THE BRIDGE IS DOWN
At about a quarter past seven on the evening of Sunday 28 December 1879, in one of the worst storms in years, the thirteen central spans – the ‘high girders’ – of the rail bridge over the Tay between Wormit and Dundee fell into the river, carrying with them the 5.20 train from Burntisland and all the passengers and crew. There were no survivors.1
THE STORM GETS UP
Throughout Scotland that weekend south-westerly winds had raged across the country, causing widespread damage, especially to shipping. The Glasgow steamer Norseman was washed up on the shore near Portpatrick with no sign of its crew of ten. In the Gairloch, the schooner Banshee went down and two other vessels ran aground. On the east coast a number of ships got into difficulties battling against the wind in the Firth of Forth. The schooner Alma, bound for Bo’ness with a cargo of pit props, had got as far as Inchkeith before being driven onto a sandbank off Burntisland. The captain of a steamship which arrived at Leith from Gothenburg swore he had never known such a storm in all his years at sea, and that he had had to lash two helmsmen to the wheel for their own safety.2
Yet on the Sunday morning the wind moderated slightly. The ferry from Granton to Burntisland, carrying passengers from Edinburgh to join the train for Dundee via the new rail bridge over the Tay estuary, continued to run normally. In Dundee there had been little indication earlier in the day of the disaster to come. The weather that morning had been fine, and conditions for the ferry crossing over the Tay continued to be relatively smooth until well into the afternoon. When dusk fell, not long after 4.00 p.m., the wind had freshened slightly, and an hour later, the captain of the ferry reported the river ‘was getting up very fast’. By six, when the ferry docked again on the Dundee side, all the signs were that a violent storm was imminent.3
Dundee had its share of weather watchers, both amateur and professional. Amongst them was Admiral Dougall, long retired now, but still meticulous in his observations of weather conditions from his house at Scotscraig on the Fife side of the river. Unlike most observers, the Admiral had felt uneasy about the weather earlier in the day. By four o’clock the rain was heavy, and his barometer showed a fall from 29.40 to 28.80. In the Admiral’s garden the trees and bushes were being battered by the force of the rain, and he became concerned about his old walnut tree, and whether it would survive the force of a high wind. Looking out towards the open sea, he noted how the wind came in sudden fierce gusts, which he estimated at between 75 and 78 miles per hour.4
Out on the river lay the Mars training ship, home for the past ten years of young Dundee lads destined for a life on the sea, or in the city’s bustling textile mills. Its captain, Captain Scott, had also been keeping an eye on the glass, and had noted the sudden fall in pressure in the later afternoon. As the wind reached its height, he reckoned the gale to be between 10 and 11 on the Beaufort scale – the worst gale he could remember on the Tay for the past six years. In Fife an engineer called Brodie had travelled over the bridge to his home in Cupar on the day before the disaster, but was forbidden to return the next day by his father, a strict Sabbatarian. In the middle of the night he was woken by water pouring into his house, and discovered that the flat lead sheet covering the roof, and weighing more than a ton, had been rolled up by the wind.5
On the Dundee side, in a house overlooking Magdalen Green with a clear view of both river and bridge, retired businessman Charles Clark had been keeping a log of the weather for the past fourteen years. Like the others he had noted the fall in barometric pressure and, using a scale of his own from 1 to 6, recorded the force of the wind at the maximum of the scale.
