Tay Bridge Disaster

The People's Story

Robin Lumley

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780752499604
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Globale Entwicklungsstudien

One hundred and thirty-five years after the event, the Tay Bridge Disaster remains the single most catastrophic collapse of a British engineering structure. The fateful day in 1879 shook Britain and the world of engineering to their core and sent a nation into mourning for the seventy-five souls lost to the dark, freezing waters of the Tay River. Here Lumley gives the collapse a much wider perspective than the event of one night by delving into the lives of those lost to the disaster, both passengers and railway workers, against a background of a wider Scottish history. Packed full of personal tales and with more technical appendices for those that wish to further their technical knowledge, The Tay Bridge Disaster is a must read for anyone interested in this poignant event of Scottish and British history.

1

WORKING ON
THE RAILWAY

Unlike the motor car, which can be adequately controlled by a backward child, the steam locomotive needs intelligence and man-handling if it is to run at all.

Dr W.A. Tuplin

Dundee, Scotland, 5 a.m. Sunday 28 December, 1879. A cold, pitch-black winter’s morning and the upstairs bedroom windows at 89 Peddie Street were steamy with condensation. Mr and Mrs David Mitchell were fast asleep, but a continuous thudding noise against the glass panes woke David and made him scrabble in the dark for his matches.

Outside on the front wall below, a 14-year-old boy was wielding a long broomstick handle with a wad of cotton waste bound to the top end. He gently bumped this against the window glass, hoping that Mr Mitchell would wake up quickly so that he wouldn’t have to stand for too long in the chilly morning air. The sheets of old newspaper that were swathed around his legs and body beneath his clothing were marvellous for keeping out the wind but he was still very cold.

With the bedside candle now glowing through the window, the lad knew at once that Mitchell was up and about. Off he went to bang at another man’s window, for he was a ‘knocker up’ or callboy from Dundee North British Railway engine shed and every night he scuttled around the streets in the wee small hours to wake up engine crews rostered for early duties.

David Mitchell and his family had been living in Peddie Street since moving across the river from Tayport (formerly called Ferryport On Craig) nineteen months earlier. This was just as the ‘Stupendous New Tay Railway Bridge’ had opened as ‘The Wonder of The Age’ as the North British Railway described the structure in its advertising material. Indeed, the bridge had been the very reason for their moving home, for Mitchell was an engine driver for the North British Railway Company.

The son of a miller at Balbirnie Flour Mill in Leslie, Fife, 37-year-old Mitchell was a senior member of the locomotive department and, as such, earned about 7s a day. He drove the prestigious express trains between Burntisland and Dundee, nicknamed ‘The Edinburghs’, as they connected with the Edinburgh ferries crossing the Firth of Forth. He’d done the same sort of trips before the bridge opened and when Tayport had been the northern terminus but now, with the railway link extended across the Tay, he was based at the newly built Dundee (Tay Bridge) Engine Shed, just under a mile’s walk from his front door.

The duty Mitchell had pulled today was irksome. He was to take the out-and-back run of the Sunday ‘Edinburgh’, a turn of duty which he often performed. Ironically, this particular Sunday he wasn’t actually rostered for the job but had swapped shifts with Driver William Walker as a return favour for a previous exchange of duties. How such little moments decide life for one man and death for another … and this was indeed going to happen again on this raw morning as we’ll see.

On a weekday, his usual ‘Edinburgh’ train was scheduled to leave Dundee Tay Bridge station for Burntisland at 1.30 p.m. There was only a two-hour layover there until the train returned to Dundee at 5.02 p.m., having met the Edinburgh passengers off the ferry across the Firth of Forth from Granton.

But on Sundays the timetable was very sparse, with only two Edinburgh services each way as compared with eight on a weekday. Scottish railway companies, under pressure from the Sabbatarians, found it convenient to discourage Sunday travel. It seems that tardiness and discomfort were deliberately contrived. Branch line connections were few and infrequent – in fact most branch or feeder lines didn’t run on Sundays at all. Mitchell’s outward trip began at 7.30 a.m. and involved an eight-hour wait at Burntisland until the homeward leg at 5.27 p.m. With the need to book on ninety minutes before departure for engine preparation, this meant a total duty time of over fourteen hours, much of it mooching around at Burntisland, where there was really nothing to do. A gloomy ferry port in the middle of a winter Sunday was no place to be stuck all day but at least the enginemen could have an afternoon nap in the shed crew room.

Having lit his bedside candle David rolled out of bed, trying not to disturb his sleeping wife Janet. Mitchell, along with the rest of the working classes, couldn’t afford the new-fangled gas lighting which illuminated the streets and the houses of the wealthy.

