The Iron Bridge over the Swilgate

[Excerpt from “Green and Pleasant” Sidebotham 2018]

The third bridge is the “Iron Bridge” over the Swilgate.  It never appears to have been given any other name, and its history is obscure. It must always have been a foot bridge, because of the comparative narrowness of the bridge, and it may be “about 1850”, as suggested by Verey.   (Buildings of England Gloucestershire: The Vale and Forest of Dean) ed. Verey) in the Pevsner series.

It depends on what you consider is “about”! 

1 Orientation If the bridge were to be routed from the town, via an alley to Perry Hill, there would be no need to site the bridge at an angle.  There are several sites where the bridge could be positioned north-south rather than north east-south west which is its current orientation.  This suggests a path straight from the end of Orchard Court or one of the alleys, to Lower Lode Lane, across what is now the cricket field, to the junction of the old main road to Gloucester, and also the Gupshill Road, the route to the relatively new town of Cheltenham via Tredington or Combe Hill.   Why was it built?  Now it serves as a way of reaching a Housing Development (Priors Park, 1946), but in 1850 there were no houses there, and so it is more likely to be heading towards Lower Lode.

2 Method of Construction Secondly, its construction is primitive.  It is almost as though the builders weren’t aware of the properties of iron and built it like a stone or brick bridge. (The very first Iron Bridge, built by Abram Darby in Coalbrookdale, which was opened in 1781, was constructed using methods used in wooden bridges). 

3  Primitive Design  Thirdly, it consists of two very short primitive spans and it is reminiscent of any clapper bridge found in the West Country, where there are short spans because of the lack of strength of the stone walkways.  Clapper bridges are ancient, and like this iron bridge, the spans are not archlike.


4 Elliptical Arches in Abutments The fourth item of interest are the abutments with their elliptical brick arches.  They are brick and not iron, and they are elliptical and not circular.  I.K. Brunel built a large elliptical arch in brick over the Thames at Maidenhead in the mid-1830s.  He was probably familiar with small elliptical arches like these, where there was a small load, because although there would be a slight increase in sideways thrust compared with a semi-circular arch, it would not be significant, and the arch would have fewer bricks in it.  The central pier with its cutwater probably causes more sideways thrust on the bridge through water resistance from debris, than it would receive from water currents. 

5 Fixing of Railings/Parapets
Also, the iron parapets/railings are joined to the decks by reinforcing scrollwork in common use from about 1780 to 1810, as railings and balconies in the new town of Cheltenham.  The ends of the hand rails have been shaped. 
6  Previous Comments
This might suggest the work of a skilled blacksmith at the end of the reign of King George III, maybe working to crude drawings not prepared by an engineer.  It is as though the person responsible for this structure had never seen an iron arched bridge, which would mean that its date of construction would predate that of the Quay Bridge by several years.
The bridge walkway is made of four sections.  Only the inner two are made of wrought iron plate.  The outer two sections taper inwards to the narrower iron sections, as though the designer were a little suspicious about the new material., or else there wasn’t much of the “new” material available
And finally, why is it such a substantial structure, when a simpler form would have sufficed?  Why is it not made from wood or stone unless it were important?  Did the Iron Bridge have an importance which has been lost in the last two centuries?

My opinion maybe incorrect, but speaking as a Chartered Materials Engineer, I would estimate the date of the bridge to be not Verey’s “about 1850” (however he came to that year), but about 1800 to 1810, at the latest, which, if accurate, would make it a very early iron bridge indeed, and almost half a generation older than the Quay Bridge and the Mythe
Bridge of the 1820s.   My deductions are necessarily subject to confirmation by someone on the spot, because I am hypothesising using photographs only

7 Dating of Bridge Since I wrote the above, I have come across a map of 1811 in the British Library, and the bridge is marked on it.  This makes the Swilgate Iron Bridge Tewkesbury’s oldest iron bridge by at least eleven years and it is well into its third century! 

