Bella Bathurst: The Lighthouse Stevensons

Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of the Stevenson dynasty were responsible for the design and construction of almost a hundred lighthouses that, to this day, still operate around the Scottish coast. Any account of so many achievements would likely run to many volumes and, no doubt, be a dry affair. The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), Bella Bathurst’s biography of the family, is a potted account of their triumphs, an often dramatic account that plaits the families’ lives, the development of engineering, and the maturing of what is now the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB), responsible for the lighthouses’ upkeep, into an engaging and informative story.

While opening with some of the needs for lighthouses in Scotland, and how, in neighbouring England, their employ had been somewhat hampered by private interests, Bathurst brings us into the genesis of the Stevensons and their pharological entwinement. Robert Stevenson’s father, Alan, died and his widow married Thomas Smith, a lampmaker, appointed to the recently instantiated NLB. Under his stepfather, Robert’s engineering skills rapidly advance, and he built some lighthouses while still serving his apprenticeship. Bathurst also gives us a precise on Eddystone, a rock lighthouse off the Cornish coast, built by John Smeaton, regarded as the father of civil engineering.

Eddystone, and Robert’s visit to see it, was to be an inspiration for the first major achievement of the Stevensons. Robert showed himself as savvy at politicking as he was at engineering to be charged with the design and construction of the Bell Rock, the world’s old sea-washed lighthouse, located over ten miles off the eastern coast, effectively on a rock. To build something that has stood the test of time so far out to sea, in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, is an outstanding feat, and Bathurst injects the story with real drama and awe so that, when the unaccommodating waves take out a year’s work, we feel the workers’ sorrow, but are invigorated by their determination to continue. If the sea was making it difficult, so too were the press-gangs ready to bundle men off to the Napoleonic conflicts overseas.

Robert Stevenson had pinned his reputation on the Bell Rock, and while he managed this early in her career, he remained a foreboding presence in the careers of his descendents. Bathurst takes us into some of their crowning achievements, notably the even more perilous and dramatic construction of Skerryvore, fourteen miles off Tiree, itself on the western reaches of the Hebrides archipelago. To read about the planning that goes into such a construction, the manpower, the ever-present risk to life from a tempestuous Atlantic, is jaw-dropping. But it also comes with family drama as Robert’s son, Alan, becomes his own man in its delivery.

Accounts of other rock lighthouses, notably Muckle Flugga and Dhu Heartach, by other Stevensons, provide just as interesting a history, although there’s a marked difference in these stories’ delivery, which doesn’t soar to the same heights as those before. However, Bathurst also gives us insight into the Stevenson that thankfully got away. Robert Louis Stevenson, author of classics like Kidnapped and Treasure Island, was Robert’s grandson (and Alan’s nephew), and much of his own accounts of his family history inform this work. He had been intended to be an engineer, but he never set aside his literary leanings the way his uncle had been made encouraged.

Where Bathurst initially limns a Scotland with a darkened coast, with dangerously rocky seas, frequent shipwrecks and myriad lives lost, the Stevensons lit it up and made it safer over their watch. The last Stevenson died in 1971. The last keeper left his post in 1998. The lighthouses are remotely maintained from Edinburgh. Automation may have ended lighthouse keeping as a profession, but they all stand to this day, signalling out to sea, and the four pinnacles of engineering in this book shine as lasting examples of human endeavour, monuments to men working at the edges of civilisation, building against the odds, for, as per the NLB’s motto, the safety of all.

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