Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge Was Built Timeshift

MUSIC: Stand By Me by Ben E King

A quarter of a million tonnes of concrete,

moulded by human genius and endeavour.

A one-mile ribbon of steel forged in the white heat of technology.

Something which put British engineering

back on top of the world.

The Severn Bridge is 50 years old,

but its elegance is timeless

and its ground-breaking design continues to be flattered

by imitation the world over.

This, then, is the scene set for the royal opening of the Severn Bridge.

It is with great pleasure that I now declare the Severn Bridge open.

The inauguration came six weeks after England had won the World Cup

and six months after the launch of colour television -

a time of huge national optimism.

CHEERING

As Her Majesty's car, leading this great procession

on to the bridge itself,

to make the first official crossing.

1966 was actually a pretty great year for British design,

for British music, for British film,

for British fashion, for British architecture,

for British bridge design.

Britain was on a roll.

Bridges have this power to transform and excite

a community and to make people really believe

in the power of the future, in a way,

you know, that man's works can actually make life better.

This is the story of the Severn Bridge,

told by those who designed it...

The Severn Bridge is the most perfect example

of a suspension bridge in the world.

It remains the leader of that sort of innovation.

Nobody has found a way of doing it better.

..and those who built it.

The workforce on that bridge, they were a breed of men on their own.

The older I get, I'm very, very proud of the job

and everything that went into the bridge.

But it's also the story of the men who lost their lives

in the conquest of Britain's mightiest river.

I always think of it as my father's.

His bridge.

For many of its 200 miles, the River Severn shadows

the border between England and Wales.

But in its lower reaches, it presents a formidable barrier

between the two countries,

isolating the industrial powerhouse of South Wales.

Once, if you wanted to drive between Cardiff and Bristol,

you faced a 100-mile journey through Gloucester and Chepstow -

their narrow roads increasingly overwhelmed by traffic.

Or you could take a small ferry, but it ran only in daytime

for a handful of cars.

The road links into South Wales from England were unbelievably awful.

People cannot really envisage how it was.

For instance, if you left South Wales and you went

to the Beachley-Aust ferry, which was the way

to get over the estuary,

that ferry didn't always run because of the tide problems.

And alongside the road down to the ferry

were stakes in the ground which said,

"Half an hour, hour, one and a half hours, two hours."

That was how long it would take you to get into the ferry.

And if it was about one and a half hours and you wanted to go down

to Torquay, that was the point your father said,

"OK, we're off."

Up through Gloucester, down the other side.

That gives you a flavour.

It was unbelievably cut off.

My name is Derek Hudd, I'm 86 years of age.

I worked on the Old Passage Severn Ferry.

It was quite hard work. You were on your feet most of the time.

I, as an engineer, worked down below, on the engines.

You were also expected to go up on deck and help load

the boat as well, which I did. But you never minded that

because it was good to get out of the engine room.

There were cars, there was a queue of cars, it was fantastic.

You could have a queue of 100 cars or more.

There was this chap, he was up there with his children.

And I said, "How long have you been here?"

And he said, "Well, we got here at half past eight."

Remember now that this was about one o'clock in the afternoon.

And I said to him, "Well, why didn't you go around?"

And he said, "God, I couldn't do that.

"The kids and the missus would have gone mad."

I used to go to stay near Chepstow.

I used to go by ferry, this ramshackle affair,

to get across this wide piece of water.

It was wonderful as a child. You would arrive, go on the ferry,

clunk across, then you got to the other side and people said,

"You made it all right, then?"

Like they expected that you weren't going to.

So the arrival of the bridge was a big deal, a great expression

of human endeavour on their doorstep.

The Severn Bridge was greenlit in the 1940s

to be the biggest in Britain.

The mile-long crossing would follow the same route as the ferry.

It would pass through an army camp and over the neighbouring River Wye

to complete the link between England and Wales.

My name is Michael Parsons.

I'm 87 years old and I'm the most senior surviving design engineer

for the superstructure of the Severn Bridge.

This was to be the longest span bridge in the world

outside of the United States of America.

So it had big importance to the firms and to the government.

And we were all conscious of the importance of what we were doing.

I was born and brought up in Bristol, so from a very early age

I used to go to the Clifton Suspension Bridge,

which meant I was inspired with the whole idea of a bridge

leaping from one side of a gorge to the other.

