The Fall of the Tay Bridge - An Unnecessary Disaster: by Ann Swinfen

On the afternoon of Sunday the 28^th December 1879 a passenger train belonging to the North British Railway Company set off from Waverley station in Edinburgh, bound for Granton, on the south bank of the Firth of Forth. From there the passengers embarked on a ferry across the estuary to Burntisland, where a second train, known as ‘the Edinburgh’ was waiting to carry them across Fife towards the city of Dundee, situated on the north bank of the River Tay. Here there was no need for a ferry – only a little over a year before, the river had successfully been bridged for rail traffic. A great storm was hurtling down the valley of the Tay. When the train pulled into St Fort station - the last stop before the bridge - the passengers no doubt were looking forward to getting home at last on the other side of the river. But part way across the bridge the ‘high girders’ over the navigation span collapsed into the raging waters below, taking with them the train, its passengers and its crew.  There were no survivors.

The bridge after the collapse

The Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 is well known to the people of Tayside and Fife. Children in primary schools learn about it; over the years there have been various articles about it in the local press; several books have been written about it; and on the 134^th anniversary of the Disaster, on the 28^th December 2013, substantial granite memorials were erected to the victims at moving ceremonies on both sides of the Tay. One might be forgiven for imagining that the last word had been written on the subject, and that there is no more left to say.

And yet there are two highly important – indeed central – aspects of the story about which there is still a vigorous debate and, as yet, no firm consensus. These are the cause or causes of the collapse, and the true number of the victims lost.

The directors nervously cross the bridge before it opens

At the time of the disaster, the bridge had been standing for barely eighteen months. The longest bridge in the world at the time of its constructions, it was hailed as an engineering triumph. Famous visitors from all over the world came to marvel at its size and splendour, including the Emperor of Brazil, Prince Leopold of the Belgians, and former President of the United States,Ulysses S. Grant. Even Queen Victoria herself ventured out of her self-imposed seclusion to ride across the bridge and attend a civic reception in Dundee. At the grand opening, the Piper of Dundee played and poems in its honour were read.

The opening of the bridge

In the following year, when the bridge fell, how many perished? It has long been accepted that all the passengers and crew without exception were killed, as the train plummeted into the river from a height of nearly 90 feet. What is not so clear is just how many passengers there were on the train at the time. Most commentaries on the disaster in recent years have opted for a figure of around 75, and there is good evidence for this number. For one thing it was the figure accepted by the Court of Inquiry set up immediately after the collapse. The Court in its turn based its conclusion on the evidence of station staff at St Fort station, where, for whatever reason, it was the normal practice for the tickets for passengers travelling to Dundee to be collected. These officials reported that they had collected 56 tickets, to which should be added passengers with season tickets, those travelling beyond Dundee and the members of the crew – a total of between 72 and 75.

Yet there was another source of evidence, arguably more robust. All deaths associated with the bridge were registered with the Parish of St Mary’s in Dundee, and the death certificates ultimately lodged in the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh. These certificates number only 59 – exactly the same names and number as were recorded in the police list in the archives of the police in Dundee. Of these 59, 47 were male, and 12 female. In the event, only 46 bodies were ever recovered. Moreover, from time to time the local press published the names of victims, and the latest of these, on 1^st January 1880, included only 56 names

In other words, the only incontrovertible evidence for the number of victims supports the conclusion that there were 59, rather than 75. Of course it is still possible that there were more, who in one way or another escaped scrutiny, but it seems highly improbable. The great majority of the known passengers were local – typically travelling back to their work in Dundee after visiting families in Fife. It is a reasonable assumption that the same would have been true of any other passengers not recorded in the list of death certificates. Could it be that some 16 people were also lost without family, friends, or employers ever noticing? While there may have been more than 59 victims, if there were, we do not know their names or how many there were. This is why the Memorials raised to the victims in 2013 firmly state that ’fifty-nine victims, men women and children, are known to have died’ in the catastrophe.