Just before six o’clock the harbourmaster, William Robertson, called into his office, and left again at five minutes past. He had ‘some little difficulty’, he said later, ‘in turning the corner at the tidal basin’, and after he had reached the west end of the Customs House he found himself caught by the full force of the gale. When he eventually managed to reach his home nearby, he told his wife that the weather was too bad for her to venture out to evening service, and he set out on his own.6
By this time the wind was starting to cause some damage. Throughout the city slates were torn off roofs, and chimney pots smashed to the ground. The wind whipped through a line of bathing huts on the shore below the esplanade, near the northern landfall of the bridge, ripping off their roofs and dashing them against the wall. Down at Taybridge Station the wind blew three loaded coal wagons 400 yards along a siding, and the engine-shed foreman, James Roberts, set his men to barricade the doors of the shed. At about six o’clock he decided to call the stationmaster, and set off for his house.7
Within the station itself the devastation was considerable. Taybridge Station then, as now, lay parallel to the river in an east-west direction. To the east, the line ran into a tunnel before sloping up into the area of the docks. To the west, the station was open to the wind, which by this time had moved round so that it blew almost directly along the station platforms. Its escape effectively blocked at the eastern end, the gale took the line of least resistance, which happened to be the glass roof covering most of the station. By the time he arrived at his office, James Smith found the whole station a wilderness of broken glass, and at once ordered it to be closed to the public.8
Also in the station were the crew from the local from Newport, waiting to take their train back again across the Bridge. They had left Newport at 5.50, just as the gale was getting up, with two employees of the Caledonian Railway in the van with the guard, Robert Shand. As the train gathered speed on the bridge, they could feel the van heeling over under the force of the wind, and the howl of the gale was deafening. One of the Caledonian men, John Buick, looked out of the window and saw showers of sparks coming from the wheels of the train. He shouted out, ‘Shand, there is something wrong with the train!’, but Shand took little notice, since he knew from experience that the sparks were caused by the friction of the wheel flanges against the rails, under the force of the wind. He did, however, take the precaution of giving the brake handle a few twists, and waving a red lantern out of the window, in the hope that the driver, Alexander Kennedy, would see it and slow down. Kennedy saw nothing, but he did feel the drag of the brake. As he told friends later, ‘I just let her out a bit more’.9
By the time that Kennedy, Shand and the others arrived in Dundee, the next train to cross the bridge, or rather to fail to do so, was already well on its way across Fife. Although this train began its journey at Burntisland, on the Fife shore of the Firth of Forth, it was known among railwaymen as the ‘Edinburgh’, since it provided the last link in a long and wearisome trek for travellers making their way from Scotland’s capital to Dundee. The first stage would have been by the 4.15 train from Waverley Station in Edinburgh to Granton, on the southern shore of the Firth; then by way of the passenger ferry across the estuary to Burntisland, where a second train would have been waiting. This second train was due to leave at 5.27, stopping at no fewer than 14 intermediate stations on the way, and was expected to arrive at Dundee’s Taybridge Station at about 7.15 p.m.
On this particular Sunday, the ‘Edinburgh’ was made up of five passenger coaches and the guard’s van. The engine, No. 224, driven by David Mitchell, was a replacement for the Drummond tank engine which normally pulled the train, but which was being repaired. No. 224 had been built in Cowlairs in 1871, one of the first of the standard British 4-4-0 type. She was equipped with a Westinghouse brake, and was painted smartly in olive green with brightly polished brass trim. Next to the engine came the first of the three first-class carriages, a four-wheeler weighing eight and a half tons, then a six-wheeled first-class carriage weighing fourteen and a quarter, two more third-class coaches, and after them the only second-class coach, much smaller and lighter than the rest. At the rear came the van, carrying David Macbeath, the guard, and 46 mailbags.10
Apparently so far unaffected by the storm, the ‘Edinburgh’ made remarkably good time across Fife. Only slightly late at Thornton Junction, the train got to Leuchars, about four miles short of the bridge, at around 7 o’clock. Although in those days a rail link existed, there were no trains from St Andrews to Leuchars on a Sunday. However, one fortunate passenger, a Mr Linskill, had made arrangements for a coach to meet him at Leuchars Station and take him on to St Andrews by road. At first there was no sign of the coach, and Linskill had got back on to the train intending to find overnight lodgings in Dundee, when at the very last minute, just as the train was about to set off again, a light on the road was seen, the coach appeared, and he was able to get down and complete his homeward journey.11
There was still one final stop before the bridge – at St Fort Station, where all the tickets for Dundee passengers were collected, and those for passengers for further destinations were examined. As the storm raged, the stationmaster and the porter hurried to help the ticket collector get the job done quickly, noticing, as they bustled through the train, that there seemed to be an unusually large number of passengers for a Sunday, due no doubt to the closeness to the New Year holiday. Amongst the passengers they noticed some of their fellow employees on the North British staff, including George Ness, an engine cleaner who had recently passed the examination for promotion to fireman, and who was married to the daughter of John Brand, one of the engine drivers on the line.12
Most of the other passengers also came from the locality. One of them was Ann Cruickshank, a spinster in her early fifties, and housemaid to Lady Baxter of Kilmaron. Ann’s body would be the first to be found after the disaster. There was William Threlfall, a shop assistant from Dundee, returning after visiting his soldier brothers in Edinburgh; John Scott, a sailor, recently discharged from his ship and almost home again; Walter Ness, a Dundee saddler, back from visiting friends at Auchtermuchty; William Macdonald, a sawmiller from Blackness Road, travelling with his eleven-year-old son Davie, after a visit to friends in Fife; William Jack, a grocer; James Crichton, a ploughman; William Peebles, a forester; and many more. There were one or two more women – Jessie Bain, with her brother Archie, a farmer; and Eliza Scott travelling with her sweetheart George Johnston, who had joined the train at St Fort to be with her on the short trip to Dundee. There was an Englishman, William Henry Beynon, a photographer from Cheltenham, up in Scotland on a business trip.13
Stationmaster Morris and his companions closed the doors and stood back as the ‘Edinburgh’ set off once more. At the approach to the bridge the train paused but did not stop as the fireman, John Marshall, leant out of the cab to snatch the bridge baton, which gave his train the right of way on the single track bridge, from the hand of signalman Thomas Barclay. Gathering speed, it passed over the first section of spans – the ‘low girders’ – before battling its way onto the first of the ‘high girders’, eighty-eight feet above the navigable channel, through whose latticework sides the wind whistled and shrieked. At some point in its passage through this part of the bridge the train was attacked by a gust of appalling ferocity. Train, bridge, passengers, crew – all fell headlong down into the black waters of the Tay frothing and swirling beneath them.14
WHO SAW IT FALL?
