‘I’ve found a new career
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 will be returning 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 – which is the only Grade I listed pier in the country – 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 Covid-19 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.