The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [53]
Robert’s Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse Including the Details of the Erection and Peculiar Structure of that Edifice only mentioned Rennie in the occasional polite aside when it was finally published. According to Robert, Rennie had been more of a disinterested patron than a paid-up participant. Though both Rennie and Robert went on to grander things, Rennie always felt slighted. His equanimity finally cracked some time later, when he was tentatively approached by the subscribers to the Stockton to Darlington Railway. They would, they wrote, be delighted if Rennie and Robert would consider jointly surveying the site. Rennie snapped back, ‘If the subscribers to this scheme have not sufficient confidence in me to be guided by my advice, I must decline all further concern with it.’
After Rennie’s death, his son Sir John Rennie published his own account of the Bell Rock works; in it, he asserted that his father had ‘designed and built’ the lighthouse. Four years later, he published a further history, emphasising again that ‘the design was prepared by the late Mr Rennie; that no modifications were introduced without his sanction and consent; and that from first to last he was responsible for the success of the undertaking’. Samuel Smiles, in his essay on Rennie in the Lives of the Engineers, took Sir John’s version, though he did concede that ‘his name has not usually been identified with the erection of the structure; the credit having been almost exclusively given to Mr Robert Stevenson, the resident engineer, arising, no doubt, from the circumstance of Mr Rennie being in a great measure ignored in the “Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse”, published by Mr Stevenson several years after the death of Mr Rennie.’ The dispute between the two sides grumbled on for several decades; the Rennies protesting their part in the works, the Stevensons publishing their own claims and disclaimers, the Rennies hitting back angrily. The Commissioners, meanwhile, responded with their usual languor, only conceding that to Robert Stevenson ‘is due the honour of conceiving and executing the great work of the Bell Rock lighthouse’, after Robert’s death.
Rennie, however, was the lone dissenting voice. The paper war between the two sides was largely the preoccupation of vested interests; as far as Scotland and the world was concerned, Stevenson had built the Bell Rock and Stevenson, as he had fully intended, took the credit. Scotland, indeed, considered Robert a genius. He had achieved the impossible, lit up the darkened ocean and brought glory both to engineering and his country. He was praised for his upstanding interest in Britain’s commerce, his disinterested contribution to the war effort with France and his generous advancement of the scientific cause. He was lauded as a true patriot, a mechanical prophet and a man in whom all the most noble qualities of the Romantic spirit were combined. As Rennie had bitterly predicted, the papers published almost weekly bulletins on his latest works, and the King of the Netherlands was so impressed that he sent a large gold medal in recognition of Robert’s services to all European seafarers. Mr George Bruce of Leith composed a poem to Robert:
The undertaking, oh! How vast, how grand,
Which shall for ages as a monument stand
To Stevenson’s, a never-dying name,
Wafted after by the loud trump of fame!
By 1810, Scott was synonymous with Scotland. His championing of the Highlands, his fancy-dress images of wild Jacobite life and his elaborate tales of noble clan feuds had seized the popular imagination. He was the first, and the most inspired, of Scotland’s marketing men and his own life had become an indivisible part of his campaign. He was also a keen traveller; when the Lighthouse Commissioners offered him the chance to accompany Robert on the annual