Who built the bridges?

This morning, September 24^th I made a visit to the Shipley Gallery to see the exhibition, Building Bridges which is part of the Reinventing the City programme (www.reinventingthecity.org.uk). The T & W Museums have assembled a remarkable collection of art works featuring the bridges which have crossed the Tyne at least since the Roman period. The exhibition is open till the 12 October and is highly recommended.

There is only one feature which falls short of one’s hopes and the curators can only be held marginally responsible. The viewer can only see fragmentary evidence of the real bridge builders – the armies of working men who laboured to builds the dozen bridges which have crossed the river east of Newburn. It will be argued that the gallery can only display what exists in the collection and in fact only a small number of items show the bridges under construction. This is a fair point. However it would have been good to see recognition, in perhaps a panel, of the labourers who undertook the manual tasks. There are a few examples in the pictures. A series of four photographs by an unknown photographer shows men at work, Jimmy Forsyth shows some construction workers in his photos of the building of the Scotswood Bridge, Muncaster’s painting of the Gateshead side during the construction of the High Level shows a squad of labourers digging foundations and finally there are some film clips from the twenties showing ill clad workers performing many deeply unsafe tasks.

There is clearly a need for research in this area. The most detailed book on bridge building, The High Level Bridge and Newcastle Central Station: 150 Years Across the Tyne by John Addyman, though excellent and well researched in many respects pays virtually no attention to the labour issue. It’s as if the bridge just materialised out of Robert Stephenson’s brilliant mind! The issue calls for research. It will be almost certainly true that the evidence will be sparse but it will exist. Half an hour in Gateshead Local Studies Library after the gallery visit brought a few items to light. First there are at least a dozen catalogue cards containing references to bridge building. Among them is a report of a strike amongst workers on the High Level. Then in a 1907-8 vulume of the proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers is an article on the King Edward Bridge which includes detailed remarks about workers’ conditions and safety. It seems to me that that there is a viable research project here. In a future piece I will try to map out how it might be undertaken.

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