Memorials on the Fife bank of the Tay

Then, what about the other key question – the cause or causes of the collapse?

To understand that we need to know something of the history of the bridge and its construction. The rail bridge over the Tay was the first stage of an ambitious plan on the part of the North British Railway company to out do their great rival, the Caledonian, by replacing passenger ferries across the Forth and Tay rivers with two great bridges, able to carry rail traffic without interruption between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. 

The Company engaged Thomas Bouch, an experienced railway engineer, to carry this out. Bouch’s original intention was to carry the railway line on a single line bridge supported for almost all of its length on tall brick columns. Unfortunately it became only too clear in the course of construction that the river bed, believed to be solid rock for most of its width, was only partly so – much of it was in fact composed of conglomerate under a thick layer of mud.

This realisation caused a rapid rethink, and Bouch came up with an alternative to support the remainder of the bridge with towers made from cast iron columns bound together with wrought iron tie bars. These tie bars in turn were attached to the columns by nuts and bolts which passed through holes in lugs, cast integral with the columns. It is generally accepted that it was these cast iron lugs which fractured, rendering the towers unstable, and initiating a progressive collapse of the structure, taking with it the train.

Joints with Lugs

It is here that the consensus breaks down. Broadly there are two schools of thought about the causes of the collapse – either the train brought down the bridge, or the bridge brought down the train.

In the first of these two camps we find Bouch himself. He was firmly of the opinion that what had brought down the train was the accident of a second class carriage coming off the rails, catching on one of the side girders, and ripping the whole structure apart. Some colour was given to this explanation by the fact that there was a known distortion at one point in the rails, caused it has been claimed by an accident in the course of construction when two of the ‘high girders’ were blown off their supports into the river. One of these was repaired and reused, leading to a ‘kink in the rail’ which could have unsettled a carriage as it passed over it. Bouch pointed to certain scrape marks on one of the side girders, which could have been made by contact with a carriage.

Girder No.4

Against that there was the fact that the marks were too high up to be reached by a toppling carriage. Dugald Drummond, chief engineer for the North British, for his part was convinced from the state of the rolling stock, that all its components had remained on the track as it fell.

A recent and intriguing contribution to the debate has been the claim that the lugs failed due to metal fatigue, induced by the passage of trains over the bridge since its inception. But this explanation has not found favour with experts in the field, who have concluded that the operational life of the bridge was far too short for metal fatigue to have set in.

So what are we left with? If the bridge itself was the cause of the demise of the train, how did that come about?

Here we need to return to the conclusions of the Court of Inquiry, which amongst other things focused on the design of the bridge, with particular reference to the question of wind pressure, and the design of the lugs, crucial to the failure of the whole construction. Bouch came in for particular criticism for his failure to make sufficient allowance for the pressure of wind against the fabric of the bridge, although it was clear that even officials at the Board of Trade, including the Inspector of the bridge, Major General Hutchinson, were not accustomed to make any such allowance for lattice girders of the length and type involved. Nevertheless it is the firm opinion of modern experts that one of the key causes of the collapse was the extreme pressure of wind on the fateful night.

The second major factor was the design and method of manufacture of the lugs to which the tie bars had been bolted. The most obvious problem was that, in the process of casting, the holes in the lugs, which were to take the connecting bolts, ended up being conical in shape instead of truly cylindrical. This had the effect of concentrating all the stress of the connection on a narrow ring of metal. On top of that, as a cost cutting measure, Bouch had specified bolts which were one eighth of an inch smaller that they should have been. 

Belah Viaduct

Again, if only Bouch had chosen to use the kind of wrought iron ring clamps he had used on the Belah Viaduct in the North of England, instead of the fragile lugs, the disaster might well never have happened at all. Why didn’t he? Because they were too expensive.

