The Lighthouse Stevensons. Bella Bathurst

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