The masters of long span suspension bridges were the Americans,

and they made them big.

The Golden Gate and the bridges of New York

were heavyweight structures with stone towers

supporting iron and concrete roadways.

But when engineers tried to lighten the load, disaster struck.

A terrifying example of the danger of vibration.

The third longest suspension bridge in the world plunges to destruction

at Tacoma in the United States.

This was quite a major bridge in the United States,

and it was a radical departure from the conventional American design.

But the fatal flaw with that design was that it had

virtually no torsional stiffness.

It was too flexible.

It wobbled itself to death, basically because there is movement,

there is inherent movement in structures and the trouble with

suspension bridges is that the vibration set off by the wind

can be like a semi-perpetual state that increases and increases

to the point where the bridge actually falls apart.

These were big issues, but the Severn Bridge

pioneered certain solutions to that.

Defying the wind was the greatest challenge

and, ultimately, the bridge's greatest claim to fame.

A unique road design would hang from suspension cables

draped over 450-foot steel towers.

But before all that,

the foundations had to be laid

in a river infamous for the second highest tide in the world.

Sir John, will you be faced with any particular difficulties

bridging the Severn at this point?

We will have to cope, of course,

with an extremely high range of tide between high

and low water, as much as 40 feet in this case.

So we will be able to get to Wales in comfort by 1965?

-I hope so, yes.

-Thank you very much, Sir John.

I'm talking to you from the middle of the M4,

the London to South Wales motorway.

Or at least, it will be the middle of the M4 in 1966.

The BBC reporter Tom Salmon documented the entire construction,

beginning in May, 1961.

This, in fact, is the long-awaited Severn Bridge,

the bridge they've been talking about building now for 100 years.

The first two years would be all about the foundations.

On either side, enormous anchorages would counter

the weight of the bridge and, in the river itself,

two bases would support the towers.

The huge tides made this the most dangerous part

of the entire project,

especially for the foundation of the east tower.

I've heard a lot since I've been out here about tidal workings.

What, in fact, does tidal working mean?

The tide goes out and the men go down on the blocks.

The tide comes back, and the men have to get off the blocks

and wait for the next time.

It's a dog-rough job and there's not many men can stick it.

This is a picture of me with our casing sinking foreman.

I had hair then.

I'm John Evans.

I was the most junior site engineer of the Severn Bridge.

We were working in a regime where

at a point in time of day there was 40-plus feet of water.

Six and a half hours later, you were on exposed rock.

Six and a half hours later, there was another 40 feet of water.

So working in this river with this huge rise and fall

was a major civil engineering challenge.

The rock was probably exposed for a maximum of two hours

at low water springs.

So you could take a very small area, clean it off,

and put a bit of concrete down.

And then you'd come back 12 hours later and do another bit.

And some of the lower parts of the rock were literally only exposed

for about half an hour at low springs.

I thought the men were brave because of

the intimidation of that water coming in.

I did feel a deep admiration for the foundation contractors.

Because of the tides, safety launches were on permanent standby

throughout the construction.

The first one was skippered by a local fisherman, Jack Hollins.

I think it's a family thing.

My father was in the shipyard. My uncle Jack was a fisherman.

He used to go out and fish for salmon.

He worked on the ferry.

He loved the water.

As a family, we knew the river.

We were warned about not getting in the river.

We were frightened of it because we knew how deadly it was.

In late '61, we heard that some men had fallen in the water

and were drifting upstream on the flood tide.

In the gathering dusk, one of the ferries set off upstream

looking for these men,

and by a marvellous set of circumstances,

the three men were picked up

some...mile or more above the work site.

Jack Hollins' safety launch had joined the search,

but when the men were rescued, he turned for home

unaware that a tanker, the Wyresdale H,

was heading towards him.

We on the Wyresdale H were bound for Swansea from Sharpness.

As I remember it, it was a very cold night.

But all of a sudden, about 6.30pm, there was this loud crashing noise,

and we thought, "Crikey, we've hit one of the marker posts."

And we ran up on deck and we were shocked to see that we had hit

a launch and the launch was smashed up between

the two bows with one man clinging to the wreckage,

shouting that his mate was in the water.