Belah Wrought Iron Clamps

Various other contributory factors have been cited as explanations of the fall. The great height of the bridge above the high water level, which arguably made it less stable, was due to fears of the authorities in Perth, up river from the bridge, that their seaward trade might be affected. That it was a narrow single line bridge at all was down to the directors of the North British – again a matter of cost. That Henry Noble, charged with the maintenance of the bridge after it came into operation, had tried to cure ‘chattering’ in the bridge components as economically as possible by hammering wedges of iron into them, may well have forced the bridge out of true.

But in the end one comes down to the simple facts.  The bridge collapsed in a fierce and unremitting gale for two fundamental reasons – the lack of a sufficient allowance for wind pressure in the design, and the fatal decision to rely on the cast iron lugs to hold the towers together, instead of the Belah clamps. Not surprisingly, Bouch, as the designer of the bridge, was devastated by the collapse of the bridge, the tragic loss of life, and the ruin of his professional reputation. He survived the fall of the bridge by less than a year.

The Tay Bridge Disaster was an engineering catastrophe, but above all it was a human tragedy. Most of the victims were young, 10 of them 18 or under, the youngest only 5. But consider the remarkable escape of six year old William Brown. William lived in Dundee with his widowed mother, one brother and two sisters. In late December, 1879, he was looking forward to travelling to Leuchars in Fife with his grandmother and his elder sister to visit his uncle Charles. But he had been very naughty – the exact nature of his crime is not revealed – he was given a severe beating by his mother, and forbidden to go on the visit. That was the last he saw of sister Elisabeth and their grandmother.

Memorials on the Dundee bank of the Tay. The new bridge in the background.

Published 20 October 2016, the new and updated edition The Fall of the Tay Bridge, by David Swinfen:

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Was Madeleine Smith guilty as charged? - by Ann Swinfen

In 1857 the trial took place in Edinburgh of Madeleine Smith, the daughter of an eminent Glasgow architect, charged with the murder of her lover, Emile L’Angelier, by the administration of arsenic.  Famously, the case against her was found ‘not proven’

The trial excited huge popular interest at the time and subsequently.  Countless books, articles, novels, plays, television programmes, and at least one film have been written and produced to tell Madeleine’s story anew for a contemporary audience. Typically these have focused on a single question – despite the finding of the court, was Madeleine in fact guilty? Or to express the question slightly differently – why did the prosecution fail to secure a guilty verdict?

The bare bones of the story are familiar enough.  Madeleine lived with her parents and siblings in Blythswood Square in Glasgow. Her father was very successful and the family very well to do. In addition to their Glasgow house, they owned a house in Row called Rowelyn, designed by Mr Smith himself, to which the family repaired each summer.  They were eminently respectable. During the week the Smiths were accustomed to hold dinner parties for their friends and business associates.  On Sundays they attended the United Presbyterian Church without fail, followed by family prayers at nine o’clock. The eldest daughter, Madeleine, was being courted by a neighbour, William Minnoch, himself a prosperous businessman, with an income of around £4000 a year.

 

7 Blythswood Square

But there was a problem.  Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Madeleine had been having an affair with a man she had met by chance in Glasgow – this was one Emile L’Angelier, formerly from the Channel Islands, who despite being handsome and smartly turned out, was employed locally as a seedsman’s packer, at an annual salary of a mere £50.  Now formally engaged to William Minnoch, Madeleine was determined to break with L’Angelier, and asked him to return her letters.  He refused. On two occasions after that, L’Angelier was taken seriously ill.  On a third occasion he died, and the post mortem showed that he had suffered from arsenical poisoning. Madeleine was arrested, charged with his murder, and taken to Edinburgh to stand trial.

