THE BRIDGE TAKES SHAPE
THE DESIGN OF THE BRIDGE
Before any bridge can be designed, especially one which is to be built across a stretch of water, the designer needs to know with certainty the nature of the ground upon which the supports of the bridge are to be built. Bouch was perfectly well aware of this, and in 1869 had commissioned ‘a thoroughly experienced borer’ called Jesse Wylie to survey the bed of the Tay along the line of the proposed bridge. Wylie had already surveyed the bed of the Forth for Bouch, and his report on the Tay was encouraging – with the exception only of some 250 yards on the northern side, the river was solid rock all the way across, below a layer of sand some 15 to 20 feet thick. In fact it was not – much of what Wylie had taken to be rock was no more than a layer of gravel or conglomerate, several feet thick, under which lay soft mud.60
Basing his design on Wylie’s findings, Bouch planned a bridge which was to be 3,450 yards long – only a fraction under two miles. It would run almost due northward from Wormit across the estuary until, just before it reached the north shore, it would curve to the east, to march alongside the river and into the projected Taybridge Station. It was to consist of 89 (later reduced to 85) spans of widely different lengths – ranging from 27 feet to 200 feet (later increased to 245 feet). All but one of these (a bow-string girder near to the Dundee side) were of his favourite lattice design, as incorporated in the Belah, Deepdale and Hownes Gill Viaducts. From its beginning on the south side the bridge was to rise on a gentle gradient [1:365] to the central section, and then fall away rather more steeply [1:74] at the northward end. To maximise the height above the navigable channel for shipping to pass beneath, the ‘High Girders’ were placed so that their bottom rail was a continuation of the top rail of the low girders, and at this section the train would pass through rather than on top of them. The spans were to be supported on brick piers, except for the curve at the northern end, which was always intended to be built on cast-iron columns braced together with cross-ties of malleable iron.
The foundations for these columns were to be provided by pairs of iron cylinders sunk on to the river bed, lined with brick, and filled with cement.61 As it turned out, a good many modifications to this original design had to be made in the course of construction, some of them, as we shall see, of major significance, and with a direct bearing on the bridge’s collapse.
THE ‘SINGLE TRACK’ CONTROVERSY
For reasons of cost, the bridge was to carry only a single track – a decision which came in for much criticism from the local press, partly on grounds of stability, and partly on grounds of utility. The Advertiser, which only a few months before had been urging its readers to invest generously in the Undertaking, was now loud in its condemnation of the single track:
In advocating a bridge across the Tay, it never occurred to us that any engineer would think of running such a spider’s thread over the river as this is to be. If Mr Bouch thinks that the comparison does injustice to his plan, then we will concede that the Bridge will in the distance have the appearance of a clothes line stretched over a long row of clothes props. Approaching it somewhat nearer the clothes props will acquire the proportions of mill chimneys, and the clothes line extends to those of Blondin’s tightrope. If anyone supposes that the Bridge as now planned will be a magnificent and imposing object – an addition and improvement to the noble scene of the river – he is very much deluded. Architecturally it is excessively bald and commonplace. Seeing, however, that it is proposed as a work of utility, we could excuse it not being ornamental, if there were a prospect of its being useful. But what will be the sense of attempting to carry the great East Coast route for more than two miles, suspended between the sky and the water on about the width of a respectable dining table? It assumes immense faith in railway passengers to imagine that they will trust themselves to this tightrope carried, on the south side of the river, at so great an elevation above the stream? Railway travelling will certainly be made a gymnastic feat so far as this bridge is concerned, and those who love something sensational in the way of adventure need only book themselves from Wormit to Dundee.62
Of course it was now far too late to influence the plans, but almost a year after work on the bridge had begun the Railway News was still campaigning for a double track line. ‘The width needed for a double line,’ it pointed out ‘would strengthen the architectural security of the Undertaking,’ a consideration having ‘special force with reference to a bridge spanning a river which is tidal, liable to enormous floods, and open to blasts of wind from the two directions that are the least merciless [sic] in their fury.’63
THE CONTRACTORS
Once he had received Bouch’s plans and estimates, John Stirling wasted no time, and without even waiting for the agreement of his shareholders or the passage of the bill through Parliament, put the contract out to tender. There were not many takers, and of the seven tenders received, four were above Bouch’s estimate. In fact the huge Undertaking was beyond the powers of all but a few, and then, even when a suitable contractor was found – the firm of Butler and Pitts – the sudden death of Pitts before work even started forced the company to withdraw, and a substitute had to be found.