We turned on the big searchlight that was mounted

on top of the wheelhouse, trained it into the water,

and we could see this man,

in the water, with his hands above the water

and his head there, and suddenly he just slipped away.

It was just this vision of this man.

It was as peaceful as that.

Jack Hollins survived the collision, but his mate was lost.

My name is Deborah Jones. I am the eldest daughter

of John Newton, who was the first man

to die during the building of the first Severn crossing.

He was happy, had a lovely sense of humour.

He was a lovely father.

The body was never found,

despite searching and the lifeboat going out,

until this day, it's never been found.

I don't think my mother said anything else,

other than he'd jumped into the water to save somebody.

Her way was, say nothing and just get on with it.

And that's what she did.

This was the first incident that had occurred on the construction site

where serious injury or loss of life had occurred,

and so it was quite a sobering period.

MUSIC: Wondrous Place by Billy Fury

Well, this is the Eastern anchorage, and this will take the whole weight

of the Severn Bridge.

And the next time you complain about having to lay

a concrete path in the garden, well, just you think of this little lot.

It's 140 feet long, 110 feet wide and 120 foot high.

And into it, when it's finished, 90,000 tonnes of concrete,

and 90,000 tonnes means that it will weigh more than the Queen Mary.

The concrete consumed vast quantities of stone,

pushing nearby quarries to the limit.

The area's hotels were stretched to accommodate

hundreds of workers coming in from across the country.

But local people knew it would all help to relieve

their biggest problem.

Before the bridge, Chepstow had a real blockage.

There were queues and queues and queues of people

that couldn't get through.

Huge lorries - they would shake the house.

And we'd even been reduced, in very warm weather,

to go and take drinks outside to the lorry drivers!

There were queues every bloody day.

Some days, it would take us bloody half a day to get to work

with the traffic in Chepstow.

Lorries crashing into shops and what have you.

And it was a bottleneck.

The famous arch in Chepstow used to be one big congestion.

And when people drive into Chepstow, they have only one object

at the moment, and that's to drive out of it, if they can.

I think once the bulk of the thundering lorries

are out of the town, people will want to come to Chepstow.

Well, personally, I'd rather come down in the bucket.

Well, so much, then, for the anchorage, 90,000 tonnes of it,

45,000 tonnes still to go.

There's another one just like it on the other side of the river,

and they tell me there's quite a bit of rivalry between the two.

We had to establish where the west anchorage was going to be.

That was in the middle of the Army Apprentice College

first rugby pitch.

And one of the early jobs was to take up the turf

and get rid of that.

Lots of new lawns in Chepstow.

Attention now switched to the base of the west tower and a new problem.

Here, there was no bedrock on the surface,

so to gain a solid footing, they had to dig 30 feet

below the river and that meant installing

temporary dams to stem the tide.

The cofferdams themselves were, in effect, a vertical cylinder,

40 feet high, 60 feet wide,

and they were formed of sheet piling.

You see it on dock walls and places like that.

My name is Graham Nash.

I arrived on the site of the Severn Bridge

to supervise the construction, as a junior engineer.

This shows the water coming in through the joints.

The cofferdam would only leak until the tide dropped

and then it would leak the other way.

Then the conventional method for sealing these leaking joints

was to pour ashes down the outside,

and it was quite fascinating, the way in which

the water jets just reduced away to nothing.

So we had faith in the structure, and so once you've got faith

in the structure, you'd put on your wet suit and your helmet

and you'd go down there.

We were working something like 60 or 70 feet

below the tide level outside.

As a ferry went past at high water, you could hear

the thump, thump, thump of the engines and the screws.

And sometimes, if the ferries came a little bit too close,

you would get an extra drenching down below.

It was an exciting job, too.

Make no mistake, it was...

We knew we were building something quite historical.

The weather was also making history in 1962.

The first inkling we had that we were in for something exceptional

came the weekend after Christmas.

We had the coldest spell of weather I can remember.

Salt water in the river,

and it became full of ice floes.

If you were down at water level on the bank, it looked as though

there were enough there to enable you to walk across.

That was quite remarkable.

Before the first snow had even looked like melting,

in fact, while most of it was still lying where

it had fallen, there came another and even greater blizzard.

Again it was the south-west that bore the brunt.

Throughout this period, we continued working

and, towards the end of February and into March,

the local quarries had to give up.

