The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [52]
A lighthouse having been erected upon the Inch Cape or Bell Rock, situated at the entrance to the Firth of Forth and Tay in north lat. 56° 29’ and west long. 2° 22’, the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses hereby give notice that the light will be from oil, with reflectors, placed at a height of about one hundred and eight feet above the medium level of the sea. The light will be exhibited on the night of Friday, the first day of February 1811, and each night thereafter, from the going away of daylight in the evening to the return of daylight in the morning.
Robert returned, swelled with success, to Edinburgh and home. The Commissioners emerged, one by one, to visit the rock and praise Robert’s achievement. In the Arbroath workyard, the workmen celebrated and dispersed, many of them moving on to other less glamorous jobs for the Northern Lights. Back in Edinburgh, Robert was applauded in the newspapers, courted by the gentry and famed within his own profession. Robert revelled in the acclaim. His pride in his own work manifested itself in fussiness over the light; he fidgeted endlessly with stores and rations and lenses, and demanded a constant series of reports and letters from those based on the rock. To capitalise on the keen public interest in the works, the Commissioners suggested that Robert should begin preparing an account of the works for publication. He dithered, sorting through plans and correcting his journals. One duty he did attend to was a geogra-phical plan of the Bell Rock reef, complete with carefully dedicated place names. The scrubby hummocks of rock gained a sudden grandeur, with names like Port Stevenson, Hope’s Wharf and Smith’s Ledge. Robert made sure not only to commemorate each of the Lighthouse Commissioners, but also many of the artificers who had worked on the rock. There was also a small patch of ground entitled ‘the Last Hope’, after the fearful escape the men and Robert had from drowning during 1807. Perhaps deliberately, Port Rennie was stuck some way out to sea.
Rennie himself did not feature heavily in Robert’s reminiscences. Though he collected his chief engineer’s fee of £400 from the Commissioners, the episode clearly rankled. In a letter of 1814 written to a friend, his usual goodwill shows signs of strain. The plans for the Bell Rock lighthouse, he noted, had been drawn up by him, though,
When the work was completed, Stevenson considered that he had acquired sufficient knowledge to start as a civil engineer, and in that line he has been most indefatigable in looking after employment, by writing and applying wherever he thought there was a chance of success…he has assumed the merit of applying coloured glass to lighthouses, of which Huddart was the actual inventor, and I have no doubt that he will also assume the whole merit of planning and erecting the Bell Rock Lighthouse, if he has not already done so. I am told that few weeks pass without a puff or two in his favour in the Edinburgh newspapers.
Rennie’s sour predictions came true. When he heard of the book Robert was compiling he was piqued, particularly since Robert had not bothered to contact him. The two had kept up a desultory correspondence for a few years after the completion of the works, though all warmth had long since been demolished. ‘I have no wish,’ Rennie wrote to a friend, ‘to prevent him writing a book. If he details the truth fairly and impartially,