Bella Bathurst - Lighthouse Stevensons

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.

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 countrys 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 familys 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 fathers 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 grandfathers work on the Bell Rock lighthouse, and of his fathers 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 fathers 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 builders 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.