persecution, to his apparent disappointment, in the religious purges of the 1680s. With the exception of John, however, Louis’s genealogy was one of stolid mediocrity. ‘On the whole,’ he wrote, ‘the Stevensons may be described as decent reputable folk, following honest trades – millers, maltsters and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction, and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory.’ In the absence of glamorous fact, Louis felt himself forced to resort to speculation. He considered the possibility of a Scandinavian connection, evidence of a French alliance and, more imaginatively, the link with a Jacobite past. By the time Louis had completed his history, the family had acquired a smattering of Highland credibility and a link with that most glamorous of cattle-rustlers, Rob Roy MacGregor. Later biographers noted crushingly that none of this wishful thinking was true. The Stevensons were descended from quiet Lowland Whigs, none of whom ever had a dangerous political thought in their lives.
Louis’s real interest in the Stevensons began with the birth of his paternal grandfather, Robert Stevenson. Robert’s father, Alan, was a Glasgow maltster who married the daughter of a builder, Jean Lillie, in 1771. On 8 June 1772, their only son was born. Alan was still a young man, barely twenty, and with his brother Hugh had become involved in the Glasgow trade with the West Indies. When Robert was two, his father and uncle sailed south to look after their business interests, leaving Jean and Robert behind in Glasgow. Once in the Caribbean, the Stevensons found themselves the victims of a swindle. One dark night, two local merchants – possibly business competitors – arrived at their house on St Kitts, and robbed them of the contents. As soon as they heard of the burglary, Hugh set sail in pursuit of the robbers, while Alan remained behind to deal with the business. ‘What with anxiety of mind,’ Robert later recorded, ‘being such very young men – and exposure to night dews of that climate, the two brothers were seized with fever and died in 1774, my uncle at Tobago on 16 April and my father at St Christopher on 26 May.’
‘Night dews’ was then the catch-all diagnosis for any tropical disease that British science had not yet explained or cured. Malaria, cholera and tuberculosis were rife, as was sleeping sickness and influenza. Whatever the cause, the consequences of Alan’s death were, for Jean Lillie, terrible. While still young, she was left a widow with a small child, short of money and dependent on her mother for subsistence. But despite her sudden poverty, she showed a fierce loyalty to her only child. If she could not improve her own circumstances, she reasoned, at least she could improve Robert’s. Her father had sent her to an Edinburgh boarding school and Jean clearly felt the benefits of an Edinburgh education, so taking her six-year-old son, she moved the forty miles eastwards to the capital. When the time came, she tried to enrol Robert at the High School (where Walter Scott and Henry Cockburn were being educated), but found she could not afford the fees. So she enrolled him at an endowed school and kept aside a little money to pay for extra tuition in the classics. Robert’s upbringing therefore became a stern apprenticeship in scrimping interspersed with plenty of Latin and God. In the mercantile freedom of the 1780s, Robert was taught the essential details: to put his faith in hard work, meritocracy and the middle-class world. For a while, his mother hoped that Robert would make a minister of the Church of Scotland. Fortunately, his lack of Greek and hopelessness at Latin put paid to the idea.
Once established in Edinburgh, Jean Lillie began attending church in the New Town. Among the congregation was another family, the Smiths. In early middle age, Thomas Smith was a stout man, tall, plain and pragmatic. He had come originally from Broughty Ferry – then a briny little suburb of Dundee – and, like Jean, had been forced to learn self-reliance early. When Thomas was still young, his father was drowned in Dundee harbour. His mother, left with a small child, brought him up herself as best she could, gave him a good and pious education and insisted that whatever trade he took, it should at least be safely on land. Thomas took his mother’s instructions to heart and found an apprenticeship with a Dundee metal worker where he spent the next five years learning ironmongery before moving down to Edinburgh. After a few years on the staff of a metalworking company, he established his own business in Bristo Street as an ironsmith, providing grates, lamps and intricate trinkets for the New Town. The business throve and Thomas prospered. He was the creature of a most particular time, a high Tory and a businessman of talent and ambition. Louis considered him ‘ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average’. His first wife was a farmer’s daughter who bore him five children. Despite Edinburgh’s reputation for medicine, surviving the rigours of childhood in the eighteenth century was still a matter of good fortune. Thomas’s first children were not lucky. Three of the five babies died; only Jane and James survived. His wife too finally succumbed to whooping cough, and Thomas was left a widower with two small children. He was married again, in 1787, to the daughter of a Stirling builder who bore him one daughter, Mary Anne, and then promptly expired of consumption. Thomas, now well accustomed to mortality, started looking for another wife.
Jean Lillie, with her small, well-disciplined son and her belief in similar ideals, was a willing match. In June 1787, the two were married. It was a pragmatic partnership, based as much on the benefits of uniting two incomplete families as on affection or companionship. It was also a marriage of equals. Jean was a strong-minded soul, who earned the devoted respect of her new husband in return for security and a stable upbringing for his children. The arrangement also served Robert well. By now, it was evident that he had infinitely more talent, and greater patience, for the practicalities of mechanics than he had for Latin. When Thomas took him on a guided tour of his ironworks, Robert was beguiled by the blend of craftsmanship and usefulness. By 1790, Thomas had taken Robert on as an apprentice, and the boy’s efforts at Greek, French and theology were forgotten.
Thomas’s main business at the time was in lamp-making and in designing street lighting for the New Town. The lamps at the time used oil, which silted up quickly with grime and gave out only a weak and smoggy light. Thomas, experimenting with methods of improving the standard design, began devising a system of reflectors placed behind the light to strengthen and focus the beam. The idea, he knew, had been used successfully elsewhere in Europe but had not yet been introduced to Scotland. At first, he made the reflectors out of concave circles of copper, the size and shape of scooped-out melons and polished to a high sheen. Later, he varied the design, welding small slivers of mirror to the back of a concave lead circle. Seen now, his reflectors look like an inside-out antique mirrored ball, but in 1780s Edinburgh, they were revolutionary. All light sources were measured in units of candela (or candlepower), one medium-sized tallow candle producing roughly two units of power. Thomas’s designs quadrupled the strength of the light and produced something closer to a concentrated beam than a lamp on its own could ever achieve.
Thomas fitted several of his parabolic reflector lights around the New Town and then, mindful of the need for more business, contacted the Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland. His reflectors, it seemed, had practical applications beyond mere street lighting; would they, enquired Thomas, be useful for lighthouses? As Thomas explained it to them,
Lamps being Inclosed are preserved from the Violence of the wind and weather but Coal lights cannot bereflector of proper power transcends it ixceedingly and is seen at a inclosed…Lamp light of itself has a more pure and bright flame than Coal light and when Conjoined with a reflector of proper power transcends it exceedingly and is seen at a much greater distance…Lamps take less attendance…Lamp lights with reflectors can be distinguished from every Other light in Such a manner as to make it Impossible to mistake them for a light on shore or on board any Other Ship…Coal lights are not capable of this Improvement.
He had, he declared, already prepared a sample reflector and was happy to demonstrate it to ‘any gentleman concerned’. The Trustees inspected his work, and agreed that Thomas’s designs would indeed be useful. Beguiled by his enthusiasm, they sent him south to gain experience from an English lighthouse builder. Once returned, he was made first engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Trust.
The title might have been imposing; the organisation itself was not. The Trust (now the Northern
