The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [26]
The outdoor life of a lighthouse pioneer suited Robert wonderfully. Thomas had put up with the voyages, obstacles and disputes; Robert actually enjoyed them. He, like Thomas, lived a sober life in Edinburgh, but once released from the city, his character expanded. His job, after all, was an unusual one. As his grandson Louis later noted,
The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridletrack through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of out-door life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences.
Robert spent the next few years supervising the lights and correcting any existing problems. Like Thomas, he was meticulous, but he brought a blunter approach to the job than his predecessor. Perhaps his greatest asset was the force of personality necessary to carry a reluctant staff along with him. As it became evident that the lighthouse work was swallowing more and more of his time, he began training assistants to help. In the early days he still did the bulk of the work entirely alone, but as time went on, he began to build relationships with a select group of workmen whom he felt he could trust with many of the mundane details. The assistants, in turn, understood Robert to be an employer who expected backbreaking work but offered in return loyalty and enlightened working practices. But it was not merely a decent wage that kept many of his assistants with him for the whole of their working lives. Robert had charisma; the charisma of great purpose. He was not charming, and would have considered charm to be an insult, but he did have the ability to lead others through sheer force of personality. He persuaded not through words but through deeds and by his own example.
At times, Robert’s intensity could be daunting. In many cases, he silenced suspicion or opposition by simply ignoring all argument on the subject. Anyone who complained that lighthouse work was too tough or too dangerous had only to watch Robert sailing through gales or striding across wave-swept reefs to feel themselves fainthearts in comparison. Anything his workmen could do, Robert himself would prove he could do better. For all his high-handed habits, Robert did not regard himself as a grandee but as an equal partner to his men. His flaw was to expect exactly the same of others as he expected of himself. As Louis later put it, ‘what he felt himself, he continued to attribute to all around him.’ Robert was a worker and an impassioned preacher for the benefits of self-discipline, and those who fell below his particular standards astonished him. When others let him down, as they often did, Robert reacted with bafflement; if he was fair with them, he reasoned, why were they not equally straight with him? Though a great leader, Robert was too often a hopeless judge of human nature. He knew himself, and considered that knowledge sufficient.
For much of the time, Robert was worrying about theory as well as practice: would a revolving light suit one place better than another; were floating lights a feasible option; could the cost and difficulty of transporting oil be offset with other savings? Robert set about refining Thomas’s original designs for the reflectors, applying a silver coating to the old copper circles, and dispensing with the beautiful but ineffective silvered-mirror designs. His refinements