8 Reason for just calling it the Iron Bridge Might the simple fact that it was, and always has been called just “The Iron Bridge” suggests that it was the iron that somehow made it different from all other bridges in the area.  That it was the very first bridge made of iron anywhere in the vicinity.  There are comparatively few river crossings in North Gloucestershire.  There were no railways at that time.  Canals had brick bridges so might it be the oldest iron bridge in the Three Counties?     Might it be dated back to the end of the Eighteenth Century?

Comments would be welcome please so that they may be incorporated into my booklet “Green and Pleasant” soon to be available in .pdf form free of charge (voluntary donation to THS) from sidebothamjohnATgmail.com (change AT for @)

POSTSCRIPT

As Kevin Cromwell has stated elsewhere, the Iron Bridge is a listed structure.  However, listed structures have been known to be accidentally damaged and/or destroyed.  I do not know how many times this bridge has been repaired/refurbished, and having seen it again since I wrote the above, it might just possibly be of a slightly later date than I first thought.  I still think it is earlier than 1850, but probably later than my first estimate of 1810 (the bridge on the 1811 map might have been wooden, for instance).  But it IS early, and probably much the same age as the Quay Bridge (1822).  Tewkesbury is certainly lucky to have it, but two things are important:

1)      The bridge must be refurbished/rebuilt/repaired with PROFESSIONAL archaeological advice

2)      The bridge should be signposted down one or more of the alleys from Barton Street, and "Out of the Hat" given information for tourists.



ALSO  There is the remains of a hinge at the end of the bridge.  What was it for, and why is it there?

corona

Different Pestilences, how they progressed, and evidence of how they died out

1  The Black Death 1300s in Europe

This pestilence came to Western Europe and was particularly virulent.  If you look carefully at the stonework in the Nave of Tewkesbury Abbey, it gradually deteriorates as you go towards the back of the church.  The reason is that the good (and some of the bad) masons were dead.  The doctors were dead, the farmers were dead.  There was no treatment and therefore the death rate was huge, and the curve didn’t flatten out until the susceptible people were dead and buried.  Then the plague disappeared because there were no susceptible people left.  The population were not at all mobile.

2  The Plague of 1665

 Generally the bubonic plague that devastated London in 1665 had a very similarly shaped mortality graph to the Black Death.  Lots of Deaths early on, and when they were all dead, the resistant people survived and the number of dead decreased rapidly.  The final disinfectant in London was the Great Fire of 1666 which burnt down about one third of the City.  Again, the population was not very mobile. The other interesting episode in that plague happened in a village called Eyam in Derbyshire.  A contaminated bolt of cloth from London arrived for the tailor in the village and he got the plague.  The Vicar, the Rev. William Mompesson was very highly regarded by his parishioners and he told them to stay in the village for as long as it took. Neighbouring villagers brought food and left it at the village boundary.  Eyam paid for it with money that was left in a container soaked in vinegar.  This went on for several weeks.  Almost half of the villagers died, but nobody ran away.  Mompesson’s wife died. Whole families were lost.  But two interesting things came from this: The undertaker survived, and no plague broke out at all in neighbouring villages. The undertaker must have been immune, and thanks to the inspiration and trust felt by the villagers for Mompesson, everyone stayed in the village.  Isolation works.

3  The Spanish Flu of 1918 

This was the first recorded pandemic, because by 1918, people were mobile, and many were under orders.  There were no effective drugs, death was commonplace, (although war injuries and TB were more common and more expected.  Huge numbers died because most people were under orders, there was therefore no isolation.  Conditions were appalling - e.g. trench warfare, and not surprisingly anxiety was high.  There was a lot of mobility which spread the disease and made it worse because it lasted longer and affected people over a larger area. These three pestilences had tall but narrow graphs.  The numbers dead/day shot up until the affected patients were mainly dead, and then the graph dived as the fewer and fewer remaining victims died. The graphs, (because they are straight up and straight down) record fairly few deaths, but as they all happen over a short time, they far exceed the level of medical intervention available.