The temperatures were so low that the crusher jaws,

which were a cast-iron material, were shattering in the cold.

Motorists were advised to take no journeys whatsoever,

not even essential ones.

1962 went out with the southern half of Britain

littered with abandoned cars.

The winter also saw the second fatal accident and it involved

another safety launch.

There was always a safety boat, and it was out there 24 hours a day

so that it could go to assist, if it was needed.

And one night, during the night shift,

it broke away from its mooring and...

..smashed into the pier, or one of the... I'm not quite sure what.

It was all very sad, because we lost two people with that one.

Both men were locals.

One was from Bristol. The other, a father of four

from the Forest of Dean, Albert Nelmes.

He was a family man.

He didn't have a trade apart from...

He started to go fishing

when there was not much work around in the '30s.

Because it was out of season,

and he always got a job,

sometimes it was building, anything he could do for the few months,

obviously to keep us four children.

I went down on that morning

to pick him up because we were sending some cattle to market.

They'd said that there had been an accident.

I was at school, in the sixth form, and the headmistress came in

and stopped the lesson and called me out,

and my sister was outside waiting and said that Dad was missing.

It wasn't until later on in that day that we were told

that they'd found his body in the launch, like.

Obviously, the tide is quite fast, running in.

Gone into one of the stanchions, uprights, and capsized.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly,

the sixth biggest bridge in the world takes shape.

Despite the setbacks,

the foundations were completed on schedule,

the anchorages on each side and the bases

in the river ready for the towers.

It was time for the concrete mixers to give way to the steel erectors.

It wasn't exactly exciting doing the foundations, really.

It was interesting but it seemed to be slow, you know.

It took two years to get that pier constructed

but once we started to erect the towers, I think then

it began to strike home that we were really going up.

A lot of people think that the towers of the bridge are made

of concrete, but in fact they consist of steel boxes,

bolted one on top of the other.

When you're building a suspension bridge,

because of the curvature of the earth, if each tower is vertical,

they're actually not parallel to one another,

because of the centre of the earth down here.

And believe it or not, that is allowed for.

If you want to get an idea of the precision of the job,

just consider, when the towers were completed,

they were strained outwards exactly 32 inches.

When the centre span is completed,

they will lean inwards exactly eight inches.

And when the side spans are added...

The towers end up vertical. Isn't that miraculous?

And on they went.

Two towers, 1,200 tonnes each, erected in eight months.

The next thing they had to do was to join the towers together.

They had to get a piece of wire across 3,000 feet of water.

Well, this they did quite simply by loading a huge reel

of wire onto a barge and driving it across

and paying out the wire as they went and letting it rest on the riverbed.

The demand for wire was insatiable,

the length almost enough to encircle the planet.

I'm Howard Peterson and I left my father's farm

and went to work in the winding shed.

I'd never seen anything like it before.

The machinery and the coils were starting to come in

and what the devil do I do with this lot?

They would come in on... Lorry loads was coming in.

You'd cut the bands on these coils and it could fly anywhere

if you didn't have it under control

and then reel it on to the main drum which was like a giant cotton reel.

The big drum was off-loaded and taken away

ready for spinning across the bridge.

And the foreman came to me one day, and he says,

"Got another job for you. I want you to go

"and you'll be labourer to the carpenter."

That was the first time I'd been up the tower.

They then put square pieces of steel mesh

to make foot-walks from one side to the other.

To look around and see for miles and then you'd think,

"God, I'm about 450 foot up.

"I've never been up this high before."

And I looked over the side then, and had a look down and see

the safety launch and all below and it was like...

Like dots down below. Unbelievable.

You'd go to the handrail, and one time the handrail wasn't there.

It would have been open. Men were working on the top

of this structure, putting...

And they had to work right on the edge of this structure.

They put the handrails around.

You can't envisage being in that situation.

The first wires were there simply to support the catwalks.

But now it was time for the main cables,

from which the road deck would hang.

And they were a different matter altogether.

And I think this is just about the finest argument

I've ever heard for giving up smoking.

And this is one of the main cables of the bridge,

looking rather more substantial up here than it does from down below.

And this, I suppose, to the layman,

is just about the most baffling bit there is of bridge building.

How do they get a cable as massive as this one across the river?

It's going now.

