As I recall, I was at a concert at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s. Maybe something in the Festival or maybe a school concert, the details are all a bit hazy. The upshot was that there was a raffle or some such and I ended up with a prize, not the main prize, but a useful prize that ended up starting me on a path that I was to follow for the next 20 or so years. A pack of 3 AR60 TDK Cassette Tapes.
I must have decided that these cassettes should be used for something significant. I had shelves full of tapes but most of those were full of the bi-tone scream of encoded data for the ZX81 and Spectrum. If I’d used my prize for archiving my attempts at BASIC programming and efforts at typing in listings from old copies of Sinclair Programs those tapes would have been lying neglected in cardboard boxes in the loft for most of the time ever since. But there was something else in a 7” box on another shelf that would perfectly complement the duration of those three one-hour long tapes, and I’d just got a sleek new Matsui Hi-Fi from Dixon’s.
I started buying 7” singles in 1980. It was a good time to start. 1979 was the year that saw highest number of 7” singles ever sold in the U.K. with 79 million sales, and no real competition to the format. I’d had enough of listening to the limited selection of records available at home and my ten year old self had decided that the time had come to start my own collection.
Every so often I’d take some of my pocket money and head into town, destined for the bright lights and cash registers at Woolworths, Boots or John Menzies. The coolest of them all was “The Other Record Shop”, a new wave emporium on the High Street, with Space Invaders and a poster of The Doors above the stairs. That’s where I bought some of my first bits of vinyl.
After a few years my box was half full and I worked out that I had around 3 hours worth of music. So I sorted them out, roughly in order of release and filled up the tapes with some of my favourite songs. I optimistically named them, and carefully labelled them in HB pencil, Tape A, Tape B and Tape C, wondering if I would ever complete that alphabet.
I bought a blank 90-minute cassette to become Tape D, which gradually filled up with singles as I bought them. I put some extended mixes on a separate tape and filled another with mostly album tracks. Tapes E, F, I and J were used for recording songs off the radio, which I later decided meant they weren’t part of the official sequence, but for the most part, the Alphabet Tapes became a repository for my growing selection of singles. The set of tapes began to expand, each one representing a soundtrack for some part of a year or two, a keepsake and reminder of times and places.
At the start I bought more singles than albums; they were more affordable, they were more collectable, they represented that one song I’d heard on the radio and wanted to listen to again. Not always the big hits, I’d often go for the more obscure releases with quirky sounds and memorable hooks. Most of the songs were new releases, but they were punctuated with purchases from second hand shops and record fairs and the odd album track. A few were from the records in my parents’ and sister’s collection.
The tapes and the records fed in off each other in a symbiotic way. I probably wouldn’t have bought quite so many if I hadn’t had the tapes to fill. They were my personal radio show. Some bands became regular contributors, others were one hit wonders. For some artists, I only ever bought singles, not albums. For others, I would buy all the releases, to ensure I had all the B-sides and remixes to complement the LPs; these would sometimes end up on alternative tapes with pithy titles. Yet again, there were bands whose albums I listened to constantly but never bought a single, so they only made fleeting appearances on the alphabet tapes. Up until around 1993, all the tracks were on vinyl, then the odd CD started to creep in to the collection.
I saw most of the contemporary bands perform live, and sometimes ended up with additional singles from the support acts. As the indie dance rock crossover that started in the late 1980s coincided with my student years, I found a rich seam of music to enjoy, with all those bands from Manchester and my adopted home of Bristol becoming particular favourites. I was a festival regular at Glastonbury from 1992 to 2000, often with a ticket to perform with Rag Morris, and many of the artists featured in my record collection performed there over these years.
I finally completed Tape Z, the collection representing 18 years’ worth of songs; the continuing mission had been accomplished. I kept making tapes for another few years until one day, or so it seemed, the displays of chart singles just disappeared from most of the record shops.
The pop charts started counting digital downloads and streaming to add to the sales figures, which eventually superseded physical sales altogether. Although I’d stopped watching it regularly, the end of the weekly edition Top of the Pops in 2006 was another effect, or cause, of the decline of the single. The definition of what a single was became rather elusive. It was no longer about the purchase and possession of a physical object, with the cost supporting the retailer and the supply chain back to the performers, writers and copyright holders. The streaming model didn’t seem to benefit the producers in the same way. I was always a late adopter, and in no hurry to sign up.
Around that time, then, I made my last mix tape. Visits to record shops became less frequent, especially as many of the best ones were closing down. Other priorities took over. It was time to move on and leave the pop charts to the next generation, which is quite as it should be.
Eventually the tapes were left in various cassette boxes which then started to be neglected as the cassette players started to break or get replaced with more high-tech alternatives.
And so it was that during the lockdown we ended up with a family subscription to Spotify. Feeling a bit guilty at first about listening to music that I didn’t feel I already owned, I started a process of spotification of my alphabet tapes. I’ve found that the vast majority of the tracks were already available in one form or another, even if some of the more obscure remixes aren’t available and various artists appear to have a policy of holding back on an album or two.
The tapes have got a bit scattered and some of my favourites are currently missing in action. Some of them I hadn’t listened to for twenty years. Some of the later tapes are a bit lacking in diversity, but each tune was chosen on its own merits. I was pleased found that I still appreciated the musical tastes of my younger selves.
Given the open-plan nature of Spotify playlists I thought it would be fun to put them up on my blog and preserve them for some sort of posterity. It’s an eclectic mix, probably not all to everyone’s taste. I hope you find something you like.
I used to buy a lot of singles. As I bought them, I recorded them onto an alphabetically arranged sequence of cassette tapes, for ease of listening. I’ve always been a bit of a late adopter, but now that I’ve got access to Spotify, I’ve revisited some of those old tapes, and started to replicate the contents of those tapes as closely as possible as playlists, again for ease of listening.
There are a few gaps in transmission which may be filled at some point. [Update – they are now!] The date indicates when the tape was compiled. Most of the songs on each tape were from that date or thereabouts but some songs were from older singles or albums that I happened to find, or be listening to at that time.
I thought I’d post this up on Record Store Day 2020 for anyone who might like to peruse someone else’s record collection. There’s a longer explanation here:
Rag Morris Mummers are currently in lock down and won’t be mumming for the foreseeable future, so to keep us all entertained during these days of isolation here’s a chance to see the full production of our mummers’ play, “The Nine Lives of Isambard Kingdom Brunel”.
This was a performance from 30th April 2011, filmed just outside the SS Great Britain, shortly before we took the play to the main stage of the Colston Hall for the inaugural Bristol Folk Festival.
We’ve just seen the anniversary of the birth of Marc Isambard Brunel on 25 April, and it’s a couple of weeks after Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s birthday on 9th April, so please consider this to be a fashionably late Birthday Present.
The Nineteen Lives
The play has been performed a number of times over the years since it was premiered in 2009.
The following list includes all public performances of the Brunel play, so far…
Date
Time
Location
Notes
12 September 2009
10:00
Zion Hill, near Clifton Suspension Bridge
World Premiere! Bristol Doors Open Day Bristol Poetry Festival
12 September 2009
11:30
Underfall Yard
As above
12 September 2009
12:30
SS Great Britain
As above
12 September 2009
14:30
Queen Square
As above
12 September 2009
15:30
Temple Meads Passenger Shed
As above
15 September 2009
19:30
Anchor Square, At-Bristol
150th Anniversary of Brunel’s death
29 September 2009
21:00
The Mansion House, Clifton Down, Bristol
Performance for the Lord Mayor!
3 July 2010
20:00
Great Western Morris 40th Anniversary, Christow.
“2 Lives” cutdown version
30 April 2011
11:30
SS Great Britain
Bristol Folk Festival warm-up
30 April 2011
12:30
M-Shed
As above
30 April 2011
14:00
Colston Hall, Main Stage
Bristol Folk Festival
24 September 2011
21:00
Woodhouse Park
Rag Morris 30th Anniverary Weekend
17 November 2011
21:15
Chapel Arts Centre, Bath
Bath Mummers Unconvention Mumming UnPlugged
19 November 2011
10.30
North Parade, Bath (Near the Huntsman pub)
Bath Mummers Unconvention
19 November 2011
11.10
Bath Abbey Churchyard (Near the West Door)
As above
19 November 2011
14.00
Old Bond St, Bath (North end)
As above
8 July 2018
11:00
Priddy Folk Festival, Eastwater Marquee
Nine Lives – 9th anniversary revival
21 July 2018
12:00
Brunel Square
Bristol Harbour Festival
21 July 2018
14:00
M-Shed
As above
Rag Morris Mummers meet Wallambard after performing at Bristol Harbour Festival 2018
Marc Isambard Brunel was born on this day, 25 April 1769. A prodigious inventor, he helped develop automation in the manufacturing process, and built the Thames Tunnel, which at the time was considered the Eighth Wonder of the World. His life, work and legacy has been overshadowed by that of his indefatigable son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but it’s fair to say that Isambard’s early life and career were guided, influenced and engineered by Marc, who was happy to lend a hand and in some cases, such as his help with designing the Clifton Bridge, let his son take the credit. Stories from his life wouldn’t seem out of place in a Charles Dickens novel; from an escape from revolutionary France, to time in a Debtor’s prison. If there was ever a biopic or (let’s hope!) miniseries based on the life and work of the Brunels, then the relationship between father and son would no doubt form the emotional core.
