Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. Deborah Cadbury
became a music hall. Coconut shies vied with ‘what the butler saw’. Beer halls, conjurors, knife throwers and all the fun of the fair brought in a profit for Mr Cohen. ‘Poor old ship, you deserved a better fate,’ Daniel Gooch wrote in his diary on hearing the news, adding, ‘I would much rather the ship was broken up than turned to such base uses.’
When Mr Cohen’s lease expired, Mr de Mattos tried to repeat his success, but it seems he did not have enough of the circus in his blood to pull it off. So, in 1888, after due consideration, the ship which had cost well over a million pounds to build, maintain and repair was auctioned for scrap for the meagre sum of £16,000.
The still magnificent ship, and all the dreams she carried of everyone connected with her, was taken to the scrapyard at Birkenhead to be demolished. At first, it looked as though the breakers would make a tidy profit. They estimated that they could sell the iron plates and various metals for £58,000, but with the Great Eastern making a profit was never a foregone conclusion and, true to her history, she made a loss. Demolition proved cripplingly expensive, as human hands were not enough to pick the immensely strong hull to pieces. This was a ship designed for strength by her creator, a ship that had survived the full fury of Atlantic storms. It took some 200 men working night and day for two years, swinging demolition balls and anything else they could find to pole-axe her obstinate refusal to be metamorphosed into so many tons of scrap. Slowly the layers of metal were peeled away, the outer skin of the hull, the inner hull, the organs of the engine and all the intimately connecting shafts and pistons, until one day where she had stood was just space.
As for the riveter and his boy, entombed alive in the double hull, rumours persisted that their skeletons were indeed found. According to James Dugan, author of The Great Iron Ship in 1953, there was one witness: a Captain David Duff who at the time was a cabin boy. He claimed to have visited the wrecker’s yard and wrote: ‘They found a skeleton inside the ship’s shell and the tank tops. It was the skeleton of the basher who was missing. Also the frame of the bash boy was found with him. And so there you are Sir, that’s all I can tell you about the Great Eastern.’ But the local papers of the time bear no record of this extraordinary story and the captain’s account has never been authenticated. For the time being, the mystery of whether or not the basher and his mate were entombed remains unsolved.
It is wrong to blame the ill fortune that seemed to haunt the Great Eastern on some evil-spirited ghosts. She was way ahead of her time and was to remain the largest ship in the world until the Lusitania of 1906 and later the Titanic. But in the mid-nineteenth century there were few harbours where the Great Eastern could dock and this fact alone limited her success. She was specifically designed for taking large numbers of people to Australia, but this never happened. Those who managed her have been criticised for their insistence on using her for the luxury market to the United States at a time when there was just too much competition on this route. If she had sailed to New York from Liverpool with a full complement of emigrants and brought back cotton or wheat, she could have made £45,000 per round trip. Eight hundred thousand emigrants left Europe for the United States in the Civil War years.
Had her creator lived beyond the age of 53 then perhaps he would have been able to steer his ship towards profitability. But Isambard Kingdom Brunel was gone and, in 1890, his dream disappeared, too. Only the spirit of the man lived on. His friend Daniel Gooch wrote on Brunel’s death, ‘the greatest of England’s engineers was lost, the man with the greatest originality of thought and power of execution, bold in his plans but right. The commercial world thought him extravagant; but although he was so, great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.’
‘There is not a more dangerous situation upon the whole coasts of the Kingdom, or none that calls more loudly to be done than the Bell Rock …’
Robert Stevenson, 1800
THE SAFE ANCHORAGE of the Firth of Forth on the east coast of Scotland has always been a refuge for shipping hoping to escape the wild storms of the North Sea. The safety of this natural inlet, however, is considerably compromised by the presence of a massive underwater reef, the Bell Rock, lying treacherously right in the middle of the approach to the Firth of Forth. It is far enough away from the coast for landmarks to be unable to define its position, being eleven miles south of Arbroath and a similar distance west from the mouth of the Tay. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a storm was brewing in the Forth and Tay area, those at sea faced a forbidding choice: ride out the storm in the open sea or try to find safety in the Firth of Forth and risk an encounter with the Bell Rock.
Hidden by a few feet of water under the sea, the craggy shape of the Bell Rock lay in wait for sailing ships, as it had for centuries, claiming many lives and ships and scattering them wantonly, like trophies, over its silent and mysterious escarpments. It bares itself briefly twice a day at low tide for an hour or two, and then disappears under the sea at high tide, sometimes its position given away by waves breaking on the submerged rocks and foaming surf over its rugged features. An outcrop of sandstone about a quarter of a mile long, it slopes away gently on the southern side, but to the north it rises steeply from the seabed, an unyielding barrier.
For early navigators the greatest danger was to come suddenly upon the northern cliff face. Any ship taking soundings north of the rock would find deep water and assume all was safe, only to learn the fatal error should the ship stray a few yards further south. All on board would listen for the last sounds they might hear of timber being torn and split as wood was crushed against rock. So many lives were lost, along the whole Scottish coast the notorious Bell Rock ‘breathed abroad an atmosphere of terror’.
For centuries the sea lanes were deserted, their wild highways left unchallenged, but from about the mid-eighteenth century the growth of trade in flax, hemp and goods for the weaving industry saw an increase in shipping and, as a consequence, a growing number of fatal collisions with the massive submerged cliff of the Bell Rock. The heavy toll brought pleas for some kind of warning light, although no one was sure how this could be done so far out to sea on a rock which for most of the time was under water.
The local people of the east coast had once succeeded in putting a warning on the rock. In the fourteenth century, it was said, a man called John Gedy, the abbot of Aberbrothock, was so concerned at the numbers who perished there that he set out to the rock with his monks and an enormous bell. With incredible ingenuity, they attached the bell to the rock and it rang out loud and clear above the waves warning all seafarers, an invisible church in the sea.
The good abbot, however, had not reckoned on human avarice. Soon after, a Dutch pirate called ‘Ralph the Rover’ stole the bell, in spite of its miraculous power to save life by its insistent warning ring. Ironically, he died within a year and must have regretted his act when his ship met bad weather and the great reef, and some said a deserving fate, as he and his ship disappeared beneath the waves. From that time, the rock acquired its name and became known as the ‘Bell Rock’.
The coast of Scotland is long and rugged and has many jagged peninsulas and rocky islets. Even by the late eighteenth century for hundreds of miles, according to local accounts, these desolate shores ‘were nightly plunged into darkness’. To help further the safety of these coastal waters, the Northern Lighthouse Board was established in 1786 to erect and maintain lighthouses. At that time, the warning lights to shipping were often no more than bonfires set on dangerous headlands, maintained by private landowners. When the warning fires were most needed in bad weather, they were usually put out by drenching rain.
By 1795, the board had improved on these primitive lights with seven major lighthouses, but progress was slow. They were chronically underfunded, though never short of requests to do more by worried shipowners, and especially to put a light on the Bell Rock. The Northern Lighthouse Board was well aware of the desirability of a light on the rock. Its reputation as a killer lying in wait at the entrance to the enticing safety of the Firth of Forth had travelled well beyond England. However, with little in the way of funds and the difficulties