The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [93]
As his sons grew, Robert faded. On 16 November 1842, he wrote a painful letter to the Commissioners announcing his decision to retire. He was, as he conceded, now seventy, and no longer capable of fulfilling the role of chief engineer. ‘It is not without regret,’ he said, ‘that I now find that my advancing years and the daily extending and important duties of my Office warn me of the necessity of retiring from public duty…In 1797 I made my first survey of the entire Coast by direction of the Board and I have ever since Continued to perform this often perilous duty and to make the annual Reports and Requisitions for the Service of the Year.’ As he pointed out, his record with the Northern Lights was exceptional by any standards. During his tenure he had been responsible for the expenditure of almost £1 million, written over three thousand letters a year and been at work for the Commissioners for almost half a century. ‘I have only to express a hope that the Board will duly bear in mind the long continued and I may be pardoned for adding zealous attention with which I have served them up to the present hour; and that when they come to consider the Subject of my retiring allowance they will not forget the very peculiar nature of my services, particularly its responsibility during the early part of my Career as their Engineer, and further that I have brought the Reflecting Lighthouses from their former imperfect state to their present perfect Condition.’ In reply, Sheriff Maconochie noted ‘at some length’ their appreciation for Robert’s services, regretfully accepted his resignation, and acknowledged that ‘his skill, attention and zealous anxiety to promote the welfare of the Establishment is in a great measure to be attributed the present admirable system in which the Lighthouses under their Care are now Carried on.’
Robert was not so diminished that he gave up work entirely. He had been involved with the lights for so long that he found it impossible to imagine life without them. For half a century, the pattern of his life had been dictated by the annual inspection voyages and the plans for new projects. The lighthouses were his job, but they had also become part of his soul. Besides, it was entirely beyond his nature for Robert to resign himself to a slow retirement. In the minds and Minutes of the Commissioners, he might have appeared as a public functionary, but to the lightkeepers, masons and sailors, he was the Northern Lights. Every inch of Scotland’s coastline was stamped with his knowledge and character; every light in Scotland had a small part of Robert Stevenson built within it. He and his family were indivisible from their work, and no amount of official procedure could separate the two.
The years of Robert’s retirement were therefore accompanied by a further flurry of work. He continued receiving petitioners, vetting new assistants and guiding the direction of his sons’ work. He despatched Tom off on a survey of all British harbours, presenting him with a densely written notebook filled with tips and hints. He started dictating a history of his life to his daughter, Jane. He began a scrapbook filled with cuttings of useful and illuminating articles (notices of railway accidents, river improvements, accounts of storms and statistics for drunkenness in Edinburgh), and often grew so impatient of journalistic inaccuracies that he took to editing the clippings himself. He stepped up his involvement in the Royal Scottish Society of Arts (an institution devoted to the dissemination of ‘useful knowledge amongst the industrious classes’) and wrote a couple of papers for the learned journals. The lights, as always, continued