Читать книгу The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst - Страница 10

‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880. ‘The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan; and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father.’ Louis might have been the most famous of the Stevensons, but he was not the most productive. Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of the Stevenson family planned, designed and constructed the ninety-seven manned lighthouses that still speckle the Scottish coast, working in conditions and places that would be daunting even for modern engineers. The same driven energy that Louis put into writing, his ancestors put into lighting the darkness of the seas. The Lighthouse Stevensons, as they became known, were also responsible for a slew of inventions in both construction and optics and for an extraordinary series of developments in architecture, design and mechanics. As well as lighthouses, they built harbours, roads, railways, docks and canals all over Scotland and beyond. They, as much as anyone, are responsible for their country’s appearance today.

But the Lighthouse Stevensons have gone down in history for a very different profession. Robert, the first of the Stevenson dynasty, despised literature; his grandson perpetuated his family’s name with it. The author of Kidnapped, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde initially trained as an engineer. To his father’s dismay, Louis escaped aged twenty-one, first into law and then into writing. As he later confessed in The Education of an Engineer, his training had not been used in quite the way his father intended. ‘What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but in deed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of the string course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary.’

With age and distance, Louis recovered pride and affection in the Stevenson trade. He wrote with awe of his grandfather’s work on the Bell Rock lighthouse, and of his father’s melancholic genius for design and experimentation. He wrote about almost every aspect of his own brief and unhappy time as an apprentice, in essays, letters, introductions and memoirs. Most importantly, Louis alchemised his experiences around the ragged coasts of the north into the gold of his best fiction. Treasure Island and Kidnapped both contain salvaged traces of his early career. The further he grew away from engineering, the more he felt towards it. He was sea-marked, and he knew it. He also recognised, with some discomfiture, that his own fame was swallowing up the recognition his family deserved. In 1886, far from Edinburgh, he wrote crossly to his American publishers,

My father is not an ‘inspector’ of lighthouses; he, two of my uncles, my grandfather, and my great grandfather in succession, have been engineers to the Scotch Lighthouse service; all the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name; and my father’s services to lighthouse optics have been distinguished indeed. I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward.

Louis was being only a little disingenuous. He liked recognition and, to an extent, courted it. But his plaintive belief that his family deserved the same acknowledgement seems farsighted now. Even at the height of the Victorian engineering boom, great men went unnoticed and exceptional feats unacknowledged. Louis did his best to remedy the injustice, but also recognised that the Stevensons hardly helped themselves. Not one member of the family ever took out a patent on any of their inventions in design, optics or architecture. All of them believed that their works were for the benefit of the nation as a whole and therefore unworthy of private gain. They were only engineers, after all; they worked to order or conscience, and were only rarely disposed to flightier moments of reflection. What pride they had in their creations they put down to the advantages of forward planning and the benevolence of the Almighty. And Louis, the tricky, charming black sheep of the family, stole all the fame that posterity had to give.

Two hundred years ago, when the first lights were built around the Scottish coast, no one talked much of security. The first beacons for mariners were either coal fires or high coastal towers in which candles burned through the night. Only a few of these fires were ever constructed in Scotland, since they consumed fuel at a voracious pace and were usually extinguished by bad weather. Thus by the mid-eighteenth century, the Scottish coast had become notorious for shipwrecks. In 1799, seventy vessels were lost in the Firth of Tay alone. Along with the physical dangers, there were also the human ones. Bands of wreckers would lie in wait for beached ships, hoping for chances of loot. Something, it was becoming obvious, would have to be done. Those engineers who did come forward were more like pioneers than bureaucrats. To place a building on a rock in the Atlantic ocean was, after all, a formidable endeavour. The pressures of wind, wave, tide and weather on a lighthouse were exceptional. No other building, not even a harbour, had to have quite the same mixture of tenacity and flexibility as the sea-towers did. Any construction in mid-ocean had to be capable of resisting waves which, when roused, could hurl several hundred tons of water at anything in their way. Every one of the rock lighthouses in Scotland was built with stone walls at least nine feet thick at the base; anything less, and they would not have lasted the first gale of winter. To build something under such pressures at a time when the only materials available were stone, wood, glass and metal was nothing short of miraculous. There was no concrete, or cranes, or hydraulic lifting equipment; there were no helicopters or pneumatic drills. Dynamite was a new and fickle builder’s tool to be treated with extreme caution. Mortar was strong but unpredictable, requiring expert mixing and split-second timing. Haulage, in many cases, was provided by horses, who did not take kindly to precipitous cliffs and needed as much tending as any of the workmen. Equipment and materials were brought by sailboat, which ran exactly the same risks as any other ship. As the early engineers discovered, building 130-foot pillars in the middle of a hostile ocean required skills and tools that had not yet been invented. As often as not, they had to make it up as they went along.

