David was more encouraging to Robert. He, unlike Alan and Bob, showed no faltering in his enthusiasm for the Stevenson trade. He did moderately well at school without showing any sign of having picked up Bob’s waywardness or Alan’s poetic intelligence. He was also physically tough, and by his mid teens had become a sturdy boy without much originality of thought but with all the self-discipline needed for engineering. By 1830, having reached the age of sixteen and the end of his school career, David was taken along with Tom (now twelve) for the first time on Robert’s annual voyage of inspection. The tour included all the Scottish lights as well as a brief detour to Wales and the Isle of Man. During the journey, David kept a journal, which is remarkable both for its length, 13,000 words, and its dullness. He had picked up many of his father’s mannerisms, including Robert’s fascination for architectural detail and his penchant for collecting statistics, but had not yet learned Robert’s capacity to give them life and meaning. Most of this and his subsequent diary is written in the strained manner of a young gentleman on his first grand tour, desperate to brandish his cleverness and terrified to show enthusiasm. For the lack of anything else to say, he kept a faithful record of the prayers said on ship, the sermons from the local ministers and the local population statistics.

  David also wrote a meticulous account of the Bell Rock, describing precisely the different rooms, the building materials and the method of storing water. ‘The sixth floor forms the lightroom,’ he noted, ‘where the reflecting apparatus is ranged upon a perpendicular axis and made to revolve by a train of machinery driven by a heavy leaden weight. The reflectors are ranged in 4 faces 5 upon each face. They have beautifully polished faces of silver formed to the parabolic curve, each being illuminated by an argand burner.’ While up in Bara, he brought the same care to his record of the islanders. ‘They are very ignorant and cannot speak a word of English,’ he wrote disdainfully. ‘None of them can read a word in their own language, and – wonderful to say in this islet of the British Dominions – there is not among the natives a single leaf of a printed book, they are all Roman Catholics, and the priest pays them a visit once a year. Most of their houses consist of holes dug in the earth…We went into one of them where we found several women and a number of children squatting upon the ground round a fire of peats burning on the floor.’ David, like most of his Lowland compatriots, found Highlanders distasteful. Robert’s respect for the Gaels had yet to filter through to him.

  Once back in Edinburgh, David responded instantly to Robert’s formal letter. Yes, he agreed, he did want to become an engineer. Indeed, he had never considered any other profession, and would start his training as soon as Robert saw fit. He too was therefore despatched to Edinburgh University to take the usual diet of chemistry, mathematics, natural philosophy, architectural drawing and natural history. Robert, burned by Alan’s example, also took the precaution of insisting that David took no classes in Latin or Greek. David succumbed happily. By 1832, he had already begun work on some of Robert’s more prestigious projects, including the new bridge in Stirling and Robert’s grand span of the Clyde, the Hutcheson Bridge.

  As with Robert’s work on Regent Road in Edinburgh, the Hutcheson Bridge was a prestigious commission, designed both as a replacement for a rickety predecessor and as a sign of Glasgow’s industrial wealth. David was employed to help the masons and the foremen and was expected to carry out heavy manual work as well as drawing and planning. Robert’s long training ensured that all his apprentices, particularly his sons, would learn the harder side of engineering. Not only were they expected to endure the long nights in cold lodgings or tedious days wetted with salt spray, they were also expected to be able to lift stones, carry water or lay foundations. Above all, as future managers of men, they were expected to look to the comfort and wellbeing of others before they looked after their own. Robert’s policy paid useful dividends; by the end of the works on Stirling Bridge, the workmen had watched David change from his distant position as the chief engineer’s son into a colleague who had rolled up his sleeves and laboured as hard as they had. Having earned their respect, they paid him back in trust. When Robert arrived to key the last stone of the bridge – with all the customary flag-waving, chain-wearing, speech-making ceremony of Robert’s grandest works – David found himself elevated to the place of honorary team-mate. ‘At six the workmen sat down to dinner in the open air,’ he wrote excitedly, ‘after which there was dancing to the bag-pipe. Mr Ritson and I were seized by a deputation from the men and carried shoulder high from the town across the service bridge to the green on which they were dancing where we were loudly cheered by the men and three or four hundred spectators.’