Prosecuting counsel, as was usual in such high profile cases, was the then Lord Advocate for Scotland, James Wellwood Moncreiff, while his opponent as defence counsel was Moncreiff’s lifelong friend, John Inglis. It is fair to say that as counsel for the prosecution Moncreiff laboured under a number of disadvantages.  The first was a general disinclination, which he may well have shared, to hang an attractive and well bred young lady for the murder of a worthless upstart. In the words of John Inglis’ biographer: ‘The pale but fresh young face, set in the curtained bonnet of the day, the graceful figure, its lines traceable through the lace of a black mantilla, the lustrous eyes and the full quivering lips as she sat in the seat whence so many have gone to the scaffold, caused even strong men to quail at the mere apprehension of her doom. Guilty or innocent, she made them think, not of the crime, or the possibility that her hand poisoned the fatal cup, but of their own sisters and daughters. To hang her was impossible!’

 

Moncreiff addresses the jury at the trial

Moncreiff’s own sympathy with the accused came out in his final address to the jury, when he declared: ‘Gentlemen, I could have rejoiced if the result of the enquiry which it is our duty to make, and of the laborious collection of every element of proof which we could find, would have justified us on behalf of the Crown in resting content with the investigation of the facts, and withdrawing our charge against the prisoner.’

At the same time he was repelled by the clear evidence in Madeleine’s letters to her lover that they had engaged in illicit sexual intercourse.  Of the letters Moncreiff declared that ‘the language in which they are couched – the matters to which they refer – show so entire an overthrow of the moral sense – the sense of moral delicacy and decency – as to create a picture which I do not know ever had its parallel in a case of this sort.’  Both Moncreiff, and to a much greater extent Inglis, concluded that she could only have learned such behaviour from the victim himself – the miserable L’Angelier.

 

Emile L'Angelier

Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps, as other commentators have concluded, because of the traditions of his office, Moncreiff’s prosecution of Madeleine was notable for its moderation and restraint. That does not mean that his approach to his task was anything less than professional, and he sought to satisfy the jury on three key issues – did the accused have a motive for murder, did she have the means to carry it out, and did she have the opportunity to do so?

The obvious motive for the crime must have been that if Minnoch ever came to learn of the contents of her letters to her lover, he would certainly have withdrawn from the engagement. But there was an even stronger motive, which might not occur to a modern audience.  In her letters, she had frequently addressed L’Angelier as her ‘husband’. As a legal historian has pointed out recently, the use of the term coupled with the admitted sexual intercourse, would in the law of Scotland obtaining at the time, have been regarded as an ‘irregular’  but still valid form of marriage.  For her then to marry Minnoch would have amounted to bigamy, with all that that entailed.

Did she have the means?  But yes – she had freely admitted to making several purchases of arsenic for alleged cosmetic purposes, on the advice, she claimed, of a friend.  The friend, however, denied that she had ever offered such advice.

And finally – did she have the opportunity?  It was on this last point that the outcome of the trial really hinged.  It could be shown that on the first two occasions on which L’Angelier complained of severe illness, the two of them had certainly been together. What the prosecution was unable to do, however, was to prove that they had been together on the third and fatal night. Inglis in defence was able to make much capital from this failure.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ he told the jury, ‘from half past nine to half past two of the clock – at least five hours – he [L’Angelier] is absolutely lost sight of, and I was startled by the boldness of the manner in which my learned friend the Lord Advocate met this difficulty. He says it is no doubt a matter of conjecture and inference that in the interval he was in the presence of the prisoner. Good heavens! Inference and conjecture! A matter of inference and conjecture whether on the night he was poisoned he was in the presence of the person who is charged with his murder! I never heard such an expression from the mouth of a Crown prosecutor before!’

And so the case, from the prosecution’s point of view, was lost.  That there were lingering doubts in the minds of the jury was reflected in the verdict.  Not a verdict of ‘Not guilty’, but ‘Not proven’.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that if Moncreiff had been able to prove that Madeleine and L’Angelier had indeed been seen together on the night in question, then a verdict of ‘Guilty’ could hardly have been avoided.

