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By Root 750 0

Trodday, Rubh Re – between 1885 and 1915, twenty-three new lights were constructed, from the Flannan Isles in the far north-west to Bass Rock opposite the summer beaches of North Berwick. The lighthouse service expanded and changed. The Stevensons took on other work and other lives, keepers came and went, fuels and lenses changed or dwindled. Through it all, the storms and wrecks still came, and the lights – colza or paraffin, electricity or gas, dioptric or holophotal – remained. Far away in Samoa, Louis was carried in a coffin to the top of a high hill. A separate industry developed to engineer his image and keep his own reputation burning. In the years after his death in 1894 he became a hero, the teller of tales, the perpetual exile, the children’s author, the man of whom myths were made. He himself helped the process a little, but returned again and again to the place and the trade from which he had come. The rest of the family remained in Scotland, still connected to the Northern Lights in mind if not in deed. The last of the Lighthouse Stevensons, D. Alan Stevenson, died in 1971, two centuries, ninety-seven lighthouses and four generations after Robert first joined Thomas Smith. And the lights remained there at the edge, still turning.

NINE

The Keepers

All of Britain’s lighthouses have now been automated. There is no longer any such thing as a lighthouse keeper. The profession has expired, forced into obsolescence by time and technology. Inside the towers, the brasswork and polish have been stripped away and in their place are banks of monitors and computer fittings. Tidy impersonal rows of electronic aids now turn the lights on and off, measure the daylight, calculate the windspeed and battle back the storms. The buildings remain, as plain and weatherbeaten as ever, but the keepers themselves have moved on.

The arguments for and against automation have long ago grown stale. On the one hand, there’s the dismantling of 210 years of exceptional tradition, the death of a profession and the drawbacks of abandonment. On the other is the truth that at the tail end of the twentieth century it does not require three grown men to keep a light bulb. Some talk hopefully about the remanning of American and Scandinavian lights, but without real conviction. The tide of logic and change dictates that lightkeeping has become a redundant skill. Everyone agrees on the sadness; everyone agrees on the sense. Indeed, to many people, it is mildly astonishing that keeping persisted as long as it did, and its disappearance is no more than the death of a minor novelty.

The impulse that created the lights also seems dated at the end of the twentieth century. The sense of public honour that drove Robert and his sons might be useful in other contexts, but their ideology now seems anachronistic in the middle of a seascape populated by supertankers and nuclear submarines. High Victorianism, with its undertones of imperial arrogance and emotional humbug, has not stood up well to the test of time. But within the enclosed space between the first light and the last, there are still lessons to be learned or tales to be told. Inevitably, it is the keepers themselves who worked the lights long after the Stevensons had gone who provide the sharpest focus on the life of the lights.

In its heyday during the 1890s the NLB employed over 600 keepers in the 80 or so lights speckled around the coast, and kept a waiting list of over 200 hopeful applicants. Where possible, the NLB tried to recruit those with some maritime experience – ex-naval and merchant seamen or retired fishermen. In part, their previous jobs reduced the need for training, but the military discipline of most sailors’ lives was also an asset. Even at the beginning of the service, the physical requirements were not hard. The NLB looked for candidates with a working knowledge of mechanics and regular habits. More important were the emotional qualifications: self-discipline, patience and a seen-it-all demeanour. Even in the mid 1990s, the NLB considered that ‘A lightkeeper must be