The Lighthouse Stevensons (review)

The Lighthouse Stevensons. By Bella Bathurst. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Pp. xxiv+268. $24.

It seems that publishers have awakened to the realization that the history of technology can provide some very good stories. Six years ago we had Dava Sobel's colorful account of John Harrison's epic struggle to make a marine chronometer, Longitude. Now Bella Bathurst has made an excellent yarn out of the careers of the Stevensons who built most of the lighthouses around the coast of Scotland. The story was told with more solidity in 1978 by Craig Mair as A Star for Seamen. But not to worry: there is a splendid archive of Stevenson family material, much of it now in the National Library of Scotland, and Bathurst has drawn on this and other primary material to construct her story.

She begins with Thomas Smith, who became the first engineer of the Northern Lighthouse Board when this was set up in 1786 to challenge the hazards that confronted shipping in the coastal waters of Scotland. These were not only the dangers of hidden reefs and awkward promontories. The value of wrecks in the impoverished economy of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland resulted in considerable local opposition to efforts to improve the sinister record of the sea for producing a regular supply of flotsam and jetsam from shipwrecks.

Smith married the widowed Jean Stevenson and took on her son Robert (1772-1850) as his apprentice in 1790. It was Robert Stevenson who succeeded Smith as engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board and established the dynasty of Stevensons who became lighthouse builders. This dynasty was carried on by Robert's three sons, Alan (1807-65), David (1815-86), and Thomas (1818-87). The only son of Thomas was Robert Louis (1850-94), who famously rejected his father's profession in order to become a writer. A little perversely, Bathurst subtitles her book "The extraordinary story of the building of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson," as if the family reputation depended on this association. Such an implication cannot be sustained, even though Robert Louis Stevenson did write the most perceptive tributes to the work of both his father and his grandfather.

The tradition of Stevenson lighthouse builders at the Northern Lighthouse Board was carried on into the third and fourth generations by the sons of David. Altogether the family built almost a hundred lighthouses, designed and installed their lights, recruited their staff, and attended to their maintenance. The buildings themselves were not very innovative; the Stevensons simply adopted the type of masonry tower pioneered by John Smeaton at Eddystone in 1759. In Robert Stevenson's design for Bell Rock, for instance, "the design was Smeaton's invention brought to Robert's perfection" (p. 89). Only the conditions were arguably more difficult than those encountered by Smeaton. Bathurst judiciously selects one lighthouse to encapsulate the contribution of every member of the family: Bell Rock for Robert (1811), Skerryvore for Alan (1844), Muckle Flugga for David (1854), and Dhu Heartach for Thomas (1872). These were all built in virtually inaccessible and hideously dangerous locations, but the skill and determination of the Stevensons guided them all to a successful conclusion.

Even thus compressed, this is a story of gigantic achievements, well told and sustained. There are blemishes, as when Bathurst calls dynamite an option for Robert Stevenson at the Bell Rock in 1808, or implies that by 1850 "many [British] universities had established separate engineering courses" (p. 197). But she manages to summarize the complicated relationship between Robert Stevenson and John Rennie, in which Stevenson as the resident engineer effectively took over responsibility for the construction of the Bell Rock lighthouse from the consulting engineer and took the credit by virtue of being the man on the spot. She also tries to disentangle the tricky controversy between Alan Stevenson and the Fresnel brothers on the one hand and the eminent scientist David Brewster on the other about priority in developing...