The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [94]
Robert also began a troubled correspondence with the Church. This was the age of the Disruption, the decisive split between the Established Church of Scotland – governed by a conservative mixture of civil and political forces – and the Free Church of Scotland, which had broken away in order to be free from state interference and to choose its own ministers. Robert, a staunch believer in the Established Church, found the split upsetting. When his local minister wrote suggesting that he might wish to come to a meeting of the kirk session to decide whether to go over to the Free Church, Robert wrote back brusquely declining. ‘As I do not at all go along with these proceedings, it does not appear to me that my attendance would be for edification.’ Age had only made him more conservative, and he was repelled by the threat of upheaval, whether in religion or in his private life.
Alan, meanwhile, had no difficulty at all in filling his time after Skerryvore. In the same meeting that Robert’s letter of resignation had been read before the Commissioners, he submitted his application for the post of chief engineer. The professional record he laid before them was impressive enough; including two separate degrees (as Master of Arts and Bachelor of Laws), the apprenticeship with Robert and then Telford, the construction of eight major lights, the introduction of dioptric lenses within the Scottish lights, the ‘numerous laborious and intricate computations’, for light sources, the private work on rivers, harbours, roads and bridges, and, most conclusive of all, the design and execution of Skerryvore. After some token deliberation, the Commissioners appointed him successor to Robert on a salary of £900 per annum. The only flaw in Alan’s promotion was the workload it entailed. The Commissioners saw no urgency in appointing another clerk of works, so Alan was left to undertake two jobs. In addition, he was expected to write a full account of the Skerryvore works for general publication, just as his father had done for the Bell Rock two decades before. Admittedly, Skerryvore had not attracted the same instant public acclaim that the Bell Rock had done. Alan was a quieter man than his father and lacked the added boost of Sir Walter Scott’s patronage, but his fellow engineers considered that his achievements had outstripped Robert’s work. An admiring notice in the Quarterly Review declared that the great triumvirate of lights – the Eddystone, the Bell Rock and Skerryvore – ‘are perhaps the most perfect specimens of modern architecture which exist. Tall and graceful as the minaret of an Eastern mosque, they possess far more solidity and beauty of construction; and, in addition to this, their form is as appropriate to the purposes for which it was designed as anything ever done by the Greeks, and consequently meets the requirements of good architecture quite as much as a column of the Parthenon.’
Alan was much more at home with writing than his father, who had found the preparation of his book an elaborate torture. But still, a full account of the works required time and patience to prepare. Alan was pushed into writing the book in spare moments at sea or during inspection tours, as he admitted in the preface, ‘My labours were also continually interrupted by the urgent calls of my official duties; and, on several occasions, I was forced to dismiss unfinished chapters from my mind for a period of several months.’ He, like Robert, was continually being despatched to London to answer to parliamentary committees or to the Trinity House men. Unlike Robert, he was not a political animal, and undertook the public side of his lighthouse work dutifully but without relish. Robert’s talent