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By Root 746 0

the meetings of the Society of Civil Engineers, of which he was now a member. Thanks to the Bell Rock, he was now moderately well known in the south and found himself well respected there. He, in turn, had an ambiguous affection for London. He liked its opulent streets and its sense of prosperity, but found English scenery dull and London habits stultifying. England, he emphasised over and over again, had little except government to offer Scotland. During the annual inspection tour of 1814, he wrote from Shetland to a friend, delightedly comparing north with south. ‘I can assure you I felt no small satisfaction in comparing the aspect of the Northernmost with the most Southern point of the land of this happy Kingdom. For about this time last year I was at the Land’s End, and I am fully of opinion, that the preference is due to Shetland whether considered for pasture or for Crops when compared with Cornwall.’

In part, his unrelenting pace was a symptom of Robert’s old fears. He remained terrified of being unable to provide for himself and his family. Like many self-made men, he remained haunted by the remembrance of poverty and sliding back down the social ladder into oblivion. In 1814, he could have given up the lights entirely, coasted on the success of the Bell Rock and built up a private business, as Telford and Rennie had done. He could have taken out patents on his optical inventions, looked for business that gave greater prestige or abandoned Scotland for more promising places. He did none of these. Work for the Commissioners at least guaranteed a regular salary. Work as a freelance consultant engineer, on the other hand, inevitably meant financial uncertainty. He took the path of caution, and paid for it in fame.

Robert was the most complex of men, a character who loved and courted physical fear but who was simultaneously terrified of emotional risk. In Records of a Family of Engineers, Louis noted Robert’s ‘interest in the whole page of experience, his perpetual quest and fine scent of all that seems romantic to a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness.’ As Louis recognised, there were two competing forces at work in Robert, an unashamed pleasure in adventure, and a ruthless need for order.

Perfection (with a capital P and violently underscored) was his design. A crack for a penknife, the waste of ‘six-and-thirty shillings’, ‘the loss of a day or tide’, in each of these he saw and was revolted by the finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his and immersed in vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is instantly translated into lives endangered. On this consistent idealism there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque. As when he laid out a road on Hogarth’s line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in quarrying, not ‘to disfigure the island’; or regretted in a report that ‘the great stone, called the Devil in the Hole, was blasted or broken down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.’

Robert’s perfectionism also manifested itself as an endless concern for money. The Commissioners’ record books are littered with disputes over wages, requests for higher pay and demands for adequate pensions. Often, it was Robert arguing on behalf of others – for raising the pay of the keepers, or for helping the wives of those invalided out of the service. More usually, it was Robert worrying away at his own fear of being taken for granted. ‘During the progress of the [lighthouse] work,’ he wrote to the Commissioners in 1802 as part of a petition for an increase in salary, he ‘travelled to the North sometimes by land and sometimes by water – ill provided with conveyance, exposed to many hardships and frequently in the greatest personal danger.’ In 1808, when work on the Bell Rock loomed, the Commissioners had fixed his salary at £200 a year. In 1829, following a further demand, they doubled it. On his retirement, he was given a pension