The Robert Howlett portrait of Isambard taken before the launch of the Great Eastern is one of the most well-known portraits of the Victorian era, but the appearance of his father is somewhat less familiar. To mark the Birthday of Marc, I reproduce two portraits of the other Brunel.
Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849) by Unknown photographer daguerreotype, circa 1845 3 3/4 in. x 2 3/4 in. (95 mm x 70 mm) National Portrait Gallery Purchased, 1994
The above photograph is from the National Portrait Gallery collection. Whilst nowhere near as famous as the portraits of Isambard taken 12 years later it nevertheless gives a fascinating glimpse into the life of Marc Brunel. It was taken two years after the opening of the Thames Tunnel, the project that would eventually become his most enduring achievement.
The National Portrait Gallery website suggested that this was probably the only photograph of the sitter, however I was delighted to see the following image posted today on the SS Great Britain’s twitter feed. It looks very much like this was taken as part of the same photographic session. As a daguerreotypes, they were each unique images, as no negative would have existed to create additional prints.
Happy Birthday to Sir Marc Brunel, born #OnThisDay in 1769. 🎉
Here's a miniature daguerreotype portrait, by courtesy of Margaret Albury, great great granddaughter of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. pic.twitter.com/xTvrZbvft1
— Brunel's SS Great Britain (@SSGreatBritain) April 25, 2020
During his life, he was also known as Isambard Brunel; the legacy of his son was such that Marc has retrospectively been referred to by his first name. I think that the above images help reclaim the identity of the original.
On 8 June 2019 it was announced that the early May Day Bank Holiday in 2020 will be moved back four days to coincide with the 75th anniversary of V.E. Day. Monday, May 4th, 2020 will no longer be a public holiday; instead we’ll be given the day off on Friday May 8th to mark Victory in Europe Day, a defining moment in history which took place in the closing stages of World War II. What difference does that make? For some of us, quite a bit.
To change the date of a public holiday with no forewarning, no public discussion and only 11 months’ notice was always going to cause problems. The first headlines concerned ruined wedding plans. Brides-to-be and grooms-to-be having to change plans after their guests could no longer commit to attending on the shortened weekend. Many people book return visits to their holiday destinations a year in advance, so to change the date of a public holiday in less than that timescale has led to confusion both for travellers and the holiday industry. Schools have had to reschedule exams. Printers have had to pulp thousands of diaries and calendars which included the dates for a public holiday which subsequently has been changed.
But the main concern to those of us who inhabit the Folk World is that the first Monday in May is a traditional coda of a long weekend of folk festivities and festivals, with events large and small taking place across the country. Starting on May 1st itself, there are celebrations of May Day and Beltane across the United Kingdom, often starting at sunrise or even the night before; with fires and bonfires on Calton Hill in Edinburgh; a choir on the tower of Magdelen College in Oxford, and Morris Dancers across the land setting their alarms for the middle of the night so they can be ready to climb an appropriate hill or visit a site of particularly special significance to Dance at Dawn. Many of these May Day events don’t have a long continuous history but they are revivals of older celebrations which along with newer customs have become part of a living, evolving tradition.
May Day has been celebrated as the start of Summer since Roman Times; traditions and celebrations are found in many cultures. It’s one of the cross-quarter days, halfway between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. The appropriation of May Day in the socialist calendar as International Worker’s Day since the late 19th Century complements the traditional celebration without diminishing or replacing it. The Public Holiday in the United Kingdom was established in 1978 to mirror Labour Day holidays taken across the world. It’s one of the few international public holidays that isn’t linked to an established religious festival. The late May Bank Holiday by contrast, on the last Monday in May, is generally linked to Whitsun or Pentecost.
For last few years May Day has been isolated in the middle of the week before the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, but 2020 had all the ingredients for a classic long weekend. May 1st falls on a Friday; this would be followed by a long weekend of celebrations; a four day long festival, lasting from dawn on Friday until Monday night. Major folk events across the country that take place on the May Bank Holiday Weekend every year include the Upton-upon-Severn Folk Festival, Hastings Jack-In-The-Green, and the Rochester Sweeps Festival. Bristol’s May celebrations will commence with dancing at dawn on Brandon Hill and Castle Park. The weekend will continue with the Jack-In-The-Green procession, which always takes place on the first Saturday in May and possibly a continuation of the revival of the Bristol Folk Festival, which took place again in 2019 after a few fallow years.
Some of these major events book artists and venues years in advance; they may depend on local schools and playing fields to provide accommodation and campsites; and more importantly they expect to be able to draw in the crowds on a Bank Holiday Monday to provide an audience. Removing the May Day Bank Holiday next year will affect all these things and will diminish the casual audience who won’t necessarily want to take a day’s annual leave in order to participate in these events, especially if it’s an ordinary school day. (Perhaps we could start a campaign for all schools to have an INSET day). The organisers of large and small events across the country, are having to make difficult decisions about whether to curtail their plans, continue with plans for hosting events on May the 4th, or reschedule for the following weekend, where the traditional events planned may not be appropriate for a weekend commemorating the anniversary of the end of armed conflict in Europe in the final months of World War Two.
The commemoration of the 75th anniversary of V.E. day is important. This will be the final “quarter century” anniversary for those who fought in the conflict and for most of those who lived through it; it is a time for both celebration and quiet reflection. It is a matter for discussion whether it deserves its own Bank Holiday more than the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War – which happened last year without one – or whether the commemorations could be encapsulated within the adjacent weekend; in the same way that armistice day parades and memorials have traditionally taken place on the Sunday following November 11th. The Acts of Remembrance in November are part of the national calendar; the anniversary of V.E. day is not something that is regularly marked in the same way, which is why this announcement caught so many people by surprise.
It is also a matter for debate whether an additional Bank Holiday should be offered instead of moving an existing one, so that the May Day Bank Holiday can be celebrated in its traditional form without disrupting those people and organisations who have had well-established events thrown into turmoil.
The same shift in Bank Holidays happened once before in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, when the Bank Holiday Monday was moved from 1st to 8th May. Perhaps then it didn’t feel so awkward as it was still technically the weekend “following May Day”; and I suspect it was announced with more than 11 months’ notice. Since then we have seen additional Bank Holidays being offered in 1999 for the Millennium Celebrations; for Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 2002 and 2012 and for the Royal Wedding in 2011. So, “moving” a bank holiday is historically far less common than offering an additional one.
Unfortunately, the debate and discussion about the move of these dates was non-existent and the announcement of the change was late – to the point of rudeness.
This has led to the second set of headlines, with lurid tales of “Furious Morris dancers who plan to march on Parliament”. The rebellion has begun; with a Facebook group and a petition to parliament and a plan to assemble outside the House of Commons on Tuesday the 23rd of July to make their feelings known. [Episode I – The Folkie Menace]
While I whole-heartedly support their activities and wish them every success, I’m afraid I can’t join them; for me it doesn’t seem sensible to take an extra day’s annual leave to travel to London, especially as I’ll have to save up my holiday in order to take an extra day off on May the 4th next year. Good luck and may your protests be peaceful and effective! However, I fear that any publicity for an event outside the House of Commons on this 23rd of July will be somewhat overshadowed by events inside. [Episode II – Attack of the Clowns]
It also seems rather disingenuous of our duplicitous Government to be encouraging us to celebrate “Victory in Europe” at the same time as tearing us out of the European Union. The Victory in 1945 was of Allies from across the world united in their resistance of a tyrannical ideology; it wasn’t about one country versus another. The partnerships forged after that conflict have helped preserve the peace on our continent, more or less, for the last 75 years. It seems absurd to be breaking those chains and attempting to stand alone. I’m afraid that the celebration of V.E. day will be recast in the shadow of the populist right and misunderstood by our conflicted and humiliated nation – especially as it appears to have usurped a more traditionally socialist holiday . [Episode III – Revenge of the Sith]
Finally, I’ve got one more reason why I support the retention of the May Day Bank Holiday, and the addition of a new Public Holiday to mark 75 years since V.E. day. I’m old enough to have seen the original Star Wars movie when it was first released, and I was born on the 4th of May. I happen to have a Significant Birthday next year, and I was hoping to spend the day off work with family and friends. I’d realised that this particular day was going to be on a Bank Holiday a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) and I was rather looking forward to it. I was even in the contemplation for a new mummers’ play for the occasion. And now that’s all in jeopardy.
With so much going wrong in the world, perhaps it seems unnecessary to focus on one disappointment out of so many. But sometimes our conflicts choose us. [Episode IV – A New Hope]
I have placed information vital to the survival of the morris rebellion into the memory systems of this WordPress unit.
Help me, Jack-In-The-Green, says I, you’re my only hope.
