The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [95]
The Commissioners also expected him to have all Robert’s energy, and more. Between 1844 and 1854, he was responsible for the design and construction of ten new lights, double what Robert had been asked to achieve in two decades. Since he was still also acting as clerk of works, he was responsible for ensuring that every detail of those lights, from the shape of the cornicing to the slates in the roof, was checked and executed correctly. The NLB was now in charge of over thirty lights, but there was still no set formula. Every light was custom-designed to fit the local conditions. At Ardnamurchan, for instance, Alan was able to use the same Mull granite that he had used on Skerryvore, but, since it was a light built on a headland, the design of the tower was entirely different from the Skerryvore model. Ardnamurchan is a hummocky, rock-scarred peninsula reaching out to the westernmost tip of the British mainland and overlooking the dangerous waters of the Minch. There is an old mariner’s tradition that any sailor who gets past the Point of Ardnamurchan safely is entitled to place a sprig of white heather on the mast of his boat as evidence of his good fortune. For this spot, Alan drew up plans for the only ‘Egyptian style’ lighthouse in Britain, with a graceful arched cornice and gently tapered walls. Round the base of the catadioptric lamp, he sketched in stylised Egyptian figurines. One of Alan’s most endearing characteristics was his love of godly details – a discreet flourish on a cornice, a brass lion’s head on a lamp stand, sea-serpents on a lantern or claw-feet for a base. The one tiny bloom of artfulness on an otherwise functional lighthouse or lantern was both Alan’s signature and his wistful hint of another life unlived.
The tests of the new dioptric lenses – first at Inchkeith and then, with improvements, at Skerryvore – had proved so successful that Alan’s next project was to extend them to as many of the lights as possible. By 1847, lenses had been installed in seven of the fixed lights, and almost half of the revolving lights, and, aside from occasional problems in persuading suspicious keepers to accept the new machinery, all were working well. Most gave a light three times as powerful as the old reflectors, capable of being seen from up to thirty miles away.
His work with the lenses obsessed him almost as much as Skerryvore had done. In a revealing aside, he claimed that ‘Nothing can be more beautiful than an entire apparatus for a fixed light of the first order…I know of no work of art more beautiful or creditable to the boldness, ardour, intelligence, and zeal of the artist.’ At one stage, he became so preoccupied with the performance of his lenses that, when a ship was wrecked on the Isle of May, he interviewed the surviving crew in order to discover whether the light itself had somehow been at fault. Both the ship’s master and mate admitted that the light had been perfectly clear, but they had become trapped on a lee shore. Alan noted that their experience was a ‘most satisfactory conclusion’. Public approval was more ambivalent. Some complained that the light was now too bright; others that the expense (around £450 for each new set of lenses) was absurdly high. Doomsayers, however, had always existed. When Robert had changed the light at Inchkeith from a fixed to a revolving beam, one elderly woman who could see the light from her home in Leith remarked that she felt sorry for the keeper. She saw the beam flashing, and believed that he was forced to sit in the