The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [1]
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