The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [62]
Robert also wholeheartedly approved of Manby’s mortar line and was instrumental in encouraging its use throughout Scotland, complaining several times in his reports that its use was not more widespread. Not all of his interest in lifesaving was entirely altruistic, however. He compiled a thorough list of British harbours of refuge, pointing out that many had become inadequate or downright dangerous for the new steamships now in use and hinting that the Stevenson firm would be more than pleased to submit plans and a quote for any new harbour the local authorities might have in mind.
Harbours, lights and locomotives were not Robert’s only preoccupations. As his children began to grow, his family was now taking up as much time as the lighthouses. In 1814, after living out a comfortable old age at Baxter’s Place, Thomas Smith died. In his final years, his main preoccupation had been his loathing of the French. Thomas, like much of Edinburgh at the time, feared the threat of revolution with a passion. As he grew older, his views became more extreme. ‘The people of that land were his abhorrence,’ Louis wrote later, ‘he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist. Towards the end he fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset; but those who played with him must be upon their guard, for if his side, which was always that of the English against the French, should chance to be defeated, there would be trouble in Baxter’s Place.’ He felt his son and three daughters comfortably provided for and entrusted them to Robert’s care, though by the time of his death, Robert had already taken over his position as head of the household in all but name.
By 1820 Robert’s eldest son, Alan, a delicate, thoughtful boy, was completing his time at the High School, while surreptitiously maintaining a furtive interest in literature and the classics. His second son, Bob, now entering his teens, showed no curiosity about lighthouses and only the most desultory interest in learning at all. David and Thomas were still too young to have learned much independence, though Robert had spent much of his time impressing on all of them the attractions of an engineer’s life. Jane, meanwhile, was now working as Robert’s assistant and secretary, writing letters, taking dictation and screening the queues of petitioners while Robert was away from Baxter’s Place.
Home life was arranged according to Robert’s ideal. The five children occupied their time with his vigorous notion of upbringing: fresh air, Scripture and study. Louis, writing over eighty years later, saw it as a time of pleasurable dread. He wrote:
No 1 Baxter’s Place, my grandfather’s house, must have been a paradise for boys. It was of great size, with an infinity of cellars below, and of garrets, apple lofts, etc., above, and it had a long garden, which ran down to the foot of the Calton Hill, with an orchard that yearly filled the apple-loft, and a building at the foot frequently besieged and defended by the boys, where a poor golden eagle, trophy of some of my grandfather’s Hebridean voyages, pined and screamed itself to death…Within, there was the seemingly rather awful rule of the old gentleman, tempered, I fancy by the mild and devout mother with her ‘Keep me’s.’ There was a coming and going of odd, out-of-the-way characters, skippers, light-keepers, masons, and foremen of all sorts, whom my grandfather in his patriarchal fashion, liked to have about the house, and who were a never-failing delight to the boys. Tutors shed a gloom for an hour or so in the evening, and these and that accursed schoolgoing were the black parts of their life.
Robert, with his fear of wasted life, tended to treat his children much as he treated his employees, inflicting discipline through industry, and morality through example. He