BATTLE FOR THE NORTH
by Charles McKean
Granta, £20; 368pp
Gale force winds had whipped up a sheet of foam in the estuary below. The driver collected the baton from the signalman and the train raced through the lattice-work of the world’s longest and highest railway bridge. It never emerged. In the girders, halfway across the two-mile firth, a second-class coach derailed. The girder gave way and the entire train and much of the bridge crashed into the raging sea. Seventy-two people drowned.
The Tay Bridge disaster was a body blow not only to the North British Railway, locked in crippling rivalry with the Caledonian Railway for the trunk route to Aberdeen; it almost destroyed the reputation of the British engineer, seen by the Victorians as the peacetime equivalent of the soldier hero. The subsequent inquiry became increasingly inquisitorial as the Board of Trade sought to make Sir Thomas Bouch, the hapless designer, the scapegoat.
The inquiry revealed a litany of shortcomings: an experimental design that took too much for granted, trouble with sinking the caissons, poor quality control in the foundry, cheapskate construction, lack of managerial responsibility, insouciance by the ailing and overworked Bouch and an unrealistic timetable imposed by the restless North British and civic pride in Dundee.
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Charles McKean’s account of the lobbying, wrangling and financial crises during the construction is as compelling as his account of the courtroom drama: no engineering detail is spared, no reputation left unsullied. The disaster was made famous by the worst poem yet written in English, William McGonagall’s doggerel on the “beautiful railway bridge of the silvery Tay”. But it was part of a wider piece of nonsense: the race by two railway companies to establish predominance on the route to the north.
Unlike France, where the rail network was planned by the state, Britain’s lines developed piecemeal, as a result of cut-throat competition. The result was wasteful duplication, ruinous litigation and parliamentary petitions and financial shenanigans. Companies that overreached themselves attempted to cook the books to appease shareholders. In the race to Scotland, the North British was the underdog, known for building quick and cheap. The Caledonian won the inland route: its rival had two estuaries to cross.
But whereas the first Tay bridge fell victim to hubris and human error, its replacement was built with caution to a tested, if unoriginal, design.
There remained, however, the formidable Forth. And McKean is as gripping in his account of this triumph as he is in detailing the earlier disaster. Bouch was sacked and his ambitious design for a Forth suspension bridge abandoned. In his place came two engineers, John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, whose remarkable cantilever design, with its rock-like stability, has made the vast structure, 340ft above water-level, a synonym for British reliability. It is well celebrated — and illustrated — in this vivid account. The Tay and Forth Bridges and the 19th Century Railway Wars