I didn’t mean to write a mummer’s play. They say you should write about what you know, and I didn’t know very much about mumming, not at first.
I’ve been a morris dancer for many years. Almost ten years ago, for a creative writing challenge, I started by writing a three act play about the rivalry between fictional morris dance sides. The play would include various types of events that morris dance sides are often involved with. The middle act would be based around a mummer’s play that one of the morris sides would perform. As the story was set in Bristol, I decided that the mummers play would be about a local hero and my first choice was the civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
By the time I’d finished writing the middle act, it was obvious that this was the part of the story that I’d expended all my energy on and the rest was quickly forgotten. The mummers play would take on a life of its own, not least because I was a long standing member of Rag Morris, a non-fictional morris dance side who would prove to be interested in performing that mummers play in its entirety.
When I first started, the only mummers play script I had a copy of was the last original mummers play that Rag Morris had staged in public. This was the story of Vincent and Goram, two legendary giants who were said to have carved out the Avon Gorge, a spectacular river valley next to the City of Bristol. That play was composed by local artist, author and former Rag Morris dancer Marc Vyvyan-Jones, with help from Roland and Linda Clare. Because that play was fairly loosely based on mumming play conventions, I figured that I would write my play to tell its own story with characters based on mumming archetypes and some of the structure from a mummers play, but to use the characters as storytellers to relate a series of incidents from Brunel’s biography, with bad puns, rhyming couplets and dramatic reconstructions.
The Vincent and Goram play begins with an introduction by Old Father Thyme; so I started my play by converting this speech into an introduction by Old Father Thames, a traditional folkloric representation of the English river in human form.
OLD FATHER THAMES
In comes I, Old Father Thames,
Welcome or Welcome Not
I hope Old Father Thames
Will never be forgot.
I rise in the west and flow to the east
Towards the rising sun
I began my journey before you were born
I’ll be going when you are long gone
The tale I have to tell this day
Is of a hero bold
A Great Briton they have called him
Though his story’s not that old
So come with me a century
Or two into the past
For now it’s time to step aside
And introduce the cast
In 2002 the BBC ran a poll, encouraging people to vote for the person they considered to be the Greatest Briton; and Isambard Kingdom Brunel came second, after Sir Winston Churchill.
The extraordinary life of I.K.Brunel lent itself admirably to a reinterpretation in the form of a mummers play. I started writing the play a couple of years after the celebration of Brunel’s 200th birthday in 2006; an anniversary that was marked with a series of events in Bristol. An exhibition entitled “The Nine Lives of I.K.Brunel” hosted in Bristol next to his great ship, the SS Great Britain, provided both the title and structure of the play. I began to read biographies, diaries and articles about the engineer to find out as much as I could about the story and and the subjects I wanted to portray.
All the incidents described in the play are based on historical fact; with a story as rich as this, full of ambition and success, comedy, tragedy and some frankly ridiculous accidents, there was no need to make any of it up. The award-winning Horrible Histories TV series, based on a series of books, uses the same process of sticking as closely as possible to the historical truth to draw out the humour of the situations. The first series was broadcast in 2009, the same year that the Brunel Play made its debut. I don’t believe that Horrible Histories have done a full episode on Brunel yet but I’d be open to offers if they want to use any of my rhymes.
Our hero introduces himself with a straightforward couple of verses
BRUNEL
In comes I, I’m Isambard –
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
An Engineer I am by trade
With many a tale to tell
I’ll build the biggest ships
and I’ll design the fastest trains
But mostly I’ll be famous for
Smoking by giant chains.
A famous photograph of Brunel, by Robert Howlett, shows him standing next to the drums which held the chains used for launching his monumental ship, the SS Great Eastern; hands in pockets, puffing on a cigar. It’s the most iconic photographic portrait of the Victorian era, and so I was keen to get in a reference to that image early on in the play.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, photograph by Robert Howlett.
The other characters introduce themselves. Doctor Foster, down from Gloucester, is a traditional mummers play character who will help revive our hero after his numerous accidents, representing the many physicians who did so in real life.
For one example, in his later years, Brunel’s doctor was his brother-in-law and friend Seth Thompson. He was the doctor who first helped Brunel when a half-sovereign accidentally dropped into one of his lungs while performing a magic trick. He also accompanied Brunel and his family on a recuperative trip to Egypt during the last year of his life, and was an executor and beneficiary of Brunel’s will.
The Vincent and Goram play features a character called Brunel-zebub as the traditional diabolical panhandler at the end of the play. St Vincent’s rocks on the Avon Gorge was eventually the site of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge, Brunel’s first great undertaking, eventually completed as a memorial to him to become an icon for the City of Bristol. In my play Brunelzebub is the villain of the piece, whose ambition is to thwart Brunel’s plans and remind him of the rising death toll that accompanied his ambitious projects. He forms a double act along with Bold Slasher to represent Brunel’s inner demons or ‘Blue Devils’ that he described in his diary during his periods of self-doubt.
Then in comes Little Johnny Jack, with his family on his back. In our play, this character, along with Old Father Thames, provide the exposition, helping to set the scene for each of the nine episodes.
With these characters in place I then began to translate each of the stories into verse and rhyme, each of the episodes lasting couple of minutes at most. I was constrained by the facts that I wanted to fit in to each segment; I wrote at the top of the script, “Abridged by Gavin Skinner”, as it felt like I was creating a rhyming summary of an existing story; and in Bristol, Brunel himself was well known building a bridge.
At the time I was writing the play, my eldest was three years of age, so I was reading a lot of children’s story books. Writers who specialise in this field such as Dr Seuss, Julia Donaldson and Lynley Dodd have probably written more poetry that is actually read out loud than anyone else, and I’m sure my familiarity with their work at that time made it easier to pick and choose rhymes and rhythms.
Here are a few examples of some of my favourite lines from the play, with an explanation of some of the source material and ideas which went into the composition.
I was keen to write a bridging verse between each of the stories and was looking for a connection between the elegant Queen Square, where Brunel fought as a special constable as it was ruined during Bristol’s riots in 1831, and the story of his Great Western Railway. I found my answer in a magazine article that referred to a little-known fact from Brunel’s diary; at one time he considered siting his railway terminus in the square.
BRUNEL
This riotous conflagration’s left Queen Square in devastation
Making it a prime location for the station Bristol needs
But should the City’s Corporation recommend its restoration
I’ll build my station by the Avon in a field called Temple Meads
After an episode in which Brunel fails to listen to expert advice during the delivery of a railway locomotive, it’s up to Little Johnny Jack to link to the next topic.
JOHNNY JACK
The Great Western Railway became a success
But what to do next made Brunel rather frantic
He wanted the journey to go further west
By Great Western Steamship across the Atlantic
BRUNEL
The problem is this – there are those who insist
That an Atlantic steamship just cannot exist
That a big enough hull would require so much coal
You would always run out before reaching your goal
But I’ve done some sums that just prove that they’re wrong
And that nautically I’m engineer number one
My ship will go fast and will be built to last
And have room for the passengers too – that’s first class
Johnny Jack links neatly from one story to the next. Brunel’s speech, with a slightly different rhyming structure, is meant to reflect the rhythm of the steam engines that drive the ship. An earlier version of the speech included a rhyme with “boat” and “float”, but I was told unequivocally by a representative of the SS Great Britain that Brunel built ships not boats.
The verses allude to the long-running dispute between Brunel and Victorian author and science communicator Professor Dionysius Lardner, who insisted that as a ship’s size increased, so would its requirement to store coal; meaning that no ship could be big enough to travel by steam over the Atlantic. Brunel proved that the fuel carrying capacity of a ship is related to the cube of its size whereas the drag of the hull, which dictated the power required to drive the ship, is in proportion to the square of its size; which meant it was perfectly possible for his large steamship to cross from Bristol to New York with coal to spare.
The story of the Battle of Mickleton Tunnel is one of the most astonishing and yet little-known episodes in Brunel’s industrious career. The contractors hired to dig a railway tunnel in Gloucestershire believed they were owed money by the railway company and downed tools and prevented the railway company from accessing the tunnel. In an utter breakdown of employment relations, Brunel raised an army of three thousand navvies from other projects in order to take back control, by force.
OLD FATHER THAMES
The fighting began, several heads and limbs broken,
Some shoulders popped out and one skull cleft in two
with a shovel; but no-one killed outright, so that’s alright,
and victory to the company in the morning dew!
The contractors found that resistance was futile
And the contract redrawn over cups of hot tea
Brunel’s private army the last to have fought
A pitched battle on the soil of our fair country
The description of the fight was almost word for word from one of the accounts of the battle.
The last of the Nine Lives, and the final character to appear, concerns Old Leviathan, the nickname for the Great Eastern, the largest ship ever built when she was launched in 1858; a record that would be held until she was broken up just over 30 years later.
OLD LEVIATHAN
In comes I, old Leviathan
Brunel’s greatest project
And his last
They said that I killed him
I almost quite ruined him
The world’s finest ship
I’ve come back from the past
So why did he build such a monstrous Leviathan?
