Lost Classic: The High Girders, by John Prebble

Shortly before 7pm on the evening of Sunday, December 28, 1879, a foreman employed by the North British Railway Company walked in the howling wind up the path to the signal cabin next to the railway line on the Fifeshire bank of the River Tay. John Watt greeted his friend Thomas Buchanan. Watt and signalman Buchanan settled down to share a can of tea, agreeing that the weather was bad. As bad as they had known it. Buchanan signalled the north bank that a train was on its way to Dundee and would shortly make its way over the bridge and across the water.

In this ominous style, the journalist and historian John Prebble opened The High Girders, a widely-praised and at the time highly influential work of non-fiction, first published in 1956. Today his book has been all but forgotten other than by a small group of fans, and perhaps by older Dundonians raised on the tale offering a parable about the power of nature and the vanity of man.

Back to the signal cabin that night. The opening chapter – or overture, sub-title “Wait, wait, we’ll see her soon!” – follows Watt and Buchanan at the scene over the course of only twenty minutes. It is, as they say, as though you are in the room, or on the track at the point where the train left solid land.

The drama builds quickly. Prebble describes, through the eyes of Buchanan, the train passing the cabin at three miles per hour. The signalman caught glimpses of faces, one a child, in the carriage windows. Watt peered out into the darkness and watched the train cross onto the bridge until there were several flashes and the taillights disappeared in the distance. He and Buchanan tried to walk out along the bridge to see what had happened but they were forced back to the riverbank by the weather.

“They saw nothing, until the moon came out, and then they saw,” wrote Prebble.

“The centre of the bridge was no longer there. One thousand and sixty yards of the great Tay bridge were gone, and with them an engine, five carriages and a brake van belonging to the North British Railway Company. Gone also were seventy-five men, women, and children.”

The fall of the bridge and the loss of life was one of the great disasters and scandals of the Victorian era. Although there were heavier losses of life in other disasters, the Tay Bridge calamity captured the public imagination across the country. Its collapse offered a tragic warning about the risks involved in technological advances made with insufficient care.

Eighteen months earlier it had all been so different when in 1878, with much fanfare and a banquet, the bridge was opened. Queen Victoria did not attend despite hopes she would make the journey from Balmoral.

The British – and the Scots in particular – took justified pride in their country’s engineering achievements. The length of the span and the complex feat of construction, during which at least 20 workers lost their lives, stood as testament to the notion that there was no unbridgeable impasse beyond the capacity of the Victorians.

Unfortunately, in this case it was hubris at play. The design of the bridge was deficient and the engineering was based on incorrect calculations.

Having begun on the terrible evening itself, Prebble’s masterly reconstruction pitches the reader back years earlier to tell the story of the project leading up to the collapse and on into the human aftermath defined by grief, recrimination and regret.

Drawing heavily on the Board of Trade investigation, and testimony recorded by the newspapers of the time in a town famed for its journalism, Prebble constructs an account that is a model of narrative non-fiction. For that reason it influenced a generation of news feature journalists after he alighted on the story in the 1950s and decided it needed telling properly and coherently for the first time in the modern style.

Prebble is best remembered as a historian of the Highland Clearances, but he was a hack by trade. Born in England he developed a fascination with Scottish history during his childhood spent in Canada, where tales of the clans and the romance of the Highlands were shared as folklore and evidence of sturdy endeavour.

The High Girders is short. I must have read it more than twenty times since my father bought me a copy at least thirty years ago.

When I wanted to write an account of the collapse of RBS (published in 2013 as Making it Happen) it was to the High Girders that I turned first in search of stylistic inspiration. Then to Selling Hitler, by Robert Harris, the story of the Hitler diaries hoax that is surely the greatest British work of non-fiction of the last half century.

Re-reading High Girders recently, after wading through several too long American non-fiction books for review, it reminded me that this is the kind of work that would struggle to get commissioned now by a major publisher. You could script the rejection letter if a writer tried. It would be deemed too direct and compelling to appeal to a quirky modern reader. This disaster was a long time ago, but it’s not academic history, so what is it? What’s the hook? Is there a contemporary parallel to pitch the book and it’s cover on? No that’s the point. There isn’t one, or if there is the reader will find it themselves because he or she is not an idiot. It’s just an extraordinary story you could not make up that leaves the reader to reflect, time and again.

Prebble knew the power of direct storytelling and the need for detail, speed and humanity without over cluttering it with musing or trickery. Here, he says, this happened, can you believe it happened? Here’s how. And here are the people who it happened to. They are not that different from us. Here is how mistakes happen and how humans cope. Remember.

The High Girders was published in 1956 by Secker and Warburg