From its slow beginnings, the organisation of lights was divided by nation: the English, the Scots and the Irish all had, and still have, separate administrations. The English service, which was founded in 1514 as the Most Glorious and Undivided Trinity of St Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent (later foreshortened to Trinity House), developed in piecemeal fashion. For a period of 300 years or so, most of its lights were built and maintained by individuals who had been granted charters. Although it did mean that the most hazardous parts of the English coast were lit, the lights’ construction was erratic and their maintenance wayward. Pepys, who was Master of Trinity House from 1676 to 1689, found private charters disgraceful. While still at the Admiralty, he wrote critically of ‘the evil of having lights raised for the profit of private men, not for the good of the public seamen, their widows and orphans’. In theory, the private owners could build, light and staff the towers in any way they chose in return for a small annual rent. Several were taken over by Trinity House once the lease had expired or had become suitably profitable. By 1800, the combination of extortionate private dues and inconsistent public ones was causing uproar among shipowners plying the English coastline. The situation had, in effect, become a form of legalised extortion: by 1818, Trinity House was reaping an annual profit of around £50,000. The few attempts to reform the situation usually resulted in an undignified tussle between Trinity House, the Crown and the landowners for a portion of the money. It was not until 1836 that Trinity House bought back all the lighthouses in private hands, an undertaking which cost them over £1 million.

The Scottish lights, by contrast, were almost all built within the space of a century. The archetypal lighthouse on its lonely rock in a lonely sea is largely the product of a Scottish imagination and a Scottish sense of endeavour. Augustin Fresnel’s nineteenth-century refinements to oil lighting and high-powered lenses were matched by equally significant developments in lighthouse construction and marine technology. The Stevenson family took up the challenge of their times, blended it with the scientific breakthroughs of their day and brought both to a point of near-perfection. As Louis later noted, engineering ‘was not a science then. It was a living art, and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its practitioners.’

In 1786 Louis’s grandfather, Robert, went into partnership with his stepfather Thomas Smith, then the Engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses. The two began replacing the flickering and unreliable fires first with oil lamps and later with a system of fixed lights using either gas or oil. In 1807, Robert started work on the Bell Rock, a vicious granite reef off the coast of Arbroath. The reef was submerged at high tide and only partially exposed at low tide, so Robert and his staff were forced to play a nervous game of waiting with the sea and the weather. Lighthouses were not Robert’s only preoccupation, however. ‘Scotland itself,’ as a biographer of his grandson later remarked, ‘was his drawing board.’ He was also responsible for the construction of the east side of Edinburgh, driving a route from Prince’s Street to the Calton Hill and constructing the Georgian order of Waterloo Place and Regent Road. Robert was also a man of a most particular mood and time, a self-made bootstrap businessman who, like many of his engineering contemporaries, used the opportunities of the post-Enlightenment world to haul himself out of poverty and into society. He placed his faith in improvement and industry, and remained to the end a devout believer in the most conservative of virtues. He was, according to Louis, ‘a man of the most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of self-improvement.’ Louis, it would seem, was not the only person to be daunted by him.

Robert had three sons who became engineers, Alan, David and Thomas. Alan was a classical scholar, musical, gifted and noted for his early championing of Wordsworth. Nevertheless, he suppressed the artistic side of himself to go into the family firm, becoming, like his father before him, the Commissioner of the Board of Northern Lights. He is remembered as a shrewd and brilliant engineer, whose greatest professional triumph was the construction of Skerryvore lighthouse on a ragged clump of rocks twelve miles west of Tiree. As Sir Walter Scott noted when he visited the site, ‘It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse – the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it.’ The light took five years to build, and, despite a fire in the 1950s, still stands today. Louis considered it ‘the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights’.

David Stevenson took up Alan’s position on his retirement. His greatest achievement was the construction of the light at Muckle Flugga, the most northerly of all the Scottish lighthouses. Constructed as a temporary light to aid British naval convoys on their way to the Crimea, it was placed on the summit of a wave-washed miniature Matterhorn. Westminster insisted that the light should be working within six months; David’s exceptional skill as an engineer ensured that, even with winter seas crashing 200 feet over the rock, it was finished in time.

Thomas Stevenson, Louis’s father, was responsible for the construction of twenty-seven on-shore and twenty-five offshore lighthouses. He built the light at Dhu Heartach, an isolated mass of rock off the coast of Mull, which Louis later used as source material for Kidnapped. At one point during its construction, fourteen men were trapped for five days in a temporary barracks while a ferocious gale pounded the rock. Louis records the foreman desperately playing his fiddle to quell the sound of the sea’s rage. Thomas is also remembered for having taken Fresnel’s optical developments several stages further, harnessing the strange new science of electricity and building a series of revolving lights in a bright and sturdy circuit which finally enclosed the whole of Scotland. Thomas was ‘a man of somewhat antique strain’, recalled Louis after his death, ‘with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.’ For much of the time, he was working in conjunction with David. The two brothers complemented each other well; David tended towards details, Thomas towards inventiveness. Both were also preoccupied with more prosaic matters, including the establishment of precise and reliable systems for constructing, surveying, lighting, supplying and staffing their fast-growing constellation of lights. Thomas’s weakest point, of course, was Louis, his only child, sickly, contrary and a source of constant worry. Thomas’s wistful attempts to entice Louis into the family firm were fruitless. The rest is literary history.

David had two sons, David A. and Charles. Both are mainly now known for their refinements to the existing systems and their shrewd maintenance of the NLB. Most of the gaudier feats of engineering had been completed by Robert, Alan, David and Thomas. There seemed little for the grandchildren to do but tinker with what already existed. But the Stevensons’ achievements in engineering, science and optics have lasted far beyond their lifespan. Anyone who has ever travelled the coast of Scotland has probably had cause to thank them. Their lights, built into the rocks of the most inhospitable land in Britain, have gone on shining for almost two centuries. Listen to the Shipping News today, and you are listening to part of the legacy of the Lighthouse Stevensons.