Few could say with certainty that they were witnesses to its fall. It was a Sunday and a storm was blowing. Most of the citizens were at home around their firesides or, like harbourmaster Robertson, at evening service in church. There were some, however, whose houses overlooked the river, and who for one reason or another were watching out for the train as it crossed the bridge. At the home of George Clark, wine merchant, a hundred yards or so from the signal box at the north end of the bridge, George and his brother William stood in adjacent rooms and waited for a glimpse of the train. George had travelled in the Far East and had experience of hurricanes on the China seas. He could see the lights of the train flickering as it entered the latticework sides of the high girders, and at that crucial moment he turned his head away. In the next room William kept his eyes firmly on the train, and as it reached the third pier of the high girders, so he said afterwards, three flashes of light came in quick succession, seeming to fall obliquely into the river. ‘Look at the fire!’ called William, ‘the train is over the bridge!’15
A little further along Magdalen Green, from an upstairs room, young Alexander Maxwell and his friend William Millar watched for the train, and a little after seven o’clock they saw its lights appear dimly at the other end of the bridge. As it entered the high girders they both saw the three flashes, though Alexander thought they came from in front of the train, while William was sure they came from the train itself. He called out that the bridge was down, though no-one would believe him until Alexander’s father had gone to get his telescope, to see for himself the great gap in the bridge and the broken stumps of the iron supporting columns against which the waves thrashed.16
In a snug little house within sight of the bridge a father was reading a bible story to his children – appropriately enough the story of St Paul’s shipwreck on the island of Melita – when the ‘thundering crash’ of a falling chimney pot brought them all to the window. As the father himself retailed it to the Dundee Advertiser, in the moonlight, as it shone through gaps in the clouds, they could just make out the bridge with the train moving along it. Suddenly one of the children exclaimed, ‘that’s just like lightning!’, and sure enough ‘a comet-like burst of fiery sparks burst from the engine, and the streak of fire was seen till quenched in the stormy water below. Then there was absolute darkness on the bridge. A silence fell upon the eager group at the window. Then with stunning force the idea broke upon my mind. “Heavens!” I cried, “I fear the train is over the bridge!”’17
Some watchers were out in the storm when the bridge fell. Not far from the house of George Clark, but a little over to the west lived James Lawson. A few minutes after seven o’clock he decided to go out and see what effect the storm might have had on the structure, and as he battled his way towards it he happened upon a friend of his called Smart. Together they watched as the train came slowly towards them. Suddenly the train lights disappeared, and a ball of fire fell down into the water. ‘There is the train in the river!’ shouted Smart, and the two of them ran for shelter under one of the northern spans.18
Up in Blackness Road lived Peter Barron, a carriage inspector with the Caledonian Railway. At 7.00 he heard the sound of a chimney pot falling and went outside to investigate. Looking across to the bridge he could just make out the lights of the train as it crept along towards the high girders, when it seemed to him that part of the bridge fell away, and then another part, while at the same time a light appeared in the river. A gap in the clouds appeared and the moon shone through briefly – just long enough for him to make out the empty space where the high girders had been.19
Out on the training ship Mars, which lay directly downstream from the bridge, the deck watch should have been in the best position of all to see what really happened. Like the others, he had watched as the train went out onto the bridge, and had seen the lights flicker as the train entered the high girders, but at that very moment a great gust of wind caught the ship and made him turn away for cover. When he could look up again the lights had disappeared, and so had the central spans of the bridge. He sounded the alarm.20
Out at Magdalen Point James Lawson met up with George Clark, who had left his house to get a closer look at the bridge, and together they ran to the north signal box to see if there was any word of the train. Climbing up the steps of the box they met signalman Henry Somerville on the way down. ‘Where is the train?’ they asked. ‘It’s been a long time on the bridge,’ Somerville replied. Not satisfied, Lawson and Clark ran to the station.
