The Lighthouse Stevensons Read online

  The Lighthouse Stevensons

  The extraordinary story of

  the building of the Scottish lighthouses

  by the ancestors of

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Bella Bathurst

  Copyright

  William Collins

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  WilliamCollinsBook.com

  This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

  Copyright © Bella Bathurst 1999; 2020

  Cover photograph © Northern Lighthouse Board

  Bella Bathust asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Information on previously published material appears here

  ll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

  Source ISBN: 9780007204434

  Ebook Edition © November 2009 ISBN: 9780007358977

  Version: 2020-07-29

  To my mother, and to Lucy and Flora.

  There are spaces still to be filled before the map is completed – though these days it’s only in the explored territories that men write, sadly, Here live monsters.

  NORMAN MCCAIG, Old Maps and New

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Preface

  Foreword

  Introduction

  One Yarmouth

  Two Northern Lights

  Three Eddystone

  Four The Bell Rock

  Five Edinburgh

  Six Skerryvore

  Seven Muckle Flugga

  Eight Dhu Heartach

  Nine The Keepers

  Ten Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Previously Published List

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  This is not – nor was it ever intended to be – a definitive biography of the Lighthouse Stevensons. When I began research in January 1996, I realised that any attempt to write a comprehensive biography of all four generations of the Stevensons would be both futile and, given the range and technicality of their work, probably quite wearing as well. And yet to write the history of just one of their lives would be to leave an incomplete picture. The Stevensons were, in the best and worst of senses, a family business and are perhaps most easily understood in that context. The solution I came to was to concentrate on the time between 1786 and 1890 when the first four Lighthouse Stevensons were working around the Scottish coastline, and to focus in detail on those four lights that were most closely associated with their respective engineers. The result of this selection is not quite biography and not quite history. If my selections at times seem arbitrary or incomplete, I can only apologise. The life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson have been the subject of innumerable biographies, studies, critiques and analyses, not to mention his own autobiographical writings. The story of his ancestors, by comparison, remains a relatively unworn path. I would hope therefore that this book would be seen as a kind of taster for the subject, and that anyone wanting to search further would be able to do so. There is more, much more, in the lives and works of the Lighthouse Stevensons than any one book could ever hope to encompass.

  FOREWORD

  The ferryman has a hangover. I have a hangover. At the hotel last night there was a wedding party which was topped off with a bar-wide debate on whether a man walking at three miles an hour down the deck of a ship travelling at 20 knots would, technically speaking, be doing 23 knots or 20 knots or 17 knots or actually not travelling across the surface of the earth at all. The left side of the bar argued that to arrive at a fair calculation, variables such as tide and current should be taken into account. The right half was trying to dance to Mariah Carey.

  It is 7 a.m. and the wind is already slapping at the sides of the jetty. The clouds are filthy grey, and the forecast says there’s a storm coming. The ferryman pulls the cord on the outboard and subsides into the stern, hood down. The boat cuts a raw white line across the Kyle of Durness, and I look out to the weather as a little blue yacht on the far side of the bay vanishes beneath a hill of water before re-emerging at its summit, hull almost clean of water. The Wrath in the Cape is drawn from the old Norse word for turning point, hvarf, but on a day like this there could be no more apt description, particularly since the MoD has turned the whole area into a live firing range. To me this already looks like the middle of a storm. Has the ferryman seen worse?

  He looks up. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sakes, yes.’

  The Northern Lighthouse Board’s Land Rover is waiting by the mooring on the other side, its windscreen wipers plinking. Wordlessly, the ferryman hands up a couple of boxes, hauls round and heads back in the direction of the bar. The Cape’s last Principal Keeper Iain Roberton has driven the 11 miles along the track partly to collect supplies and partly because he wants to get away from all the building works – people clumping in and out of the cottages, routine all over the place. This light is one of the last to be automated. As part of the process, the old diesel generators need to be removed and replaced with computerised monitoring equipment linked to the NLB’s HQ in Edinburgh. Where necessary the lighting apparatus itself has also been changed: big old lenses replaced with smaller modern alternatives, tungsten bulbs substituted for the first generation of LEDs.

  We pass a notice: London 746 Miles. Then a recent bomb crater. The MoD generally leave the keepers in peace, but once in a while pilots find the temptations of a large white tower pinned to a large stone coast overwhelming. The keepers haven’t been shot yet, but they do sometimes get lightly strafed. From the other direction there are different hazards: sea, wind, fog, all the things a lighthouse is designed to stand against. The buildings here are tight-fitted to this treeless, sheep-swept corner of the country, but there’s a cracked window pane in the kitchen from the last gale when the sea reached up 130 feet and tapped out the glass. The previous month a force nine lasted for four days (‘a bit breezy’), during which Iain had to make a grab for the railings to stop himself from going over the cliff. ‘It’s a right funny feeling being lifted off your feet. I lost my glasses, it was blowing that hard.

