• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 770 0

friend and champion of the era’s most influential poets, a pioneer of optical technology, and the architect of one of the most exceptional structures ever built. Skerryvore, the lonely tower in a lonely sea, became his lasting monument, ‘immovable, immortal, eminent’, as Louis put it. The time he spent on that dark rock in the mid-Atlantic, battling with wind and wave, gave him something close to happiness. The years afterwards, sick and persecuted, seemed a hard penance. Throughout his life, from the first submission to Robert to the final submission to illness, there remains a whisper of the might-have-been. Sometimes, as at Skerryvore or pondering lenses with the Fresnels, Alan gives the impression of a man fulfilled in his work. At other times, he gives the sense of someone bent out of true by more forceful wills than his. Some measure of his character is still contained within Skerryvore itself, built brilliantly, but also built at great personal cost.

With Alan now gone and Tom preoccupied, it was David and Elizabeth who took on Robert’s role as Stevenson grandees. They lived the fine refined New Town life, gave parties and supported the post-Disruption Church of Scotland. David, not a questioner by nature, brought up his sons with the intention that they should inherit the lights. He also passed on many of his pragmatic qualities. Both Charles and DAS picked up a sense of pedantry in details and thoroughness in life. David did not believe that imagination was a necessary quality in an engineer. One had only to glance at his sons’ feckless cousins, Bob and Louis, to see the proof that too much intellectual freedom was bad for the soul and the finances.

In 1855, David made the crucial choice between the lights and the general engineering work. Sole reliance on the NLB, he decided, was a dead end, too specialised and too insecure to support both brothers for long. In an address to the Commissioners, he pointed out that his workload had increased several hundredfold. Three new lights were to be built in 1854 alone, not counting the works on Muckle Flugga, the paperwork had risen from 150 orders and logs to over 1,000 documents for each light, and the bureaucracy surrounding the annual accounts had doubled. ‘When I had the honour to be nominated Successor to My Brother the late Engineer to the Board, the impression was that the business for the future would be less extensive than it had been,’ he wrote. ‘New arrangements have however since been made by which the duties connected with the Ordinary management instead of being diminished have been greatly increased.’ With such a load in addition to his own troubled health, ‘which has never been very robust since I had an illness about 3 years ago of more than 2 years duration, constrain me to intimate that I am unable to undertake the duties of Engineer to the Board on the present footing, an intimation which I make with all the reluctance and hesitation which naturally attaches to retiring from an office which has so long been held by members of my family.’ Nominally, David and Tom should have been sharing the work equally, but, given the differences in their characters, it was inevitable that much of it had been delegated. David, as always, had a clearer organisational mind. When one side of the business faltered, it was he who fussed it back to health. Tom was usually too busy with his own esoteric schemes to devote his full attention to all aspects of the business and, though the two were complementary partners, the burden of the NLB and the family business had inevitably devolved on David.

David suggested that the Commissioners might consider appointing Tom and himself jointly as general engineers to the Board, ridding them of the need to deal with unnecessary paperwork. If the two were to work as partners, concerning themselves only with essential business, then the burden of the lights could be better balanced. Forthwith, work would not be delegated to one person alone, but to two separate departments. One, supervised by the Stevensons, would design and plan