The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [96]
Aside from the new lights, Alan also spent time sorting out the keepers. As with many in the early lighthouse service, they had been appointed on a temporary basis as and when necessary. Alan made the first steps towards establishing proper terms of employment, revising the lists of duties and lobbying the Commissioners for improved salaries and pensions. He also appointed a full-time lighthouse missionary to travel round all the NLB stations, ministering to the keepers and reporting back to George Street. With most of the remote lights, it was almost impossible to allow keepers to go to church on Sundays, and, as at sea, the usual practice was to have a service at the light conducted by the principal keeper. There were other, less spiritual preoccupations as well.
During 1846 and 1847, the potato blight which had already devastated Ireland, blew its way to the Highlands. In total, over 100,000 people were left destitute in the north-west, many of whom either emigrated to the New World or travelled to the cities in search of work. The disaster was exacerbated by the Clearances, which had reached their peak in the 1830s. There was little the Stevensons as individuals could do to alleviate the situation, but by 1847, matters had reached such desperate levels that the Commissioners willingly employed ‘50 starving labourers and all those dependent on them’ in building a road to Eilean Glas light. The road was not strictly necessary, as an existing dirt track already provided an adequate link, but Alan saw the necessity of providing whatever employment he could. ‘At first,’ he reported to the Commissioners, ‘many poor people came 9 miles daily to their work and returned at night to their huts, having only one meal a day; but temporary Barracks of Old Timber have been provided and meal has been supplied to them in part payment of their wages for which they are truly grateful.’ When the famine reached epidemic levels in Caithness, Alan also began building roads at Nosshead and Dunnet Head. In the end, far fewer people died as a result of the famine in Scotland than in Ireland, due mainly to the reluctant but effective efforts of the landlords, the Church and the government relief co-ordinator, Sir Edward Pine Coffin.
Alan’s workload prevented him from completing the last tasks at Skerryvore – the fitting of Soleil’s lenses and the completion of the harbour at Hynish. Since David was now occupied with private business, Alan sent Tom in his stead. By 1844 Tom was twenty-six and supposedly fully independent. He had completed his apprenticeship five years previously and had already supervised the construction of at least one light alone. But he had proved a very different pupil from either of his brothers. Years of work for his father had made him disciplined, but he lacked Alan’s driven creativity. Unlike David, he had a tendency to ramble off on his own schemes and interests, and what he gained in spontaneity he lost in focus. Even after five years of full qualification, he continued to lean on Robert, panicked by too much responsibility and prone to sour outbursts when left to his own devices. As he wrote petulantly to David in September 1842, while supposedly in charge of the construction of Little Ross light, ‘I think I have written 5 or 6 letters to my Father and had a long letter from Elgin the other day without an answer to any of my queries…I really must insist upon my correspondence being answered in a business like way as it places me in a stupid-awkward like box.’ Robert, in his turn, still fussed over Tom, vetting his work and encouraging him with threats and promises. In Robert’s eyes, Tom remained the worrisome youngest child, more cosseted than his brothers and less self-sufficient. When Tom wrote to his father asking plaintively for an assistant to help with some dredging work, Robert replied with a rare flash of humour that ‘we must take care not to covet our neighbour’s manservant.’ Tom, it seemed, had tipped the balance with his father from interdependence