McGonagall inspires

A composer and writer from Arbroath, Cairney launched a website last week – Scottishanthem.co.uk – for people to vote for their favourite among his 13 compositions, or suggest another song. “It’s early days,” he sighs. Yet he is following a well-worn path: that of the single-minded Scottish enthusiast. It seems apt that he is a devotee of William McGonagall, the much-derided Dundonian poet.

“He’s an inspiration to me,” Cairney says. “If you can imagine going into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson and he knocks you down every 10 seconds, but you keep on getting back up and you last the 12 rounds, that’s McGonagall. He had this unbelievable self-belief. I like his poetry because it’s unpretentious.”

Cairney was the vice-chairman of the McGonagall Society six years ago, during the centenary of the poet’s death, arranging a festival celebrating his work and writing a musical that he hopes to stage at the Edinburgh Fringe. He does not consider McGonagall’s work as a direct influence, but admits the writer of such memorable compositions as The Tay Bridge Disaster will have had a bearing on his own creations.

“I have worked with McGonagall’s rhyming structures, when I wrote the songs for the musical, and everything rubs off on you,” he says. “Writing is an unconscious thing, you never know when you’re rhyming or not, you just do it by feel, by instinct. You mostly wake up in the morning with the thing written in your head.”

Scotland the fave: search for a new anthem
Times Online, UK - Apr 14, 2008

Weaving some magic: £9.6m brings history of mills to life

The famous Stanley Mills reopen:

Weaving some magic: £9.6m brings history of mills to life
The Herald – Mar 22, 2008
It was an engine of the Industrial Revolution, driven by the tremendous power of the River Tay and the might of hundreds of ordinary workers.

RAMESWARAM Bridge

RAMESWARAM: Memories of migrations and times gone by stare out of every span of this British-built bridge. It is set to open to train traffic again, this time in broad gauge tracks, linking mainland Tamil Nadu with the Hindu holy town of Rameswaram.

The Pamban Bridge connects Mandapam at the edge of south India to Pamban Island on the Bay of Bengal where Rameswaram thrives. Until 1911 people crossed by boat to visit an ancient Ram temple at Rameswaram, 600 km south of Chennai.

The British built the bridge in 1913-14 across the Palk Strait dividing India and Sri Lanka for a regular train service when they decided to hire workers from Tamil Nadu to tea plantations in the island nation.

t was a time when the Tamil people of Serendip (now Sri Lanka) and the subcontinent saw themselves as one. The Boat Mail chugged on the narrow track, going right up to Land’s End, 27 km south of Rameswaram.

At Dhanushkodi, the Indo-Ceylon Express and the Rameswaram Express disgorged thousands, and they took a 20-km Irvin and Goschen steamer ride to and from the emerald island for work and marriages.

A railhead at Thalaimannar, on the Sri Lankan side, took the labourers to the highland estates.

The rail track also brought to Rameswaram trains full of pilgrims from Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – almost entire villages travelling together to make that once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Ram temple at the very place from where the Hindu god is said to have launched his battle against Ravana. They still come in packed trains every year.

A cyclone in 1964 washed away the track from Rameswaram to Dhanushkodi as well as a train full of people. Several grids of the Pamban Bridge were broken.

The bridge is a bridge-building example in many ways.

It came up at a time when engineers across the world were suddenly faced with technology failures. The two most memorable collapses were the Tay Bridge collapse in Britain and the Ashtabula Bridge collapse in Ohio in 1876 – around 80 people lost their lives in each of the accidents.

Exceptionally strong vibrations due to wind stresses under a moving load created instability, and eventual collapse of the Tay Bridge. It took engineers 25-30 years to find that forces could be broken into vertical and horizontal components, and joints could be used to diffuse stress on spans.

The bridge in Tamil Nadu was built according to specifications patented by German engineer William Scherzer and there is a plea to make it an UNESCO World Heritage site.

Built with just Rs.2 million in two years by 600 workers, it is 2.06-km long, running over 10-feet deep water at places. Just strengthening it structurally this year has cost nearly Rs.250 million.

It sits on an artificial sandstone reef. Nearly 5,000 tonnes of cement, 18,000 cubic feet of crushed metal stone, 2,600 tonnes of steel and 80,000 cubic feet of boulders were used to build it.

The bridge has 145 fixed spans, and one-navigation span (a total of 225 feet) that opens for ships. The drawbridge at the centre comprises two sections of the navigation span, called the Scherzer span. Each weighs 415 tonnes.

It is a spectacular sight when drawn up to let ships through.

It requires six people on each side to manually operate and lift the moving sections for ships to pass. Experts from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, are now engaged in motorising the moveable span.

After the 1964 cyclone, the girders of Pamban bridge were replaced and an anemometer was installed. When the wind speed crosses 55 km per hour, signals on the bridge send out an automatic warning to approaching trains.

The Pamban bridge has been closed since June 2006, to change the meter gauge rail track to broad gauge.

“We used 450 workers. People had to work at a height of 50 feet above sea level in 55 km per hour wind speeds,” Divisional Manager Hemant Kumar said.

After the gauge conversion, the first ship was allowed to pass under the bridge June 21. The bridge, which is ready for broad gauge traffic, will be inaugurated in a few days time.

Bridge of memories reopens
Economic Times – Aug 11, 2007

Monster fish was not Britain’s largest salmon

Monster fish was not Britain’s largest salmon

By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent

Last Updated: 12:01pm BST 17/10/2007

After an outbreak of feverish speculation in the normally sedate world of angling, Miss Georgina Ballantine can rest in peace.

	There were internet rumours that the lastest salmon was 56in long

The ferryman’s daughter caught the largest salmon ever hooked in Britain on the River Tay in 1922, and her record has never been threatened since.

Until, that is, a Highland fisherman hooked a monster close to Loch Ness, prompting rumours that the most romantic angling record of all had finally fallen…

Miss Georgina Ballantine also features in this book:

The big ones that didn’t get away
Telegraph.co.uk – Mar 11, 2007

McGonagall exhibition

A unique exhibition of paintings dedicated to the life and work of Dundee’s famous bad poet, William McGonagall, has been officially opened at Dundee Central Library. The paintings, entitled The Comic Legend of William McGonagall, are on show in the library’s Wighton Heritage Centre and were created by Edinburgh artist and teacher Charles Nasmyth.

Each painting represents one of the many stories about the man who penned The Tay Bridge Disaster and was widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language.

The bard immortalised
Evening Telegraph – Apr 5, 2007

New Foot bridge

New bridge planned for River Tay
BBC News – Aug 24, 2007