The lighthouse stevenson.., p.6
The Lighthouse Stevensons, page 6
The early wreckers also brought a certain grim ingenuity to their tasks. Many locals in areas in which ships were regularly wrecked did not just wait for disaster; they created it. Luring ships onto the rocks was a particular favourite. The Scilly Isles, the West Country and the Hebrides were all rumoured to have wreckers who put up false lights to guide the mariner onto the rocks. It was easy enough to light a bonfire on a dangerous coastline, or tie a lantern to a horse’s tail so it imitated the swinging of a ship’s light. For a while, the first lighthouses only made the situation worse. The local wreckers, aware that ships relied on the towers to know their position near land, set up rival lights nearby in order to beguile the pilots away from their true course and onto the nearby coast. There were other methods as well. The Wolf Rock, eight miles south-west of Land’s End, was a notorious hazard for shipping, and was regarded by the local Cornish wreckers as an excellent source of plunder. Within the rock, however, there was a cavern hollowed out over centuries by the movement of the tides. When the waves crashed through it, trapping and then releasing the air within, the cavern made a sound eerily similar to a wolf’s howl. The wreckers, worried that the lonely baying of the rock would alert ships to the Wolf’s existence, stopped up the cavern with stones to silence it.
Unfortunately, the Scots were no kinder. Compton Mackenzie’s amiable fable of the SS Politician in Whisky Galore was based on a less amiable truth; the Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland were enthusiastic wreckers. Legends and rumours seeded themselves with suspicious frequency; the local minister on the Isle of Sanday was reputed to pray devotedly every Sunday for those in peril on the sea, to ask God politely if he intended to sink any ships soon and, if so, whether He couldn’t organise it so they were wrecked on Sanday. When Robert Stevenson started work on the island in 1806, he noted that wrecks were so frequent in the area that the islanders fenced their fields with ship-timbers instead of stone. Wrecking also produced another curious inequality; rents on the sides of the island that produced most wrecks were higher than on the more hospitable side. Living in a wreck zone had kept the northerners rich, and the southerners poor. Robert was also astonished to discover ‘a park paled round, chiefly with cedar wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras built ship; and in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley meal porridge, instead of their usual beverage.’ Thomas – and Robert in his turn – had a hard task in selling their lights to the islanders before they had even begun to build them.
But for all the predictable and unpredictable human difficulties, Smith’s early efforts with the Scottish lighthouses provided a useful guide for all his professional successors. He was, after all, not a trained engineer in the modern sense, but an imaginative man who did his best with the materials available. The Commissioners had only a vague idea of what the work would entail, and expected Smith to complete most of the supervision on his own and unpaid. For almost ten years, Thomas took no salary at all from the NLB (who were, in any case, broke) and relied entirely on his income from the Edinburgh work. There was some method in his madness.
Thomas worked for the Commissioners because he believed implicitly in the need for guidance at sea, not because he thought it might profit him. He had been reared with a strong notion of public duty, and was quite prepared, despite the lack of money and the spartan conditions, to live up to his promises. Despite the improvised nature of the work, his reports show a good-natured stoicism for the endless hardships he put up with. He noted everything, from the supply of window putty to the problems the keepers had with grazing for their cows. Where routine could be imposed, Thomas tried; he wrote reports, revised instructions, built relationships and imposed discipline. Once it became evident that lighthouse work would demand an ever-increasing amount of time and attention, Thomas resigned himself to regular annual voyages around the coast inspecting existing lights and assessing the necessity for new ones. The voyages were usually hard and often frustrating; Thomas settled into a familiar pattern of remaining storm-stayed in port or being delayed by the unwelcome attention of press gangs.
