Death on the Bridge

IN JULY 1890, some four months after the Prince of Wales stepped from the royal train to ceremonially tighten the last of those legendary six and a half million rivets, two brass plaques were unveiled on either side of the Forth Bridge.

One of them bore the start and completion dates of the mammoth construction task, the other the names of the great and good – the railway company directors, engineers and contractors involved.

There was no such memorial, however, for 13-year-old David Clark, a rivet catcher, who ended his short life by plummeting 150ft from the emerging superstructure, possibly the youngest fatality incurred during the construction of this triumph of Victorian engineering prowess, or for labourer Peter McLucas, who also died in a fall and was, at 61 the oldest, or the 71 other "briggers", the unsung bridge-builders now known to have perished in the construction of one of the world's iconic structures.

For many years the "official" figure of deaths during the bridge's construction was 57 nameless casualties. In recent years, however, research has suggested a considerably greater figure, and now a book published this month sets the roll of those who died as direct result of working on the bridge as 73 confirmed so far – with more than 30 other deaths also related to the project. And more than listing anonymous statistics, The Briggers, written by Elspeth Wills with a team of South Queensferry-based researchers, names them, while a wealth of photographs puts faces on the long-forgotten navvies, engineers, divers and others who pulled off one of the greatest engineering feats in history.

"We discovered that although there was this oft-quoted official statistic of 57 deaths, nobody had ever traced the names," says Wills, a historian and author who became involved with the Queensferry History Group. Four of the group's researchers – Frank Hay, Jenni Meldrum, Len Saunders and James Walker – had been gathering information about the bridge casualties, their task given increased momentum by calls for a memorial to the dead bridge-builders.

In response to suggestions that the death toll may have been much higher, Wills reckons there could well be 70-plus, although not necessarily as many as 100. "Over a hundred is often bandied about, but the researchers were rigorous in rejecting, for example, press reports for which the death certificates couldn't be traced, or reports that didn't name anyone, particularly towards the end of the project, by which time it had ceased to be news."

Whatever the true figure, as the book's appendices suggest, death on the bridge could come suddenly and violently: crushing by machinery, slipping and plunging into the Forth – despite the presence of safety boats – falling tools, metal plates and machinery, wind-blown planks … Rivet teams could include more than one generation of the same family, and it is impossible to contemplate the feelings of Patrick Shannon as he watched his son, Thomas, aged between 13 and 15, plunge to his death, landing virtually at his father's feet.

Then there were the often specialised workers from Europe who laboured in the pneumatic caissons, the 70ft diameter wrought iron cylinders used to create foundations for some of the bridge piers and towers. Their double walls were filled with concrete to sink them, and during installation they acted like diving bells, pumps maintaining air pressure to stop water entering while the men laboured in them.

Decompression issues weren't fully understood and men suffered from "caisson disease", now known as the bends, with at least one dying from it. Two others drowned when a caisson ruptured. (Men suffering from caisson disease knew enough, however, to re-enter the caissons at the weekend to ease their pain, an early example of what we now call hyperbaric medicine.)

There were horrific accidents, too, away from the bridge, such as the fire near Aberdour in October 1888 that consumed a contractor's dormitory hut housing navvies working on the northern rail approaches. Three men died. No-one ever claimed their charred remains.

The researchers combed through the archives of three newspapers published during the construction period – The Scotsman, the Dunfermline Journal and the short-lived Queensferry Observer. "We had seven years of newspapers to go through, one of them a daily, so it was a huge task," explains Frank Hay, who runs a website business from South Queensferry.