The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [100]
Alan’s marriage followed the pattern of the rest of his life. He had met Margaret Scott Jones in 1833, while on a working visit to the Welsh lights. Margaret, then twenty-one, was the daughter of the local landowner who disapproved of Alan on both financial and social grounds. He was, after all, the son of a bourgeois man who – regardless of his reputation, his successes and his stability – retained the sheen of new money and suspect effort. Moreover, Robert’s philosophy had ensured that each of his children should earn their own way, just as he had. At the point when he met Margaret, Alan was still completing his training and had yet to be taken on as a full partner in the family firm. Most of the Stevenson apprentices paid Robert for their training; in his sons’ cases, he waived the charge but did not give them a full salary until they qualified. Even when they did, it was only £150 a year, low even by the standards of the time. Alan was broke, in other words, and all the Cicero in the world would not convince Margaret’s father he was suitable for his daughter. The two were banned from contact with each other, but managed to maintain a furtive correspondence. Much of Alan’s communication came in the form of poetry, which, despite all Robert’s frettings, he still wrote in secret. He prayed, he wrote in a poem of 1834, that she might ‘never know the chill / Of cherish’d hope, requited ill.’ In 1836, he was writing of the unnamed, ‘yonder beach, / Where first our love was plighted; / Oh! meet me, lady, with the love / Distrust has never blighted.’ In 1844, eleven years after he first met her, Alan married Margaret. He was thirty-seven, she was thirty-two.
The two settled in Windsor Street, not far off from Baxter’s Place. By 1851, the couple had produced four children, two of whom, Robert Alan Mowbray (Bob) and Katherine Elizabeth Alan, were later to become lifelong companions for Louis. With the birth of his children, his new professional status and Skerryvore behind him, Alan appeared finally to have reached a point of contentment in his life. But just as Alan’s life finally seemed to have reached its domestic and professional zenith, fate intervened. His workload had doubled again with his promotion to Chief Engineer, and the endless dank journeys around the coast of Scotland were beginning to tell on his health. The annual tour had now become an unwieldy juggernaut of preparation, logistics and materials. Back in the early days, with only a dozen or so lights to supervise, Robert had found the journey a comparatively easy matter of landing supplies and checking on the keepers, but by the mid 1840s, there were around thirty-five lights scattered round every headland and islet of Scotland’s outermost points. For one man to supervise the details of every single one was almost too much. For one man with precarious health making the journey several times a year in all weather it was the kind of load that only a Stevenson would have been stubborn enough to attempt.
In 1844, there were the first indications that the burden was beginning to take its effect on his strength. ‘I am still grievously afflicted by Drowsiness,’ he complained at Hynish in July while inspecting Tom’s work at Skerryvore. By August, he was forced to row thirty-six miles in an open boat to reach Barra Head light, since there was not enough wind to sail. A few days later he tried to reach Calf of Man in a gale. For two days, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the local boatmen to take him out, and on the third, ‘I walk to the boat where I am nearly lost in the surf in embarking, having fallen back but am caught up by one of the boatmen.’ In July of 1847, while on the annual voyage with the Commissioners, he noted shakily, ‘I am ill with Rheumatism.’ By the 25th, in Oban, he wrote, ‘the night is v bad.’ His handwriting became increasingly patchy and erratic over the next couple of days. ‘In Lochindaal all day with gale,’ he noted on Wednesday the 28th. ‘I am v. ill.’ Next day, ‘leave Lochindaal at 3.1 am so ill that the