The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [81]
Above The light of Dhu Heartach, built under the supervision of David, Thomas and Robert Louis Stevenson, and completed in 1872.
Right Raising coal to the tower at Dhu Heartach.
Left The barracks on Dhu Heartach, in which the resident engineer, Alan Brebner, and thirteen workmen were trapped for two weeks during a gale.
Below Dhu Heartach (or Dubh Artach, as it is now). Lightkeepers disliked it for being small, cramped and uncomfortable. Like all of the Scottish lights, it has now been automated.
that would have persuaded Robert, least of all when Alan’s chosen cure seemed so luxurious. But Robert could scarcely have complained that Alan spent his time travelling in languid convalescence. When the Commissioners sent him to France in 1834 to research lenses with Leonor Fresnel, he returned with results that changed Scotland’s lighthouse optics for good. He had already met the Fresnel brothers in 1824, and the three had established a productive professional friendship.
During the complex transition from reflectors to lenses in the Scottish lights, Alan corresponded with the brothers frequently, keeping in touch with their experiments and encouraging their practical applications. He also escorted Leonor and his wife on their tour of Scotland in 1837, visiting the lights and inspecting Stevenson works. ‘Fresnel is in high spirits,’ wrote Alan from Thurso in August, ‘he and Madame sung a scene of an opera after breakfast in capital style.’ Alan, the Fresnels discovered, provided a willing audience for their work. He was lively, quickminded and less suspicious of new technologies than his father. By the late 1820s he knew the Scottish lights well enough to decide which designs would or would not work within them and suggested refinements, first with diffidence and then with gathering self-belief. When Augustin Fresnel died in 1828, Alan continued his association with Leonor, who introduced him to his lens-maker, Soleil. ‘After seeing the lens apparatus in its present improved state I confess I think it possesses some notable advantages over the reflecting apparatus,’ he wrote home to Robert in 1834, ‘and what I least of all expected is the apparent superior fitness for Fixed lights…On the subject of immediately dismantling our present lights, to substitute lenses, M. Fresnel thinks our Reflectors so much better in England and Scotland than those of France that there is not the same call for immediately adopting lenses…Wait, he says, until your present reflectors are worn out and then replace them by lenses.’ When Alan did begin establishing a full set of dioptric lenses in the Scottish lights, it was, by default or design, Robert who took much of the credit for their development. Alan wisely stayed silent and waited his turn.
At home, working for the Stevenson firm or the Northern Lights, Alan seemed everything his father wanted him to be. He put up with the long hours of transcribing reports, preparing specifications and plotting budgets without complaint. He attended to the details of less glamorous projects with efficiency and patience. Despite his occasional ill health, he spent the same days flogging from place to place that Robert and Thomas had in their time, sometimes confined to his cabin with seasickness or stuck in damp lodgings far from the nearest town. ‘I have taken your advice about my flannel shift, which I found repeated on the outside of the letter, no doubt on my mother’s advice,’ he wrote to his father while surveying sites for a railway in Forfarshire. ‘Such husbanding of health, it must be said, for one who has walked wet and dry through Strathmore!’ Finally, in 1830, seven years after he had first begun work for Robert, the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses appointed Alan their Clerk of Works.
The appointment was made on Robert’s recommendation, and caused some controversy at the time since Robert had already promised the post to at least one other of his assistants. In a letter to James Slight as far back as 1823, he had discussed his plans for the position,