather. Stretched too far, the relationship could have become awkward or imbalanced, but as it was, the two made ideal accomplices. Thomas, though a milder character, was a generous teacher. The two men were alike in many respects. Both had been reared the hard way; both believed in the benefits of a stern apprenticeship, and neither took anything for granted. Before he died, Thomas was to realise that Robert’s talents would one day far eclipse his own. It is a measure of Thomas’s generosity that, far from resenting his stepson’s advancement, he was delighted.

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