When back in Edinburgh, Thomas spent much of his time planning improvements to the lights. There were also the demands of Edinburgh society; Thomas, as entrepreneur and public servant, slid happily into the comforts of the New Town bourgeoisie. He trusted implicitly in the Edinburgh virtues of thrift, hard work, humanity and humbug. In middle age, he grew a little stout, but never idle. He worked hard for his business, looked after his family, and took to holding dinner parties. His make-do background had some influence on his later character; once the business was healthy enough, he became the most conservative of men, joined the Edinburgh Spearmen (a volunteer regiment ostensibly called up to fight the revolutionary French but actually dedicated to suppressing domestic riots) and became a captain. The discipline of his public life coincided nicely with his professional existence. He did well from the New Town, which provided an almost inexhaustible demand for brassware, grates and fittings of all kinds, and fitted into the new middle-class world of salons and afternoon teas with ease.
Thomas had been able both to exploit the new, hubristic mood of the city, and to appropriate many of its values. And, having earned his place in society, he was a contented man. He had overcome great insecurity to establish himself in a role which demanded exceptional effort, but rewarded him with both position and respect. His marriage to Jean Lillie had given him a warm and stable family life, and the lighthouses provided the means to keep it. By 1803, he had been confident enough to buy himself a patch of land in Baxter’s Place in the lee of Calton Hill, and to build on it a grand new family house in delightfully fashionable style. It was large enough, indeed, to allow both for a warehouse in which he could experiment with designs, and for a separate flat in which the older children would later be installed. Inside its newfangled elegances, the Smith and Stevenson children lived in disciplined harmony, apparently quite content with the splicing together of the two families. And, it was rapidly becoming evident, his marriage had also gained him an apprentice who seemed to have every intention of continuing his connection with the Northern Lights.
By the age of sixteen, Robert Stevenson had already become an adult. In youth, he appeared a sturdy, rounded young man, with a complexion ruddied by outdoor work and with a deceptive spark of humour in his eyes. He remained uneasy with books and culture, but was completely at home with the practicalities of stone, iron, brass and wood. While at home, he became the model of a conscientious gentleman, attentive to his mother and devoted to his stepbrothers and sisters. He was also becoming a plausible successor to Thomas as head of the family. Even then, he had already shouldered all the adult responsibilities of his future life and was busily developing an ambition to move on in the world. He, like the rest of the Smith-Stevenson brood, felt the need ‘to gather wealth, to rise in society, to leave their descendants higher themselves, to be (in some sense) among the founders of families’, as his grandson Louis later put it. Above all, Robert wanted to be useful.
Much of Robert’s later attitude to life was marked by the experience of his childhood. His early years had shown him first the impoverishment caused by his father’s early death, and then, through the move to Edinburgh and his mother’s marriage to Thomas, the evidence that merit and enterprise earned their rewards. Above all, they had taught him to trust in himself. He also remained mindful of the sacrifices Jean Lillie had made for him, acknowledging many years later that ‘My mother’s ingenuous and gentle spirit amidst all her difficulties never failed her. She still relied on the providence of God, though sometimes, in the recollection of her father’s house and her younger days, she remarked that the ways of Providence were often dark to us.’ The move to Edinburgh and the uniting of the two households had also proved helpful. Thomas’s example in ironmongery and lighthouses had not only settled Robert in his chosen vocation but allowed him to repay what he felt were some of his early debts in life. He was also lucky in his choice. Engineering suited him, drawing out both his fondness for adventure and his talent for mathematical abstractions. It allowed him to be creative, and to contribute something of worth to posterity. Above all, it was a useful, manly sort of trade, requiring both solidity and self-confidence.
For the moment, however, Robert was still preoccupied with the slow climb up the foothills of his profession. During the 1790s, he was despatched to Glasgow University to learn civil engineering under the supervision of Professor John Anderson. ‘Jolly Jack Phosphorous’, as Anderson was known, was rare among eighteenth-century tutors for being as enthusiastic about the practical applications of engineering as he was about its theory. It was said that Anderson had first interested James Watt in steam power, and, scandalously, that his university classes were based as much on fieldwork as they were on black-board studies. He later bequeathed money to a separate technical college in Glasgow staffed with tutors who would not ‘be permitted, as in some other Colleges, to be Drones or Triflers, Drunkards or negligent in any manner of way’. The college flourished, and was eventually to become Strathclyde University.
