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    What the Victorians Got Wrong
    What the Victorians Got Wrong
    What the Victorians Got Wrong
    Ebook162 pages1 hour

    What the Victorians Got Wrong

    By Stan Yorke and Trevor Yorke

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    About this ebook

    The nineteenth century was an era of scientific advance like no other in history. And no nation gained more from its forward momentum than Britain and her Empire. Railways were built, bridges constructed, rivers tamed and electricity harnessed, to the great benefit of all But progress was only achieved at high cost. Impatience for achievement too often resulted in catastrophe and disaster. In 1879, the Tay Bridge was the longest in the world and a wonder of its age. But on a stormy night in December, disaster struck when the central section of the bridge collapsed and the 7:13 pm train from Edinburgh plunged into the icy waters of the Tay, taking the lives of 75 passengers and crew. One of the worst man-made catastrophes in Victorian Britain was caused when the wall of the Dale Dyke dam at Bradfield in South Yorkshire was breached in March 1864. This released 650 million gallons of water that poured down towards Sheffield at a mile a minute in a 9ft wall of liquid which demolished houses, factories and bridges and claimed the lives of 240 people. The accounts of how the Victorians could and did stumble into appalling errors of judgement offer a sobering counter balance to the often related tales of glorious successes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCountryside Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2008
    ISBN9781846748707
    What the Victorians Got Wrong
    Author

    Stan Yorke

    Stan Yorke is a writer and retired engineer, with a particular interest in historic machinery. His books include English Canals Explained, Steam Engines Explained and Steam Railways Explained.

    Read more from Stan Yorke

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      Book preview

      What the Victorians Got Wrong - Stan Yorke

      INDEX

      Introduction

      In the course of writing other books that have dealt in the large part with the successes of the Victorian era, it occurred to us that that there must surely have been some failures among all the triumphs. Once the question was raised, we recalled the tales of disaster that we had come across in our research.

      We live in a time of development not invention. Throughout the 1900s and into the 21st century, people have been presented with better versions of cars, aeroplanes, trains, telephones and a multitude of other items that we sometimes naively assume were invented by our own generation. The development of an idea is technically challenging and exciting but doesn’t involve the need to accept something that has never been seen before. A classic example is the mobile phone, embodying techniques and components that are at the forefront of modern technology, yet accepted by all without a moment’s thought, simply because the concept was already familiar. Just think how the Victorians would have reacted to the telephone – they simply had nothing to compare it to.

      The Victorians were faced with massive changes of scale. There had been horse-drawn trams for over 200 years but only on short local lines, then, after just a few decades, railways were widespread and people travelled faster than ever before. The steam engine developed from a lumbering giant into a powerful and reliable source of energy, made in their thousands and producing levels of power only dreamed of before. The era also brought completely new concepts such as electricity and steel – probably the most useful material since wood. There were enormous improvements in agriculture, the chemical industry was born and iron ships were no longer totally dependent on the winds.

      It is against this tumultuous background that we must view the mistakes that were undoubtedly made. Many were failures not of materials, the strength of which hadn’t been fully understood, but of organisation and understanding of the concept of safety. Victorian society was run by the wealthy who, for generations, had viewed the poor as expendable. Remember that the slave trade was only abolished in 1833 after years of campaigning. Opium was harvested in the British-run Indian subcontinent and brought profit to Britain despite the obvious suffering it caused. The careless attitude to the loss of life caused by disasters was frankly the norm of the day. To the bosses it was a mere inconvenience, to the wretched poor it was something that was just part of life. This way of thinking goes some way to explain why improvements sometimes took so long to be applied.

      The book includes a wide selection of subjects, some dark and tragic, some almost comical, presented as an antidote to the current thinking that all things Victorian were successful. That so much of their achievement is still with us today and so many of their inventions lie behind our current lives is a sign of just how little they did get wrong.

      Stan and Trevor Yorke

      CHAPTER 1

      Holding Back Nature

      The Dale Dyke disaster

      Dale Dyke Dam, Bradfield, South Yorkshire On the night of 11 March 1864 the newly-completed dam holding one of the Bradfield reservoirs burst causing one of the worst disasters in British history. How could such an apparently simple structure, designed and built by experienced men, fail the first time it was put to the test?

      11 March 1864

      The wind was howling down the valley as William Horsefield made his way tentatively across the new dam keeping just below the top edge to shelter from the elements. This huge earthen structure had taken over five years to complete and was the largest of a series of four around Bradfield. The dams were needed to supply the increasing amount of power demanded by the burgeoning city of Sheffield eight miles down the valley. As Horsefield reached the centre of the dam he noticed a crack running horizontally for 50 yards along the surface, large enough to fit one finger in. He thought it was probably caused by frost but still informed a colleague as the dam was now full to the brim for the first time. After some debate they decided to contact the engineer.

      The moment that John Gunson ran for his life as the dam above him ripped apart.

      John Gunson, the resident engineer, had visited the dam earlier in the day to inspect the effects of the gale and waves on the dam but had left at around 4 pm, satisfied that all was well. It was probably with some surprise that he later opened the door of his Sheffield home to a young man saying a crack had been found and he must come with all speed. Gunson and a colleague made their way by horse and trap to the dam where they found workmen had already opened the huge sluices at the bottom to start lowering the water and relieve the pressure on the structure. The engineer inspected the crack and decided that there was no imminent danger but to be safe he suggested blowing up the weir at the side to speed up the drainage.

      Their efforts with dynamite were thwarted by the damp conditions so Gunson returned to look at the crack – now he was more concerned as waves were splashing over the top and running into the opening at his feet. He decided to monitor the rate at which the water was draining so made his way carefully down the embankment to the valve house at the bottom of the dam. No sooner was he inside than shouts from above made him look back up. His heart must have sunk and his body frozen when in the dim light he saw the earth dam simply peeling away creating a huge chasm through which a dark wall of foaming water now began to pour. The engineer turned and ran for his life scrambling up the side of the valley as the first gush of water roared past his feet. The gap ruptured into a massive breach, releasing an immense 650 million gallons of water down the narrow valley directly towards the city of Sheffield.

      A map showing the main area of destruction marked by the dark strip along the middle. This eight-mile section from the dam down into the middle of Sheffield was flooded in less than half an hour.

      The first village in the path of the deluge was Low Bradfield but, luckily, word that there was a problem had spread among those who worked on the project and, at the first sign of trouble, those who hadn’t already left scrambled to high ground. A short way further on, though, people were still fast asleep and unaware of the night’s events. Travelling at around a mile a minute, the 9 ft wall of water simply demolished their homes. Whole families were wiped out in seconds, drowned in the relentless flow of ice-cold water. In Sheffield it stormed through factories, demolished bridges, and uprooted trees until finally dissipating miles downstream between Rotherham and Doncaster.

      As daylight broke the full horror of the scene became apparent. An eight-mile sea of mud and water, with fragmented buildings, severed rows of houses, and shattered machinery was all that remained of this once fertile and industrious valley. Policemen and volunteers were literally pulling bodies out of the quagmire, some with just a naked limb sticking out, others trapped in their houses where they met their fate. Tragedy was everywhere. Three children were found dead in the bed they were

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