The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [83]
Alan also had workmen to hire. Thirty trained masons, twelve quarriers, four smiths, two foremen and a shoal of contract carpenters, builders, joiners and storekeepers were needed. Each was to be paid between 3s 10d and 2s 6d per day for two years’ guaranteed work. Alan was in charge of the health and welfare of every single one. He took only a few of the labourers from Tiree itself. He did occasionally use local boatmen and quarriers but found that ‘partly from incapacity and partly from excessive indolence, [they] could not be trusted for a moment to themselves.’ The islanders were suspicious of the Edinburgh men; the workmen, in turn, treated the islanders with contempt. Even Alan was not above the occasional twinge of southern smugness. Once the workyard was up and running, he noted.
the desolation and misery of the surrounding hamlets of Tyree seemed to enhance the satisfaction of looking on our small colony, where about 150 souls were collected in a neat quadrangle of cleanly houses, conspicuous by their chimnies and windows amongst the hovels of the poor Hebrideans…The regular meals and comfortable lodgings and the cleanly and energetic habits of the Lowland workmen, whose days were spent in toil and their evenings, most generally, in the sober recreations of reading and singing, formed a cheering contrast to the listless, dispirited, and squalid look of the poor Celts, who have none of the comforts of civilised life and are equally ignorant of the values of time and the pleasures of activity.
Alan neglected to mention that Tiree had just been scourged by the Black Factor, the Duke of Argyll’s lieutenant during the Clearances, who was to reduce the population from over 4,400 in 1831 to 3,200 in 1861. It was not entirely surprising that the islanders seemed depressed when most had lost a family member to the emigrant ships.
Alan also began looking for suitable stone for the light and instructed one of his assistants to begin quarrying the black granite on Tiree. In the space of two summers, they turned out 3,800 cubic feet of rock, which was eventually used for the lowest four courses of the light. But the Tiree stone was too flawed, too hard and too time-consuming to use on the whole of the tower, and Alan was forced to ship more malleable pink granite from Mull. Even the ship itself caused trouble. The Commissioners originally balked at buying a specially built tender solely for use on the Skerryvore works, but finally relented after it became evident that no other ship could withstand the Hebridean seas and Alan’s demands. Until the Skerryvore tender was built, the workmen endured the seasick lumberings of the main lighthouse ship, the Pharos. ‘The inconvenience arising from her heavy pitching was, to landsmen, by no means the least evil to be endured,’ Alan noted later.
Planning the works was enough to keep him occupied for months, and the lighthouse itself was almost subsumed under paperwork and arrangements. But the design of the light had occupied long days of thought and worry. In theory, he could simply have taken his father’s design for the Bell Rock and adapted it to Skerryvore’s conditions. In practice, he began again from scratch. Skerryvore, with its fissured rock, its exposure to the force of the Atlantic, and its series of creeks and snags, made the Bell Rock seem easy. Waves pounding the reef could exert up to 6,083 lbs of liquid pressure, a force of nearly three tons per square foot. On the Bell Rock, by comparison, the highest measurement had been 3,013 lbs of pressure, around one and a half tons. If the equation was extended to the full height of the tower, it had