after complaints about the state of the Scottish coast had reached boiling point. Several evil-tempered storms during the winter of 1782 had crippled both the naval and the merchant fleets, both of whom urgently petitioned Parliament to remedy the existing situation. Parliament set up a committee which recommended the construction of at least four lighthouses, scattered at vital points around the Scottish coast. In 1786, the bill was passed and the NLB was born. The Act for Erecting Certain Lighthouses in the Northern Parts of Great Britain provided for a management committee and a few officials to collect revenue, stipulated the sites of each light and then left the Board to its own devices. With its leaden cargo of sheriffs, judges and public goodbodies, the committee had only the most feeble knowledge of the sea and none at all about lighthouse construction. The Lighthouse Commissioners, as they were known, had been selected with the intention of providing political and financial canniness to the Board; as public officials, they were accustomed to question the cost of everything and trust the value of nothing. Their appointment was also partly political. Since the lighthouses would be built within the sheriffs’ fiefdoms, it was easier to give each one a place on the Board than to woo them anew every time a light was to be built on their land.
From the beginning, therefore, there was a strict division of roles. The Commissioners figured and the Engineer built. The Commissioners respected the experience and integrity of the Engineer; the Engineer lived within the Commissioner’s restrictions. ‘I beg leave to acquaint you that I am willing to do every thing in my power to bring to perfection the plan proposed,’ wrote Thomas in September, ‘and to superintend the erection of the lights, teach the people how to manage them and to do every thing necessary to put and keep them in a proper state…It is impossible at present to form any judgement of the trouble attending this business as I hope it will turn out a benefit to the Country.’ His first job, they announced, would be to construct four new lights: one at Kinnaird Head just beyond Fraserburgh, one at Mull of Kintyre overlooking the Firth of Clyde, one at Eilean Glas off the edge of Harris, and one on North Ronaldsay, a small island above the Orkney mainland. He could build them, staff them and light them in any way that he wished, they promised, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. The Commissioners, meanwhile, stayed in Edinburgh, counting the costs and squabbling politely with London.
Thomas could have been forgiven for wondering what exactly he had got himself into. For a start, he had no architectural experience, let alone the kind of experience necessary to build a sea-tower exposed to the hardest conditions wind and wave could hurl at it. Lighthouse construction was, to say the least, a specialist subject in the 1780s, although the idea of a lighted tower for mariners’ guidance had existed in some form or another since the Pharos of Alexandria was built by the Egyptians in 300 BC. The Pharos was an immense and ornate tower 450 feet high, topped with an open fire, and considered so splendid that it was usually listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Later attempts were less glamorous. Since there was no state control of lighthouses in Britain until well into the eighteenth century, their design was left to the individuals who built them. Far from being the trim marine spires of popular image, the English lights developed endless exotic variants. Most were coastal towers with large braziers of coal fixed to their roof. Some were church steeples loosely adapted for the purpose. Disused castles and priories were occasionally put to use, and in Ireland, there were several lights built in stone-vaulted cottages. Even those built specifically as lighthouses did not follow any definite pattern. Some looked like stumpy medieval rockets, some like upright coffins, others not much different from the average cow byre. One or two followed the design of fortified keeps, sturdy enough for the hardest gale. Others were no more than an iron basket filled with coal and suspended on a pulley. A number of owners built their lights in wood. Unsurprisingly, not many examples of these survive.
Until the 1780s, the only permanent light in Scotland was on the Isle of May which had been alternately saving and exasperating mariners for a century or more. The lighthouse had been built in 1636 on a small, low-lying islet at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. The mouth of the river was filled with snags for unwary shipping; rocks, sandbanks and awkward reefs on the surface and a graveyard of dead ships underneath. The islet was the first and the largest of these rocks and had gained a vicious reputation for shipwreck and destruction. In 1635, the Scottish Privy Council had given the task of constructing a light to three of Charles I’s favoured Scottish courtiers, who designed it, built it and maintained it at their own expense and then charged local shipping for its use.
Even by the make-do standards of the age, conditions for the lone keeper were unusually grim. The isle, a mile long by a third of a mile wide, was barren except for a little pasturage and a low, squat tower like a medieval keep with a brazier on the roof. The owners hired a local man, George Anderson, to tend and supervise the fire, and arranged for a boatman to appear every few days to drop a new delivery of coal into the shallow waters by the island’s rocky shore. Anderson would pick the coal out of the waters, haul it along to the tower on his back and winch it up in a bucket to the roof. For this, he was given a salary of £7 a year, 30 bushels of meal for his family and all the fishing rights he could want. Since he therefore spent most of his time away from the island looking for fish, the fire stayed untended and usually went out at the crucial moment. It was several years before someone took pity on the poor man and offered him the assistance of a second keeper and a horse.
Even when the fire was maintained, one light was hardly satisfactory for all Scotland. As the Isle of May proved, coal lights were inefficient, gobbled fuel and expired just when they were most needed, in gales or heavy rain. They required constant supervision, were usually clogged by smoke and could easily be mistaken for fires inland. Thomas was evidently going to have to start from scratch, devising new buildings, new fuels and new solutions if he was to succeed in improving the current situation. But if lighthouses came without templates, so too did their architects. There was, as yet, no such thing as an archetypal engineer, let alone a civil or marine specialist. The qualifications and bureaucracy of the modern profession did not exist 200 years ago. When Samuel Johnson published his famous Dictionary in 1755, he described an engineer as ‘an officer in the army or fortified place, whose business is to inspect attacks, defences, works’. As Louis later pointed out, ‘the engineer of today is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables, and formulae to the value of folios-full have been calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the footprints of the pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field was unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and adventures. ’ If he was to design, build, supervise, and maintain each of the NLB’s new lights, Thomas therefore needed to become an inventor in his own right. Much of his work was without precedent, and where tested methods did not already exist, Thomas had to improvise as best he could.
Trudging around the rim of Scotland, he soon realised that his new role entailed far more than merely fitting reflectors. Initially, he used the English lighthouses as his template, but was forced almost immediately to adapt to Scotland’s particular rigours. Most English lights of the time were built safely inland out of dependable local stone. Any building on the stormy coast of Scotland needed to withstand all that the elements could hurl at it; a lighthouse, with its flimsy glass and curlicues of ironwork, required a particular kind of strength. The first four lights were, according to Robert Stevenson, ‘on the smallest, plainest and most simple plan that could be devised, and with such materials as could be easily transported and most speedily erected’. All were built of unembellished stone, with walls thick enough to resist the strongest assaults of water or wind, and with plain lanterns bound with a tight corsetry of metal stanchions. The light at Kinnaird Head was adapted from an old fortified tower, and did just as well withstanding the elements as it had done withstanding invasion.
Despite the economy of the designs, Thomas soon discovered that his workload doubled. His assistants were untrained and his experience was suited more to the refinements of New Town ironwork than it was to designing weather-beaten coastal buildings. Two of the four planned lighthouses were on remote islands, which meant long, dangerous sea journeys and difficulties with supervision. Even on the Mull of Kintyre, which was at least on the mainland, materials could not be landed