  Part of his summer duties included work on the new road to Kintyre lighthouse. Out there on the gristly spit of land overlooking the Ulster coast, David also learned the isolation of lighthouse work. The light at Kintyre was one of the first to be constructed by the NLB back in the 1780s on a remote patch of moorland fifteen miles from Campbeltown. The light was halfway down a steep cliff which was inaccessible to boats and all materials, and supplies for the light had to be brought on horseback along a route snared with spating burns and hidden potholes. The road had been necessary for some time but, like much of the less urgent lighthouse work, it had been shelved until money permitted. David was charged with supervising much of the construction work, the laying of durable foundations and the purchase of stone and materials.

  David wrote occasionally to his mother, confessing he was lonely. His lodgings were damp and uncomfortable, the workmen grumpy and he longed to be home. David did not admit his fears to his father. Robert, it was clear, was not interested in self-doubt and would have been furious if any of his children had confessed to feeling inadequate. ‘I am coming on here very well,’ wrote David cheerily to his father in August 1832. ‘I have been levelling and surveying and also attending the road works and wishing myself sometimes with the spade, sometimes breaking stones and sometimes quarrying!!’ The only hint that David was not entirely happy came in a final aside. ‘I was glad to hear of Bob’s safe arrival [in Edinburgh] – he will be with you before this reaches you. Give him my compliments and tell him I have been dreaming about him every night for the last week or 10 days. I am wearying to see him…I hope to hear from you soon – let me know how long I am likely to stay here – I have been here four weeks already.’ To make matters worse, he found himself in the middle of an outbreak of cholera. One of the workmen suddenly sickened and died and, when David next went to Campbeltown, he found the streets silent and the houses deserted. The locals, panicked by the prospect of a full-blown epidemic, had fled.

  If Robert thought he could relax his vigilance after David and Alan joined the family business, he was mistaken. Thomas, it seemed, was proving to be as intransigent as Alan and Bob had been in their time. As the youngest child of the family, he had spent his youth being alternately indulged and ignored by parents exhausted by years of child-rearing. He was boisterous, full of tricks and eager spirits, victimised and adored by his older brothers. He, unlike Alan, had not had to bear the full weight of Robert’s expectations, and had therefore been allowed much greater freedom to develop as he pleased. True, he too had gone through the same long pupilage of lighthouse tours and paternal sermons, but it was his brothers who had taken the brunt of Robert’s zeal for education, discipline and industry. As a result, he lacked both Alan’s intensity and David’s pedantry. He was, and remained, a more spontaneous character than his brothers. His letters to Robert could be chattily informal in a way that Alan’s had never been, and his habits had an exuberance to them that even Bob had lacked. As he grew older, he became a more complex character. On the one hand, he was more outwardly demonstrative than his elder brothers, on the other, he was prone to bouts of debilitating melancholia and self-doubt.

  As his son Louis later gleefully pointed out, Thomas’s school years were not his finest moment. In fact, his experience seemed to consist mainly of being strapped for various crimes and inadequacies. Tom was also at the High School when it finally moved from Infirmary Street to its grand new position on Regent Road, though his attitude to this sudden raise in status was soured by his lifelong loathing for school and schooling. Instead, he developed a desultory interest in books, natural history and literature. Louis later recalled,

  He had a collection of curiosities. He had a printing press and printed some sort of dismal paper on the Spectator plan, which did not, I think, ever get over the first page. He had a chest of chemicals, and made all manner of experiments, more or less abortive, as boys’ experiments will be. But there was always a remarkable inconsequence, an unconscious spice of the true Satanic rebel nature in the boy. Whatever he played with was the reverse of what he was formally supposed to be engaged in learning. As soon as he went, for instance, to a class of chemistry, there were no more experiments made by him. The thing then ceased to be a pleasure and became an irking drudgery.