To travel non-stop to Australia by steam!
No ship will surpass me for half a man’s lifetime
There’s no power on Earth that can compare with me
The last line was inspired by the cover image from Thomas Hobbes’ book, “Leviathan”, that I spotted in a newspaper while writing the play. This includes the inscription, “Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comperatur ei”, itself a biblical quote from Job chapter 41: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him”
But the stress of building the monstrous ship was too much, even for Brunel; he visited his marvellous ship for the last time shortly before her maiden voyage, when he suffered a stroke.
In our play, this represents the final victory for the blue devil Brunelzebub, who in a final act of indignity, recounts Brunel’s last days in the form of a limerick; albeit one with a deliberate break in the rhythm or scansion in the second line.
BRUNELZEBUB
As Brunel he went home and was lying on
His deathbed…
…his steamship was flying on
Then some pipes overloaded,
A boiler exploded
And six stokers were dying on Leviath-on
Brunel built his great reputation
On the work of the men of this nation
Only some paid the price
Of their own sacrifice
What they need is a standing ovation
This character represents the engineer’s inner demon, and it seemed appropriate to give voice to his own regrets and self doubt at this point. Brunel’s son Isambard wrote of his father in his biography, “The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer”,
In times of difficulty, such as the trial of the Atmospheric System and the launch of the ‘Great Eastern’, his chief thoughts were for those who would suffer through the failure of his plans.
Each of the characters then stands to give their own tribute to Brunel, or in the case of Bold Slasher, something based on a less than flattering obituary:
Not one of the great schemes which he set on foot can fairly be called profitable, and yet they are cited, not only with pride, but with satisfaction, by the great body of a nation supposed to be pre-eminently fond of profit; and the man himself was, above all other projectors, a favourite with those very shareholders whose pockets he so unceasingly continued to empty.
There is always something not displeasing to the British temperament in a magnificent disappointment.
Obituary in the Morning Chronicle 1859
This translated into rhyme like this:
BOLD SLASHER
This ambitious, reckless engineer
Financially so cavalier
His work cost his investors dear
As profits tumbled year on year
Which they accepted with good cheer
Good grace and no resentment
His shareholders would never fear
For he would always “pioneer”
With bold abandon persevere
It only boosted his career
The British temperament finds good cheer
In a magnificent disappointment
Finally, in a change from the traditional mummers play role, Doctor Foster has to admit defeat, and he can’t bring this hero back to life.
DOCTOR FOSTER
Here I stand, Old Doctor Foster
And I know what I can, and what I cannot do
This man has done more in his short life than I ever could
But even I know when a man’s life is through
Here lies a man who learned how to move mountains
And we must remember his story to tell
For his legacy’s still all around us – no doubting
The greatness of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
I imagined the first line of the last verse as a bookend to the line from Dr Seuss’s final book; Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
“Kid, you’ll move mountains!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So get on your way!”
And we finish with a reminder that we are all just storytellers, telling the tale of a hero, bold, as Old Father Thames said in his introduction. The Doctor’s last line is only the second time that Brunel’s full name is used in the whole play, after the title character introduces himself at the start.
But in the end, in our play, Brunel Lives! He leaps to his feet without any Tip-Tap or Hocum Pocum and leads a final heroic Morris Dance as the crew of the SS Great Eastern finally set sail for South Australia.
And so the play arrived through a series of serendipitous coincidences, of story and history, time and place, form and structure, rhyme and rhythm. In its own way it became a success, from the original performances of Nine Lives in 2009, nine years ago today; three days later to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Brunel, and through several revivals. There are a number of relevant performance locations linked to the stories we tell and we have taken our play to all the most resonant sites in Bristol. There are also an ongoing sequence of significant anniversaries of events in IKB’s life and career. This summer we performed the play during Bristol Harbour Festival on stage in Brunel Square, next to the SS Great Britain, two days after the 175th anniversary of the launching of this great ship.
The writing of it only deepened my respect and enthusiasm for the great man. But it has left me with something of a problem. I had hoped that I would develop a series of mummers play biographies, but the truth is that there isn’t anyone else quite like Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In the nine years since I still haven’t found any other life story more worthy of re-imagining as a mummers play.
After writing this play, I started more properly investigating the form and structure of traditional mummers plays on websites such as Master Mummers, an excellent research resource which include a wealth of information and links to hundreds of traditional scripts. The other plays we’ve done have tended to be more closely aligned with the source material, respecting it to a greater or lesser extent as required.
Going forward, it must be time to start thinking of writing another play, on a completely different topic, perhaps one that has fewer ties to the mumming play format and yet allows more freedom to create original rhymes and characters and stories. Perhaps I’ll write it, or perhaps you will. I look forward to reading it or seeing it or being in it. Mummers plays are a living tradition. Just give us room to rhyme!
En Avant!
With thanks to Greg Brownderville, Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, who kindly asked me to speak with his students this evening over the interweb about the writing of mummers plays. Good luck to his students, and anyone else, who might be inspired to write one!
I read most of the above post by way of an introduction.
Photograph of Brunel By Robert Howlett (British, 1831–1858) (Metropolitan Museum of Art) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Photographs of the 2018 cast taken by Patrick Slade.
Imagine a zip wire running through the Avon Gorge, under the Clifton Suspension Bridge, depositing a flock of happy flying punters on the Bedminster side of the river.
You may not have to imagine for much longer, for such a plan has already been proposed and supported by Bristol’s tourist authorities.
When this idea was first mooted in the Bristol Post recently, one of the questions posed was, “What would Brunel think?”
To contemplate his potential response, I’d recommend considering Brunel’s involvement in the 19th Century equivalent; his daring crossing of the gorge in a basket suspended beneath an iron bar that had been hauled the 900 yards across the gorge in the days before the laying of the foundation stone of the bridge in 1837. It’s an event that we marked in our Rag Morris Mummers Play, “The Nine Lives of Isambard Kingdom Brunel”, first performed in on Bristol Doors Open Day, September 12th 2009 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of the great engineer.
To expand on our 90 seconds worth of exposition about the bridge from our half hour play, and to mark 5 years since that play first saw the light of day, 150 years since the Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened, and 155 years to the day since the death of Brunel, I thought it was time to write a bit more about how the bridge came to be built; about Brunel’s crossing on the Iron Bar and while I’m here, suggest a few things that the Clifton Zipsters might wish to look out for on their way back up to St Vincent’s Rock. I’ll admit that the page title is a bit misleading; but imagine, before the bridge was built, that the idea of crossing from one side of the gorge to the other by any means must have seemed as spectacular and as thrilling as today’s plans to install a zip wire.
The challenge is this! There’s a new competition…
Brunel’s design for the bridge was a response to a competition launched to find a solution to a problem – building a bridge across the Avon downstream from Bristol Bridge that would be high enough for tall ships to pass underneath, in a time before swing bridges and lift bridges were commonplace. The cliff faces of the Avon Gorge between Clifton and Leigh woods provided a natural foundation for the bridge. This was the site that an Alderman of Bristol, William Vick, had specified in 1753 when he left a legacy in his will that was intended to be used to build a Clifton Crossing, once the sum had accumulated to £10,000. By 1829 the Bridge Committee felt that sufficient funds were available and news of the competition caught the eye of one Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the 20 year old son of Sophia Kingdom and French Engineer Marc Isambard Brunel.
At that stage, the young IKB had been working as a resident engineer on his father’s Great Project – building a tunnel beneath the Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping; the first underwater passenger tunnel ever attempted. However this dangerous work had resulted in a terrible flood on 12 January 1828, which left six men dead, Isambard severely injured, and work on the flooded tunnel suspended. It took six months for him to recuperate, time he spent in London, Plymouth and Bristol. While he was in the West Country he began to make the connections which would lead to him working in the Bristol Docks and submitting four proposals in response to the competition for designs for a Clifton Suspension Bridge. Each design crossed the Avon Gorge at a slightly different point, with spans of between 720 and 916 feet; two of which suspended the chains from the rock faces rather than from masonry towers.
The Bridge Committee appointed Thomas Telford, then the first President of the Institute of Civil Engineers, to judge the competition, bringing IKB into direct contact with one of the pillars of the engineering establishment. While Brunel’s proposals were imaginative and well received, when it came to actually building the bridge, Telford rejected all twenty two of the proposals submitted to the competition, including Brunel’s. Telford declared that the intended spans, dictated by the topology of the landscape, would be too wide for any suspension bridge proposed, due to the problem of lateral resistance to wind pressure. Telford’s own estimate of 600 feet as being the upper limit of the cast iron technology of the time, was remarkably similar to the span of his own Menai Suspension Bridge, completed in 1826. Instead Telford was asked to submit his own design, which reduced the span by the required distance by building a pair of massive stone pillars from the base of the Avon Gorge.
Telford Clifton Suspension Bridge plan – (Wikimedia)
Brunel’s response was cutting:
As the distance between the opposite rocks was considerably less than that which had always been considered as within the limits to which Suspension Bridges might be carried, the idea of going to the bottom of such a valley for the purpose of raising at great expense two intermediate supporters hardly occurred to me.
