The Lighthouse Stevensons. Bella Bathurst

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.

       ONE Yarmouth

      Captain George Manby had reached the age of forty without having contributed significantly to life. His childhood in Yarmouth had been undistinguished, his military career nondescript, and by early middle age he had sunk deeply into debt. Apart from an incident in 1800 when he appeared wild-eyed at the Secretary at War’s door offering to assassinate Napoleon – an offer which the Secretary politely declined – Manby seemed an unlikely candidate for immortality. His naval colleagues also noted cynically that the only battle scar he had yet earned was a gunshot wound, allegedly sustained while running away from a duel.

      The death of Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 changed all that. Manby had been at school with Nelson, and although the two had not been friends, Manby still regarded the admiral with affection. When Nelson died, Manby was spurred into action. Inspired by his hero’s example and impressed by the public grief over his loss, Manby concluded that his best chance of fame lay in saving lives; in particular, saving lives at sea. It was a startling choice. Manby’s only marine experience until then had been an unsuccessful spell as a naval lay captain on a frigate heading for Dublin. The ship had foundered off the Irish coast, and, once embedded upon the lee shore, began sinking fast. Manby wrote later that ‘the striking of the ship was the most awful and momentous period I had hitherto experienced. The immediate hallooing of all hands on deck; to the pumps, plumb the well, cut away the masts, throw the guns overboard. And amid all this activity, the dismal moans of some, the screams of the women.’ The crew hurled everything moveable over the sides and the rising tide finally pulled the ship back to the sea’s uneasy safety. Once back in Portsmouth, Manby reflected on his experience and concluded that the sea and he were not well suited to each other. Instead, he applied for a post as barrack master, a position which allowed him to keep his military honours while staying safely on dry land.

      Manby did admittedly have good reason to be cautious. Two centuries ago, almost a third of all British seamen died pursuing their trade, being either killed by the punishment of life on board ship or sacrificed to storms and drownings. Nearly everything the modern mariner relies upon – competent maps, accurate instruments and adequate communication – was either unreliable or non-existent. The major sea lanes around Britain were crowded and collisions were frequent. What is now fixed and understood was then debatable, and navigation was more a matter of art than science. Sailors depended on experience or luck to avoid danger, and when they did run into trouble there was no kindly lifeboat service to deliver them. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was made harder to assist victims than it was to collect the proceeds from wrecks. Previous legislation had defended the salvagers, not the mariners, and neither government nor shipowners devoted much