1879 Two estuaries form barriers to travel along the east coast of Scotland – the Firths of Forth and Tay. Trains from Edinburgh to Dundee and Aberdeen had to cross both, so the early railway companies were keen to bridge them. The Tay Bridge was the first to be built. Of lattice-grid design, resting on cast iron piers, it was – at two and a quarter miles – the longest bridge in the world on its opening in June 1878.
It lasted a year and a half, until one stormy night the combined stresses of load and winds brought the mid-section down with a train on it, killing 75 passengers and crew.
So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Tay Bridge disaster was celebrated or mourned (it’s hard to tell which) by the lines above, from what is commonly considered to be the worst poem in the English language, by William Topaz McGonagall. What makes the poem’s tone so unstable is partly those unruly metrics, with lines varying randomly from eight to thirteen syllables – or as long as it takes them to arrive at those obsessive rhymes. Even in his time and place McGonagall was a popular figure of fun, something of a town treasure, but since then his fame has spread, and he has never been out of print.
By contrast, the disaster was also marked by a much better poem, now almost forgotten. This was ‘Die Brück’ am Tay’, which the German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane managed to get into print just thirteen days after reading of the tragedy.
With scant regard to Scottish priorities, Fontane re-schedules the accident for Christmas Eve in order to underscore the human tragedy. On the north shore the bridge-keeper and his wife scan the south anxiously for a light, the sign that the Edinburgh train is crossing the bridge with their son Johnnie on board, bringing the Christmas tree for the family celebrations.
The point of view then shifts to Johnnie, who laughs to recall all those earlier Christmases when the old ferryboat failed to get him home in time. Granted, a storm is brewing up, but now they have the bridge, and the train, pulled by
Ein fester Kessel, ein doppelter Dampf,
Die bleiben Sieger in solchem Kampf.
Und wie’s auch rast und ringt und rennt,
Wir kriegen es unter, das Element.1
It was not to be. The elements, conjured up by those elemental forces, the three witches from Macbeth, who open and close the poem, bring the pride of Victorian engineering crashing down. ‘“Tand, Tand / Ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand”’, say the weird sisters. ‘“Trash, trash / Is everything built by man’s hand”.’
1 ‘A strong boiler and a double head of steam, / Bound to win such a battle, / And as it races and wrestles and runs, / We’ll beat it down, the element.’