4  The current Corona Virus 2019/20 

There are certain actions which look as though they will be necessary in overcoming this particularly insidious pandemic.  It is particularly serious because it is impacting a mobile peacetime society with little or no personal knowledge of extremely high levels of disease, high unemployment, or anything other than the freedom of peacetime and relative plenty.  We need to take our actions seriously, this is not a game. This is not just a struggle against a disease. It is a WAR. Also, the symptoms of this virus are not as dramatically distinctive as earlier plagues, and the disease is taking place in times when we: go to supermarkets to buy our food, we don’t grow it; we live in a “replace not repair” community, and we take personal transport for granted and have jobs many kilometres from where we live.  Very few people walk from their home to their place of work. We are also used to a great amount of personal freedom.

What we must do medically, as opposed to economically. 

We need to know how many cases there are of corona virus We must test as many people as possible to find out. We need to plot this information to establish the shape of the graph.  “Flattening the line” The least lethal and quickest way to deal with this pandemic is to allow it to kill off all people who are susceptible to it.  Unfortunately this would scar our society as we know it, and completely overwhelm our medical facilities.

If we try to “flatten the line”, by using certain draconian precautions, the graph may get flattened, but in doing so, it will take longer to revert back to zero, and therefore, ironically, more people will be killed than if nothing were done.

Consequences of flattening the line Many businesses will close.  Many people will suddenly find themselves out of their jobs.  Most of us have lost our basic freedoms.  Many of us become perturbed or frightened by our new circumstances.  It is important that to keep money flowing, people need to earn a living wage. This is where we get contentious. 

We are at war with an enemy which we cannot see, and which does not share any of our objectives, other than to reproduce as much as its “food chain” will allow.

Because we are “at war”.  we need to act that way.  Miltary hospitals should become overflow hospitals, preferably away from hospitals where corona virus is.  The armed forces have much they can do.  Where, for instance, are our two new disaster relief ships, HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide? 8000 people are being stood down from one airline alone.  Could some of those personnel e.g. cleaners, have minimum retraining and clean hospitals?  This keeps an income in the family and money flowing which can be spent in businesses that will otherwise close.  On a large scale it would help to steady the stockmarket where “ordinary Mums and Dads”, and “extraordinary Grannies and Granddads” have their super in the form of shares.

PROGNOSIS

At the moment, we have severe restrictions on what we can and can not do.  These will, in time, let’s say three months, give or take, reduce the number of obvious corona virus patients almost to zero.  That would be the end of June. However . . . At a given point, restrictions will be eased, perhaps even lifted.  The coronavirus will come back, because it was never totally eliminated.  The line will go up again, not as high, and then decrease.  As restrictions are eased and tightened and eased again, there will be a “ripple effect” of maybe five cycles.  This would mean that normal life (as we knew it a few short weeks ago) will return in about eighteen months, which will be September 2021.

And I already have an engagement in October 2021!

Teddy's Life. A Giant of a Man

The year was 1968, and about four months before Christmas I moved into my furnished bed sitting room.  My first time away from Mum and Dad.  Of course I still saw them once a week when I went for Sunday lunch and did my washing.  (I know what you are thinking.  No, I used the Launderette next to my watering hole, The Sudeley Arms, where I could be sure of bumping into friends while my smalls were tumbling and spinning)  Some of my friends had that effect on me when I was twenty-two!

Christmas approached, and I imagined the feast that Mum and Dad would put on for us.  Turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas Pudding, and Trifle for Christmas Tea.

Calamity!  A couple of days before Christmas, my parents phoned to tell me to stay away.  They had both got flu.  They would be staying in bed.  I was not to go anywhere near them.

So I went shopping.  A powdered curry reconstituted with water, a half bottle of German Riesling, and an individual fruit Christmas Pudding.