Such a response was in fact slightly disingenuous, as Marc Brunel had previously suggested to young Isambard that the gorge “could not be crossed in one” and had sent a sketch showing a single intermediate supporter raised from the bottom of the valley – in a “Chinese Pagoda” style, which appears to divert the course of the navigable river Avon to one side to accommodate it.
But why was Marc Brunel attempting to influence his young prodigy in the first place? In fact, it’s well documented that Marc Brunel was far more involved with the Clifton Bridge design than he is often given credit for. His sketch of a bridge with a support going to the bottom of the Avon Gorge was remarkably similar to one of a pair of suspension bridges at in the French island of Réunion, now known as Saint Denis, east of Madagascar, that had been designed and built by Marc Brunel in 1823; six years before the Clifton Bridge competition opened. The bridge over the Riviere du Mat also has an intermediate supporter in the centre of the bridge; compare for instance the arc of the additional suspension chains below the deck of the bridge, which were intended to give the bridge additional stability, and were a novel part of Marc’s design. Isambard, who supervised the assembly and testing of these bridges in England before they were shipped out to the Indian Ocean in kit form, also incorporated such inverted chains beneath the structures of all four of his original proposals.
Suspension Bridge on the Isle of Bourbon (Collection of David Denenberg)
Once Telford’s expensive solution was also rejected, in October 1830 the Clifton Bridge trustees reopened the competition for the bridge design, and Brunel, who had been continuously modifying and improving his own designs, was in a position to resubmit an application and was invited to do so, along with twelve other engineers. Following further consideration, Brunel and Telford were on the short-list of five; although Telford’s design still included the two “intermediate supporters” and was subsequently rejected.
Surprisingly, perhaps; one of Brunel’s four entries to the second competition also made use of a pair of massive pillars reaching down to the level of the river. Given Brunel’s earlier disparaging remarks, one wonders whether this was out of sheer pragmatism. If the judges might eventually decide that this was to be the principal that they wanted the design to follow, then Brunel was going to make sure that his proposal was the best of the bunch.
Brunel, he did enter – and won!
The four remaining engineers were allowed to continue working on their designs and Marc Brunel’s diary for early 1831 includes several months of work on the Clifton Bridge. When the final proposals were submitted, Isambard’s design was placed second; but he arranged an audience with the judges at Blaise Castle and through his not inconsiderable powers of persuasion, was able to resubmit his designs to address the engineering deficiencies that the judges had considered; an opportunity not afforded to the three other engineers. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was appointed as engineer to the Clifton Suspension Bridge on the 19th of March 1831, less than a month before his 25th birthday.
Even then, until the end of June, Marc Brunel was still busy working on the designs for Isambard’s bridge; and yet he was happy for the work to be credited to his son; perhaps for reasons of paternal altruism. Isambard’s appointment was made with the full knowledge that his more experienced father was known to be working on the designs; there was a safe pair of hands behind the inexperienced, yet talented, young engineer.
It could be said that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was Marc Brunel’s greatest engineering legacy; and that 150 years later, perhaps Isambard Kingdom Brunel as an individual or “brand” is greater than the sum of his engineering achievements. There are certainly other engineers whose works were more profitable, more numerous and more successful from an engineering point of view but the legacy of Isambard the Great Engineer, innovator, self publicist and showman has given his diminutive stature a longer shadow that many of his contemporaries.
To prove it would work, he traversed the route early
Before the foundation stone was laid amid pomp and ceremony on Saturday 27 August 1836 it was decided that the best way of transferring building materials from one side of the gorge to the other would be to install an iron bar across the gorge with a system for winching stuff across in a basket. The bar was 1000 feet long, 1½ inches wide and was welded together on the Leigh Woods side. Once it was assembled, on 23 August a ship’s mooring rope or hawser was passed across the gorge and the bar was carefully pulled across by winding this rope up with a capstan. However, just as it was about to be fixed to the rocks on the Clifton side, the hawser broke and the bar fell into the Avon Gorge. When the bar was hauled back up again the bar it somewhat the worse for wear.
This incident is beautifully described in “The Literary Gazette, and Journal of the Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c” 1836 edition. The British Association held their Sixth meeting in Bristol in August 1836 and it is no coincidence that Brunel chose to organise the ceremony of the laying of the foundation stone when some of the greatest natural philosophers of the day happened to be in town. In consequence, some of the events surrounding the ceremony have been recorded in this fascinating document.
In the course of the forenoon the iron rod, stretched across the Avon for the ceremony of Saturday morning, when the first stone of the suspension bridge is to be laid, was precipitated from its airy height in consequence of the breaking of a rope on the Clifton shore. One man only was slightly hurt, but the iron was embedded above five feet deep in the bed of the river. Its appearance, when fished up again, was very curious, being not only crusted with mud, but bent into all the forms of the channel into which it had been precipitated. Its curves and contortions, when once more elevated to its position, which was ably accomplished by the engineer (Brunel junior) before Thursday morning made it a more picturesque object than it was before; and thousands visited the spot which had become additionally interesting from the accident.
The breaking of the iron rod over the Avon created a strong sensation; and Mr Brunel approved himself worthy of his parentage, by the skill and exertion with which he fished it up and replaced it in time for the ceremony of Saturday morning.
The 27th August saw the grand ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone which was followed by a breakfast at the Gloucester Hotel, at which “The reception of the elder Brunel who arrived during the repast must have been particularly grateful to his feelings”. This was followed by a somewhat more notorious incident:
On the evening of this day, Messrs Laxton and Tait, two young engineers, we believe employed on the bridge, got into a basket-car and were drawn across the rod. Some obstacle occurred about midway, and the rope by which they were being pulled across, was obliged be loosened; and this at a time when the Benledi steamer was passing below. Her mast caught the line and had it not been cut with great presence of mind, in all probability a fatal catastrophe would have attended this adventurous attempt. As it was the oscillation of the rod with the suspended car was appalling, and the terror of the spectators was scarcely appeased when they saw the parties drawn back in safety to the shore.
It is curious that any suggestion of Brunel himself having a similar accident is not reported in this journal. The Bristol Mirror newspaper, however, reported the above story with some slightly different details; the basket contained one man, and named the Killarney as being the steamer involved. It then went on to say that that Brunel had a similar incident later in the same day where the basket stuck fast on the “kink” of the bar; whereupon
Mr Brunel endeavoured by swinging it to and fro to release the car but being unable to do so, this intrepid gentleman mounted the car, climbed the ropes and released the car when swinging over this tremendous chasm.
A. Vaughan in his excellent biography of Brunel, “Engineering Knight Errant” suggests that the above story may well be hearsay and somewhat unreliable. Perhaps the Bristol Mirror’s story pertaining to Brunel was a fabrication based on the event related above. In any case, it may well have been the start of the separation of the fact and the fiction in the history of Brunel; adding a dash of heroic mythology to the story of the Great Engineer.
The base of the Clifton Abutment (Photo: Gavin Skinner)
The base of the Leigh Woods Abutment showing the anchor point for the Iron Bar. (Photo: Gavin Skinner)
It is better documented that the bar was replaced during September and on the 27th of that month Brunel travelled in the basket across the gorge “with the greatest of ease”, three times; on each occasion with a different companion. Many years later in 1854, according to L.T. C. Rolt’s biography of Brunel, when work on the Bridge had ceased due to funding problems, the trustees collected £125 from people wishing to cross the gorge in a basket themselves. Rolt also suggests that the anchorage points for the bar are still visible near the bases of the abutments on both sides of the gorge. In fact, on the Leigh Woods side, the anchorage point is a square pillar that can be seen on the south side of the bridge approach. On the Clifton Side, the anchorage point is no longer visible but is marked by a pair of trees.
On 26 December 1835, the 29 year old Brunel wrote in his diary an end-of-year summary of his ongoing works, mostly railway-related, but including the famous quote:
Clifton Bridge – my first child, my darling, is actually going on – recommenced last Monday – Glorious!
And also a remark about his other suspension Bridge.
Suspension Bridge across the Thames (Hungerford foot-bridge) I have condescended to be engineer of this but I shan’t give myself too much trouble about it. If done it will add to my stock of irons.
However, his optimism was short-lived. The Hungerford bridge at Charing Cross would turn out the be the only suspension bridge to his design that he would live to see completed.
Incomplete in his lifetime
As with many of Brunel’s projects, the Clifton Bridge was not immune to financial considerations. The budget set aside for the bridge was never enough to complete it and despite efforts at additional fundraising the project stalled soon after 1840.The abutments, piers and towers on both sides of the bridge were mostly completed but bridge itself remained unbuilt and the suspension chains, although delivered by the Copperhouse foundry of Hayle, were surplus to requirements. The abutments became a popular venue for picnics and other, perhaps less wholesome, activities, and there was some discussion about whether to remove the unfinished construction work to return the gorge to its natural state.