It's a process, whereby you pull a loop of this up over the towers,

across the main span, up over the other tower

and down to the far anchorage.

And then the carrying device

comes back with a loop of wire again

and it goes back and forward, back and forward.

Cable spinning, as it was known, was relentless.

16 hours a day for six months

until 18,000 miles of wire had been spun across the river.

All rights, Rob? Tether that up.

And for the whole six months,

only strong winds gave the steel erectors any respite.

Food and drink was brought to them on the catwalks

as the spinning went on.

I'm Brian Hughes and I worked on the Severn Bridge,

supplying the men that were spinning the cable with tea and soup.

My job actually was delivering the tea down to the men on

the catwalk. It takes about half an hour to

walk down there and back. With the tea on your back, mind.

But it was all right.

They were God.

Everything a steel erector wanted, he had to have.

And if a steel erector was unhappy, you'd be for the high jump!

Our tearoom was bolted to the side of the tower

and you'd enter through the roof, like, go down

the ladder, just like going into a submarine.

And towers was moving...

easy, could fall eight foot from side to side.

Cos when you was in that canteen, down by the side of the what's-his-name,

you put a cup under the table, he'd moved from one side back to the other.

Even a full cup of tea, mind.

When the weather was bad and the guys had to come in...

..I suppose they wore out more packs of cards than

any other industry I know!

The sound of the pulleys pulling the wires across was very distinctive.

It was a sort of tinkling,

clanking noise and you could hear this going on

from early in the morning until late in the evening.

Spinning continued day and night through the summer of 1964.

It became a way of life.

The team were very keen on skittles.

And we became interested in the possibility of competing

with some teams from Chepstow.

Once or twice we drove around the top and down to Chepstow and

that meant a very late return home at the end

of the evening. And then someone said,

"Well, why don't we walk across?"

The lights are always on. They're always safe and so we used to

walk across and have our skittles

and then have a beer and walk back again.

It was a very good way of spending an evening.

On the deck,

on the top of the towers, it was...portable loos.

We had a guy there that looked after the loos.

And he stunk that much, we wouldn't let him in our tea hut

so we used to bolt the hatch down.

I don't know what possessed the man.

He came to empty the toilets

and threw the bucket of waste over the side

and didn't even look to see where it was going to land.

And, unfortunately, the safety launch.

Beautiful day, the sun was shining

and we heard a splitter splutter, which sounded like heavy rain.

I went out of the wheelhouse and found

that somebody had tipped the contents of the chemical toilet

and most of it had landed on us.

The gaffer came rearing into the...

to the tea hut and gave us boys a real dressing down

about throwing the bucket of waste over the side of the bridge

and we said, "Well, it wasn't us. You'd better go and examine

"what the contents are and you can see it wasn't our fault."

And one of the steel erectors slapped me on

the shoulder and said, "It must be your lucky day.

"What are you backing on the horses?"

Once all the wires are in position, they are

compressed into a circle...

..and clamped together at a controlled tension. Each cable is

now ready to take a load of 10,000 tonnes

and the equation is almost complete.

MUSIC: Girl From Ipanema

The final stage of construction

was where the Severn Bridge achieved its greatest innovation.

Today, the old shipyard in Chepstow shows little sign

of its ground-breaking role in civil engineering history

but this was where they built the bridge's revolutionary roadway.

This was the first time a box structure had been made

of this shape or this size.

It was built from stiffened plates.

One, two, three, four, five and we all knew this was

an innovation and I think we all wanted to make a success of it.

Well, I could describe it as a spaceship.

The wind coming up the river,

they were designed for it to go underneath

and up and over, so it was an aeroplane shape, really.

Well, you know, I do believe I'm...

There. It looks like

we're discussing whether it's time to go for lunch!

The plated box design was a response to

the Tacoma disaster in 1940.

But it took 20 years for the idea to gain favour.

Those winds had sent shock waves through the world of

civil engineering.

Fortunately, the only casualties were a car stalled on the bridge

and a dog.

As a result of the failure, we in this country decided

that we would have to

stick to the open truss,

as in all previous American big bridges.

The classic American truss deck

comprised a heavyweight lattice of steel girders

under a concrete roadway.

And right up to the start of the Severn Bridge construction,

this was the plan that was being fine-tuned in the wind tunnel.