There is a postscript - never previously published.  According to members of the Moncreiff family, after the trial was over James Moncreiff invited both the trial judge, Lord Hope, and defence counsel Inglis to dinner at the family home in Tullibole Castle.  

Tullibole Castle

After the dinner was over, a servant entered and told the diners that there was a man at the door who wished to speak to them urgently. The man, it turned out, was a sailor only recently returned from a long voyage.  He had read in the papers about the trial, and had some important information. According to him, before he left to go abroad he happened to see Madeleine Smith on the night L’Angelier was poisoned emerging from the basement at Blythswood Square in the company of a young man answering to the description of the unfortunate victim. He recognised Madeleine, who had been at primary school with him. What should he do? The three eminent lawyers conferred together. Then they each dug into their pockets and pulled out all their ready cash, amounting to exactly twenty guineas.  ‘Take that,’ they told the sailor, ‘and say no more about it.’

Read more about this case and others in David Swinfen's biography of Lord Moncreiff:

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

The Yelverton Affair - by Ann Swinfen

In 1852 a young couple met for the first time by chance aboard the cross channel packet from Boulogne. Theresa Longworth, the sixth child of a wealthy Manchester silk manufacturer, was just twenty-two, and was coming home after receiving a convent education in France. Charles Yelverton, a Major in the Royal Artillery, was thirty-three, the third son of an Irish peer, Lord Avonmore. By all accounts, the Major was a dashing figure, and Theresa, if not beautiful, was vivacious and intelligent. The attraction was immediate, strengthened on Longworth’s side by Yelverton’s thoughtfulness in escorting her home, when her sister failed to meet her off the boat. In June of the following year, when Longworth was in Naples to complete her education, she learned that Yelverton was in Malta, and wrote to him asking him to forward a letter to a friend in Monastir in Turkey. So began a regular correspondence, until they met again in the Crimea, where Yelverton was on active service, and Longworth was a nurse with the French order of Soeurs de Charité.

So began an intimate relationship which was to result in a series of court cases, in Dublin, Edinburgh, and finally before the House of Lords, as Longworth strove to persuade the courts to recognise the legality of her marriage to Yelverton.

 After they both returned to Britain, they met again in Edinburgh, where Longworth had taken lodgings in St Vincent Street in the house of a Mrs Gemble, while Yelverton was stationed with his unit at Leith Fort.  Yelverton visited her in St Vincent Street on an almost daily basis, where according to his testimony in court, they had sexual intercourse at every opportunity, while Theresa insisted that the meetings were innocent.  In a letter she wrote to Yelverton’s mother, Viscountess Yelverton, Longworth claimed that in Scotland, the couple had gone through a form of marriage.  ‘A secret union was thought of. We differed about the manner.  He preferred a Scotch method.  I, being a Catholic, could not consider any marriage as sacred unless performed in my own church.  Nevertheless we did go through a ceremony together which he assured me was binding.’

 

Church of the Sacred Heart, Killowen

The ceremony referred to here was neither a Catholic marriage, nor the ‘Scotch method’. Longworth claimed that on the 12th April, 1857, they had sat down together in St Vincent Street, and read the Church of England marriage service from the Book of Common Prayer. Neither of them seems to have considered this as of itself as a binding marriage contract. Yelverton later denied in court that it had ever taken place, while Longworth, so she claimed, had refused to give in to Yelverton’s demands that they sleep together until their marriage had been blessed by a Roman Catholic priest. To humour her, Yelverton eventually agreed to travel with her to Ireland, where, on the 15th of August, 1857, in the chapel of Killowen, near Rostrevor, they went through a form of service officiated by a Catholic priest, Father Benjamin Mooney. Longworth evidently regarded this as a valid marriage service, while Yelverton saw it as no more than a sop to her conscience. Anyway it had the desired effect, and for several months thereafter, the couple travelled together round Ireland and Scotland as man and wife.

