The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [90]
Considering the dangers the men were expected to deal with, there were remarkably few accidents at the works. George Middlemiss, foreman of the carpenters, died halfway through the project, his heart inexplicably paralysed. One workman died of consumption. One of the masons became violently ill during his first night on the barracks, and his screaming spasms throughout the night prevented his colleagues from sleeping; all of them were pleased to see him rescued and borne off to Hynish the next day. Alan had employed a full-time doctor for the 150 workmen, but was lucky to escape with a thin tally of seriously injured men.
With the working conditions as bad as they were, however, it was unsurprising that some of the workmen objected. The previous year, the boat crew had mutinied, complaining that Alan’s insistence that they moor so close to the reef was both dangerous and absurd. They insisted that if they did not get an immediate increase in wages, they would abandon Alan and everyone with him on the rock. The crew’s argument did not impress the steamer’s master, who dismissed them as soon as they were able to return to Hynish. But the mutineers’ sour temper affected the rest of the workmen and there were several desertions throughout the course of the works.
There were other difficulties as well: complaints over wages, conditions or the liquor ration, and arguments between the men that grew overheated. The case of Mr Hill, one of the foreman masons, was unusually troublesome. Hill’s behaviour had been ‘the talk and merriment of the country’, Alan reported to Robert. He had ‘been guilty of excessive folly in regard to giving himself airs, being quarrelsome and occasionally intoxicant. The Doctor gave me a woeful account of his absurdity and is of opinion that he is touched. I made every enquiry I could and find it too true. I therefore gave Mr Hill notice to prepare to leave from all together along with me. He was at first violent and high; but I told him calmly but resolutely that my mind was made up and that he had better submit calmly than make any noise…You need not,’ he added in a hurried postscript, ‘show this to my mother as it may make her uneasy. She has a great fear of, “daft men”!’ Small wonder poor Jean Stevenson worried. Her son was stuck alone on a lonely rock, confined to a tiny barracks and forced to live under military discipline with a group of potentially mutinous workmen. In such a situation, any mother would have worried for her son. Things were particularly dangerous when the workmen consoled themselves with smuggled whisky, as they often did, and ended up flailing at their colleagues.
Once the foundation pit had been levelled, Alan began landing the stones for the first few courses. He found, just as his father had, that trying to land a two-stone lump of granite from a rearing boat onto a slippery reef was an uncomfortable task. The crew had to get as close to Skerryvore as they dared, chain the stones, hook them to the crane and wait warily while the swinging rock was hauled up. If they came too close to the rock, they risked being lifted by a wave and thumped down on the reef; if the crane lost its grip, the men would have been flattened by the stone’s fall. The sea was often so bad that the crew had to