  Once out of school, Tom seemed unenthusiastic about settling into any profession. Robert, as usual, wrote formally to him, demanding that he decide his business. Tom vacillated and then replied listlessly, saying that he had no particular career in mind just yet. Robert, exasperated, hauled him into the Baxter Street office to help with dogsbody duties. Once there, it was evident that Tom showed no more excitement about engineering than he had for anything else. Robert took him off on surveying expeditions and got him to work on planning and drawing, at which Tom proved more a hindrance than a help. At one point, he announced an interest in becoming a publisher. Robert helped him set up a working printing press and watched as Tom grew frustrated and then abandoned it. Then he said he would like to become a bookseller, so Robert took him to London to pick up tips from the local traders. That, too, came to nothing. Robert sent Tom back to Edinburgh to work for his old friend Patrick Neill, who had published Robert’s Bell Rock book a few years back. He also wrote to Tom, hoping still to deal with him by force of persuasion. What Robert said in that letter was as revealing about his own philosophy as it was about Tom’s behaviour. He wrote in August 1835,

  You were anxious to know the nature of the Bill Charges, and if it will have any tendency to stamp upon your mind the value of money – and its indispensable possession in this world, I shall think the double postage well bestowed…If you want to live as a gentleman, you must work as a man, for there is no dining without a purse. Now as you have not been born to the purse, you must just look after yourself. I blame myself for not sending you straight from the High School at once to business in some way. I regret my judgement in it with a young man who is perhaps not aware of the ground on which he stands. A young man who is perhaps more taken up with appearances than realities – who wants to be a gentleman without the means – who perhaps thinks of an exterior as the only thing…Consider the absolute necessity of making provision for the time when it will be asked of you, what is this man? Is he doing any good in the world? Has he the means of being ‘one of us’? I beseech you Tom, do not trifle with this until it actually comes upon you. Bethink yourself and bestir yourself as a man.

  Robert’s letter only had the effect of making Tom stay on a little longer with Neill. When a chimney pot in the printing works crashed to the ground just beside him, Tom took it as a timely warning that publishing was a deadly profession, and left. Finally, having exhausted all possible idle options, he reappeared on his father’s doorstep and asked him for an apprenticeship. In fact, Robert had little need for an extra apprentice at the time, since both Alan and David were now working full-time and he also had an existing stable of well-trained assistants. Nevertheless, it seemed like a useful settlement to his youngest son’s dilettante habits and Robert accepted him. By spring of 1836, Tom had started classes at Edinburgh University and begun the long slog to full qualification, though he seemed as lacklustre over his new career as he had about his old ones. Meanwhile, sifting through the pockets of an old coat, Robert discovered something that seemed to justify all his darkest fears about Tom. Tucked into a corner out of sight was a small bundle of dog-eared papers. Tom, it seemed, had been secretly preoccupied with fiction.

  If Tom had been caught smuggling gunpowder or dealing in wreck, the effect could not have been worse. Robert was so shocked by the discovery that he could scarcely bring himself to mention it. Finally, he wrote to Tom, painfully detailing the ‘seven pages of my good card paper filled in your handwriting with great nonsense…I made an attempt to read it but I could not go on with it. I spoke to David about it. He looked at it and said there was a drawer full of such stuff in your room. I beseech you, Tom, give up such nonsense and mind your business. You are most ignorant of the history of your country and the science of your profession. As I have told you before – to little purpose I fear – this is not the time for you to write but to read lessons in morals and the practical details of your business. I have reminded you that I am 66 years of age and what then? I leave you to consider this and fill up the blank for yourself.’ All Robert’s old terrors returned. All his fears of producing literate but useless children were apparently justified. All the lessons learned by Alan’s example, it seemed, had come to nothing. He need not have worried. Tom, mortified by his father’s reaction, caved in almost immediately. Since it was plain that he would never make an author and that Robert, driven to extremity, was now applying the emotional thumbscrews, he flung away his attempts at writing, and finally applied himself properly to engineering.