The second firm to which the work was entrusted was Charles de Bergue and Co., a highly reputable engineering firm, which undertook to complete the work within three years of the contract date of May 1871, at a cost of £217,099 18s. 6d. Under de Bergue’s manager on site, Albert Grothe, and with a workforce initially of seventy men, the business of building the longest bridge in the world was begun. On a windy Saturday in July 1871, the 22nd, a small ceremony was held on the promontory above Wormit at which the foundation stone for the great bridge was laid by William Paterson, the young son of Bouch’s resident engineer.64
But de Bergue’s too ran into difficulties. Charles de Bergue was already ill at the time when the contract was signed, and he died in the spring of 1873. After his death, when the firm came under the control of his widow and daughter, it was found to be in serious financial difficulties – most of which had arisen directly from the demands of the Tay Bridge contract. In order to make sure of securing the work, Charles de Bergue had submitted a dangerously low bid, and in his estimates he had made no proper allowance for any increase in costs along the way. His company was owed money for work already carried out on the bridge, while its own creditors were pressing hard for repayment.
Bouch himself took a hand it trying to retrieve the situation. He urged the North British directors to pay for work done, but at the same time expressed concern that the firm was now controlled by two women, and as he wrote later, ‘Finding that the works could not well go on under them, it was deemed advisable to get the representatives of de Bergue to renounce and give up the contract.’ Given that the firm’s difficulties had arisen from the decisions of Charles de Bergue, and not the two women, this may seem more than a little unfair, but the outcome was that de Bergue’s withdrew, leaving the whole enterprise in disarray. The situation was discussed between Bouch and Grothe in detail at a meeting in London, following which Grothe wrote a long letter outlining one possible solution to the problem, that is that the Company should dispense with a regular contractor altogether, and instead employ Grothe himself as overall manager of the project, in return for an annual salary of £1,000. Penalty clauses in the proposed agreement would ensure that the deadline for completion would be met, and further delay in finding a replacement for de Bergue’s would be avoided. The directors, however, rejected this proposal in favour of finding new contractors.
It took a further three months to engage a successor – Hopkins Gilkes & Co. of Middlesbrough – whose senior partner, Edgar Gilkes, had worked with Bouch on the construction of the Belah Viaduct, which they had completed in record time. One of the first decisions of the new contractors was to confirm Albert Grothe as their resident manager, and the work continued without any further delay.65
BUILDING THE BRIDGE
How does one build a bridge of this magnitude? Up until that time, the orthodox method of building a bridge across water was to construct staging along the line of the bridge, fabricate the girders on the staging, and then transfer them on to the supports built alongside. Given the weather conditions along the Tay, in particular the combination of sudden high winds and fierce tidal currents, this was not a feasible plan, and new methods had to be devised. At this stage, de Bergue’s were still the contractors, and they decided to make the parts for the bridge at their workshops in Cardiff and Manchester, and transport them to an on-site fabrication yard which they set up on the shores of Wormit Bay. Here too they built a complex of offices, workshops, and facilities for their workmen, which included at Grothe’s insistence dormitories, a dining hall, and even a reading room.66 Down at the river’s edge they built a wharf standing 80 yards out into the Tay, and wooden staging on which the girders would first be assembled, and then floated out on huge barges to where they would be raised up onto their columns of brick by means of hydraulic jacks.
