The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [79]
By 1835, Alan Stevenson had been an apprentice for seven years, Clerk of Works to the Northern Lighthouses for a further five and an equal partner to his father in the family business for two. At the age of twenty-eight, he had already designed and built seven lighthouses under Robert’s supervision, and had recently undertaken a complete review of all lens designs in the Scottish lights. His path to full qualification had been a weary one, dulled with bureaucracy and routine. But if his father remained hesitant about handing over full powers to Alan, the Commissioners didn’t. They trusted him, appreciated his quiet, incisive intellect, and believed in his future. Skerryvore, it was evident, was the perfect moment to launch Alan as an architect and engineer in his own right.
Robert’s feelings towards his eldest son remained ambivalent. It was plain to Robert, as it was to anyone else who came in contact with him, that Alan was an exceptional young man, more than capable of shouldering the full burden of the Stevenson engineering business. But Robert veered between pride and incomprehension. He was well aware that Alan was clever; too clever, Robert considered, for his own good. Robert had never fully recovered from Alan’s early flash of independence and still fretted when he heard reports of Alan’s literary leanings or came across scribbled fragments of poetry. In 1828, alerted to a further bundle of verses, Robert wrote worriedly to Alan, reminding him that ‘This is a very precious time for you, Alan, in the study of elementary and technical books till you can no more forget them than that you have ten fingers and as many toes. It is a great pity that we too often let such opportunities slip. Yet surely there is nothing in your present circumstances that should distract your attention from the theory and practice of your profession.’ Alan was then twenty-one, had been an apprentice engineer for six years and showed no more inclination to take up a career in literature than he did for knitting. He loved the world and its sensations for their own sake, not as a substitute for his profession. But his enthusiasms bothered his father deeply. All the extraneous stuff of Alan’s life – the books, the poems, the obscure classical allusions he sometimes inserted into professional reports, the love of travelling and the soft-hearted thoughtfulness – were puzzling to Robert and at times downright suspect.
The travel, in particular, worried Robert, and he occasionally vented his frustrations to others. While Alan was in France in 1824 working with the Fresnel brothers and touring engineering projects, Robert wrote to his assistant Alexander Slight, complaining that his son would have been more use at home in Scotland working on the new light at the Rinns of Islay than frittering away his time in foreign places: ‘His writing to you of his travels will naturally draw upon you the obligation of your opinion as to the amendment to be made by application and a steady pursuit of the immediate object in which he is engaged.’ If Robert alone couldn’t persuade Alan to sit down and behave as he should, in other words, he was going to have to recruit others to help concentrate his mind. No matter that Alan had taken the trip with Robert’s encouragement in the first place. While he remained out of sight, there was no telling what distractions he might find. Robert knew his son to be a talented and conscientious worker, but