But the design team led by a taciturn Welshman called

Gilbert Roberts already had the plated box in mind.

They just hadn't had the time or opportunity to test it.

A very good solution had been found

to the problem of the Tacoman errors by making it

with openwork trusses.

As the wind stream meets the front girder, it divides

and curls round the top and bottom edges of the girder.

But this had the cost of considerably

increasing the actual ordinary wind forces.

And the way to get round that would be to

make them much more like an aircraft wing.

And Gilbert Roberts wanted to test the new aerofoil

type deck. This was unprecedented

and wind tunnel testing time is scarce and expensive.

And then one day, Gilbert came over into my...

into the office and said the model they were testing

in the wind tunnel has broken loose from its anchorages

and has smashed itself.

The man responsible was seriously worried and

thought that Roberts would be highly critical.

"I'm dreadfully sorry, Mr Roberts, but

"we've just broken the model."

And it wasn't in Roberts's nature to say, "Hurray!"

But that was his reaction, in fact.

So I said, "Well, the time has come, I think, sir..."

He was sir to me.

"I think the time has come, sir, that we've got

"to think about the possibility of using the plated box."

So out went the heavyweight truss

and in came the plated box, a third of the depth and half the weight.

It sailed through its tests and went quickly into construction,

a stroke of genius with a touch of serendipity.

It was streamlined, which meant that the wind forces were less.

It used less steel and therefore it weighed less

and therefore, you've reduced both the lateral forces

and the vertical forces so there were savings on

the cables, on the towers and on the anchorages,

because the tension of the cables was less.

And if you add all those savings together, it's immense.

One of the towers of one of the big

American bridges contained more steel

than the whole of the Severn Bridge.

And, you know, I think, when this was pointed out

to the American engineers, they got a bit annoyed, really,

and thought that we'd been cheating.

The Americans might have envied another benefit

of the boxes - that they could float and

therefore be towed down to the bridge.

The first of 88 that would span the Severn was launched

in September 1964.

All the dignitaries were

watching and already on the sides and he had to

blow, give it a blow with a hammer

and the pin flew up, hit the hammer out of his hand,

up in the air, caused quite a lot of amusement

but slowly, the unit started up

and slowly launched itself into the river.

And no problems, all perfect,

much to our delight and relief!

Slender, streamlined,

almost fragile looking, their appearance

conceals a strength and solidity which will

allow winds of 100mph to blow harmlessly around them.

The road sections of the bridge

are made of steel - in fact, they really are

just a series of steel boxes which have been

made up in the steelyard at Chepstow and then

launched into the River Wye down a slipway.

A special barge was built to collect the boxes and

take them to the bridge.

Called the Severn Knave,

it had no rudder and was steered by four outboard

engines, one on each corner.

My name is John Roberts.

I was a deckhand on the Severn Knave in 1964.

We were just waiting for the sections to come into the water

and then we'd get hold of it and secure it.

It was a very nice job to work on.

We used to look at each other and say, "They pay us for this!"

The skipper of the Severn Knave was Jack Hollins,

the man who'd survived the fatal accident on the first

safety launch in 1961.

Now, his knowledge of the river would prove invaluable.

Jack had always worked on the river.

He was a fisherman, operated one of the boats in the Wye.

Very skilful. He was just always in control.

He used to see things before they happened.

Jack was tall, dark and handsome

and he was always part of our lives as children.

And we used to go and stand at the end of Raglan Way

and we look down on the Wye River and it was

something to see, it was like looking at a submarine, actually.

Very large, wide submarine.

The main part of the road decking,

as they call it, is 80 feet wide and there will be

four traffic lines 12 feet wide, two in each direction.

All the sections for Severn were bought down the Wye

past our construction work and then we would

go round to Beachley Point and watch the work

of lifting the Severn units.

To form the roadway, the 88 boxes had to be hoisted into

position, a job demanding patience and seamanship.

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

The tide doesn't run truly

underneath the bridge. You can get sections and

you can get parts of it where it's running upstream

and another part where it is running downstream, both at the same time.

So Jack had to manoeuvre this vessel into position

underneath the lifting tackle

and it would've been a fairly tricky job to do.

INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER

We'd get the sections,

bring them out into the Severn, drop anchor, 50 yards,

100 yards before the bridge and then you'd let it out

on the winch, and just drop it down under the bridge.

You've got to have good visibility.

You've got to have wind less than 30 knots and

preferably no snow and ice.

They also needed particular tides, which meant it would take

18 months to complete the task.

I don't think there was any other skipper around that

could have done it myself.

I don't know, but I had a lot of respect for him.

When you're building a suspension bridge, the classic way

was to start at the towers and work both

into the side spans and then into the main span

whereas at Severn, the first boxes were lifted in the middle.

And immediately, you began to see what a huge structure

it was going to be.

So then just behind me, the winches

which are used to winch and hoist the main

road sections into position, and if you walk

to the very edge of the tower and look over,

you can see the sections of the roadway or decking

as they call it, that have already been hoisted into place.

And of course, the ferries

used to pass underneath the works so everybody

could see what was going on.

And it generated huge interest locally.

MUSIC: The Times They Are A-Changin' by Bob Dylan

# Come gather around, people

# Wherever you roam

# And admit that the waters

# Around you have grown

# And accept it that soon

# You'll be drenched to the bone

# If your time to you is worth saving

# Then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone

# For the times, they are a-changing. #

There's a lovely moment

in the story of the evolution of the Severn Bridge

when none other than Bob Dylan, one of the greatest stars of the day,

turns up. Barry Feinstein took this wonderful photograph

where you see Bob Dylan in shades looking very cool

but what's exciting, I think, is the fact that

this was the very tour that Bob Dylan changed

from his acoustic set to playing electric.

He was changing. The times, in his own words, were a-changing

and there is Bob Dylan, standing at this very moment

of great change in British culture,

popular culture and, of course, how remarkably,

in civil engineering too.

# The times they are a-changin'. #

I remember the bridge was being built.

It was a sight to see, of course,

and this been has a memory I've carried with me. The understanding

that bridges have this power to transform and excite

a community and to make people really

believe in the power of the future, in a way,

that man's works can actually make life better.

For a year, the roadway spread slowly to

the east and west. But before the crossing

could be completed, there was another setback.

I just got a message on the weekend

that Jack was dead. Simple as that.

It was just a normal day. He was in the garden and

Jack got stung by a bee and because the traffic

was stopped, he was unfortunate that the doctor had to run,

couldn't get to him in time to give him the injection

and he died in the garden.

Disbelief. Disbelief.

He'd survived all sorts of things and to die from a rather

paltry thing like a bee sting was just unbelievable.

But that's when his luck ran out.

We didn't know what they would do, the bridge builders,

or whatever.

So I ended up in charge of the Severn Knave.

BIRDS CAW

March the 1st 1966, St David's Day.

And the last section of roadway to go in.

The last section was at Beachley on St David's Day.

Just drove it around on the engines with the anchor secure.

When it was in position, it was hoisted up the river.

I think the man who designed and built the bridge,

very, very clever.

How everything fitted, everything went together, everything

come together smoothly.

That was the end of the job.

But it was a good job.

MUSIC: Paint It Black by The Rolling Stones

# I see a red door and I want to paint it black

# No colours any more, I want them to turn black... #

After over five years of the most advanced engineering,

four men on their hands and knees did the final job,

because no-one had yet invented a machine that

could tarmac the roadway.

# ..line of cars and they're all painted black

# I see people turn their heads and quickly look away... #

Two decades in the planning, six years in the making and

five months ahead of schedule,

the Severn Bridge was fit for a queen.

This, then, is the scene set for the royal opening of the Severn Bridge.

An occasion of such importance

that the BBC scheduled two hours of live coverage.

We all went across to Aust,

where the Queen appeared and she was introduced

to everybody, dignitaries from far and wide.

Sir Gilbert Roberts, responsible for the design of the superstructure

and the steelwork.

Magnificent lady that she is.

Mike Parsons has been working on the Severn Bridge

on and off for 17 years.

I was much more...almost servile in those days, faced with the Queen.

I see the pictures of myself, slightly bowing

with my hand held out.

And now, John Robertson.

He's 25 years old. He's from over in the other side, from Chepstow.

Met the Queen!

Eventually, he became skipper of the Severn Knave.

I was called around to Mr Hyatt's office. He thanked me

and he said, "For what you've done, I'd like

"you to meet the Queen."