I should mention that my bedsit was in a very large 200 year-old house overlooking the Park.  My ex-Polish landlord Teddy, and his family, and his wife's family and children, and two other people of my age all lived under the same roof.

One other thing about Teddy.  He had a tattoo on his arm.  It was a number.  Once, when we were by ourselves in the house, he explained that he had been a slave worker in Auschwitz for six months at the end of the War.  He told me a lot more, too, but it wasn't the sort of thing I'd want to write about here.  He was a lovely man, the sort of person you feel better for knowing.

Just as I was serving up my Christmas mini feast, there was a knock on the door.  In came Teddy.

"What are you doing here?  Why aren't you at home with your parents?"

I told him what had happened

"Oh dear!  I'm afraid I need your chair" he said, as he took my only dining chair and disappeared down the stairs.

I was destined to have a Perpendicular Christmas Dinner.

The door opened again.

"Well, come on!" he said, "I need someone to sit in it!"

So I followed him downstairs into the very elegant dining room, and he directed me to my chair.  There were three in his family around the table, as well as another four in his brother-in-law's family, two or three cousins, two or three friends, and four people from off the street.  Including me, about seventeen or eighteen of us sat down to a full Christmas dinner featuring a large roast goose.

It was quite remarkable.  I was reminded of it a few weeks ago, when I had a signed print reframed.  He gave it to me when I left his house to go to University.  He did not want it, and it was a good luck present from him to me.  Whenever I see it I am reminded of a very kind man who lived a very different life to my way of life at the same age, and his wife Renee, who both gave me such wonderful memories of a very special and unusual day!

Last Night I had a Dream

Last night I had a dream.

I was a boy of eleven again, and I was with my parents.  After our teatime picnic somewhere in the New Forest, Dad suggested that we head for Southampton Water as he had read that there were lots of ships in the Port of Southampton that evening.

Just as the Golden Hour was upon us, at about the time of sunset, we joined a friend with a small boat at Totton, then sailed down to Hythe Pier and back.  Back in 1957 there were no container ships and no container terminals.  There weren't many planes, either.  Those that had to travel, travelled by ship.

A series of ships with white hulls and yellow funnels were moored one behind the other in the New Docks.  These were vessels of the P&O and the Orient Lines.  All of them were moored in a straight line, bow to stern along the mile-long quay.

In those days, the local papers used to have a column giving dates, ship names, shipping lines, destinations, and sometimes even cargoes, so a small boy had much to dream about as he read the Shipping News.

Our little boat sailed down the River Test, past these huge liners, some of which were preparing for six- or even eight-week voyages.  The Chusan was in-bound from Singapore via the Suez Canal, while the sharp-eyed would notice the little blue flag with the white square flying from the bridge of the Orcades that denoted she would sail within the hour for the Mediterranean, Suez Canal, Aden and India.

Also outbound, but not until after dark, the Ocean Monarch of the Shaw Savill line made ready for her long journey through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to Sydney, Australia.

The light was fading quite rapidly now as we passed two Union Castle Liners.

The Durban Castle and the Edinburgh Castle were smart as paint with their lavender hulls twinkling with the fairylights of the portholes, and their large floodlit red funnels with the black tops.

A Red Funnel ferry fussed out of the Town Quay on its way down Southampton Water to Cowes on the Isle of Wight.  Red Funnel was also the company that supplied the tugs at Southampton.  In the days before fancy devices like bowthrusters were invented, tugs had to manoeuvre the large vessels until they were going fast enough to steer by themselves.

Easily larger than the others, the Queen Elizabeth, of the Cunard Line was at the Ocean Terminal.  There was a deep sonorous note from her foghorn and she began to move!  She was outbound for New York, and would be there in about six days time.  She, too, had her two red and black funnels floodlit, and twinkles of lights in her black hull and white superstructure.  Soon, her passengers, film stars, politicians and businessmen would take their places at some of the many onboard restaurants as the ship sailed round the Isle of Wight.  She had four tugs round her, like a mother hen and her chicks.  There was a tug at the front, one at each side, and one at the stern, facing the other way to keep her straight.  They were soon discarded.

