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His cousin was already a lightkeeper, and Bruce was stuck in Anstruther, Fife, at a loose end. “I was from a mining community, I didn’t know anything about the service before I went in, not a thing.” His wife Hazel remembers the early days: “When Bruce joined, everyone where we came from gave us six months They said we’d never stick it. And I can honestly say we’ve loved nearly every place we’ve been sent.”Only the rock stations bothered them. There are three categories of lighthouse: rocks, islands and land lights. Wives and families would only be permitted to stay with their husbands on the island and land lights; rock lights were customarily too remote and too cramped to allow for more than the three keepers themselves.

When Bruce joined the service, the relief system meant that a keeper spent two months on the light and a month on leave; later this was reduced to a month on, a month off.For a while, he was posted to Skerryvore, a rock light built on a vicious huddle of granite 15 miles south-west of the Inner Hebridean island of Tiree. He didn’t much like the place; during the storms of winter the tower would become claustrophobic with the smell of oil and bodies. (Keepers, it was said, returned ashore with curved spines from the semicircular beds and peg legs from the winding stairs.) While he was there, a force-12 gale once blew. “And you could feel the tower swaying, you could feel it moving you, it was amazing. When we went up on to the balcony the next morning, there was a water tank there and the storm had ripped the lid, burst the bolts, and this tank was just hanging on with one bolt.” He reflects for a while “If you let it, this job could frighten the life out of you.

It is, it’s fearsome sometimes.”On the rock stations, a molehill becomes a mountain. There’s been supers [trainees] on these places, and they went melancholy. There was one super at Dhubh Artach – they called it the Black Hole at one time – and he got so bad he got down on the grating, he was going to dive off and swim ashore.” The rock lights’ frequent inaccessibility also caused problems. “There was one place I heard of, where one of the keepers died. We used to have these coffin boards in case someone died and we had to get them ashore. Well, it seemed that the weather was awful bad so they had to hang the coffin from the balcony rail, and it just hung there till the sea went down and the ship could pick it up.”Hazel, likewise, had to abide by the pragmatic standards of the service “You marry the keeper, you marry the job,” she says.

“While he was away on the rock, I’d be looking after the kids. There was always something to do, always something going on, but it was still quite lonely. And if he’s away all that time and he comes home, if he gets on to the kids, they say he’s no business getting on to them.” Bruce interjects. “I almost got to the stage when I’d walk in the door and the kids would say, who’s that man? They were practically shaking my hand sometimes.”Traditionally, a keeper would be transferred on to another station once every three or four years.

Recently, however, with the dwindling number of lights still manned, the remaining keepers stayed longer and longer at their postings. The Browns have now been at Duncansby for 11 years and regard the looming prospect of retirement with some trepidation. As Hazel points out, the NLB provided more than just a job for Bruce, it provided a life for them both. “I’m going to have a strange time adjusting because I’ve never had to pay rent, I’ve never had to pay electricity or fuel bills. Even when you got transferred, the Board would send you an itinerary with the train times and everything It’s better than the forces. And we’ll miss it.”Not that the job always commanded such ferocious loyalties. For the best part of two centuries the Stevenson family provided the Scottish lighthouse service with engineers – four generations of them.