  For all Robert’s warnings to his sons that he was getting older, he showed little evidence of reducing his usual hectic pace. If he felt the onset of old age, his actions scarcely betrayed it. Where possible, he still embarked on the annual circuits of Scotland for the lighthouse inspection tour, and spent much of the rest of the year darting from place to place, consulting and opining. He was often called down to London to appear in Select Committee proceedings as an expert witness and to appear at the meetings of the Society of Civil Engineers, of which he was now a member. Thanks to the Bell Rock, he was now moderately well known in the south and found himself well respected there. He, in turn, had an ambiguous affection for London. He liked its opulent streets and its sense of prosperity, but found English scenery dull and London habits stultifying. England, he emphasised over and over again, had little except government to offer Scotland. During the annual inspection tour of 1814, he wrote from Shetland to a friend, delightedly comparing north with south. ‘I can assure you I felt no small satisfaction in comparing the aspect of the Northernmost with the most Southern point of the land of this happy Kingdom. For about this time last year I was at the Land’s End, and I am fully of opinion, that the preference is due to Shetland whether considered for pasture or for Crops when compared with Cornwall.’

  In part, his unrelenting pace was a symptom of Robert’s old fears. He remained terrified of being unable to provide for himself and his family. Like many self-made men, he remained haunted by the remembrance of poverty and sliding back down the social ladder into oblivion. In 1814, he could have given up the lights entirely, coasted on the success of the Bell Rock and built up a private business, as Telford and Rennie had done. He could have taken out patents on his optical inventions, looked for business that gave greater prestige or abandoned Scotland for more promising places. He did none of these. Work for the Commissioners at least guaranteed a regular salary. Work as a freelance consultant engineer, on the other hand, inevitably meant financial uncertainty. He took the path of caution, and paid for it in fame.

  Robert was the most complex of men, a character who loved and courted physical fear but who was simultaneously terrified of emotional risk. In Records of a Family of Engineers, Louis noted Robert’s ‘interest in the whole page of experience, his perpetual quest and fine scent of all that seems romantic to a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness.’ As Louis recognised, there were two competing forces at work in Robert, an unashamed pleasure in adventure, and a ruthless need for order.

  Perfection (with a capital P and violently underscored) was his design. A crack for a penknife, the waste of ‘six-and-thirty shillings’, ‘the loss of a day or tide’, in each of these he saw and was revolted by the finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his and immersed in vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is instantly translated into lives endangered. On this consistent idealism there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque. As when he laid out a road on Hogarth’s line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in quarrying, not ‘to disfigure the island’; or regretted in a report that ‘the great stone, called the Devil in the Hole, was blasted or broken down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.’

  Robert’s perfectionism also manifested itself as an endless concern for money. The Commissioners’ record books are littered with disputes over wages, requests for higher pay and demands for adequate pensions. Often, it was Robert arguing on behalf of others – for raising the pay of the keepers, or for helping the wives of those invalided out of the service. More usually, it was Robert worrying away at his own fear of being taken for granted. ‘During the progress of the [lighthouse] work,’ he wrote to the Commissioners in 1802 as part of a petition for an increase in salary, he ‘travelled to the North sometimes by land and sometimes by water – ill provided with conveyance, exposed to many hardships and frequently in the greatest personal danger.’ In 1808, when work on the Bell Rock loomed, the Commissioners had fixed his salary at £200 a year. In 1829, following a further demand, they doubled it. On his retirement, he was given a pension but was galled to discover that Alan had replaced him at a salary of £900 per annum. The remainder of his income came from private business, work for the Convention of Scottish Burghs and occasional articles in the learned journals. His expenditure was steady but burdensome. In addition to the cost of keeping a household, an office and a regular travelling itinerary, he was also devoted to the welfare of his apprentices. In part, he had arranged his life in order to allow himself freedom, but he had also deliberately chained himself to his duties and dependants. The more commitments he undertook, the more good works he piled up, the more firmly he was anchored to the bourgeois life. Security came from the immutable things in life – a family, a block of stone, a lighthouse, an annual salary. But all the fortune and stability in the world could not entirely silence his worries, and he ended up marking the same insecurities on his children.

 

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