Before this could be done, however, the bridge supports had to be constructed. To begin with the original plan was adhered to, that is to make each of the piers out of two cylinders of wrought iron, eight and a half feet in diameter. Once each of pair of cylinders had been made on the shore, they were attached to two pontoons, one on each side, taken out to their assigned position, and lowered on to the river bed. The Advertiser explained the procedure to its readers in some detail in October 1871:
The cylinders . . . are prepared in three parts joined together – a malleable iron cylindrical base, a sur-base shaped like a truncated cone, also of malleable iron, and overall the cylinder itself, made of cast iron. The top of the sur-base is closed over with a plate of the same strength as the outer skin, a hole being left in the centre to enable the divers to clear out and build in the under portion of the pillar. Upon the platform thus formed, the interior of the cylinder is built up of solid brick and cement, having also the centre space free. To float these masses of material, two pontoons have been constructed by Mr Austin, bearing four strong malleable iron girders. On each girder is placed a hydraulic ram capable of raising 60 tons, and the pontoon being floated so as to bring the centre between the girders, the mass is floated off, and sunk by means of the rams into its proper site.67
Once they were in place, the tops of the cylinders were sealed, an air-bell was attached, and all the water inside the columns was pumped out. It was then the task of the workmen to climb down into the cylinders and dig out the mud, gravel and sand on the river bed until the cylinder had sunk down on to the firm rock underneath. The next stage was to build a thick lining of brick inside the cylinder, and finally fill the core of the construction with cement. The first nine piers from the Wormit end were made in this way, and then a method was devised of making them as one complete construction on a large base, so that up to twelve men could work inside at one time, thus speeding up the time needed to install them. Once the piers were completed the girders were floated out on pontoons and positioned on the piers, then gradually lifted up as the columns were built up under them.68
Such a description gives no idea of the rigours of the work. Men laboured within the narrow cylinders, or caissons, in shifts of twelve hours at a time in candlelight, day and night, in bitter cold and stifling heat, and always with the threat of disaster, for if a cylinder settled awkwardly on to the river bottom they could be trapped beneath it, or drowned as the water rushed in and overwhelmed them. (Later the invention by the engineer Frank Beattie of a steam-driven pump to excavate the silt led to significant savings in time and improvements in safety.) For those working high up on the bridge girders there was the danger of being swept off into the sea by a sudden gust. As the Advertiser had warned when the first work began:
One of the chief difficulties the contractors will have to contend against will doubtless be the heavy gales of wind from the west. Mr Patrick Matthew has predicted the danger of the Bridge being destroyed by some of these gales. There is no reason why they should blow over the Tay Bridge any more than many other great bridges, but it is not improbable that they may once and again do considerable damage while the work is in progress.69
No-one was more sensitive to public anxiety about the safety of the bridge than the contractor’s chief engineer, Albert Grothe. A popular figure in Dundee, and much in demand as a lecturer on the construction of the bridge, Grothe took every opportunity to reassure his audiences. To those who questioned the security of the piers, he answered confidently that ‘the foundations of the piers would all be on rock’. The piers themselves would be enormously heavy – the smaller 9 foot 6 inch ones weighing some 700 tons, and the large 13 foot 6 inch ones 1,500 tons. He then did a calculation to show that the maximum pressure which would be exerted on the concrete of the piers by the weight of the superstructure – pillars, girders, and the train itself – could never exceed 6 tons per square foot, while concrete of the quality to be used could withstand a pressure of 80 tons.
To those who worried about the effect of a large vessel colliding with the bridge supports he was equally reassuring, and his statement throws some interesting light on the state of bridge engineering of the day. ‘The superstructure,’ he conceded, ‘looked very light, but it only looked so. Engineers were well up in these matters now. It was twenty-seven years since wrought iron was used for bridge building, and it was a hundred since iron bridges were built in England. The duty of the engineer was not now a question of calculating merely the strength of the girder, but it was the understanding and selection of that system which gave most strength with the least waste of material.’ Moreover great care was taken to make sure that the iron used for the bridge was of the highest quality. Samples were regularly sent for testing to the establishment of Mr David Kirkaldy in London, and ‘every bit of iron which had a square section of one inch had to stand a tensile strain of 22 tons, or it would never have the honour of forming part of the Tay Bridge. (Cheers.)’
