The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [12]
Once established in Edinburgh, Jean Lillie began attending church in the New Town. Among the congregation was another family, the Smiths. In early middle age, Thomas Smith was a stout man, tall, plain and pragmatic. He had come originally from Broughty Ferry – then a briny little suburb of Dundee – and, like Jean, had been forced to learn self-reliance early. When Thomas was still young, his father was drowned in Dundee harbour. His mother, left with a small child, brought him up herself as best she could, gave him a good and pious education and insisted that whatever trade he took, it should at least be safely on land. Thomas took his mother’s instructions to heart and found an apprenticeship with a Dundee metal worker where he spent the next five years learning ironmongery before moving down to Edinburgh. After a few years on the staff of a metalworking company, he established his own business in Bristo Street as an ironsmith, providing grates, lamps and intricate trinkets for the New Town. The business throve and Thomas prospered. He was the creature of a most particular time, a high Tory and a businessman of talent and ambition. Louis considered him ‘ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average’. His first wife was a farmer’s daughter who bore him five children. Despite Edinburgh’s reputation for medicine, surviving the rigours of childhood in the eighteenth century was still a matter of good fortune. Thomas’s first children were not lucky. Three of the five babies died; only Jane and James survived. His wife too finally succumbed to whooping cough, and Thomas was left a widower with two small children. He was married again, in 1787, to the daughter of a Stirling builder who bore him one daughter, Mary Anne, and then promptly expired of consumption. Thomas, now well accustomed to mortality, started looking for another wife.
Jean Lillie, with her small, well-disciplined son and her belief in similar ideals, was a willing match. In June 1787, the two were married. It was a pragmatic partnership, based as much on the benefits of uniting two incomplete families as on affection or companionship. It was also a marriage of equals. Jean was a strong-minded soul, who earned the devoted respect of her new husband in return for security and a stable upbringing for his children. The arrangement also served Robert well. By now, it was evident that he had infinitely more talent, and greater patience, for the practicalities of mechanics than he had for Latin. When Thomas took him on a guided tour of his ironworks, Robert was beguiled by the blend of craftsmanship and usefulness. By 1790, Thomas had taken Robert on as an apprentice, and the boy’s efforts at Greek, French and theology were forgotten.
Thomas’s main business at the time was in lamp-making and in designing street lighting for the New Town. The lamps at the time used oil, which silted up quickly with grime and gave out only a weak and smoggy light. Thomas, experimenting with