At Taybridge Station itself, stationmaster James Smith was getting increasingly worried at the non-arrival of the train. The position of the signals showed that it must have passed the signal box at the south end of the bridge, but the minutes slipped by with no sign of it. Although there was no telegraph operator on duty on a Sunday, Robert Shand, the guard from the local, tried to get through to the south box, but without success. At that point they were hailed by Clark and Lawson, who told them that the train had gone down into the river. Not yet convinced – the train could conceivably have stopped and retreated to the Fife side – Smith nevertheless ordered his staff to clear the station and close the gates. Together with James Roberts, the engine shed supervisor, he set off to the north box to hear what Somerville had to say. He found little comfort there. According to Somerville he had received a telegraph from Thomas Barclay in the south box at 7.14 to notify him that the train had entered the bridge. Normally it would have taken the train about five minutes to reach his box, and he had gone down to collect the baton in the usual way. The five minutes passed with no sign of it, and at 23 minutes past seven he had climbed back up the steps of the box to peer across the river into the blackness, but there was nothing to be seen. He had tried in vain to get through to the south side by both telegraph and telephone.
Finally Smith and Roberts decided that there was nothing else for it but for them to walk along the bridge and see the damage for themselves. The going was not too difficult to begin with, but soon the wind forced then down on their knees and Smith was overcome with giddiness and could go no further. Bravely, Roberts kept on going, having to crawl now as the wind threatened to tear him from the floor of the bridge, and send him to join the train in the river below. For over half a mile he inched his way along until he reached the end of the low girders – and the end of what was left of the bridge. A few yards ahead of him he could make out the broken ends of the rails pointing down at an angle towards the river, and the shattered end of the water pipe which had carried the supply across the river to Newport, but now gushed uselessly into mid-air. Roberts wasted no more time, but turned and fought his way back to where the others were waiting for him.21
There were fewer witnesses on the Fife side of the river. From a window of his house in Newport, former Provost Robertson watched for the train, believing that his son might be on it. He could follow its progress as far as the beginning of the high girders, before it disappeared behind a house and was lost to view. He never saw it reappear, but instead made out two distinct columns of spray rise high above the bridge and then, so it seemed, the navigation lights of the bridge fell away towards the water.22
In the south signal box, Thomas Barclay had telegraphed to Somerville that the train was on its way, set the signals to allow it on to the bridge, and gone down to the track to hand the baton to John Marshall on the engine footplate. He had then climbed back into the box to join his friend John Watt, an off-duty employee of the railway, who had come out with Barclay to keep him company on the stormy night. Watt kept his eyes on the train as it drew away from them along the bridge, able to see both the three red lights fixed to the back of the guard’s van, and the shower of sparks from the wheels as they rubbed against the rail. A sudden flash from the high girders distracted his attention, and when he looked again, the red lights had gone. ‘Something has happened to the train’, he told Barclay, but Barclay reassured him – the train had simply gone over the hump in the middle of the bridge, as it always did.
But of course there was nothing normal about the train on this particular night. The expected signal from Somerville to acknowledge its arrival at the north box never came – indeed they soon found that all telegraph and telephone connections with the north shore had gone dead. Like Smith and Roberts, Barclay and Watt decided to try to see what had gone wrong for themselves, but could only struggle a little way along the bridge before the wind defeated them and they had to turn back. While Barclay stuck to his post in the signal box, Watt set off for the nearby station of St Fort, but finding that the stationmaster at St Fort was out, decided to battle on the four miles to Leuchars. By the time he got there he was in such a distressed state that Thomas Robertson the stationmaster refused to believe his story and sent for a doctor. At last convinced that Watt was telling the truth, Robertson set off in the doctor’s gig for St Andrews, where the tragic news was confirmed by telegraph, whereupon he turned around and went back to Leuchars.23
A BOAT GOES OUT
Back in Dundee, harbourmaster Robertson (Robertson is still one of the most common surnames in Dundee today) had come out of church at about eight o’clock. The service had been held against a background of the roar of the storm, and at 7.15 the minister had been obliged to pause in his address as his words were drowned by a huge gust of wind and a loud tearing noise from the roof. Out in the street there were slates and broken chimney pots scattered all around, and an anxious crowd who had heard the rumour that the bridge was down. Robertson hurried first to the station, but Smith and Roberts were still out on the bridge, so he made for his own office at the harbour and stared incredulously at what remained of the bridge through the office telescope.24
Certainly a boat should go out, but no boat was immediately available. The harbour tug was beached, and could not be refloated until the next tide in five hours’ time, while the ferry Dundee, having been stormbound since six o’clock, had only just left for Newport. In the meantime, while Robertson waited for the return of the ferry in an agony of impatience, at Taybridge Station two men had arrived in response to a message from the stationmaster – Provost Brownlie and Mr James Cox, a prominent Dundee industrialist and chairman of the Tay Bridge Undertaking, which had raised the capital for building the bridge. Their first thoughts seem to have been to prevent a panic by letting out as little information as possible. Local newspaperman John Malloch described how, after they had arrived at the station:
Great care was taken that no-one who had come to meet friends should learn of the fears of the railway authorities, and at length they were advised to go home in the belief that the railway authorities perhaps thought it dangerous to allow trains on the bridge, and that probably it was being kept back until the gale moderated.25
Such attempts to supress information about the real state of affairs were futile. From the central post office of the town there arrived Mr Gibb, the Postmaster, with more distressing news. He had received a telegram from the postmistress of Broughty Ferry, a few miles down the estuary, to say that mailbags had been washed ashore there on the beach. There could be no clearer confirmation of the fate of the train.
