Black Country bridge was a record breaker
GALTON Bridge in Smethwick is one of the Black Country’s most celebrated landmarks. Our picture was taken on Saturday, May 25, 1968, and it shows the bridge from the vantage point of near the railway bridge over the BCN main lines.
In 1824 Thomas Telford was commissioned to improve the old winding route of the Birmingham Canal, built by James Brindley in the 1770s. Telford proposed a straighter canal with a deep cutting to bypass the troublesome locks at the Smethwick summit that caused endless delays.
Greatest
Telford’s cutting was one of the greatest engineering feats of its day and was the largest earthworks ever undertaken in the world up to that point, being around 12,000ft long, 150ft wide and 70ft deep.
Telford carried Roebuck Lane over his new cutting with a new cast iron bridge, its sections being cast at the Horseley Iron Works in Tipton. The bridge was completed in 1829 and at 151ft it was the longest single-span bridge of its kind in the world. However, it was not the longest bridge in the world outright, as Telford’s Menai Suspension Bridge was completed in 1826.
Telford wrote: “The
motive for this extraordinary span was safety, combined with economy, for if it had not exceeded the span of the other bridges across this canal, the abutments must have been founded as low as the bottom of the canal, because the bridge must have been carried 70ft up to the level of the top of the banks, which would have led to an immense mass of masonry liable to bulge and be overthrown in rainy seasons by the earth acquiring a hydrostatic pressure; whereas by increasing the span to 150ft, there was opportunity of founding the abutments at a depth merely sufficient to admit of a proper iron-arch curvature; so that the proportion of masonry is small, and produces variety by
its appearance of lightness, which agreeably strikes every spectator of the massive works.”
Now we have a question for Bugle readers: who was the bridge named after?
Samuel Galton, you say – but which one?
Some histories of the bridge have that it was named for Samuel Galton Jr (1753-1832), while others maintain that the bridge is named for his son, Samuel Tertius Galton (1783-1844).
Both were alive when the bridge was completed in 1829 and both were prominent businessmen in Birmingham and the Black Country.
The father was the famous member of the Lunar Society who lived at Great Barr Hall. He
had a wide range of business interests but is chiefly remembered today as an arms manufacturer – despite being a Quaker.
However, by the time Telford was cutting his canal and building the bridge Samuel Galton Jr had retired and the family’s business interests were in the hands of Samuel Tertius Galton. He ended the family’s gun making business in 1815 and became a banker in Birmingham.
He married Frances Darwin, daughter of his father’s Lunar Society colleague Erasmus Darwin, and they were the parents of controversial eugenicist
Sir Francis Galton.
Can anyone tell us definitively which Samuel Galton in the bridge is named after?