With the bridge works on the back burner, over the course of his career Brunel was busy with a hundred other projects; including the Great Western Railway and various branch lines as well as railways in Ireland, Italy and India; his three Great Steamships; supervising the design and construction of the Great Exhibition and designing a portable field hospital used during the Crimean War.
In one of these projects he returned to the Avon Gorge with a proposal to build a railway down the western bank. The Portbury Pier and Railway company obtained parliamentary permission to build a railway line in 1846 to lead to a floating pier at Portbury; an early attempt to encourage shipping away from Bristol docks, which had the disadvantage of being situated some miles up the winding, tidal river Avon. As engineer to this company, Brunel proposed that the railway should use the Atmospheric Principal. At this point Brunel’s atmospheric railway in South Devon was under construction but not quite operational. If the Portbury line had been completed as planned, it may well have been a useful, less high profile, testing ground for this innovative system – which in South Devon generated the fastest speeds of any railway yet built. In the end, however, the atmospheric railway failed due to various technical and financial challenges, including problems with frost and rats; and Brunel’s Portbury line was shelved when the fundraising failed. A new company was formed some years later to build a railway to Portbury and Portishead, which received parliamentary approval in June 1863 and opened less than four years later in April 1867. Note that the current plan to rebuild the railway to Portishead always involves a perpetual five year wait.
Brunel’s final great bridge – the Royal Albert Bridge that carries the Great Western Railway across the Tamar from Plymouth to Saltash, was an extravagant yet elegant and uncharacteristically economically viable engineering solution to the problem of crossing the waterway. The design of the bridge includes two vast spans formed of lenticular, or lens-shaped trusses; the tops of the trusses being formed from heavy iron tube, the bottom of the trusses formed from a pair of chains. For these, Brunel bought the unused chains from the Clifton Bridge Trustees and had some more links made up at the Copperhouse foundry.
At the time that the bridge was opened in April 1859 by Prince Albert, Brunel was returning from a trip to Egypt where he had hoped the atmosphere would be beneficial to his health. The following month he was taken to see the Tamar bridge but by this time his health was so poor that he had to lie down on a couch while a locomotive pulled his carriage slowly across. Years of smoking, working long hours and suffering from accidents of various kinds were taking their toll.
A few months later, as his leviathan steamship, the SS Great Eastern, designed by Brunel and built by John Scott Russell, was being prepared for her maiden voyage, Brunel suffered from a heart attack on board and was taken back to his London residence to recuperate. He never recovered and died of a stroke on 15th September 1859.
Finished by friends, as a fitting tribute
Following his death, there was a posthumous proposal to complete Brunel’s vision for a Clifton Suspension Bridge as a memorial to the engineer. Foremost among those in favour of this scheme was John Hawkshaw; a leading light in the Institute of Civil Engineers, and distinguished engineer William Henry Barlow, who who were to become engineers to a new Clifton Suspension Bridge Company, with many other leading engineers acting as trustees. Hawkshaw was at that time planning the construction of a new London station at Charing Cross to be reached by a railway bridge across the Thames. This work would involve the dismantling of the Hungerford Bridge that Brunel himself had designed; and Hawkshaw realised that the new Clifton Bridge Company could be sold the suspension chains from that bridge while maximising the scrap value for the London Bridge and Charing Cross Railway.
The bridge company quickly found that financial support was forthcoming to find approximately £35,000 for the completion of the bridge. There was some concern among former bridge trustees and some Bristolians that the project was being managed and funded by Londoners, but a compromise was reached. A parliamentary “Act for erecting a Suspension Bridge from Clifton in the City and County of Bristol to the Parish of Long Ashton in the County of Somerset” became law on the 28th June 1861. Hawkshaw and Barlow re-engineered the design for the bridge to bring it up-to-date with current engineering principles, and also reduce costs by removing some of Brunel’s embellishments. The height of the piers was increased from 230 feet to 245 feet above the level of the river; the bridge deck was reduced from 32 feet to 30 feet in width. In many ways it is a bridge that is sited at Brunel’s original site and has a similar outline to the bridge that the Brunels – both Marc and Isambard – designed but on closer inspection holds few of the details that I.K.B himself may have planned to include.
The bridge was opened to foot passengers on 9th December 1864 with all the pomp and ceremony that Brunel himself would have appreciated; and there were beer and sandwiches at the Victoria Rooms for the workers. Conspicuous by their absence from any of these celebrations were I. K. Brunel’s sons; Isambard and Henry, who felt that not enough had been done to recognise the part their father had played in the project. They considered that Hawkshaw and Barlow had taken all the credit; despite the whole enterprise being a memorial to their esteemed father.
In future years both John Hawkshaw and Henry Marc Brunel would leave their legacy on the River Thames in ambitious projects that both Isambard and Marc Brunel would have been proud of. Hawkshaw was engineer to the East London Railway Company, which in 1865 took over Marc Brunel’s Rotherhithe to Wapping foot passenger tunnel, eventually using it to carry a railway line from New Cross to Shoreditch; now part of the London Overground network. If you’re in the area, do visit the splendid Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe. And Henry Marc Brunel, who learned engineering skills as a pupil of Hawkshaw became structural engineer to another Hawkshaw pupil, John Wolfe Barry, when he was chief engineer of Tower Bridge in London; which, like the Clifton Suspension Bridge, was an elegant 19th Century solution to the problem of designing the furthest downstream bridge on a major waterway that would allow tall ships to pass underneath.
The Clifton Zip Wire
The idea of a zip wire from the Clifton Bridge to Bedminster creates a bit of a problem – where would the wire end up? I would expect to be given the same constraints that Brunel was under, to allow safe passage for a tall ship to travel under the wire – with clearance of around 30 metres at the exit from the Cumberland basin, around 600 metres away from the bridge. Starting at the Clifton Observatory at around 90 metres above the high water mark, the zip wire would need to be at least 900 metres long, by my rough reckoning. To avoid the “Brunel Way” flyover, the wire would have to end up in Greville Smyth Park, or possibly on some corner of the Bedminster Cricket club. And I’m not sure if they’ve been asked yet.
So, what would the little blue daredevils have to look at on their long walk back to Clifton? I present three quite interesting structures of architectural and engineering merit that could be investigated.
1) The Ashton Avenue Bridge
The Ashton Avenue Bridge (Photo: Gavin Skinner)
This was once a swing bridge at the entrance to the New Cut, which carried the Bristol harbour railway on the lower deck and road traffic on the upper deck. Long since replaced by the Brunel Way flyover, the upper deck has been removed and the lower deck is a footpath and cycleway now used as part of the national cycle network.
Plans are afoot to incorporate the bridge in the controversial Bristol MetroBus system. According to TravelWest, the plan is to “restore the Victorian Bridge and return it to its original role as a public transport corridor.”
I for one would love to see it restored to its Victorian double decker heyday with a separate roadway for the buses and cycleway underneath; it would be particularly impressive to see it in operation as a swing bridge again; although I don’t suppose this is what the MetroBus People have in mind.
2) Brunel’s Other Bridge
Brunel’s Other Bridge (Photo: Gavin Skinner)
This structure, currently hidden away beneath the larger Plimsoll Bridge at the end of Cumberland basin (which leads on to Brunel Way) was a large wrought iron swivel bridge, which was designed by I.K.Brunel’s engineering practice and first became operational in 1849. Its iron tubular structure can be seen to foreshadow Brunel’s later railway bridge over the River Wye at Chepstow and the Prince Albert Bridge over the Tamar. Before the Clifton Bridge was completed, Brunel finally achieved his ambition of constructing the first bridge over the Avon upstream of the Severn estuary.
There’s a campaign by various local enthusiasts to restore and preserve this bridge for future generations, and they are doing a fantastic job.
3) The Clifton Rocks Railway
The Clifton Rocks Railway – Lower Station (Photo : Gavin Skinner)
This uneconomical funicular railway was built in a tunnel through the cliffs from the Avon Gorge Hotel, to Hotwells, first opened in 1893. The intention at the time was to offer connections from Clifton Village to the tramways into the city centre, the railway to Severn beach and steam ships from the Hotwells landing stage. After the widening of the Portway in 1922 – now the main A4 route between Bristol and Avonmouth – the Clifton Rocks Railway fell into decline and closed in 1934; although it was used by the BBC as a radio broadcasting studio during the second world war.
I would propose that the most exciting route back for out intrepid Clifton Zipsters would be up through the Clifton Rocks Railway tunnel. I know that it’s never going to be reopened as a railway but perhaps some kind of pulley system could be reintroduced?
In conclusion
I hope this has been a useful potted history of the Clifton Bridge; and the interconnected roles played by Marc and Isambard Brunel, John Hawkshaw and William Barlow; and how it fits into the surrounding natural and historical landscape. I look forward to taking my place in the queue for the the Clifton Zip Wire, whenever it gets built; or if not, alternatively I can hope that one day I shall have an opportunity of crossing the gorge in a small basket, suspended beneath a thin iron bar.
