The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [59]
Robert found the new tartanised image of his country strange. He was proud of Scotland’s fashionability but bemused by the dewy-eyed musings of his New Town neighbours. In one of his occasional letters to Scott, with whom he maintained an intermittent correspondence, he recalled the author’s fascination for all things Jacobite. He had noted, he wrote, that ‘in conversation, you never term Prince Charles “The Pretender”’ and was therefore sending on a small bag of articles, ‘which I shall not attempt to describe’, given to him by the eighty-four-year-old daughter of a clergyman who had been with Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden. Robert had found Scott’s habit of turning the Highlands into picturesque fiction odd. Like most of Edinburgh at the time, he admired Scott’s Waverley novels, but had seen enough to know that Scott’s heroic images were nonsensical. Admittedly, Robert did make his own contribution to the change in thinking. His roads and bridges and railways provided the means for Scotland’s heritage industry to thrive.
Improvement of his country was only part of the story. Robert’s most persistent search was for improvement of himself and those around him. The success of the Bell Rock and his appointment to the Scottish Burghs produced ample new works for the Stevenson engineering business. The queues of petitioners seeking Robert’s advice increased so much that he began complaining that Baxter’s Place was too crowded with callers to allow him any peace. Much of the work he was being given was mundane – reports on harbour works, consultations on bridges or supervision of drainage – but Robert had a horror of turning work down. Instead, he took on apprentices who worked on the tedious detail while Robert consulted on more prestigious works. James and Alexander Slight, David Logan and James Ritson were all old and trusted colleagues who had worked with him for upwards of twenty years. Ritson in particular became a close family friend of the Stevensons and was regarded by Robert’s children as their ally and friend. All Robert’s apprentices were expected to pay their dues, taking winter classes and training for decades. Those who did pass his exacting standards would be given unprecedented authority to supervise building works and take on their own responsibilities.
In addition to his senior assistants, Robert also took in younger apprentices to the workshops. Baxter Street was almost becoming a miniature university for engineers. Fathers or guardians, casting around for something suitable as an occupation for their sons, wrote nervously at first to Robert enquiring just what exactly this engineering thing was. By the 1820s, the few diffident enquirers had swelled to a flood. One letter, to Sir Edward Lees, who was seeking a position for his son, stipulated Robert’s conditions:
I have to notice that the young engineer should be educated as for a liberal profession. Notwithstanding that your young friend may have completed his grammatical and arithmetical school education he must now attend for at least three years to the higher branches at College and other classes. Especially for Mathematics, Chemistry, Natural Philosophy and Natural History, to architectural drawing, hand sketching &c. Besides attending to the above branches my sons and the young men of my office were sent to a millwright’s shop or a Foundry for 12 or 18 months before entering the office.
As the petitioners – rich or poor, grand or desperate – increased, so did Robert’s demands on them. A full apprenticeship, he wrote to Patrick Syme, one of his old colleagues on the Bell Rock who was now looking for a position for his son, was 100 guineas for a full year’s work, ‘payable in advance for three years…the office hours are from 10 till 4 and from 7 until 9 but we modify these while the [university] classes are sitting to enable our young men to attend them. We shall do what we can,’ he added reassuringly, ‘to make a good engineer of him.’
Robert’s attitude