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By Root 714 0

care, assistants sabotaged the principals’ cows, the pigeon post got blown off course or taken by hawks. Robert’s response was characteristic. For every new problem there was a new instruction. Books were to be dusted on the first Saturday of every month, parasols and umbrellas were banned from the light rooms, lenses were to be polished with chamois skin and vinegar every day. Any visitor ‘in a state of intoxication’ was banned from the lighthouse premises. Principals were to get ten tons of coal every year; assistants received eight tons. Principals ‘must treat Assistants with courtesy and civility, but, at the same time, with firmness. Any act of disobedience, insolence or disrespect, on the part of an Assistant lightkeeper towards the Principal is forthwith to be reported to the Secretary.’ Travelling arrangements, correct letter-writing procedure, reading matter, medication, church attendance, maternity care, every cranny of the keepers’ existence was investigated and corrected by the Commissioners at some point during their tenure.

By the time of Alan’s promotion to Chief Engineer, reading matter for each lighthouse had been established. Each light was to receive copies of useful instruction books and approved fiction. Wives were encouraged to study Francatelli’s Cookery for the Working Classes, How to Manage a Baby, and Miss Nightingale on Nursing. Keepers with young children were to have the first and second Books of Reading, the Rudiments of Knowledge, the Moral Class Book, the Introduction to the Sciences and the Geographical Primer. The Commissioners also appointed a missionary to visit the more remote lights, both to ensure that the keepers had not taken up any hunnish practices and to provide some form of outside teaching. ‘As regards the instruction of the younger members of the families in religious and secular knowledge, I made it a point to collect them together for this purpose at least twice each day,’ wrote George Easton, the missionary between 1852 and 1893. ‘In addition to Bible lessons, I taught them writing, reading, arithmetic, geography, grammar and English history (Scottish history was not generally taught to Scottish children until the 1960s). ‘I know no class of men who have it so much in their power to remedy by personal exertion the unquestionable evils connected with their isolated positions as Lightkeepers; and I have never missed an opportunity of impressing this upon them.’ Copies of the Weekly Scotsman and the Illustrated London News were also sent to each light, though, given the stormy weather and the unreliability of relief boats, they were usually well out of date by the time they arrived. Inevitably, the novels on offer usually included a generous dose of Sir Walter Scott.

Diet and medication were also well covered. By 1873, each keeper was allowed a daily ration of a pound of butcher’s meat, a pound of bread, two ounces of oatmeal, barley, and butter, a quart of beer and as many fresh vegetables as could be grown at the light. The vegetable gardens were so jealously guarded that keepers were allowed to take any movable crops with them when they transferred to a new light, or to sell them on to the new keeper. All lights were also supplied with a medicine chest for basic first aid, plus a separate supply in case of a cholera outbreak containing a supply of opium pills, ‘useful in looseness of the bowels’, castor oil, spermaceti ointment, and Durham mustard for use as a poultice. Cholera was, in fact, a serious threat (there were major outbreaks in Scotland in 1832, 1848 and 1853) though, as the Commissioners pointed out, the isolation of most lights from the rest of the population slowed or stopped its spread to the keepers. All lights were also issued with a copy of the Medical Directions for the Use of Lightkeepers, which covered everything from correct use of leeches to the treatment of scurvy, poisoning, worms, smallpox and fainting.

Accompanying the standard-issue medicine chest was an extra box containing a dozen cases of essence of beef for making beef tea, two cases of