Knight was visited by tragedy

The name Thomas Bouch cropped up in Craigie’s quiz at the weekend and to Dundonians the name is synonymous with disaster and tragedy, writes Fraser Elder.

Throughout the years Bouch’s name has featured in local parlance as a description for incompetence and the most usual targets have been tradesmen who’ve been responsible for “Bouched jobs”, which in

time has been updated to repairs and so on being “botched”.

It has been recorded that the English rail engineer left a trail of devastation behind him on Scotland’s east coast, as after the horrific Tay Bridge disaster his previous structure in Montrose, the South Esk Viaduct, was hurriedly demolished.

Then his association in the building of the Forth Rail Bridge was immediately terminated after the findings of the public inquiry into the Tay Bridge had revealed it had been “badly designed, badly built and badly maintained”.

His design for a suspension bridge over the Forth was scrapped and the project for a cantilever structure by Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler was adopted and completed in 1890, with another of Bouch’s creations, the Portobello Pier, also later demolished.

In the summer of 1878 Queen Victoria made a belated crossing of the Tay Bridge and shortly after awarded Bouch a knighthood at Windsor Castle, but within 18 months he died at the age of 58 with what was medically termed “a distressed mind”.

History has decreed Sir Thomas Bouch will notably be credited as the engineer who introduced the highly successful first rollon-roll-off train ferry service in the world, which operated throughout the UK early in the 19th Century.

Ironically, it was an important transport feature in the River Tay between Broughty

Ferry and Tayport before being superceded by the ill-fated first rail bridge.