In view of the ultimate fate of the bridge, one of the key questions which Grothe had to address was that of the ability of the bridge to resist the pressure of the wind. ‘Supposing,’ he put to his audience, ‘that there were a heavy westerly gale and a train was going over the bridge, what would be the effect?’ According to his calculations:
It would require a westerly gale of 90 tons pressure at the top of the pier on the square foot to knock the pier over standing on the bare rock . . . Now with what pressure did the wind blow? The pressure which the gale would have had at the top of the pier which wrecked the Royal George was 21 tons, while he had shown that not less a pressure than 90 tons was necessary to blow the pier over. (Great applause.) But some people might say, supposing a cyclone or a typhoon which visits India were to come here. What would the consequence be? The total pressure of the severest typhoon that has ever happened would be equal to 42 tons against the pier, but then it would require 90 tons before the pier could be upset. (Great applause.) Now where were they to get a wind strong enough to do that?70
A CATALOGUE OF ACCIDENTS
There were in fact a number of accidents which occurred during the construction of the bridge, some of them fatal. Two men were drowned when three cylinders on the south bank collapsed and pinned them down in the mud. When number 14 pier was being filled with cement, a vent which should have allowed the air to escape became clogged and the air pressure built up until it blew out a plate. This in turn caused an air-bell and its engine to fall onto a barge below and kill two men. The worst incident, in which six men died, took place in the early hours of Tuesday 26 August 1873. The accident happened in one of the caissons which had been floated out and sunk into position, and inside which the night shift of a foreman and seven men were digging out the gravel and mud. An air-bell was being used to pressurise the caisson to help keep the water out, the normal pressure being between 12 and 20 lbs per square inch. One man and a sixteen-year-old boy were up above the air-bell, in charge of the engine for the air pump. No-one knows exactly what went wrong, but at 2.30 a.m., just as foreman Johnston had come out of the air lock for a breath of fresh air, he felt a sudden rush of wind past him, and heard the screech of metal against metal. The explosion flung the boy, William White, into the river, where by great good fortune he was able to swim to a small boat tied to one of the barges. Paddling the boat with his hands, he was able to pick up the other engineman, Anderson, who was no swimmer and was on the point of drowning. They were also able to rescue the foreman and one other workman, Farquar, but the rest were dead, either killed by the explosion, or drowned by the inrush of water into the cylinder.
There was no public inquiry, as there would have been today, but Grothe carried out one of his own without much success. The pressure gauge showed a pressure of only 14 lbs – well within the normal range for safe working. Grothe’s opinion, which Bouch relayed to the directors of the North British, was that a coal barge moored nearby had swung against the caisson and broken a plate, leading to an explosion as the air rushed out, but there was no evidence to support this theory. The only good to come out of this incident was that Grothe ruled that in future no shift would last longer than eight hours, and that to compensate the men for the loss of earnings he would raise the rate of pay from eight to ten pence an hour. Altogether the bridge cost the lives of twenty workmen, together of course with the passengers and crew lost in its collapse.71
Not all the accidents which befell the bridge were caused by human misjudgements or the failure of machinery. The weather was often to blame both for loss of life, as men were swept off the bridge by sudden gusts of wind, and for various setbacks to the progress of construction. As Albert Grothe himself commented after the bridge was finally completed, ‘The most notable difficulties in connection with the construction of the Tay Bridge were caused by the boisterous character of the weather on the river.’ In 1872 a gale blew for three weeks without a pause, making work on the water impossible, and in 1874 an unusually hard winter saw ice floes on the Tay which likewise stopped work for weeks on end. In August 1876 one of the high girders was being towed out to the bridge on its pontoons when one of the tugs broke down. A strong wind was blowing at the time, and the one remaining tug was powerless to prevent the girder being swept downriver towards Broughty Ferry. Just in time a second tug came out from Dundee to the rescue, and the girder was recovered and positioned safely on its cutwaters by late evening. A more serious and expensive incident occurred in February 1877, again as the result of gale-force winds, coincidentally involving the same span which