It was now dark and we were below Hythe Pier, almost as far as the huge Warsash Naval Hospital.

A wonderful sight!  The two-funnelled Queen Elizabeth, having discarded her tugs, disappeared down Southampton Water, and as she did so, the three-funnelled Queen Mary, inbound from New York, passed each other.

We turned round and headed back to Totton, past the "Mary", which was berthing at the Ocean Terminal.  Past the Orcades as she began her long voyage to India.  We passed the other liners, everyone a mass of lights, until we got back to Totton.

I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Thinking about it, it was, when I was fast asleep.

What a shame digital cameras had not been invented when I was a boy.

Hydrogen for power

Hydrogen we are told is the miracle fuel.  You see, when it burns, you don't get any nasty carbon dioxide.  All you get is lovely clean water.

However . . .

ll those of you who are older than a certain pre-computer age, you will remember the spirit duplicator.  Without going into the technicalities, you put what you wanted to print into the duplicator, wound the handle, and out came some damp pages with fuzzy violet writing on them.  I say, writing, because you could hand write on them.

I mention this, because in my year 9 Chemistry exam we were given our papers, but before we could get started, a very embarrassed Chemistry teacher announced that

"Question 4 is not very clear.  It should read "What is a fuel?". 

What a swizz!  It clearly said "What is a Fuck?"  This rapidly went round the classroom producing "fucks" all over the place.

The following week, the marked papers came back.  Question 4 had not been done very well at all.  Our teacher said that a fuel was something that could be changed to something else and give out heat.

None of us seem to have learned much at all since that day, but the sad fact is, that if you want to produce energy, you nearly always have to use fuel, and that fuel heats up the planet.

If you take a glass of water, you have zillions of atoms of oxygen joined on to two zillion atoms of hydrogen.  You need quite a lot of energy to separate them into the separate gases, molecules of oxygen and molecules of hydrogen.

You separate the two gases, and then you burn your one zillion hydrogen molecules (two zillion hydrogen atoms) in oxygen to form water and heat.

Hydrogen is a fuel, and far from being the wonder of the century, we are still fucked up.  Big time.

So what can we do?  Well, there are just too many people on the planet.  We could kill off the baby boomers, but as a boomer, I have to tell you I would resent that solution.

We need to grow plants which will remove carbon dioxide from the planet, NOT provide food and NOT provide forest fires.

Make everything out of wood, preferably hand made.  Grow pond weed followed by water lilies, and rhubarb, (we don't want forest fires!) and gradually we could work up to vast areas of rice, which could be used for thatching.  This would tire people out until they were too shagged out (see question 4) to do anything except sleep until sunrise. 

With fewer people, who knows, maybe the planet will have a chance.

The future of the Planet . . . and sadly, how to solve the problem

There's a lot of news at the moment about how we've messed up our planet, and the next two generations are complaining and demonstrating about how we have let them down.  To a certain extent they are right.  I own shares in a company that mines coal and iron ore.  Others have shares in steelworks, and more still have money invested in metal goods.  All the investment in the world contributes to global warming.

But we breathe
Cows fart
Trees burn
Dead animals and plants decay

In Science, (you were probably asleep at the time - I know I was!) you learned about the Law of Conservation of Energy.  You know the one.  When water flows over a waterfall, the water loses Potential Energy, gains Kinetic Energy, and when it gets to the bottom, some heat is given out.  (It's a well-known fact that the water at the bottom of a waterfall is slightly warmer than at the top.)

But that's not the important bit.  There's a bit that almost everyone forgets.  The Law starts with "In a CLOSED SYSTEM . . ."  The Earth is a closed system.  Almost every time energy changes from one sort to another, some heat is given out.  This warms the system, which is the Earth and its occupants.