In addition to his classes in mathematics, natural philosophy (physics), drawing, and mechanics, Robert learned much of direct value to Thomas’s business, and in later years became an ardent supporter of Anderson’s methods. ‘It was the practice of Professor Anderson kindly to befriend and forward the views of his pupils,’ he wrote later, ‘and his attention to me during the few years I had the pleasure of being known to him was of a very marked kind, for he directed my attention to various pursuits with the view to my coming forward as an engineer.’ Having discovered the attractions of a subject he wanted to learn, Robert had also become a keen preacher for the benefits of a sound education. The first fees he earned for his engineering work were passed on almost instantly to his old school, and his letters home are peppered with references to the usefulness of his university classes. Once converted to anything, Robert was always the most fanatic of believers.
Robert also showed an enthusiastic interest in the lighthouses. The mutable quality of the work suited him and after accompanying Thomas on a couple of his regular inspection tours, Robert began to appropriate small patches of lighthouse territory for himself. Thomas introduced him to the Commissioners, allowed him to fit lenses or supervise building work and encouraged him to develop his interest as warmly as possible. By the mid 1790s, Robert appears often in the NLB’s Minute books, first as understudy, and then in more significant roles. He already had a sound grasp of all aspects of the business from the sizing of lamps to the sculpting of reflectors. His chief fault, if any, was a forcefulness in his dealings that did not always endear him to potential customers. Within six years of joining Thomas’s workshop he was regarded as an equal in almost all aspects of the work, and by 1800 had been made a full partner in the firm.
And so, in the pattern that was to become settled for the next three Stevenson generations, Robert spent his winters at home in the south studying and his summers in the north supervising the details of work on the lights. Much of his education was also completed in Thomas’s workshops first at Bristo Street and then at Baxter’s Place, making grates for the gentry and lamplights for the Corporation. As master and pupil, Thomas and he were well suited to each other. It was in some ways an odd partnership; Thomas was, after all, not only Robert’s employer, but also his stepfather. Stretched too far, the relationship could have become awkward or imbalanced, but as it was, the two made ideal accomplices. Thomas, though a milder character, was a generous teacher. The two men were alike in many respects. Both had been reared the hard way; both believed in the benefits of a stern apprenticeship, and neither took anything for granted. Before he died, Thomas was to realise that Robert’s talents would one day far eclipse his own. It is a measure of Thomas’s generosity that, far from resenting his stepson’s advancement, he was delighted.
THREE
Eddystone
Edinburgh in the early 1800s was an enticing place for a middle-class merchant with an enthusiasm for self-advancement. After the blow administered to its pride by the Act of Union in 1707, the city had descended into a long sulk. Union had allowed Scotland to keep a few trophies of her independence – her own law, a separate educational system, a bishop-stripped church – but the old, bitter quarrel with London did not cease overnight. Even Defoe, whose role as an English agent was to sell Union to the Scots, had found relations difficult. ‘Never two nations that had so much affinity in circumstances, have had such inveteracy and aversion to one another in their blood,’ he wrote disconsolately. By the 1750s, as trade improved and the benefits of Union began to be felt, the city emerged from its self-absorption. Gradually, it began to look to England and London as its example; there was much talk of Britishness and the first furtive attempts at English speech, English habits and English thinking. Soirees (pronounced ‘sorries’ in Edinburgh and ‘swurries’ in Glasgow) were held more frequently, tea was drunk and Scots began, as the philosopher David Hume put it, to be considered, ‘a very corrupt dialect’. Fifty years later, Lord Cockburn (rivalled only by Sir Walter Scott for his domination of the Edinburgh scene) wrote gloomily that ‘When I was a boy, no Englishman could have addressed the Edinburgh populace without making them stare, and probably laugh. We looked at an English boy at the High School as a ludicrous and incomprehensible monster. Now these monsters are so common that they are no monsters at all.’