had broken away the previous August. On this later occasion, on 2 February, the girder and its neighbour had been successfully floated out to their positions on the bridge, where they were to form the spans joining piers 28 and 29, and 29 and 30. By mid-afternoon they had been raised by hydraulic rams to a height just above their final position on the tops of the columns, and were being supported by temporary lifting battens while the work of constructing the tops of the columns upon which they would finally rest was being completed. At four o’clock a sudden fierce gale struck the bridge, sending the workmen scurrying for cover, and then at 8 p.m. a particularly furious gust blew the two unsecured girders down from their perches, taking with them both their own supporting columns, and the next girder along. Falling from a height of some 90 feet above the water level, they crashed down on the wreckage of the columns which had preceded them, becoming severely damaged in the process. One was in too bad a state to be salvaged, and for the time being was left where it fell, but the other was retrieved, sent back to Middlesbrough to be straightened out, and replaced on the span of the high girders nearest to the Wormit end of the bridge. The cost of this accident was estimated at some £3,000.72
A RADICAL REDESIGN
In some ways the worst accident to befall the bridge, before its final tragic collapse, had taken place even before the plans for its design had been prepared. As we have seen, Wylie’s report that the river bed was solid rock for almost the entire distance across the estuary had been the basis upon which Bouch had drawn up his designs. When it was discovered in 1873, not long after the death of Charles de Bergue, that the report was inaccurate, the discovery inevitably forced radical changes in those designs, changes which were to affect the construction and arguably the integrity of the whole structure.
The basic problem was that, after the fourteenth pier from the south side had been placed in position on the river bed, what had been reported to be solid rock was found to be no more than a thin layer of conglomerate – compacted boulders and gravel – covering a great depth of mud, and of course with much less strength to support the enormous weight of the bridge. At the north end also, problems with mud had seriously delayed progress with the curved section, and when an attempt was made in late 1872 to erect the brick columns for the straight section at this end, the foundations kept giving way. Bouch seems to have taken this serious blow entirely in his stride, and informed the directors that ‘there is no difficulty whatever in making good foundations on this material.’ Grothe likewise was apparently unconcerned by the news about the borings, which, he explained blandly to an audience in March 1876, ‘had turned out to be rather different from what they had been expected to be.’ ‘The gravel’, he assured his listeners, ‘was perfectly safe as a foundation, but it was not as solid as rock.’73
It was thought that all that was required to make a sound foundation on gravel was to increase the area of its base, in order to reduce the pressure exerted by the weight of the bridge superstructure on the foundations from the 6½ tons per square foot originally planned, to 4½. This, it was said, could easily be accomplished by sinking huge iron caissons filled with cement on which the piers would rest. Unfortunately it was not so simple. Bouch got his assistant Allan D. Stewart to check his calculations – Stewart was the mathematician in Bouch’s team – and his conclusion was that the pressure would have to be reduced still further – to 2¾ tons. To achieve this would require not just the enlargement of the piers, but a major redesign of the columns resting on those piers – the columns which in turn held up the girders and track on which the trains would run. Bouch’s solution, perhaps not surprisingly, was to replace the columns of brick with columns consisting of cast-iron tubes braced together with malleable iron cross-ties – a system which he had used so often and so successfully on his previous railway viaducts over land. The intention initially was to construct these new piers from iron columns in groups of eight, but when it was found that even the new large caissons were not wide enough to take eight columns, Bouch reduced the number to six, arranged in an elongated hexagonal shape supported by an iron baseplate, itself resting on sixsided brickwork constructions made on shore and floated out to its caisson by pontoon. The columns themselves were quite slender, some 15 and some 18 inches in diameter, and cast in 10-foot lengths which were then joined together end to end by bolts through flanges. The columns were also cast with lugs on the sides to which cross-bracing was bolted, and where the bottoms of the columns rested on their supporting bases, they were secured by holding down bolts capable of taking a load of some 200 tons.