I am sitting in a cool room.  If I stand in front of the heat pump outside, it feels hot, because hot air is being removed from the house.  In winter, it's the opposite way round.  A century or more ago, a chemical reaction between the fuel and the air (logs or coal) produced heat (and using chemical energy, created carbon dioxide!)

The important part of the Law turns out to be "In a closed system".

The more organisms that we have on this planet, the more energy is changed, more heat is given out and our closed system, the Earth must, by the Laws of Physics warm up.

So, scarily, we have to reduce the number of homo sapiens on the planet.  I say that as a scientist with no hidden agendas, not as a politician.  I was born in 1946 and one billion more people are living on this planet now, all converting energy and producing heat.

Somehow, and I have no idea how, we have to find a way of removing heat from this closed system we call Earth.  How we do it, I have no idea, but if we don't, ecosystems will change including extinctions, the planet will heat up, and the last person will die of suffocation when the oxygen level drops significantly.  Whatever we do, ecosystems will change irrevocably.

Why Christianity?

Recently, I've been reading and writing about my home town in England.

Although Tewkesbury should be well known for many things, above all it is famous for its old Abbey. 

Parts of the Abbey are ancient and go back to its consecration in 1121.  Above anything else, Tewkesbury is well known for its Abbey.  In fact Tewkesbury exists mainly because it was the "service area", the supplier of the Abbey.  Christianity has ruled the town over the last  nine hundred years because of its wonderful philosophy of improving people's morality.  Turning the bad into good.  This is not to say that everyone is saintly.  There would be no need for Laws if everyone was good.  The Ten Commandments would be more than enough to improve people's lives.
In other words, if I can stay fit enough, I shall see if I can endure that huge flight (a day AND a night in the air - about 24 hours!) and attend the 900th Commemoration of its Consecration in 2021.
And yet, even with that potential morality, there have been bad men at Tewkesbury.  A traitor, a rapist, a pirate.  Someone who was hanged drawn and quartered.  And that's only one person from one family!
But there were many many good, tolerant people from Tewkesbury, who chose to ignore the Quakers and Baptists a century before the Act of Tolerance in 1689.  And sadly, many Christian warriors who chose to fight the Crusades.
Those people were Christian because they had all been welcomed into the Church by Christening, or Baptism at a very young age indeed, long before a child was capable of comprehending anything, let alone the tenets of a complex religion.  Good, in the name of Christ does not ring true to me, even though I have a clergyman as a brother-in-law, and I am apparently very distantly related through marriage to a Saint!
Think of it like this.


Say I want to go from the centre of London to the centre of Birmingham.  I could walk, ride a bicycle, a horse, ride in a car, a taxi, or a train, or even an aeroplane, or combinations of these.  I could, thanks to the Grand Union canal, even travel by barge!  If I were in the centre of London, and wished to travel to the centre of Birmingham, I could get there by any modes of transport I chose.  They would all get me there.  Some would be more expensive, slower, more inconvenient, but all would take me from Piccadilly Circus to Chamberlain Square.
And that, I suppose is the source of my doubt.  Can we, as Christians, as Muslims, as Jews, as Buddhists, Hindus, and every other philosophy, criticise each other, when a believer in a car, cannot and will not see that a train may be as good, or do the job properly.  Because religious people, by the nature of their religion believe absolutely in their faith, everyone else MUST be wrong.

Trains?  They're dirty!  Why don't I give you a lift in my car?  My son's been in the back seat - move all his rubbish to the other side.  You'll have to excuse the toffee papers, my daughter has a sweet tooth, and she will NOT take the wrappers away with her.  The car believer thinks his car is clean, just as the train believer ignores the ten minute delays at Milton Keynes and Coventry which makes the train twenty minutes late.

Who is right?  Maybe everyone is, in their own way
Who is wrong?  Maybe everyone is, in their own way.

That's why, if I'm asked my religion, I answer "Undecided"