In December, Longworth went to stay with friends, a Mr. and Mrs. Thelwall, in Hull, and Yelverton visited her there. Then in 1858 they set off again to travel in France, where Longworth discovered she was pregnant. Yelverton left to return to his military duties, while she struggled to cope with a miscarriage and subsequent ill-health. Before she lost the baby, however, she wrote to Father Mooney to ask for a copy of her marriage certificate so that there would be no problem over the baptism of the child. Mooney duly sent her what purported to be the certificate, but according to one account the marriage had not been entered into the parish books, and the names of the witnesses were fictitious.

Then the whole situation began to fall apart. Yelverton’s departure from France was abrupt and acrimonious. He now found himself in financial difficulties, for which he blamed his ‘wife’. But worse was to follow. On the 26th June, 1858, Yelverton married the widow of an Edinburgh professor, one Emily Marianne Ashworth Forbes, who was reputed to have inherited £50,000 from her husband. Longworth learned of the marriage on the 29th. She also received a letter, probably written by Yelverton’s older brother, making it clear that ‘all connection between Major Yelverton and Miss L. should now cease’, and offering Theresa a passage to New Zealand, ‘or to anywhere else she should wish'.

It was time to fight back. Longworth succeeded in having Yelverton arrested and lodged temporarily in the Calton jail in Edinburgh on a charge of bigamy, though the case collapsed for lack of evidence. Then she sought the restitution of her conjugal rights through the newly created Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, only for the Court to disclaim jurisdiction. Staying for a time with her friends in Hull, she and John Thelwall devised an ingenious scheme, whereby he was to claim in court that Yelverton, as Theresa’s husband, owed Thelwall £259:17:3, for board and lodging costs incurred by his ‘wife’. The real purpose of the action, of course, was to force recognition of their marital status, and it was this claim which Longworth took the court in Dublin in 1861. In this she was initially successful. After no more than an hour of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict in her favour, declaring that there was both a Scottish and an Irish marriage. Theresa was the heroine of the hour, and delivered a victory speech, in which she declared that the verdict had made her an Irishwoman.

Her triumph was premature. All that had really been decided in law was that Yelverton owed Thelwall £259:17:3. So it was the turn of the Scottish courts to rule on the marriage. Here Longworth was supported by Lord Advocate Moncreiff and Solicitor-General Maitland, who argued successfully on her behalf that under Scots law obtaining at the time (and which continued so to do until 1939) she was indeed married, on two grounds of what was described as an ‘irregular marriage’, but no less valid for that. First was the marriage by ‘consent de praesenti’, which simply meant that the two had agreed to be married by mutual consent, and secondly a marriage 'subsequente copula', which meant that a promise to marry had been made, then followed by sexual intercourse. It is satisfying to note that Longworth’s first action on the conclusion of the case was to proceed ‘direct to the residence of the Lord Advocate, who had so ably and effectively fought her case, and while tendering her cordial thanks, presented his Lordship a very handsome bouquet.’

It couldn’t last.  Yelverton now took an appeal to the House of Lords.  Despite once again having the professional support of Lord Advocate Moncreiff, Theresa lost the case.  In the next few years she tried by other legal means to achieve her objective, but without success. In 1865, again with Moncreiff as her champion, she sued the Saturday Review for libel, to the tune of £3,000, for an article which had portrayed her as little better than a common prostitute.  She lost again.  But it was by no means the end of her story. In later years she travelled widely, and wrote two books describing her experiences.  Having been rejected by Yelverton, and had her claim to be his wife dismissed by the highest court in the land, she simply ignored the lot of them, and called herself Mrs. Yelverton, or, after the gallant major succeeded to his father’s title, Viscountess Avonmore.
 

Theresa Longworth, Yosemite 1870, Carte de Visite

Read more about this case and other notable cases of the nineteenth century in David Swinfen’s biography of Theresa Longworth’s counsel, James Wellwood Moncrieff:

 

Ann Swinfen
www.annswinfen.com