The Lighthouse Stevensons. Bella Bathurst

Lillie, terrible. While still young, she was left a widow with a small child, short of money and dependent on her mother for subsistence. But despite her sudden poverty, she showed a fierce loyalty to her only child. If she could not improve her own circumstances, she reasoned, at least she could improve Robert’s. Her father had sent her to an Edinburgh boarding school and Jean clearly felt the benefits of an Edinburgh education, so taking her six-year-old son, she moved the forty miles eastwards to the capital. When the time came, she tried to enrol Robert at the High School (where Walter Scott and Henry Cockburn were being educated), but found she could not afford the fees. So she enrolled him at an endowed school and kept aside a little money to pay for extra tuition in the classics. Robert’s upbringing therefore became a stern apprenticeship in scrimping interspersed with plenty of Latin and God. In the mercantile freedom of the 1780s, Robert was taught the essential details: to put his faith in hard work, meritocracy and the middle-class world. For a while, his mother hoped that Robert would make a minister of the Church of Scotland. Fortunately, his lack of Greek and hopelessness at Latin put paid to the idea.

      Once established in Edinburgh, Jean Lillie began attending church in the New Town. Among the congregation was another family, the Smiths. In early middle age, Thomas Smith was a stout man, tall, plain and pragmatic. He had come originally from Broughty Ferry – then a briny little suburb of Dundee – and, like Jean, had been forced to learn self-reliance early. When Thomas was still young, his father was drowned in Dundee harbour. His mother, left with a small child, brought him up herself as best she could, gave him a good and pious education and insisted that whatever trade he took, it should at least be safely on land. Thomas took his mother’s instructions to heart and found an apprenticeship with a Dundee metal worker where he spent the next five years learning ironmongery before moving down to Edinburgh. After a few years on the staff of a metalworking company, he established his own business in Bristo Street as an ironsmith, providing grates, lamps and intricate trinkets for the New Town. The business throve and Thomas prospered. He was the creature of a most particular time, a high Tory and a businessman of talent and ambition. Louis considered him ‘ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average’. His first wife was a farmer’s daughter who bore him five children. Despite Edinburgh’s reputation for medicine, surviving the rigours of childhood in the eighteenth century was still a matter of good fortune. Thomas’s first children were not lucky. Three of the five babies died; only Jane and James survived. His wife too finally succumbed to whooping cough, and Thomas was left a widower with two small children. He was married again, in 1787, to the daughter of a Stirling builder who bore him one daughter, Mary Anne, and then promptly expired of consumption. Thomas, now well accustomed to mortality, started looking for another wife.

      Jean Lillie, with her small, well-disciplined son and her belief in similar ideals, was a willing match. In June 1787, the two were married. It was a pragmatic partnership, based as much on the benefits of uniting two incomplete families as on affection or companionship. It was also a marriage of equals. Jean was a strong-minded soul, who earned the devoted respect of her new husband in return for security and a stable upbringing for his children. The arrangement also served Robert well. By now, it was evident that he had infinitely more talent, and greater patience, for the practicalities of mechanics than he had for Latin. When Thomas took him on a guided tour of his ironworks, Robert was beguiled by the blend of craftsmanship and usefulness. By 1790, Thomas had taken Robert on as an apprentice, and the boy’s efforts at Greek, French and theology were forgotten.

      Thomas’s main business at the time was in lamp-making and in designing street lighting for the New Town. The lamps at the time used oil, which silted up quickly with grime and gave out only a weak and smoggy light. Thomas, experimenting with methods of improving the standard design, began devising a system of reflectors placed behind the light to strengthen and focus the beam. The idea, he knew, had been used successfully elsewhere in Europe but had not yet been introduced to Scotland. At first, he made the reflectors out of concave circles of copper, the size and shape of scooped-out melons and polished to a high sheen. Later, he varied the design, welding small slivers of mirror to the back of a concave lead circle. Seen now, his reflectors look like an inside-out antique mirrored ball, but in 1780s Edinburgh, they were revolutionary. All light sources were measured in units of candela (or candlepower), one medium-sized tallow candle producing roughly two units of power. Thomas’s designs quadrupled the strength of the light and produced something closer to a concentrated beam than a lamp on its own could ever achieve.

      Thomas fitted several of his parabolic reflector lights around the New Town and then, mindful of the need for more business, contacted the Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland. His reflectors, it seemed, had practical applications beyond mere street lighting; would they, enquired Thomas, be useful for lighthouses? As Thomas explained it to them,

      Lamps being Inclosed are preserved from the Violence of the wind and weather but Coal lights cannot bereflector of proper power transcends it ixceedingly and is seen at a inclosed…Lamp light of itself has a more pure and bright flame than Coal light and when Conjoined with a reflector of proper power transcends it exceedingly and is seen at a much greater distance…Lamps take less attendance…Lamp lights with reflectors can be distinguished from every Other light in Such a manner as to make it Impossible to mistake them for a light on shore or on board any Other Ship…Coal lights are not capable of this Improvement.

      He had, he declared, already prepared a sample reflector and was happy to demonstrate it to ‘any gentleman concerned’. The Trustees inspected his work, and agreed that Thomas’s designs would indeed be useful. Beguiled by his enthusiasm, they sent him south to gain experience from an English lighthouse builder. Once returned, he was made first engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Trust.

      The title might have been imposing; the organisation itself was not. The Trust (now the Northern Lighthouse Board, or NLB) had been established after complaints about the state of the Scottish coast had reached boiling point. Several evil-tempered storms during the winter of 1782 had crippled both the naval and the merchant fleets, both of whom urgently petitioned Parliament to remedy the existing situation. Parliament set up a committee which recommended the construction of at least four lighthouses, scattered at vital points around the Scottish coast. In 1786, the bill was passed and the NLB was born. The Act for Erecting Certain Lighthouses in the Northern Parts of Great Britain provided for a management committee and a few officials to collect revenue, stipulated the sites of each light and then left the Board to its own devices. With its leaden cargo of sheriffs, judges and public goodbodies, the committee had only the most feeble knowledge of the sea and none at all about lighthouse construction. The Lighthouse Commissioners, as they were known, had been selected with the intention of providing political and financial canniness to the Board; as public officials, they were accustomed to question the cost of everything and trust the value of nothing. Their appointment was also partly political. Since the lighthouses would be built within the sheriffs’ fiefdoms, it was easier to give each one a place on the Board than to woo them anew every time a light was to be built on their land.

      From the beginning, therefore, there was a strict division of roles. The Commissioners figured and the Engineer built. The Commissioners respected the experience and integrity of the Engineer; the Engineer lived within the Commissioner’s restrictions. ‘I beg leave to acquaint you that I am willing to do every thing in my power to bring to perfection the plan proposed,’ wrote Thomas in September, ‘and to superintend the erection of the lights, teach the people how to manage them and to do every thing necessary to put and keep them in a proper state…It is impossible at present to form any judgement of the trouble attending this business as I hope it will turn out a benefit to the Country.’ His first job, they announced, would be to construct four new lights: one at Kinnaird Head just beyond Fraserburgh, one at Mull of Kintyre overlooking the Firth of Clyde, one at Eilean Glas off the edge of Harris, and one on North Ronaldsay, a small island above the Orkney mainland. He could build them, staff them and light them in any way that he wished, they promised, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. The Commissioners, meanwhile, stayed in Edinburgh, counting the costs and squabbling politely with London.

      Thomas could have been forgiven for wondering what exactly he had got himself into. For a start, he had no architectural experience, let alone the kind of experience necessary to build a sea-tower exposed to the