The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [0]
The extraordinary story of
the building of the Scottish lighthouses
by the ancestors of
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bella Bathurst
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
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Preface
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
Copyright
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.
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