And so, the royal car

moves towards the eastern approach to the new Severn Bridge.

And down below us now,

the klaxon horns are sounding from the boats.

There's something very special about seeing a very

light structure, especially a bridge,

crossing a great big landscape,

so at that point you might expect a bridge to be this

mighty great stone or concrete construction,

to take you safely across and what you find is

something very filigree and fine indeed.

The overwhelmingly simple fact about all this is

that nowhere in the world is there a bridge like this one.

It's the lightest for its length and strength ever built.

And the techniques used in its construction have

already been copied and will certainly continue

to be copied, not only in this country

but in all parts of the world.

The breakage of the model

was completely crucial, because it opened the door to testing

the new scheme, and the new

scheme at that time was completely innovative

for long span bridges.

And later, she is to see the Concorde.

Now building at the BAC's Filton factory.

So quite a day, this, for British engineering.

I think as a nation at that time, we did feel supremely confident.

I personally felt I could do anything. I know it's ridiculous,

really, but everybody felt confident for the future.

The idea of a bridge to span

the Severn has been a vision for many years.

And as an advertisement of the ability of British

engineers and constructors and shows

just what can be achieved.

It is with great pleasure that I now declare

the Severn Bridge open.

The bridge was considered so

special that an orchestral piece was

commissioned for the occasion.

It was commissioned, actually, by none other than the BBC.

It was a work called Severn Bridge Variations,

written in six connecting parts by

three Welsh and three English composers.

The French had done this quite a bit over the years,

celebrating engineering structures with modern music.

The British came in,

this Anglo-Welsh venture, rather beautiful.

A year after the royal opening, a second plaque was

unveiled to commemorate the six men who lost their lives

in the construction of the Severn Bridge. Remarkably few, perhaps,

for such a perilous project.

In 50 years, many more of the 400 who built the bridge have

passed away. But those that remain

preserve their memories with great pride.

At the end of the day, we had a party and we all got

very merry and that was it.

Some years after I finished on the ferry, I thought,

"I'll paint a picture of the last day"

and I just sat down and painted this.

I like Raoul Dufy and I try to

paint like him but his paintings look very easy to do.

But, no, it's not easy. No, it wasn't easy to do.

But I just painted. I just painted it and there it is.

I've got shallots in the corner now, waiting,

when they grow up, they'll

be for pickled onions, for pickling.

Broad beans, leeks,

and this is the walkway from the Severn Bridge. Oh, and by the way,

I forgot to mention my rhubarb.

You can see how strong...

You can put all the pressure on it.

And it's perfect. Not a bit of rust after 50 years.

I think the bridge today looks just as fine as

what it was when it was first built.

I can remember flying, coming back from holiday on the flight,

looking down from the plane and you could see

the bridge, absolutely perfect.

That made me feel proud.

I'm glad we landed!

CREW LAUGHS

MUSIC: Stand By Me by Ben E King

It has an inherent beauty, doesn't it?

Between the towers, they suspended this cable which takes

a particularly strong characteristic form,

a parabolic curve and I suppose, part of the great success

of the Severn Bridge truly is

the fact it is simply beautiful. Like a great work of art.

It looks right to people who

don't know anything about engineering.

They can see how it works.

It's like hanging washing on the line, you know, you can see how

the washing is supported by the thin wire

but it is a fact that if it looks right, it's a good

indication that maybe you have got it right.

So right that the Severn Bridge design has been

adopted by every subsequent long span suspension bridge

and Mike Parsons and his team won a prestigious engineering award,

sharing it with the inventors of the jump jet.

-Are you all right?

-This is a form of

stability I've never investigated.

I received the MacRobert award as part of the prize given

to Freeman, Fox and Partners for the design

of the Severn Bridge. And this was the first one

that's ever been awarded

but I think they picked a good one to start with.

20 years ago, the second Severn Crossing created

a more direct route for the M4

and prompted questions about the future of the old bridge

that continue to this day.

But for the men who built it, there will only ever be one way.

It remains the leader of that sort of innovation.

Nobody has found a way of doing it better

and I always use the old Severn Bridge

whenever I have occasion to go to South Wales.

# Darlin', darlin', stand by me

# Oh, stand by me

# Oh, stand now

# Stand by me. #