The remarkable Stevensons and their engineering feats
Lighthouse aficionado and engineer Paul A Lynn answers a few of our questions about his latest book, Scottish Lighthouse Pioneers
Much has been written about the technical achievements of the Stevenson family, but what does your book tell us about their personal journey to protect sailors and fishermen?
Their personal journeys were as diverse, and interesting, as their personalities. Robert Stevenson, founder of the dynasty, was a man of extraordinary courage and determination who relished the challenges of building lighthouses in difficult locations. He hardly knew the word “impossible”, and made his reputation with the Bell Rock lighthouse in the North Sea. His eldest son, Alan, was a lover of poetry and the natural world, and a friend of William Wordsworth. A man of delicate health, he was cajoled into lighthouse engineering by his father, and devoted years to placing a lighthouse on the vicious Skerryvore rock, 12 miles off Tiree – but it cost him his health.
The next son, David, was an engineer by inclination and talent; more in his father’s mould, with a personal journey that was less tormented. The last son to become a lighthouse engineer, Thomas, was essentially a romantic; a lover of old books and stray dogs, he entered the family firm by default. He pursued his own scientific investigations, finally making major contributions to lighthouse optics. His personal journey was also very much bound up with his beloved wife Maggie and their only son, Robert Louis Stevenson, who, after a miserable apprenticeship with his father, staged a student revolt to become a world-famous storyteller.
I understand there are eyewitness accounts of the Stevenson engineers in action left by two of Scotland’s most famous literary sons? What can we learn from Sir Walter Scott?
Walter Scott accompanied Robert Stevenson on the annual inspection of Scottish lighthouses aboard the Northern Lighthouse Board’s yacht in 1814. This took them from Edinburgh to the Bell Rock, and then the far north of Shetland, Orkney, Cape Wrath and the Hebrides. Scott was fascinated by the voyage, which exposed him to the realities of life in some of Scotland’s most remote regions.
We learn a lot from him about the social and economic conditions in which Robert Stevenson operated, and about life aboard a small sailing vessel in notoriously dangerous waters. His sensibilities as a poet give us a very different picture from that of Robert Stevenson, the no-nonsense man of action who was preoccupied with his engineering responsibilities and the lighthouse inspections. Walter Scott provides a delightful, enthusiastic, and sometimes surprising commentary on the Stevenson story.
And Robert Louis Stevenson?
Robert Louis Stevenson’s eyewitness account has a very different tone from Walter Scott’s, for two main reasons. They were entirely different characters (although both great writers); and RLS was subjected to an unwelcome engineering traineeship by his family. Whereas Scott was delighted to travel around the coasts of Scotland on the lighthouse yacht in 1814, RLS felt out of place and out of spirits on a similar voyage with his father Thomas half a century later. His account of social conditions on Fair Isle, midway between Orkney and Shetland, is riveting.
What’s so special about the story of Muckle Flugga?
The razor rock of Muckle Flugga is the final northern outpost of the British Isles, rising 200 feet above the North Atlantic and assaulted by storm-force waves and hurricane winds. It was long considered an impossible place to build a lighthouse. And when the decision was finally taken in 1854, it was not primarily to protect fishing boats or merchantmen from disaster, but the Royal Navy.
It was to prove a formidable job. Every piece of equipment, bricks and other building materials were carried up a precipitous rock face from small landing boats; workmen were in constant danger. Among the myriad challenges faced and overcome by the Stevenson lighthouse pioneers, this was one of their most daunting. n
Robert Stevenson relished the challenges of building lighthouses in difficult locations and hardly knew the word ‘impossible’