Dressing quickly, he took a perfunctory wash, using the china water bowl. Then, thanks to a Christmas present just three days ago from Janet, he cleaned his teeth with John Gosnells’s Cherry Toothpaste, which came in a pale grey ceramic bowl with a lid. The wording on the top of the container proclaimed that the contents were ‘For beautifying and preserving the teeth and gums as well as being extra moist’ and that the ‘Cherry Toothpaste is patronized [sic] by The Queen’. In 1879 this was an expensive gift.²

Mitchell savoured the cherry taste as he brushed his teeth with a bone-handled toothbrush with horsehair bristles. Then he tiptoed towards the stairs.

On the way, he couldn’t resist taking a quick peek into the other bedroom where his children, boys David, Thomas and Andrew, aged 8, 7 and 5 years respectively, and wee 2-year-old lassie Isabella were all sleeping soundly. The youngest, Margaret, was still a babe-in-arms and slept in a cradle in her parents’ bedroom.

David Mitchell Junior had kicked out his blankets during the night so Mitchell Senior gently tucked his lad in once more. Smiling softly to himself, he went downstairs to make some breakfast and find his food for the rest of the long day ahead.

After lighting the kitchen oil-lamp, he raked through the glowing embers of the cooking-range fire and, with a couple of lumps of coal, soon coaxed it back into life. Mitchell put a kettle of water on to boil and opened a drawer in the kitchen dresser. The drawer was lined with thick brown paper and contained several soft grey lumps of cold porridge and buttermilk, each about the size of a cricket ball.

Janet had made these the night before, along with some ‘potted hough’ which was a stew of meat off-cuts and pig’s trotters that had now set solid in its own gelatine. Mitchell cut off a sizeable wedge, selected a couple of porridge lumps and wrapped the lot in more brown paper. He placed the little parcels in his food (or ‘tummy’) bag, sometimes called a ‘piece box’. For pudding, he made up some ‘jeely pieces’ – basically jam or marmalade sandwiches. These were a popular working-class dessert ever since the firm of James Keiller and Sons had begun producing marmalade and jam in Dundee at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Now the company’s factory in Chapel Street exported the preserves all over the world.

While waiting for the kettle to boil, Mitchell took a cardboard packet of Epp’s Cocoa Powder from the larder and tipped two liberal spoonfuls of it into a mug. He idly scanned the wording on the packet which extolled the virtues of Epp’s Cocoa as an excellent breakfast: ‘a delicately-flavoured beverage which may save us heavy doctor’s bills.’

With the boiling water, he made both his breakfast cocoa and a pot of tea, which, after cooling sufficiently, he decanted into two empty whisky bottles to be enjoyed as his drink while on the footplate of the engine. The tea would be drunk cold and without milk or sugar, for the era of the tea-can for footplate brew-ups was many years in the future – during the Second World War, in fact.

Warmed against the raw morning by his cocoa, Mitchell set off into the darkness and down the hill towards Perth Road and Nethergate, thinking that Sunday duties were a bit of a nuisance for a family man such as he. No matter, he’d be back home just after eight that night and would at least be able to tuck in his brood with a quick bedtime story: with his children all being under 10 years old they still believed in magic and fairytales. Then he would have a bite of supper with Janet, and some peace and quiet. For Mitchell was a sober and careful man with a gentle face and he had a great love for his family.

But now, the crisp December air was in his lungs as he walked purposefully to work to earn his 7s a day, dressed in clean white moleskin trousers, tweed peaked cap, blue pilot jacket, strong boots and a dark tweed waistcoat with albert watch-chain clinking. What with his jaw-line beard in the fashion of the day, he looked every inch the professional railwayman he most certainly was. A little earlier, his workmate for the day had left his own home at 18 Hunter Street, just over half a mile from the engine sheds. Bachelor John Marshall was 24 years old and had eight years’ service with the North British Railway, first as an engine-cleaner and now as a fireman.³

Mitchell and Marshall worked easily together on the footplate, as teamwork was essential in every way to the successful operation of a steam locomotive. Indeed that bonding continued in off-duty hours as the tall young fireman with dark hair was a frequent and welcome visitor to the Mitchell fireside. There, the talk was inevitably about engines, engines and more engines: the types and classes on the North British compared with those on the rival Caledonian Railway, their features and foibles and every aspect of driving and firing them.

Janet Mitchell often remarked that she might as well be living in the engine shed itself and if railwaymen lavished half the care on their womenfolk as they did on their engines, then there wouldn’t be a happier set of wives in the world! But at least husband David’s earnings from driving engines had enabled her to buy a new mangle from G.H. Nicholl’s Ironmongery Store in Bank Street. The Monday washing day chores were thus made a little easier and the big iron machine with its winding handle now dominated the kitchen.

Mid-Victorian enginemen were the elite amongst the ranks of the working class. Recently enfranchised in 1867, they were on a par with the policeman or schoolteacher: respectable, sober and God-fearing. The craftsmen of the steam age, they didn’t just go to work as other men did – they ‘proceeded to go on duty’.

