It broke our hearts: The day Clevedon Pier gave way
Clevedon Pier partially collapsed into the sea 50 years ago tomorrow. So what went wrong? Phil Curme , chairman of the Clevedon Pier and Heritage Trust, reveals the story behind the disaster, and explains how it highlights the need to make £400,000 annually to cover running costs and essential maintenance
ON the morning of October 16, 1970, Bernard Faraway was attending a routine meeting at the council offices in Bristol. Little did he know that he was about to hear some news that would turn his life upside down.
Bernard was the piermaster at Clevedon and at approximately 10.30am, a disembodied voice at the end of a telephone line, breathless with excitement, told him that his beloved pier had collapsed.
He rushed back to Clevedon and couldn’t believe what he saw. “It was like a dream and it broke our hearts”, he said to a journalist some years later.
The sight that greeted Bernard’s return to Clevedon seafront was indeed distressing. The seventh and eight spans of the pier were cantilevered into the muddy waters of the Bristol Channel. The pierhead, an embarkation point for the Campbell’s steamers that still occasionally chugged up and down the coastline, was an island.
Eyewitnesses who saw the pier collapse spoke of the seventh trestle on the southern side giving way and the adjoining decks sliding into the water in a cacophony of grinding metal and splintering wood. It apparently took 20 minutes for the broken spans to settle.
Afterwards there was an eerie silence punctuated only by gasps and exclamations from those who had witnessed the tragedy. It wasn’t long before this turned to anger. Who was to blame? Why had this happened?
It quickly became apparent that the collapse had occurred whilst a load test was being undertaken. Three workmen from the local council had been using water-filled bags and measuring instruments to look for movement when weight was applied.
A rumour quickly spread, which endures today, that the three hapless workmen had taken a tea break and inadvertently left a tap running.
The newly formed Clevedon Pier Supporters Club were indignant. The work was not properly supervised, they said. Was the water tap left on thus causing excessive loading?, they angrily demanded in a letter to Cleve don Urban District Council.
Others pointed to the lack of maintenance and the fact that with the decline in the steamer trade, the tolls were never going to cover the pier’s costs. Even Sunday opening, the building of a dancehall on the pierhead and the installation of slot machines were never going to be enough to create financial stability, they said.
So, what really happened? Well, the pier received very little maintenance pre-Second World War and none at all during the conflict. In 1952, the pier’s insurers flagged their concern and began insisting on certificates of safety from specialist consulting engineers.
Eight years later the consulting engineers, Messrs. Underwood and Partners, started insisting on physical testing of the structure, having observed that “one third of the metalwork has been lost through rust”.
Initially the tests – 50 lb per square foot – were undertaken using demountable water tanks obtained from the Ministry of Defence. To prevent overfilling, a hole was cut in each tank and covered with an asbestos sheet. In the event of a problem, the asbestos plug could be broken and the water released.
Later, for reasons of economy, nine 100x2ft thin polythene bags were used. The pier was tested in this manner five times in ten years and after each such event one span was painted. The trestles were left as they were because they were thought to be sound.
Mid-morning on the day of the fateful test – October 16, 1970 – everything seemed to be going to plan. Seawater had been pumped up to deck level and the plastic sacks on spans seven and eight were filled.
Shortly before 10am the testers broke for a tea break. Half an hour later, the assistant engineer in charge took a reading and found there had been movement on one of the marker boards.
Rushing back to what is now Scarlet’s Cafe, the assistant engineer, having ascertained that the board hadn’t been accidentally moved, took the team back to the hut on the pier where the measuring instruments had been set up.
It quickly became obvious that two sections of the pier were moving and that it would be unsafe for anyone to run the 800ft necessary to release the load.
The inevitable happened, and with the water in the test tanks flowing into the area of vulnerability, the load became too great and the seventh trestle on the south side of the pier gave way. With no support, spans seven and eight failed as well – taking the seventh trestle on the north side with them. Luckily, no one was hurt.
A local council van driver, David Ruddock, witnessed the collapse having just watched his mate Roy Lovelock fill the last of the three bags that he’d help lay out – lengthways – on span seven.
Having driven his vehicle off the pier, David was chatting to a carpenter in front of a storage hut on land now occupied by the Hawthorns Retirement complex.
He had his back to the pier and when his mate said: “Bloody hell, the pier is falling down,” he turned around to see the two deck panels upending and sliding into the water.
“It looked funny going down,” he remembers – in his typically understated way.
The pier was eventually reopened 19 years later after the community successfully fought off the threat of demolition and secured the funding and expertise to restore it to its original Victorian splendour. That is another, equally dramatic, story.
On October 16 this year (a Friday – as it was on the day the pier collapsed) David Ruddock returned to the pier for the first time since he drove his van off the planks 50 years ago. Sadly, Bernard Faraway, the man who took the distressing phone call, died some years ago.
However, some of the people who worked so hard to save the pier following the disaster are still around, and no doubt there will be few moist eyes in evidence, 50 years to the day after the collapse and the start of a campaign that is a source of enormous pride for the people of Clevedon – and rightly so.
The 1970 collapse demonstrated that a lack of regular repainting of the pier – the country’s only Grade I listed pier – would lead to disaster.
Nowadays, a programme of maintenance is in place, and in order to cover the costs of this the pier needs to make £400,000 a year in order to generate an annual surplus of £100,000 to cover running costs and maintenance.
However, the outbreak of Covid19 has presented a huge challenge to income for the pier, which before the outbreak comprised around 65 per cent from admission charges with the remainder covered by events, weddings, room hire, fishing permits and rental from the trust’s catering partner.
People wishing to support the pier can do so in a number of ways – including buying plaques on the deck or even a limited edition 50-year pass is now available. For details see clevedonpier.co.uk