  ’The track broadens out to a wide green field, a tower topped with a black diamond lantern and one of the most astounding views in the world; two coasts, two oceans, and the eastward opening to the Pentland Firth. In the foreground a Bond helicopter is suspended just over the edge of the cliff, several reels of electrical cabling swinging from its underside. It has been picking up construction materials from the deck of the NLB ship Pharos in the Firth below and transferring them to the light. These are the last disrupted days before the changeover, the end of a profession, the removal men taking out one era and replacing it with the next.

  In November 1996, as the process of de-manning the Scottish lights was reaching its peak, I was 746 miles away on the third floor of the Science Museum. An exhibition of lighthouse
optics had been set up and in a corner one of the old threeand-a-half-ton Fresnel lenses was revolving on its brass pivot with a low-watt bulb shining inside. I stood and watched it for a long time, entranced. If you looked directly towards the bulb it would vanish for a second and then reappear, LARGE and small, LARGE and small, its beam tinted with green or haloed with rainbows of prismatic light. If you turned towards the black partition wall, the same light swept round in a smooth circle, strongest in the centre but blurring out towards its edges. Its circuit was broken by three shutters interrupting the beam and making it appear to flash once, twice, three times. Then a long flash, then the same interruption: flash, flash, flash. Then round again, smooth and unperturbed, as sure of itself as any point of science could ever be.

  Below was a sign explaining that this particular lens had originally been used at one of the Scottish lights built by Robert Stevenson. I studied the sign for a while. Stevenson with a V, not a PH. A distant half-memory surfaced – hadn’t the writer Robert Louis Stevenson had some sort of connection with engineering or architecture?

  Downstairs in the shop I asked if they had any books on the Stevensons. They were helpful – looked up things on the microfiche, found plenty on Robert Stephenson, Rocket scientist, but drew a blank on lighthouses. There seemed to be nothing about the man who had made that light upstairs or how he might be connected to RLS. I walked across Hyde Park possessed by a single, idiotic idea. That lens was a piece of pure magic, as rational as anything the Scottish Enlightenment ever produced but as mythic as Prometheus. Those lights would be difficult to build even now, so how on earth had they managed it two centuries ago? Robert Stevenson – whoever he was – had obviously done something astounding, so why weren’t he and his family better known?

  That evening at home I picked through bits of RLS’s autobiographical writing – gleams of history in Kidnapped, forewords and introductions. It wasn’t just Robert who had been an engineer, I discovered, it was all of them, four generations, virtually every male in the family except for a couple of cousins and RLS himself. Though the Stevensons had been general engineers, they had stuck to lighthouses for so long that lighthouses had eventually stuck to them. That was who they were – Lighthouse Stevensons.

  Except, of course, for the one who wasn’t. Even in fragments RLS’s ambivalence was audible, sometimes directed at specific individuals and sometimes at – well, who? History? His peers? His wife, Fanny? Himself? My God, I thought, he writes so beautifully, and he sounds so torn. As you would be. If all your family – grandfather, two uncles, father, cousins – were firefighters or paramedics, if what they did was wild and pioneering and every day it made a difference to the lives of others, and if you then decided to turn aside from keeping people alive and become a writer, and if all your stories then ate the fame you knew was due to your family, you’d probably feel ambivalent, too. The more I read, the more astounding I found these four generations who had changed the shape of Scotland and then vanished, occluded by a brighter star. The following morning, I had decided. I might know nothing about engineering or the sea, but so what? I was going to write this.

  It was the first book I wrote, and I knew even then that I’d got lucky. It wasn’t just that I arrived at the point when the last of the Scottish lights were being automated, it was all of it. Sitting bowed in the basement of the Northern Lighthouse Board with an elephant folio of Cook’s Voyages splayed on the shelves, or sifting through boxes of Stevenson papers in the National Library of Scotland while the Edinburgh Festival rioted outside. For a few months I went every day. Something about the routine of it made it possible to build up a kind of retrospective intimacy with each Stevenson just through their handwriting – not just the words, but the words behind the words, the way they spoke and wrote: Robert by turns direct, commanding or circumlocutory, the way Alan’s hand could slip from health to sickness to seasickness, writing in bed or from the lighthouse yacht or from some forsaken end-of-the-road croft. Often his writing looks agonised, the drift of ink and its disorder reminding me of Robert Falcon Scott’s final journal entry from the Antarctic: ‘For God’s sake, look after our people.’ Occasionally, too ill even to hold a pen, he dictated through a scribe.