It was the high noon era of engine smartness, with the gleaming brass and paintwork only seen nowadays on preserved railways. Engine cleaning, using ‘sockers’ of cotton waste and tallow, was a ritual strictly supervised and scrutinised. Dirty and unkempt engines were almost unheard of on goods trains, let alone on passenger services.⁴

Not only were the driving wheels and spokes cleaned but also the areas behind the spokes received attention. The inside-cylinder covers were scoured with brick dust until they shone like chrome.

Smoke box rings, brackets, dart handles, handrails and buffers all received the same treatment. The engine-cleaners would climb onto the smoke box footstep and pull themselves up by the grab rail until they could stand precariously on the boiler barrel itself, clasping the chimney to polish it, and the brass whistles at the front of the cab roof were burnished until they gleamed.

Unlike today, fourteen-hour shifts for enginemen were not uncommon. One driver spoke of being on pilot-engine duty for forty hours and complained, not surprisingly, that his faculties were impaired. When he reported his condition to his Superinten- dent, he was asked to retract his words or face dismissal. He refused and was fired!

Fatigue was found to be the cause of a nasty accident in 1873, in which the guard of the train had been on duty for nineteen hours and the driver and fireman had clocked up thirty-two hours. Some drivers had only six hours of sleep in a week.

In 1877, a Royal Commission was set up to investigate railway accidents and staff fatigue was found to be a frequent cause. The Commission displayed a peculiar reluctance for ‘any legislative interference prescribing particular hours for railway working’. Instead, the Commission thought: ‘It must be left to the companies to work the men as they feel best and most convenient.’

Often there was no proper uniform issue and a driver could be fined if his train arrived late or if he let an axle box run hot.⁵ However, pride in their craft and job security motivated the men over and above any of these hardships. One railwayman reputedly went to church on Sundays proudly carrying his shunter’s pole as his badge of office, so that all should know what he did.

So it was that, having enjoyed a pleasant if dark walk along Nethergate, passing the Morgan Tower and the new Gothic slab of St Andrew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, David Mitchell turned down the lane leading to the Caledonian Railway’s engine shed at Dundee West station (the terminal of that line coming from Perth), passing in front of it and across its tracks to reach the NBR Tay Bridge engine shed which, named like the railway station lying adjacent to it, was a brand-new structure built for, and at the same time as, the bridge was constructed.

Greeting James Robertson, the Locomotive Shed Foreman, with a cheery, ‘Here for the Seven-Thirty’, Mitchell booked on duty at around 6 a.m., ready to drive the 7.30 a.m. departure for Burntisland. The round trip, which carried Her Majesty’s Royal Mail in both directions, was over by 7.20 p.m. on arrival at Dundee and was the last main-line train due to cross the Tay Bridge on a Sunday night. The last scheduled movements across the bridge were the branch-line trains to Tayport, the ‘church trains’ as they were nicknamed, leaving Dundee at 8 p.m. and returning by 8.50.

All very normal indeed – a rather ordinary train stopping at all intermediate stations, not really running to express schedules as if the North British Railway was loath to disturb the lethargy of a Scottish Sunday. So Mitchell concluded that he should be back home in the bosom of his family by mid-evening, as usual. What wasn’t usual was the choice of engine for the train.

Mitchell was informed that the previous night Locomotive Inspector James Moyes had failed engine No 89 Ladybank (or perhaps it was No 314 Lochee – accounts vary on this point) because of a minor mechanical fault. The small 0–4–2 tank-engine had been diagrammed⁶ for the job as was normal for the lightly laden Sunday ‘Edinburghs’.

David Mitchell carefully read the ‘Special Notices to Enginemen’ board, which listed any temporary speed restrictions, permanent way work, changes in signalling or alterations to timings. He then called in at the stores to draw oil bottles (actually made of tin) plus cotton waste in quarter-pound balls for cleaning hands and wiping down control levers. He found his mate John Marshall already busy preparing the replacement engine which Moyes had earmarked the night before and pronounced to be in first-class condition.

It was No 224, a 4–4–0 tender engine designed by Thomas Wheatley and one of a pair on the North British with that type of wheel arrangement. Built in 1871 at Cowlairs Works in Glasgow, Nos 224 and 264⁷ were now specifically diagrammed to work the weekday ‘Edinburghs’ and usually had Sundays off for minor maintenance and tube cleaning.

She was not a particularly big steam railway engine by twentieth-century standards, but for her day, No 224 was quite a monster. Sitting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Terry Jones
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Working on the Railway
• 2 Tay to Forth: Across Fiobha, the Kingdom of Fife
• 3 Crossing the Forth
• 4 Duress Non Frango
• 5 Strangers on a Train
• 6 The Tay and Two Cities
• 7 The Rainbow Bridge
• 8 Heavy Weather
• 9 Iron and Cupar
• 10 The Last One Across
• 11 Train of Tumbrils
• 12 The Long Drop
• 13 Who Saw What?
• 14 Inquiry
• 15 The Rebuild
• 16 Coda
• Appendix
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Plate Section
• Copyright