The Scottish Enlightenment emerged slowly from this half-derelict background. The great upswell of enterprise and industrialisation produced an extraordinary group of men who came from lowly backgrounds to fill the sudden need for innovation. In the century after Union, Scotland produced an exceptional group of artists, philosophers and scientists, including Burns, Smollett, Adam Smith, Alan Ramsay, Robert, William and John Adam, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Henry Raeburn, James Watt, Thomas Telford and David Hume. The men who guided the Enlightenment were united by a growing belief in the force of reason. Man, they argued, was no longer at the will of his environment; he could explain it, control it and shape it where necessary. Life in all its aspects could be improved upon; there was to be no such thing as an old truth. Faith could be questioned, landscape could be shaped, economies could be transformed. In particular, they came to regard the ??dy of mankind and the improvement of human nature itself as an essential part of enlightened life. They put aside the ??oning faiths of the pre-Union years and replaced them with a new philosophy, brisk and scientific. Scotland was no longer forcibly strapped to her past; it was possible to improve on history.
The intellectual adventurousness of the age was matched by a rush of enterprise. Agriculture and business flourished, new industries boomed and old practices vanished. The expansive mood was a blessing for entrepreneurs. Many of the richer merchants took to the ultra-fashionable new hobby of agricultural improvement, turning their acreages into models of economic discipline and landscaped tameness. Some went north to enlighten the misguided Highlanders. They planted trees, started enterprises and encouraged the use of new machinery. Alongside the new flocks of scientists and social engineers, the inventors throve. Engineering, previously considered a profession for tradesmen and foreigners, began to develop a status and confidence of its own. Some of the mill-wrights, masons and clerks who moved into the profession were shrewd enough to see the urgent need for new design, and rose to meet the challenge. Down in England, Smeaton was building lighthouses, Arkwright was showing off the benefits of water frames and Trevithick was designing prototype locomotives. In Glasgow, James Watt moved on from making musical instruments to experimenting with steam engines. In the north, Thomas Telford had begun threading roads around the coasts, while John Rennie was building bridges. By the mid-nineteenth century, Prince Albert was heard to note approvingly that ‘If we want any work done of an unusual character, and send for an architect, he hesitates, debates, trifles: we send for an engineer, and he does it.’ The heroes of post-Enlightenment Britain also encouraged the view that hard work, imagination and enterprise were all that a man needed to rise from the lowest level of society to the highest. Titles did not matter quite as much as ability. It was small wonder that Thomas Smith and, in his turn, Robert Stevenson felt themselves in familiar company.
Edinburgh’s architects, meanwhile, were building the New Town. The city that Defoe had visited in the 1720s was, by even the most optimistic standards, disgusting. Overcrowding, disease and squalor had given Auld Reekie its name and reputation; Glasgow, by comparison, was the finest, sweetest city in all the Empire. The lack of housing and the density of people meant that people took shelter where they could find it. Each of the tottering Old Town tenements housed a cross-section of every class and occupation from Lords to barrow boys. The Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh were drawn up by the Convention of Royal Burghs in 1752 and construction work began soon after. The Nor’ Loch below the Mound was drained and landscaped, the Lang Dykes became Princes Street and the slow geometry of the Georgian New Town began to unfold. Work had not been finished before the middle classes bolted from their squalid quarterings near the Castle to the new city.
The division between the old town and the new was the most eloquent illustration of the divisions in Edinburgh’s character. It had always seemed the most strong-minded of all Scots cities, but under the surface the contradictions became more obvious. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it managed to sustain several wildly contradictory faiths: anti-Englishness and fervent Britishness; improvement and nostalgia; depression and vivacity. It never did, as it sometimes liked to believe, exist in cosmopolitan isolation. During this period it feared the invasion of the French, the Papists or the Wild Highlanders even more than it feared the loss of its identity to England. The terror of anarchy produced a contrariness in the city’s character, at once devout and cruel, reasoned and unreasonable.
