The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [28]
In practice this meant that Robert often worked blind, unaware of the efforts of his fellow engineers and unable to do more than feel his way through the darkness. In time, Robert established links with many of the most important British and European inventors and an atmosphere of mutual helpfulness, jolted by the occasional hiccup of professional jealousy, gradually developed. For the moment though, Robert was more preoccupied with refining his existing designs. He spent his winter nights making elegant architectural drawings, detailing the dimensions of each lantern, and polishing his reflectors to perfection.
Robert relished the journeys and fretted at the endless delays spent in harbours or waiting for supplies. Behind the occasional non-committal statement in his diary or the NLB Minutes that he ‘found the light in good order’, lay hours of patient pedantry. His written evidence reveals as much by its omissions as by the endless records of missions accomplished. On paper, Robert was not an eloquent man. His diaries and minutes tell a gruff history only occasionally illuminated by flashes of insight. His grammar, as Louis later noted with some exasperation, was often hopelessly tangled and his occasional attempts at flattery ill-judged. As he wrote offhandedly to a colleague in 1802, ‘In submitting this address to you, I was otherwise impressed than with the view of laying something before you that might afford pleasure from style and composition. Those are no happy talents of mine, for my avocations in life intirely preclude me from such advantages.’ His son Alan was later to find Robert’s habit of referring to himself in official correspondence as ‘the Reporter’ or ‘the Writer’ mystifying. But Robert, unlike his son, remained conscious throughout his life of the gaps in his education. He spent twelve years chasing his degree, and was finally prevented by his lack of Greek or Latin. His solution was to turn their absence into an advantage, and to be as plainspoken as possible in all his dealings. Sometimes, indeed, his brusqueness verged on bullying. In all his work there was a sense of barely stifled urgency; he wanted life to be as fast and as efficient as he was, and he grew almost frantic when transport, communication or human fallibility disappointed him.
But along with his desperation for haste Robert had extraordinary patience for detail. Most engineers, planning out a bridge or a road or a light, would have given only the most necessary sketchings. Robert gave ornaments or cornicings the same attention as he did load-bearing walls. He didn’t need to bother; he just wanted to. Likewise, he remained meticulous about the regular blizzards of paperwork that the lighthouse service produced. He would often return late at night from a day’s hard journeying and start on a further mileage of instructions. At one stage, he calculated, he had written and received over 3,000 letters in a single year, in addition to preparing the rough and fair copies of reports, estimates, invoices and private correspondence. For a while, he also kept up a separate journal, a memorandum book and a diary. When his youngest son, Thomas, visited England in 1844, Robert handed him a crowded little notebook containing jottings on almost every harbour in Britain. Again, Robert had not written it from necessity, but from an instinctive thoroughness in all his dealings, however apparently irrelevant.
As chief engineer, Robert was also expected to contend with less predictable difficulties. One of the major hazards of any journey