Five years ago, in September 2009, Rag Morris Mummers first performed a mummers play about the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Two years later we took the play to the first Bath Mummers Unconvention, and I presented a talk about the play at the Mummers Symposium; the text from the talk is available in the Symposium Proceedings on the Folk Play research web site. Now that it’s five years since we started rehearsing our play, I thought it was time to add a version of that talk on my preinclusion blog, and at the same time include some video excerpts of our first performances.
You may have been lucky enough to see the play in Bristol in 2009, or at the 2011 Bristol Folk Festival where it was performed on stage at the Colston Hall. The play was performed at the 2011 Bath Mummers Unconvention, firstly at the UnPlugged concert on the opening night and then on the following Saturday when we took it out on to the streets of Bath.
I’m going to be looking into some of the questions I’ve been asking myself about the play since the inception of the project; and how the answers to those questions informed the development of the play, looking at aspects of the philosophy of the performance and the production.
Who?
Bristol’s Rag Morris used to have more of a tradition of performing self-penned plays, though the last major production had been 1993, a year before I started dancing regularly with Rag. This play about the legendary Bristolian giants, Vincent and Goram, had been penned by Marc Vyvan-Jones with help from Roland & Linda Clare.
These two giants had a test of strength to win the hand of the fair Princess Sabrina, and to prove his worth; Vincent carved out the Avon Gorge with a pickaxe. The script for this play included the character of Brunel-zebub, as the devil with the frying pan who was raising funds to build a bridge to span St Vincent’s Rocks.
So while I was thinking about writing a mummers’ play, and who should be in it; using the script of the Vincent and Goram play as a template for creating a local story about a Bristolian hero; I started thinking about Brunel-zebub and the man who had inspired the name of this character, and whether Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself could star in his own mummers’ play and return for a showdown with his inner demon.
But would Brunel make a suitable candidate for inclusion in a mummers’ play, which would attract an audience in Bristol? As I started thinking about the characteristics needed for our mummers’ play hero, and reading a few books about Brunel for research, he seemed to tick a lot of the boxes.
1) Was he a hero in the tradition of St George or Robin Hood?
Yes he was; he came from a class of men who have been referred to as “heroic engineers”, such as Thomas Telford or George and Robert Stephenson who personified the fight against the greatest technical challenges of the day. A contemporary editor of the Railway Times described him as an “Engineering Knight Errant”, and went on to say he was; “always on the lookout for magic caves to be penetrated and enchanted rivers to be crossed, never so happy as when engaged ‘regardless of cost’ in conquering some, to ordinary mortals, impossibility.” This was when Brunel was developing his atmospheric railway, so the writer wasn’t being entirely complimentary. But such a character seemed ideal for a mummers’ play.
2) A defining moment of any mummers’ play is a fight. Did our hero get into fights?
Yes he did. He was in Bristol during the Queen Square riots of 1831, he was sworn in as a special constable and arrested a looter. Twenty years later he instigated his own riot at Mickleton Tunnel, commanding an army of 3000 navvies in a dispute with a company of contractors who had failed to complete their work on time and on budget. He was also a risk-taker and rather accident-prone, and these accidents provided an opportunity for our Doctor character to revive him with his pills and potions.
3) Was he a local hero?
Brunel had a strong association with the City of Bristol, although he never had a permanent address there. Many of his major projects were connected with the city; his designs for the Clifton Suspension Bridge were first submitted at the age of 23; the original terminus for the Great Western Railway was in Bristol and two of his great steamships were built and launched into the Bristol Harbour.
4) Was he a popular and interesting character?
Brunel a fascinating and complex individual whose story encapsulates both the successes and failures of the Victorian age. In 2002 he was voted number 2 in the BBC’s poll of Greatest Britons, second only to Winston Churchill. And his name pops up all the time in the most unlikely places. In the summer of 2011, Bristol Zoo organised an Art Trail of model gorillas around the city, which were then auctioned off for charity. The gorilla that raised the most money was called Gorisambard; the final bid being more than twice as much as the nearest rival, a whopping £23,000. I’d suggest it was the most sought-after gorilla simply because of its connection with the city’s favourite local hero.
How?
So, Brunel ticked all four of these boxes, and having chosen the star of the show, I started to think about how to write the script. There were two clear choices; write a simple hero-combat play with Brunel as a character in name alone, with a few jokes about cigars and railways; or to build the play around one or two historical events from Isambard’s life.
Before this project began, I wasn’t quite as obsessed about Brunel as perhaps I am now. But as I read more and more, it became clearer to me that to do the story justice and to honour the man’s memory it would be better to stick to the historical fact than the hysterical fiction. Because with Brunel, the truth was often stranger than fiction; and because his story was so full of incident and intrigue, I wouldn’t structure the play around just one historical event; it would be based around nine.
In 2006, a series of cultural events and exhibitions to celebrate the bicentenary of Isambard’s birth was organised by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership under the banner of Brunel 200. As part of this, the ss Great Britain hosted an exhibition at the nearby Maritime Centre entitled, “The 9 lives of I.K.Brunel”.
This exhibition looked at Brunel’s life and career by highlighting nine occasions when he was in mortal danger, from a flood in the Thames Tunnel he was helping his father, engineer Marc Brunel, to build; to a fall into the engine room of his first great steamship, the Great Western, following a fire. Incidents such as these occurred throughout his life; if you read any stories or books that mention Brunel even in passing, you’ll often find one of more of these events gets mentioned, almost as a defining moment, the disasters complementing the triumphs. Brunel’s life story has created a kind of historical mythology of its own; and it’s that mythology which we tried to capture in this play, by concentrating simply on these triumphs and disasters.
The nine lives structure lent itself perfectly to that of a mummers’ play, or rather nine short mummers’ plays, and that’s how the script developed; each with a brief introduction to set the scene, a challenge, incident or accident to provide the dramatic peak or turning point, represented by some visual gag or dramatic reconstruction, which would then be quickly resolved; where necessary with a little something from the Doctor’s bag to get the man back on his feet, all ready for the next disaster.
The character of Brunel was surrounded by a cast of six other characters, all loosely based on mummers’ play archetypes, who would be called upon to represent some aspect of his personality or an influence on the story. These included Brunelzebub, Bold Slasher, Little Johnny Jack, and Old Father Thames, who represents the rivers associated with Brunel’s projects, which he spent so much time bridging, tunnelling underneath or launching ships into; and Doctor Foster, down from Gloucester, who stands in for all the physicians who treated Brunel after his accidents and through his ill-heath; one of whom was actually called Doctor Morris.
What I wanted to do was to create a kind of performance that drew from the mummers’ play tradition, and was also a play about Brunel. So to visualise the relationship between these sets of ideas, I drew this venn diagram. What we ended up with was a hybrid of two plays – a mummers play biography – and finding out where and how these two parts intersected was the challenge of writing the script.
Turning this around, it was also apparent that this play could potentially attract two audiences; an audience of Brunel fans, and audience of Mummers’ Play fans.
To be honest, if I wanted to write and perform in a stand-alone piece of Brunel-themed street theatre which wasn’t within the mummers’ play tradition I probably would have found it a rather more complicated process. It was a useful way to introduce and establish the project in just a few words, both to Rag Morris and to the venues and other organisations that were to help with the staging of the production.
This mummers’ play, in common with many other such plays, was designed to be performed at a specific moment in space and time. So let’s look into where and when the play was first performed.
When?
Isambard Kingdom Brunel lived from 1806 to 1859. He died at the age of 53 after a stroke brought on by health problems, which would have been exacerbated by stress and his habit of smoking copious numbers of fine cigars every day.
Now my script was developed a couple of years after the Brunel 200 celebrations, so it was too late for that, but there was an opportunity to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Brunel’s death, which would fall on the 15th of September 2009.
The date also offered an opportunity to collaborate with another event for the historically inclined; Bristol’s Doors Open Day, which fell on the 12th of September that year. We wanted to take the play out to the locations most closely associated with Brunel’s story in Bristol, and many of these were either open especially for Doors Open Day or were close to other such venues. So with the kind cooperation of the organisers, we were heavily promoted in the Doors Open Day programme for that year.
Where?
I made a map for our programme leaflet to show some Brunel-related sites in Bristol. The venues we took the play to included the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Underfall Yard, the ss Great Britain, Queen Square and the Temple Meads passenger shed – Brunel’s old railway terminus.
One further performance was scheduled for the evening of the 15th of September next to the Explore-At-Bristol science centre where I was working, which was followed by a free Science Café discussion entitled, “When Engineers were Heroes”. This took place on the actual 150th Anniversary of Brunel’s death; and was, as far as I know, the only significant cultural event to mark this occasion.
We’ve now performed the play at various venues in Bristol, including the M-Shed, near the site of the dockyard where the Great Western Steamship was built, where we performed in April 2011 before heading to the Colston Hall.
What to wear?
As part of the development of the performance, we had to decide what the characters had to wear.
I’ve heard people say that Brunel’s top hat and tailcoat costume was unusual; that he wore a taller hat than everyone else because he was worried about his diminutive stature.