  Either way Alan was always more tempered than his father, more tolerant, but somehow further back. Robert was a master both of detail and of the grand design who worked to a hard view of human nature but remained thrilled by the lift of adventure. As RLS noted, ‘What he felt himself, he continued to attribute to all around him.’ RLS’s best known literary character is Jekyll/Hyde, still considered the ultimate delineation of a split personality: public and private, light and shadow, secret and revealed. His grandfather embodied all of those things, a composite of opposites contained within a singular man. In the hush of the library’s manuscript section, this family rose from the page alive and loud again. From the stains of rainwater blots to family squabbles over rent payments and eating habits, the reality of their lives took on form and weather.

  Meanwhile, out at the edges, the last of the keepers were packing up and preparing to leave.

  The cottages are cosy and the kettle has recently boiled. The Assistant Keepers Kenny and Alan appear, recently woken from the last watch. Interest in the automation process has been increasing and all three have recently grown accustomed to being persons of interest. Most keepers recognise the sense of automation, but they wouldn’t be professionals if they weren’t discomfited by some of its results: drystone dykes patched with remedial fencing, cement bags all over the place, the watched coast now not seen at all.

  Kenny opens a packet of Rich Tea from the stores and pulls the milk out of the new fridge. Beside him in one of the cupboards are the dry stores, the 1990s equivalent of ship’s biscuit, designed to prevent the keepers from starving in the event that the relief cannot be made. When circumstances permit, fresh veg or meat can be brought over from Durness. Alcohol is not permitted, and from the beginning of the service all the lights were supposed to be dry, though like everything else this was occasionally subject to interpretation. Some time later, one of the last keepers at the Bell Rock, sends me a picture of a Hogmanay celebration which included twenty-one cans of McEwan’s Export, eight bottles of whisky, one of Drambuie, a wall of lager and a Tennent’s Special extension. No food at all.

  Outside, the backdraft from the helicopter’s rotors rattles the double glazing. Iain Roberton has been with the NLB for thirty years and cannot bring himself to think beyond the moment of ‘closure’. None of the keepers have begun to look for other jobs since they say there’s no point this far in advance. ‘I’ll miss it’, says Alan, even though the Cape was seen as one of the worst postings. ‘I hate people saying you must be lonely out here. I’ve never been lonely.’ He looks out towards the space where Orkney should be. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘I wish I was coming with you.’

  A couple of hours later the Scotsman’s photographer and I are on the helicopter. He is harnessed to the seat with the door open, taking photographs of the sea and the slabby coast while the pilot does wheelies round the light, running tight to the north walls of Scotland and then pulling up so hard that the controls spark red in alarm and the rotors chop at the air. The wind is already strengthening. Below us the surface of the Firth now wears wrackish strands of white and the helicopter prances from side to side while all the air I had in my lungs disappears in an almost-scream of exhilaration.

  Several hours later on the Pharos, the weather has worsened. The ship was scheduled to take further supplies up to Fair Isle, but instead we are running for shelter in Scapa Flow. From the ship’s bridge the Pentland Firth rises and rises. The wind speed is now at 50 knots and the forecast is severe gale force 9 or 10. The captain Bryce Henderson finds a spot near St Margaret’s Hope close by three lights and lowers both anchors. The helicopter stopped being able to fly once the wind speed exceeded 40 knots, so there’s now no question of us leaving until this is over.

  Opening the steel door out on
to deck has become increasingly difficult. The wind pitches from a song to a shriek and the division between sea and air softens and dissolves. Water appears from above in gouts, or sideways as projectiles, or from below as sudden rearing mountains lifting over the bow and smashing towards us over the decks. Sea has become sky, and the sky has vanished. A kind of darkness falls, broken by the beams of lighthouses. Beside us or behind us or abruptly in front the high-up, squared-off lights of oil tankers loom, implacable as office blocks, sliding past us on their way out of the Flotta terminal. For long moments the ships just seem to stand there, the tankers’ engines insisting they are doing 15, 20 knots but the force of the water holding them almost stationary.

  The forecast is now at force 11, the wind at between 55 to 60 knots, and though there are two anchors down the one at the stern is dragging. Henderson has been an NLB man for a long time and in between the urgent punctuations of Mayday calls he stares out of the window, listening. Beneath his uniform, in through his feet and his fingertips, he is tuned to the sound of the ship so acutely he could trace it down to the last semitone. In the silences the rest of us can pick up the faint gravelly scuffle as the back anchor drags. Below us is foul ground, bits of seabed which haven’t been surveyed since the Stevensons’ day. Henderson thinks the anchor is snagged on something and isn’t holding ground. He’d like to move the ship to a more secure anchorage but Scapa Flow is strewn with old ship and submarine carcasses, and there’s no guarantee he wouldn’t just catch on another wreck. Beneath the bridge the cable of the bow anchor is pulled so tight we can feel a hard, high thrum sounding through the ship’s steel plates. Behind there are other sounds, bangs and wrenches, the discordance of metal played out to the end of its tether.