October, 2009 One of the great delights of bridge chasing occurs when I think I am pursuing one bridge and all kinds of other bridges serendipitously insert themselves into the story through a chain of coincidences. This particular story starts with a funeral, however, and involves a corpse in the woods.
Last summer my neighbor in the big house, Grizel Cochrane Williams, would walk over with her Border Terrier Tom to have a chat and a cup of tea. At 95 she was a delightful lady of the old school (related to the privateering Admiral Cochrane who was the prototype for Jack Aubrey) with an infectious laugh and a skeptical Scotch take on life. She had a stroke last winter and died just before I returned. Grizel had a Catholic funeral. Tout Powys was there in those marvelous saucy English hats and bespoke suits, carrying top hats. At her wake, I was chatting with a neighbor who mentioned that his former prep school in Devon, Stoodleigh, had had an iron bridge where its drive turned off the main road to cross the River Exe. So, one sunny day in August having nothing in particular to do, I hopped in the car and drove to Devon.
I found the bridge but as I was staring at the dedication plaque which was dated 1998, I was interrupted by an exasperated man asking if I realized that I had parked my car on his private property and would I please move my car? I said I would be happy to do so: that I had come all the way from Wales to find this old bridge but that evidently the bridge I had come to find was long gone. Immediately diverted, he asked if I would like to see the old bridge which seemed a ridiculous question until he went on to explain that when they had replaced it with the bridge we were standing on, they had simply dumped the old one in the woods.
Intrigued, but wary of another wild goose chase in unfamiliar woods, I persuaded him to come along and show it to me. By the time HE had gotten lost himself and had to be set right by a hippy character (with the requisite piercings who talked without removing his cigarette, Humphrey Bogart fashion), my new best friend and I were a bridge hunting team without ever having exchanged names. We found the poor old Stoodleigh bridge, cut in half length wise but intact, with baby trees growing in and through it.
I emailed Mike Fair some photos of his bridge and asked if he knew anything else about it - like when it was built and by whom. He mentioned a County Surveyor's report number which he had never followed up, but just as soon as he was through haying, he would now get on to it at last and let me know when he did. Meanwhile, I went off bridge hunting in East Anglia where I dropped into an Essex antique store at Clare to ask directions.
During the course of the inevitable conversation about why an American lady is running around England looking for iron bridges, the proprietor casually mentioned that a friend of his had an old iron bridge on his estate near Halstead. The bridge, when I found, it was in derelict condition, but it fascinated me because to my untutored eye it might have been built by a very innovative and once prolific bridge builder, James Dredge, whose known surviving bridges are down to only seven.
With dreams of wowing the civil engineering world by discovering a lost Dredge, I decided to get the opinion of Don McQuillan, the author of all the articles I had read on Dredge. But how to get an email address for McQuillan? I started with my email pal Mike Chimes the head librarian at the ICE. Chimes didn't have it, but he sent me by cyberspace to one Greenfield who sits on the ICE History and Heritage Panel for Southwest England. The reasoning was that since Dredge started his career as a brewer in Bath before he took up designing bridges, Greenfield would be likely to be in touch with McQuillan who was on the ICE History & Heritage Panel for Northern Ireland.
Greenfield did indeed put me in touch with McQuillan who said after viewing my photos: no - it was an intriguing bridge but not by Dredge, alas. I reported this to Greenfield while thanking him and I just happened to mention the Stoodleigh bridge corpse in the woods in hopes that perhaps his own Southwestern England History and Heritage panel might have some information on it. His answering 'ping!' came back so fast, I hadn't even gotten out of my chair. This was because Greenfield and his civil engineering business partner are writing a paper on those Southwest iron foundry owners and fabricators who built Brunel's bridges in that part of the world.
When I mentioned that the poor corpse looked like someone had seen Brunel's bridge at Saltash and tried to copy it, he immediately thought of a Mr. Hennet who had worked on the Saltash bridge. I gave Greenfield the file numbers Mike Fair had given me for the Stoodleigh bridge and he got on to his friends in the Devon County Surveyor's office to find the file. Unfortunately, it is only slightly smaller than "Gone with the Wind", so he had not read it yet when I left Wales in October, but he forwarded me some 1914 photos of it, to be followed he assures me with a snyposis of the report. Someday.
So, to summarize the coincidences, if I had arrived in Wales a week later and missed Grizel's funeral or if I had not parked my car in exactly that particular wrong place or if I had not been prompted by some imp to mention the corpse in the woods to Greenfield whom I was consulting about a totally different bridge, I would not now have two civil engineers on two different History and Heritage panels as enthusiastic and helpful pals. Someday, on Welsh Time, I will eventually get Greenfield's take on whether Hennet built the Stoodleigh Bridge or - more to my point - the correct engineering term for what method of construction is holding it up: a tied bow or a girder bridge pretending to be a suspension bridge.