But the evidence clearly shows that this was not the case; your well-dressed man about town would often wear something of this kind. In contemporary photographs taken when Brunel attended the disastrous launch of his Leviathan steamship, he’s surrounded by men all wearing long coats and tall hats. So the characters on our play all wear the same basic outfit to replicate this look. This is similar to what the Doctor wears in many mummers’ plays, which makes a lot of sense, as the tradition of performing mummers’ plays was being established around this period and this is what many professional men would have worn at the time.
As Brunel ended his career while photography was still in its infancy, there are only around a half dozen photographs of him, and they are all fascinating and brilliant.
So that was how we appeared on our first public performance, at 10am on Saturday 12 September 2009, at the Clifton Suspension Bridge Lookout point. And I think we approximated the look of those old photos rather well. We all wear essentially the same costume, with just a few props – a taller hat, a cloak, painted faces – to distinguish between the different characters.
But why have the two bad guys got blue faces? There was, of course, a good reason for this. Brunel kept diaries and wrote letters throughout his life, many of which are now in the safekeeping of the Brunel Institute, run jointly by the ss Great Britain and the University of Bristol Library’s special collections archive.
One of these documents is Brunel’s secret diary, On one page, written in 1828, when he was just 22 years of age, a few months after the Thames Tunnel accident which caused the tunnel to be closed up, he uses various unusual phrases. When write about his hopes and dreams, he’d describe “castles in the air”; if things weren’t going so well for him, he’d sometimes say he was feeling “blue devilish”. At one point he says,
It makes me rather blue devilish to think of it and since I am very prone to build airy castles I will now build a few blue ones which I am afraid are likely to prove less airy and more real.
Now in those days these blue devils were a kind of common slang for depression and unhappiness; in later years the word “devils” would be dropped and people would simply say they had “the blues”. And Brunel suffered a lot from the blues and from self-doubt. Although his indefatigable spirit would enable him to put that to one side and dream up a new project that was even more groundbreaking than the last, even if it flew in the face of conventional wisdom, or even of common sense. As his colleague and friend Daniel Gooch said of him after his death; “great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.”
So perhaps Doctor Foster represents that indefatigable spirit; or at least, perhaps he had some of that spirit in his bag of medicine, mixed in with the laudanum. And he needed that because death hangs around the story of Brunel like a cloud, represented by Brunelzebub and his little black account book, recording the collateral damage which resulted from Brunel’s great construction projects, as many of the accounts of his life do, as if these engineering works were an equivalent to a military campaign.
I like to think that during his later life that when Brunel designed the mobile field hospitals used during the Crimean war, it was almost as an attempt to add some figures to the opposite side of the balance sheet, by saving a few lives to compensate for those which had been lost. And they certainly did save lives; the death rate in the Brunel-designed hospital, in Renkioi, was 3%, compared to 42% in one of the hospitals it replaced, at Scutari.
But of course we didn’t need that counterbalance in our mummers’ play, because, as in countless other mummers’ plays, the Doctor is there to bring the dead man back to life again, to stick nine fingers up in the air at death and to say, today, in our world, on this stage, our hero does not die. And that is the story we attempted to tell; a story of challenges faced and met and conquered, a story of depression and death; of disaster and triumph; the story of that indefatigable spirit and of a remarkable man.
And at the end of the play, after the character of Old Leviathan arrives like an angel of doom to relate the tragic story of the Great Eastern steamship, Brunel lies on his deathbed, his life flashing before him, as if this performer and great engineer were imagining his own life story being acted out in the form of a mummers’ play; and so the play concludes, but Brunel Lives! And the seven characters become six dancers and one musician and together they perform a morris dance, and the spirit of his Great Leviathan can finally take the Ghost of Brunel on a voyage that never took place; a voyage to South Australia.
The Big Bang happened not just once, but twice, in the heart of the Mendips at Priddy Folk Festival on Sunday 13 July. The latest Rag Morris Mummers play took an unsuspecting audience right back to the dawn of time, when Old Father Time was still quite young and Old Mother Nature first wrote down all her laws.
A fiery ball of energy begat Mister Matter and Auntie Antimatter, who were just itching for a fight; requiring Professor Paul Dirac, Bristol’s first Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, to explain his ground-breaking research, Doctor Barry O’Genesis to help solve one of the fundamental mysteries of the wonders of the universe, and Doctor Dark Matter, with his dark, dark medicine, to take Auntie Antimatter on a journey to the Dark Side. Constant Billy, however, just thought it was all far, far too silly.
The beginning is nigh!
Nature abhors a vacuum
I challenge thee to come and have a go, if you think you’re hadron enough
In comes I, Little Paul Dirac, with all my formulae on my back
Positive vs Negative
In comes I, Doctor Barry o’Genesis
In Come I, Doctor Dark Matter
On with the dance!
The play was performed in the morning at the Eastwater Marquee and in the afternoon at the market field, to the delight and confusion of folk play enthusiasts and passers-by. One of them commented, “That was a bit like a mummers’ play”; and he wasn’t wrong.
The Big Bang can be thought to bookend Rag Morris’ sequence of historical, mythical and allegorical mummers’ plays; which now take in a potted history of nearly everything. We’ve paraded dozens of characters – including Vincent and Goram, Saint George, Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – in a flexible and adaptable format that almost always features a fight to the death and a Doctor with a little drop of tip-tap. Nevertheless there remain vast untapped tracts of tempting historical fact and fiction that remain unmummered, so watch this space for any hints of the the first inkling of what the next effort might concern.
If you could suggest any likely venues, festivals, physics conferences or quantum theory seminars where a performance of our Big Bang mummers play might be appreciated, please contact me or email bag@ragmorris.com.
Mummers Reunited
Sweep you all back to the past
Back in time
The Quantum Theory of the Electron
Is there a doctor to be found?
Come and have a go if you think you’re hadron enough
Dark, dark medicine
Bang!
No universes were created or destroyed during the production of our play.
We are now rehearsing the next Rag Morris Mummers’ play, what I have wrote, entitled “The Big Bang”, which we are due to première at the Priddy Folk Festival on Sunday July 13th. We’re continuing our tradition of featuring local heroes from Bristol, following earlier mummers’ plays featuring both Vincent and Goram, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Our band of mummers are members of Rag Morris, a Morris Dance side that is also a University of Bristol Student’s Union Society. We include current and former University of Bristol students and postgraduates in the cast of this brand new play, which has in fact been inspired by one of the University’s greatest alumni. So watch out for Little Paul Dirac delivering a lecture about particle physics, a fight between Mister Matter and Auntie Anti-Matter, and Doctor Barry O’Genesis who arrives to save the day. In our view there is very little in life that cannot be improved by the addition of a morris dance; we hope to astound, educate and entertain in equal measure.
In Comes I, Little Paul Dirac, with all my formulae on my back
Paul Dirac was born in Bristol in 1902, and graduated from Bristol University twice, with a BSc in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Mathematics. He won a scholarship to study for a PhD in Cambridge where he carried out the work that earned him his reputation as a theoretical physicist of the highest order – describing an electron in a mathematically elegant equation that was compatible with both quantum physics and special relativity. The solution to this equation predicted the existence of a then-unknown atomic particle that was named the anti-electron, or positron, which was discovered experimentally a few years later and earned Dirac a Nobel Prize “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”. He was Britain’s answer to Einstein, but it has to be said, that he’s considerably less well known; a balance we are attempting to redress in our own small way with our little mummers’ play.
The tale before you shall be told of how the universe begun
Mummers’ plays are often justifiably accused of making little or no sense; a good vantage point, perhaps from which to survey a realm of quantum theory that few people can claim to understand. By using a format that is itself an invented pastiche of medieval mystery plays we attempt to shed a little light on a new creation mythology inspired by the unravelling of the sequence of events that took place in the first few seconds after the Universe was created. With limited success.
Come and have a go, if you think you’re hadron enough
At the heart of any traditional mummers’ play there is a conflict between two characters, one of whom falls and then rises again with the assistance of a mysterious doctor. In our new play the protagonists represent the symmetrical and opposite fundamental particles of matter and anti-matter. An equal amount of both was created in the seconds following the big bang and, all things continuing to be equal, all of this should have vanished; the matter and anti-matter cancelling each other out in a metaphorical puff of smoke, or a more literal burst of high energy gamma radiation photons. The fact that enough matter remained to form our present universe is a mystery that has stumped clever physicists for decades. This mystery may finally be solved if you are lucky enough to catch a performance of the latest Rag Morris Mummers’ play, “The Big Bang”.
What I wanted to do was to create a kind of performance that drew from the mummers’ play tradition, and was also a play about Brunel. So to visualise the relationship between these sets of ideas, I drew this venn diagram. What we ended up with was a hybrid of two plays – a mummers play biography – and finding out where and how these two parts intersected was the challenge of writing the script.
Turning this around, it was also apparent that this play could potentially attract two audiences; an audience of Brunel fans, and audience of Mummers’ Play fans.
preinclusion 