The new bases were to be massive affairs of concrete, 20 feet thick and over 30 feet across, topped by their hexagonal cutwaters of brick and masonry. Their sheer size and weight required the adoption of new methods of construction. While in many parts of the river bed there was a layer of rocks and gravel sufficiently strong to support the weight of the caissons, in others there was not, and arrangements were made to bring in a team of experienced pile drivers from Holland, under the management of Gerard Camphuis, to secure the foundations. To speed up the job of excavating the foundations, Frank Beattie, one of the site engineers, devised an ingenious and effective sand pump, like an enormous vacuum cleaner, which was operated by divers working on the river bed.74
As all this represented an unwelcome and unplanned increase in costs, to save money Bouch reduced the number of spans, and therefore the number of bases required to support them. The high girders were reduced from fourteen 200-foot girders to thirteen, that is eleven girders of 245 feet and two of 227 feet, while three more piers were saved among the low girders. An inevitable consequence of the substitution of cast-iron towers for columns of masonry was that the bases were now too small to allow for the kind of inclined side supports which had been a feature of Bouch’s land-based viaducts.75
Having made his decision, Bouch wrote to the Board to explain his thinking. In order to reduce the pressure on the bases, he had decided to build the bridge supports of ‘strong iron columns’, beginning the ironwork about five feet above the level of the spring tides to reduce the corrosive action of the salt water. As well as being much lighter than the original brick, he claimed that the new iron columns would have several extra advantages – they would be cheaper, stronger, and would be easier to erect. The only drawback he could see was that they would have to be repainted every three years at a cost of £200.76
THE WORMIT FOUNDRY
It does not seem to have occurred to anyone at the time to ask why, if the iron columns were such an improvement over the brick, they had not been specified in the first place, but the Board was in no position to quibble. The alternative to Bouch’s iron columns was no bridge at all, and that they could not afford to contemplate. But the change of plan was by no means so economical or so simple to achieve as Bouch had led them to believe. For one thing it meant scrapping large quantities of ironwork prepared for the original design, and also, of course, it would require the casting of large numbers of new columns. At this point the management of de Bergue’s (this was before the change of contractors to Gilkes and Co.) made an important decision, which in the opinion of one commentator at least, ‘was to have a disastrous effect on the subsequent fate of the bridge’. They decided to cast the columns themselves at a foundry they built for the purpose at Wormit.77
The foundry was largely the work of Frank Beattie, a former chief draughtsman from de Bergue’s, and one of the most experienced engineers working on the bridge contract. Beattie had designed the foundry as a simple rectangular one-storey building equipped with a small steam engine to drive the lathe, the multiple drilling machine and the fan for the furnace. The crucible for melting the iron was placed outside the building, with a trough leading from it to the interior to carry the molten iron to the moulds. Inside there was a travelling crane capable of lifting a load of eight tons, and moving it to any part of the building.
Both the working conditions and the standards of workmanship were to come in for a good deal of criticism during the Inquiry. Some, but by no means all, was justified. It was common practice for the cores of the moulds to be dampened with salt rather than fresh water, and whatever the alleged advantages of this practice for reducing impurities on molten metal, it inevitably produced quantities of acrid fumes. The iron supplied for casting – known as Cleveland no. 3 – was not of the best quality, and the use of low grade metal led to poor quality castings, as the molten pig iron refused to run easily into the moulds. Sometimes the metal fused with the casting sand to produce a scab on the surface of the column; at other times air bubbles left the surface pock-marked with holes. Imperfections of this kind were disguised by filling them with a substance known as ‘beaumont egg’, a mixture of wax, iron filings and lamp black, which when rubbed over with a stone looked just like the cast metal. Some of the columns came out of their moulds with imperfectly cast lugs, and these had to be made good by a process known as ‘burning on’. Few experienced moulders would deny that burned-on lugs were weaker than properly cast ones, but on the other hand there is very little firm evidence to show that that any columns with burned-on lugs were actually incorporated into the structure of the bridge. What certainly is true is that the holes in the lugs were universally cast rather than drilled, with the result that the holes come out conical in shape rather than cylindrical. It was to be claimed at the Inquiry that these conical holes were partly to blame for weaknesses in the cross-bracing of the columns.78
Problems with the contractors and with the river bed, the need to redesign the bridge, and the delays caused by the weather and various accidents all help to explain the slow progress made in building the bridge, and the growing impatience of the North British directors. In July 1876 Stirling offered Edgar Gilkes a bonus of £2,000 if a train could be passed over the bridge on 1 September of the following year, raising the bonus soon after by a further £500. But in February 1877 the two high girders blew off their piers, and Gilkes insisted that the September deadline could be met only if two new spans were constructed, rather than repairing and re-using one of the damaged ones. Reluctant to authorise the additional expense of two new girders, Stirling agreed to extend the deadline by two more weeks, and increased the value of the bonus to 4,000 guineas, on the condition that on the appointed day a train of forty coal wagons, with two engines and two brake-vans should cross the bridge. After some private misgivings, Gilkes wrote back to George Wieland, the North British secretary, assuring him that the bridge would be finished by 15 September, ‘trusting to your usual consideration should we be a day or two short in our calculations’.79 In the event, the first train to cross the bridge did so on 26 September 1877, only eleven days over the deadline.
