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By Root 782 0

through time. Engineering was no longer the amateur trade that it had been when Robert began, it was now a respectable profession. When Robert had begun the Bell Rock, there were so few experts in marine architecture it was possible for him to communicate personally with every one of them. By the time of his death, many universities had established separate engineering courses and young men were pouring into apprenticeship schemes similar to the one Robert himself had introduced. His sons, though pioneers within their own specific sciences, were not and did not need to be that all-round ‘man o’ pairts’ that Robert had been. Even the lighthouses, an esoteric sideline compared to the traditional marine fare of bridges, harbours and dockworks, were now a known and studied quantity. Smeaton, Robert and Alan had, between them, brought the rock lighthouse to a degree of perfection that few others could, or would need to, match. Tom and David, for their parts, wisely found different territory on which they could make their marks.

Meanwhile, Alan struggled on for two more years before succumbing to his own illness. On 9 February 1853, the Commissioners received his resignation. In an emotional letter read out before the Board, he admitted that his departure would not come as a surprise to them. He was now ‘under the necessity of begging to be permanently relieved from duties which I grieve to say there is now no prospect of my being able to resume. I cannot take this step so important to the interests of myself and family, without much pain; nor can I relinquish without many serious regrets, an Occupation with which I have for so many Years been familiar…The Circumstances and duration of my servitude and emoluments are so perfectly known that I will not enter into any detail on the subject.’ His letter was accompanied by two letters from doctors, certifying that Mr Alan Stevenson was afflicted with an unusually serious form of paraplegia. He ‘has ceased to make such progress towards the recovery of his health…he can never resume the arduous duties of his office.’ The Commissioners accepted his resignation with ‘deep regret’, considered the question of his pension, and awarded him half his annual salary. A few months previously, crippled by pain and hopelessly disillusioned by the path his life had taken, Alan had inscribed a poem on the title page of his young son’s bible.

Read in this blessed Book, my gentle boy;

Learn that thy heart is utterly defiled…

This day five years thou numberest; and I

Write on a bed of anguish. O my son,

Seek thy Creator, in thine early youth;

Value thy soul above the world, and shun

The sinner’s way; oh! seek the way of truth.

Oft have we knelt together, gentle boy,

And prayed the Holy Ghost to give us power

To see God reconciled, through Christ, with joy;

Nought else, but Christ brings peace in sorrow’s hour.

God and poetry remained Alan’s only consolations. He had always been devout but in his retirement he became almost maddened by his own guilt. God, it seemed to Alan, was teaching him through suffering. He saw his paralysis not as an arbitrary tragedy, but as God’s retribution for past sins. Every time the pains lifted, he had moved a little way to paying his penance; every time they came back, God was punishing him. He became tortured both in mind and body, and as the disease began to take its insidious toll on his brain, he lost his ability to see himself as anything other than a sinner eternally punished. At one stage, he went through an agony of conscience over his insistence that the Skerryvore men should work on the Sabbath. In 1854, a decade after the light was completed, he wrote to each one of them apologising. ‘I blame myself,’ he confessed, ‘as sole cause of this violation of the Law of God; and I state this with great pain, duly humbling myself before Him, not only as an individual transgressor, but as a deceiver of others…Being now awakened to the great wickedness of such conduct, I feel bound to confess my sin, not only to God, against whom it was committed, but before