The Lighthouse Stevensons

The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson
(HarperCollins, 1999)

Extract from the Introduction

“Whenever I smell salt water, I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880. “The Bell Rock stands monument for my grandfather, the Skerry Vhor for my Uncle Alan; and when the lights come out at sundown along the shores of Scotland, I am proud to think they burn more brightly for the genius of my father.”

Louis was the most famous of the Stevensons, but he was not the most productive. Between 1790 and 1940, eight members of the Stevenson family planned, designed and constructed the 97 manned lighthouses which still speckle the Scottish coast, working in conditions and places which would be daunting even for modern engineers. The same driven energy which Louis put into writing, his ancestors put into lighting the darkness of the seas. The Lighthouse Stevensons, as they became known, were also responsible for a slew of inventions in both construction and optics and for an extraordinary series of developments in architecture, design and mechanics. As well as lighthouses, they built harbours, roads, railways, docks and canals all over Scotland and beyond; they, as much as anyone, are responsible for their country’s appearance today.

But the family who became known as the Lighthouse Stevensons have gone down in history for a very different profession. Robert, the first of the Stevenson dynasty, despised literature; his grandson perpetuated his family’s name with it. The author of Kidnapped, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde was initially trained as an engineer. To his father’s dismay, Louis escaped aged 21, first into law and then into writing. As he later confessed in The Education of an Engineer, his training had not been used in quite the way his father intended. “What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but in deed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of the string course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary.”

With age and distance, Louis recovered pride and affection in the Stevenson trade. He wrote with awe of his grandfather's work on the Bell Rock lighthouse, and of his father's melancholic genius for design and experimentation. He wrote about almost every aspect of his own brief and unhappy time as an apprentice, in essays, letters, introductions and memoirs. Most of all, Louis alchemised his experiences around the ragged coasts of the North into the gold of his best fiction; Treasure Island and Kidnapped both contain salvaged traces of his early career. The further he grew away from engineering, the more he felt towards it; he was sea-marked, and he knew it. He also recognised, with some discomfiture, that his own fame was swallowing up the recognition which his family deserved. In 1886, far from Edinburgh, he wrote crossly to his American publishers; "My father is not an 'inspector' of lighthouses; he, two of my uncles, my grandfather, and my great grandfather in succession, have been engineers to the Scotch Lighthouse service; all the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name; and my father's services to lighthouse optics have been distinguished indeed. I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward."

Louis was only being a little disingenous; he liked recognition and, to an extent, courted it. But his plaintive belief that his family deserved the same acknowledgement seems far-sighted now. Even at the height of the Victorian engineering boom, great men went unnoticed and exceptional feats unrecognised. Louis did his best to remedy the injustice, but also recognised that the Stevensons hardly helped themselves. Not one member of the family ever took out a patent on any of their inventions in design, optics or architecture. All of them believed that their works were for the benefit of the nation as a whole and therefore unworthy of private gain. They were only engineers, after all; they worked to order or conscience, and were only rarely disposed to flightier moments of reflection. What pride they had in their creations they put down to the advantages of forward planning and the benevolence of the Almighty. And Louis, the tricky, charming black sheep of the family, stole all the fame that posterity had to give.

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