The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [118]
Tom, he supposed blithely, would have been less impressed by the artistry of the storm than by its effects. ‘I can’t look at it practically however: that will come I suppose like gray hair or coffin nails.’
When finally finished, long after Louis had departed for more promising places, the breakwater stood intact for four years until a spectacular storm in December 1872 destroyed the entire harbour, shifting one massive block of stone weighing 1,350 tons and folding the whole structure into the sea. Tom was devastated. In fact, his reaction was far more extreme than the incident warranted. But he had based his professional faith on studying the sea, learning its moods, its tempers and its breaking points, and the discovery that much of his life’s work was founded on a miscalculation was almost unbearable. The early studies he had made of the force of waves were based on the movements of ten- or fifteen-ton blocks, not of something that weighed as much as the whole mass of the Bell Rock lighthouse. His reaction was initially incredulous, then defensive. He published papers complaining of the force of the elements the Stevensons contended with, photographs of immense waves smashing against the harbour walls, anything that might vindicate his position. Eventually, once the disputing was over, the breakwater was rebuilt, this time with a 2,600-ton foundation block in place. In 1877, another apocalyptic storm washed it away. Tom could do nothing but turn away in disgust.
On his return from Earraid, Louis had skipped off gladly down south before returning to Edinburgh to continue his training. In 1871, after delivering his paper to the Royal Scottish Society, Louis summoned his courage and confessed to his father he would never make an engineer. The compromise, advocacy, was scarcely more satisfactory, as Louis crept further and further towards the life of writing. ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure,’ Louis reports Tom shouting at him a year later. His decision also put great strain on Thomas’s relations with the rest of his family. To justify his son’s behaviour, he blamed Bob, which had led to several quarrels with Alan before he died, and to compensate for the disappointment of Louis’s disappearance from engineering, he was forced to blame DAS and Charles for becoming all that their father had wanted them to be.
The disputes between Tom and his son were only an incidental backdrop to the lighthouse work. Back in the offices, now based, as they have been ever since, at 84 George Street in Edinburgh, commissions were coming in from both New Zealand and China. The Stevensons’ existing expertise with the Indian lights made future work abroad more straightforward. Many requests consisted only in shipping off lenses and machinery without the need for training keepers or designing lights. Much of it was now undertaken by Alan Brebner, who had been made a full partner, and, increasingly, by DAS and Charles. Both Tom and David were beginning to suffer from bouts of ill health. In their case, it was not the slow wasting sickness that Alan endured, but the more prosaic effects of age and fine living. By 1881, David was forced to retire and handed on much of his work to his sons. Tom took over as senior engineer to the Board, but he too was prone to illness. Louis’s decision not to take up the family business had proved a serious discouragement. Once David retired, Tom had less heart for the lighthouses. He did not work happily with David’s sons, who seemed to him to represent a living reproach