At long last the Dundee reappeared, with Captain Methven, the ferry superintendent, aboard. It was now ten o’clock, more than two and a half hours since the bridge had gone down, but conditions on the water had forced the ferry to make a long detour, and she had been unable even to approach the bridge. While there could be little hope now of finding any survivors, nevertheless the ferry was quickly supplied with blankets and ‘medical comforts’, and with the harbourmaster, the Provost, the stationmaster, a doctor, and various other gentlemen on board, set off for the bridge. Captain Methven took her in as close as he dared, before lowering a boat which the crew rowed from one end of the gap to the other, through water littered with planks ripped from the floor of the bridge. They could see clearly that all the high girders were down, and the iron columns which had supported them were broken off, leaving only the stumps of the piers sticking forlornly out of the water, as they still do today. But of the people who had been aboard the Edinburgh, there was no sign at all.26
THE ‘SPECIAL’ FROM EDINBURGH
It was time to alert others to the catastrophe. Station master James Smith sent off the following telegram via the Caledonian Railway line to a Mr Bell at the North British Railway Company’s office at Portobello:
‘TERRIBLE ACCIDENT ON BRIDGE. ONE OR MORE OF HIGH GIRDERS BLOWN DOWN. AM NOT SURE AS TO SAFETY OF LAST TRAIN DOWN FROM EDINBURGH. WILL ADVISE FURTHER AS SOON AS CAN BE OBTAINED.’ [sic]27
The message was soon relayed to the Chairman of the Company, John Stirling, who in turn got word to the bridge’s designer, Sir Thomas Bouch, at his home in Edinburgh. Arrangements were made for both of them, together with John Walker, the general manager, to travel by special train to Dundee, necessarily following the same route as the ill-fated Edinburgh, at least as far as the south shore of the Firth of Tay. They left Edinburgh on the special at 12.20 a.m. on the Monday morning, and having arrived at Granton, crossed the Forth on Leviathan, the special rail ferry designed according to Bouch’s own plan to carry goods wagons across the river to Burntisland, and then on by train again, arriving at Leuchars at 4.00 a.m., where stationmaster Thomas Robertson was ready to greet them. Bouch, Robertson reported later, ‘was in a pitiful state of mind’.
At Leuchars the principals were given the latest information, including a report from stationmaster Morris from St Fort, in which he estimated, quite wrongly as it turned out, that the train had been carrying some 300 passengers when it went down. This mistake may have arisen from a count having been made of all the tickets collected at St Fort Station that day, instead of for the tickets for the ‘Edinburgh’ alone. In actual fact there could not have been room on the train for as many as 300 passengers, and later estimates put the number on the train at 75, though only 46 bodies were ever recovered. The most recent research, based both on the official police report and the death certificates preserved in the National Register of Archives in Edinburgh, suggests that the true figure of those who are known to have been lost was 59.28 Most unfortunately the figure of 300 was included in John Walker’s report which he telegraphed from Leuchars to the North British office in Edinburgh shortly after his arrival:
From the reports made to us here of the terrible calamity at the Tay Bridge it appears that several of the large girders of the bridge along with the last train from Edinburgh were precipitated into the river about half past seven last night. There were, I deeply deplore to say, nearly 300 passengers besides the Company’s servants on the train, all of whom are believed to have perished. The cause of the accident has not yet been ascertained.29