SOME EMINENT VISITORS
Not surprisingly, the building of the bridge was an object of great interest to the people of the area, and to visitors from many parts of the world. Some were professional engineers, anxious to learn or perhaps to criticise; some were newsmen, with a brief to bring their papers’ readers up to date with the progress of the bridge; while others were celebrities, whose visits were newsworthy occasions in themselves.
One visitor, in the early days of 1876, was the correspondent of The Times, whose ‘first impression, received from a glance at the works, is the extreme tenuity of the line the bridge will ultimately present. It is constructed for a single line of rails, and its fine outline seems but ill adapted to stand the stormy seas and furious gales for which the river is famous.’ A closer inspection was found to be more reassuring – ‘the structure presenting, on careful examination, the idea of great strength and solidity.’ The observer made his way to the high ground at the south end of the bridge, where he discovered Albert Grothe’s office, as well as the various ‘store rooms, refreshment rooms, lodgings for such of the men as reside permanently at the works, and other buildings.’
‘Here also’, he noted,
has been erected an iron foundry, where the innumerable cast iron pillars etc. to be used in the structure have been cast, planed, drilled, and prepared for use. Below, on the water’s edge, are extensive stores of bricks, cement, and other materials, while two jetties present a scene of much activity as groups of workmen build up and rivet together the lattice girders which are to span the piers . . . Between the jetties singular structures of brick and iron are being put together, while the fleet of floating pontoons, barges, tugs and steam launches show the apparatus by which the huge masses are carried out into the river, and by which the work of sinking and fixing them is carried on and superintended.80
Amongst the celebrities who came to pay homage to the bridge were the Emperor of Brazil, in July 1877, and Prince Leopold of the Belgians, who arrived at Newport in September 1877, crossed the river on the ferry accompanied by Thomas Bouch, and was taken out to the high girders on a wagon drawn by a ballast engine. Earlier that same month the bridge had received an even more distinguished visitor in the person of the former President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, perhaps better known in Britain as the general who won the American Civil War for the North. He arrived from Edinburgh on 1 September, together with Sir James Falshaw, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Mr and Mrs Bouch, and a large entourage of hangers-on. They were met at Tayport by James Cox and Edgar Gilkes, then escorted to the harbour where the tug Excelsior was to carry them over the river (the plaque marking the occasion may still be seen on the wall of one of the harbour buildings). En route they called on the Mars training ship, where they were piped aboard and given a tour round the ship. This concluded with a suitably uplifting speech from Sir James, who solemnly advised the boys to ‘strive to be good men and useful members of society’. ‘There may be generals among them,’ suggested Cox, but this was going too far for Falshaw. ‘If there may not be many generals among you, boys, there will be many corporals among you at least. (Cheers.) You will all get on by good conduct, and steady and patient perseverance.’81
The party carried on to Dundee and the customary lunch presided over by Cox. With lunch there were more speeches, and after lunch came the obligatory visit to the bridge itself, the party walking out on to the structure until they were about a mile from the north shore. Still more speeches, and the presentation of a book of photographs prepared by Mr Valentine, the well-known Dundee photographer, showing the bridge in its various stages of construction. Grant’s laconic comment on these wonders – probably apocryphal – ‘It’s a very long bridge.’82