The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [42]
Rennie, away from Edinburgh and hopping frantically from one project to another, replied when he had the chance. He had been to visit another offshore light in Ireland, he wrote in a letter of September 1805, noting warningly that ‘the Bell Rock will be ten times as hard to do as the lighthouse on the South Rock can have been’. When he did have the chance to reply, he had evidently thought deeply about the different methods of constructing the light, and of the best use of materials. His letters to Robert were filled with an answering barrage of estimates, queries and opinions; whether northern granite was really the most appropriate stone, how the lantern was to be designed, how best to mix mortar, how many link-pins should be necessary. Robert, in his turn, proposed a series of changes and amendments to Rennie’s schemes and blithely ignored many of his chief engineer’s suggestions. Anyone following the proceedings closely might have noticed that it was not Rennie’s plans that Robert was working to by now, but his own. Rennie, startled by the bombardment of correspondence and by Robert’s peremptory tones, became distracted and uncertain. As the date for the start of works on the rock neared Robert increased the pressure further. Rennie, away in London, Bristol, Portsmouth, Glasgow or Birmingham, kept up as best he could. Though resolutely good-natured throughout, he clearly began to feel his grip slipping as Robert’s tightened.
Nor did Robert neglect the Commissioners. By March 1808, while works were already well underway, Robert felt himself to be in a strong enough position to try one further manoeuvre. In an address to the assembled lighthouse trustees, Robert suggested – in his usual circumlocutory manner – that he should resign his other business and be appointed sole engineer to the Northern Lights. The lighthouse work, he argued, had expanded so greatly since Thomas Smith was first appointed that it no longer suited anyone to have a mere contracted amateur supervising all aspects of the lighthouses. The Commissioners needed someone to devote themselves full-time to the position; Robert, naturally, was the rightful candidate. And, while they were about it, perhaps they could consider the question of his salary? The move was a shrewd one. Not only did it consolidate Robert’s position, but it also removed the Commissioners’ belief that lighthouse work could be offered to any old jobbing engineer. True, it was too late for the Bell Rock, but still, the Commissioners could no longer reduce Robert to a footnote in their dealings.
The whole episode, from Rennie’s first appointment to the final realisation of Robert’s ambition to be sole master of the Bell Rock, took three years – three years of agile diplomacy and shrewd manoeuvrings; three years of quiet stubbornness. In public, Robert remained self-effacing, pragmatic in his dealings and stoic in his workload. But his sly campaign to sideline Rennie and ensure that he would be credited with sole authority for the Bell Rock demonstrates a flintier habit of mind. He was competitive, ambitious and frequently political; he knew the value of his own work and expected its due recognition. He planned many moves in advance, and he had the self-assurance to believe – before the first surveys of the site had even been completed – that the Bell Rock would turn out to be his passport to immortality. The fact that he was to