Many happy returns for bridge

IT is only 40 years since it opened and perhaps we have grown used to it now but in 1964 it was the biggest suspension bridge in the world outside America - and it is still the biggest in Europe.

From the towers - often shrouded in fine mist - to the surface of the water 512ft below, from the spectacular and graceful sweep of the 3300ft central span to the unrivalled backdrop provided by its older, brick-red sibling, there are few manmade structures capable of stirring such national pride as the Forth Road Bridge. And together the two bridges constitute one of the modern, manmade wonders of the world.

Today, as queues of rush-hour traffic impatiently crawl beneath the two supporting lines of cable which drape the length of the bridge - each made up of 11,600 wires, and two feet in diameter, they hold in place the gently swaying dual carriageway below - it may be easy to take for granted the remarkable feat of engineering, the human cost and the sheer scale of the challenge faced by the men who dreamed of building a road across the Forth.

That dream became a reality 40 years ago next month, when, six years after the first clod of earth was shifted and work on the bridge began, the Queen’s sleek black Royal Daimler led a motorcade which included Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, officials and VIPs, from the Lothian and Fife, over the Forth.

It is estimated 100,000 enthusiastic visitors had waited since dawn on that misty morning in 1964 - many more sat glued to grainy black and white images on television sets around Britain for the live BBC broadcast. For them, the opening of the Forth Road Bridge, with its 30,000 miles of wire cable, was history in the making.

Four decades on, it’s almost hard to believe that the opening of a bridge, regardless of its design and structure, could almost bring a nation to a standstill. But then, it’s perhaps also hard to imagine what modern life would be like without the vital artery which connects Edinburgh to Fife and beyond.

It was September 4, 1964, when the Forth Road Bridge opening ceremony heralded a new dawn for Scotland’s infrastructure and economy. Some 39,000 tons of steel and 115,000 cubic metres of concrete had been used to build the dream. The cost: £19.5 million and seven lives.

Yet, while the opening of the bridge sparked national celebration, the dream of a road spanning the waters of the Forth stretched back many, many years.

Indeed, it wasn’t even a bridge that the first ferry-weary travellers dreamed of using to get from Lothian to Fife - it was a tunnel.

Ferries had crossed the Forth since long before the 11th century, when Queen Margaret granted free passage on her new ferry to those on pilgrimage.

BUT boats had a habit of sinking or being swept downstream and wrecked. Frequent wars meant ferries would not operate in order to prevent men from the north joining southern troops. And regular outbreaks of plague led to the service being abandoned to halt the spread of disease.

The first proposal to construct a tunnel under the Forth emerged as early as 1617. However, the sheer costs involved and the uncertainty over what actually lay underneath the Forth, meant the tunnel idea never came to fruition.

It was in the mid-1700s when one of the nation’s greatest engineers, Thomas Telford, identified North and South Queensferry as the likeliest points for a bridge across the Forth. But it would be two centuries before it came to fruition - and the intervening time would see that other great engineering achievement - the construction of the rail bridge in the 1890s.

As writer Lillian King points out in Building the Bridge, published to mark the 40th anniversary of its opening, the bridge as it stands today is largely thanks to a determined campaigner, Edinburgh journalist James Inglis Ker in the 1920s.

"He believed a road bridge was all that was required to restore Edinburgh to its rightful place as the gateway to the north and that it would materially enhance the usefulness of the new highway between Glasgow, Edinburgh and Leith," she explains.

"A road bridge would bring these three centres into direct contact with Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy, Perth and Dundee, and provide employment for 5000 men who could be accommodated at Rosyth and would stimulate the steel, iron, wood, cement, brick, stone and lime industries."

Ker’s idea made it as far as parliament and test bores were even carried out before the entire scheme floundered through a lack of funds.

But there was no lack of proposals for a crossing and in 1947 the Forth Road Bridge Joint Board was formed. The bridge was designed, and the construction supervised, by two firms of consulting civil and structural engineers, Messrs Mott Hay and Anderson and Sir Freeman Fox and Partners. The dream was becoming a reality. By August 1958, some 360 workers - almost entirely Scots - were preparing to hand-build a modern miracle: the first long span suspension bridge in Britain. Their work was captured on film by Dunfermline photographer Morris Allan, in a series of stunning images now held in the Fife town’s Carnegie Library.

NOW 80, he recalls joining the bridge builders as they battled the elements on mesh walkways, high above the Forth.

"The [camera] equipment was very heavy," he says. "Carrying it on terra firma was one thing, carrying it on a walkway when you could look down and see nothing beneath you but the Forth was quite different. I always had the feeling that my feet were going to go through the mesh instead of staying on the surface."

Allan also provided a touch of controversy while the bridge was still being built. He created a Christmas card with a manipulated image of his children - with baby daughter Judy at the top of the bridge. But in the days before digital cameras, the possibilities of such trickery was not well-known and the card caused "considerable consternation", especially after it was displayed by his first wife, Betty, in the window of her hairdressing salon in Dunfermline.

The end result of those six years of bridge building work was unique. "It was the largest suspension bridge in Europe at the time. It really was a wonderful achievement and of great significance to this part of Scotland," says Professor Roland Paxton of Heriot-Watt University and chairman of the Forth Bridges Visitor Centre Trust.

The bridge has certainly been asked to deliver since then. In 1964 it carried some 1.5 million vehicles a year, income from tolls was a mere £176,743. Last year the number of crossings had soared to 24 million, and the revenue from tolls was £9,798,341.

"It is reaching saturation point for traffic flow - and that is why there is talk of a third crossing," says Prof Paxton. "But there is no reason why the bridge cannot be around for a very, very long time."

That is perhaps tribute to the men who designed and built the bridge.

What is remarkable is that only seven people died during the construction - in June 1964, when a safety net collapsed and three men plunged 170 feet to their deaths, and in June 1962, when an approach road viaduct collapsed, killing four.

Their loss is marked by a memorial, erected in tribute to their sacrifice, at the bridge administration offices.

It is a simple reminder, in the shadow of their legacy: a bridge that, for many, is more than simply a river crossing.

Building the Bridge by Lillian King is published by Windfall Books, priced £10

An exhibition of pictures tracing the history of the building of the bridge will be on at the Lochgelly Centre, Lochgelly, from September 6 to October 15