The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [122]
All the Stevensons seemed to hold a dim view of the keepers’ characters. Even Alan, usually the most tolerant of the family, reported to a Select Committee in 1845 that ‘we have no information excepting from one or other of the keepers, and we generally find them very ready to give information against each other, for it is remarkable that they are generally on very bad terms; I know not how, but so it happens.’ As Louis reported, no doubt encouraged by Thomas, the keepers ‘usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient of quarrelling, and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on speaking terms with any other…The principal is dissatisfied with the assistant, or perhaps the assistant keeps pigeon, and the principal wants the water from the roof. Their wives and families are with them, living cheek by jowl. The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the dissention. Perhaps there is trouble about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs Assistant is more highly born that Mrs Principal and gives herself airs; and the men are drawn in and the servants presently follow.’ As Louis noted, Robert had been shrewd enough to use this dissent to his own advantage. In one of his diaries he had noted that ‘the lightkeepers, agreeing ill, keep one another to their duty.’
Those duties might not have been onerous, but they were specific. The keeper at Port Patrick light was given instructions in 1802 to trim the wicks of each oil lamp down to precisely three-sixteenths of an inch, and reminded that he was to ‘clean the reflectors with linen or cotton rags, and then use a brush for cleaning the throat of the reflectors, and thereafter use the brush upon the surface of the Reflectors to complete the cleaning, that he clean the windows in the inside with linen or cotton rags, and on the outside to clear the glass of the dimness they are so apt to contract when the sea runs high with fresh water and a mop.’ Furthermore, he was reminded ‘that he keep always in remembrance that the lives and fortunes of numerous individuals often depend upon the exact performance of the duties of a lightkeeper.’ Often, the keepers’ wives helped out with the duties of the light, cleaning, housekeeping and maintaining the records when necessary. The majority of mainland lights allowed for families, with neatly divided cottages for the principal and the two assistants and ground for grazing a cow or sheep. The NLB never appointed female keepers, on the illiberal but understandable grounds that one woman bundled up with two men for four years on a place like Skerryvore was asking for trouble. On the rock lights – those such as the Bell Rock that were too remote or small to allow for more than the keepers themselves – the wives remained on shore nearby. The life of a lightkeeper’s wife was similar in many respects to a fisherman’s. She endured the same long waiting, the fright at storms and gales, the solitary motherhood, the stranger come home every few months to greet the bewildered children. If you married a keeper, you married the job, as several keepers’ wives point out even now. Every few years or so, just as the children had settled into a new school, the transfer instructions would come through, and the family would move on, up north, to the isles, down to a city, out to the west.
Since their jobs therefore affected not just the keepers themselves but all those dependent on them, almost every aspect of their lives had to be vetted. As Robert discovered, there were not only the usual problems in maintenance and discipline, but unexpected difficulties to contend with as well. Dazzled birds came crashing through the lantern panes, keepers’ wives needed maternity