OPENING THE BRIDGE
Before the official ceremony, Lt. General Sir George Osburn marched 1,000 men of the Royal Tay Fencibles and North Lincolnshire Militia from their quarters in Sunderland barracks, across the bridge to Whitburn sands for review.[i] Some weeks later, the formal opening in August 1796 by the duke of Gloucester attracted a crowd variously estimated between 50,000 and 80,000, of all social classes including members of the aristocracy, with Burdon appointed Provincial Grand Master for the occasion.[ii]
The ceremony was emphatically a Masonic event, organised by a committee of the Provincial Grand Lodge. A procession left the Phoenix Lodge for Mr Irvine's inn, where it was joined by the bridge commissioners, clergy, magistrates, army and navy officers, and the Loyal Sunderland Volunteers, who provided a salute from the battery. From High Street to Bridge Street, the gathering followed ‘the architect of the work, Bro. Wilson, with the tools and cushion’, the masters of the Sea Captains’ and Phoenix lodges, and representatives of lodges across the north of England. Many of the volunteers and clergy also wore Masonic regalia. At the bridge – where wooden railings were in place, ‘as the iron palisades are not fixed, nor are the footways made’ – an oration was given by William Nesfield, Provincial Grand Chaplain, from which all but masons were excluded. After a speech by Burdon, the daily post for Newcastle crossed the bridge for the first time. The crowd then repaired to chapel for divine service and a sermon by John Brewster chaplain of the Lodge of Philanthropy, Stockton, and afterwards to the Assembly Rooms for 'an elegant cold collation'.[iii] Celebrations continued elsewhere, for instance at a theatre in Durham in 1797, where views where exhibited of ‘the famous iron bridge at Sunderland’ under construction and complete.[iv]
tHE BRIDGE IN OPERATION
The bridge, a signal of Sunderland’s growing prosperity, itself made a significant contribution to transforming the town’s economy and landscape. It was established on the model of a turnpike or canal trust, but the capital costs were many times those of a road. Expenditure may have been as high as £41,800, though sums of £33,400 and £26,000 plus the cost of the ferries are variously cited, with Burdon’s contribution £30,000 and the remainder raised by subscription, in £100 shares.[v] The Act of Parliament required that the ferry proprietors be compensated, in consequence of which the bridge commissioners became responsible for running those ferry services which continued after the bridge’s opening.[vi] For the harbour ferry, sums of £1,800 to the bishop of Durham, the owner, and £4,500 to the lessee, William Ettrick, were paid from bridge tolls, with interest at four per cent.[vii] The new bridge also demanded a turnpike road connecting it with Newcastle and South Shields.[viii]
The commissioners named in 1792, whose duty was to oversee the bridge and its tolls, numbered three hundred, though day to day responsibility fell on a much smaller group which included Burdon as chairman, Scarth, Cooper Abbs, Richard Pemberton, John Goodchild, Rain Gregson, Robert Biss, Christopher Hill, James Robinson and George Robinson.[ix] The maximum toll was fixed – passengers ‘were to pay no more for going along a good bridge, than they paid for crossing an inconvenient ferry’ – and after costs for bridge maintenance had been deducted, any surplus went to pay interest to investors, to a maximum of five per cent. Profits beyond that would repay the capital sum. Once that had been cleared, tolls were to be abolished. Burdon and his fellow investors, having taken a risk of a complete loss should it prove impossible to complete the bridge, would at best receive only a modest rate of interest and eventually recoup their capital.[x]
Not only was the bridge a triumph of engineering, but it rapidly proved to be a financial success. Routine outlay was small – a new ferryboat in 1803 costing £50, occasional repairs when ships damaged the bridge, cleaning and lamp-lighting.[xi] Bowdler added a postscript to his notes in January 1797: ‘… the tolls for three months after it was opened produced on an average above £30 per week, a sum far exceeding the general expectation of the neighbourhood. The tolls have since been let by public auction for one year for £1,380, and a reasonable expectation is formed of a further advance when the roads on the north side of the bridge shall be completed.’[xii]
Annual lease of the tolls of Wearmouth bridge
Bridge / FerryMay 1795-Nov. 1798 average / £387 14s
1796-8 / £1390
1799, bridge collected, boat let / £1422 / £356
1800-2 let for / £1405 / £386
1803-5 let for / £1645 / £532
1806-8 / £2030 / £515**
1809-11 let for / £2100 / £405
1812-14 let for / £2375 / £440
** Let in 1805 for £660 – ruined the man who took it; re-let 1807 for £515 – also found too dear. 1808 let for £405.
Source: Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres.III.B.2/31
The largest coaches paid 3s., cattle 1d. each, pedestrians 1d. if laden, a halfpenny if not. In 1793 the ferries had brought in about £410 a year in total – £250 from the harbour boat, and £80 each from Pann and Southwick. Although fewer ferries ran after the bridge opened, the revenue from them fell only slightly.[xiii] Burdon reported to Soane in 1818 that the bridge had cleared substantial parts of its debt: ‘It has paid the bishop’s debt £1,800, and £1,500 to his lessee of the boat, and if we could live about 20 years, we might pass over it as a free bridge.’[xiv] Later that year he reported in the same vein: ‘I continue to superintend the accounts etc of Wearmouth bridge, and I have the satisfaction to tell you that the affairs are prosperous, as far as regards its repair and its revenue. We have now let the bridge and boats for £2,870 a year, which is just seven times the aggregate rent of all the boats on the river, at the time of opening the bridge in 1796... We have paid off £3,800 of the principal, and I believe that with good management it may be a free bridge in about 20 years.’[xv]
But at the very time Burdon should have been celebrating his triumph, his personal affairs were in crisis. The Berwick upon Tweed bank of Surtees, Burdon, Brandling & Embleton, his inherited share in which was the bedrock of his fortune, fell into financial difficulties in 1803. The failure of the sailcloth factory at Castle Eden contributed to this, but unwise speculations in the Tyne ironworks at Lemington by two of Burdon’s partners, Aubone and John Surtees, were more significant. The bank collapsed in 1806 and Burdon was ruined.[xvi]
Burdon’s stake in the bridge was a valuable asset which earned a steady five per cent, and would in due course be fully repaid. The stock was secure enough to be acceptable as collateral on loans.[xvii] However it was illiquid, its prospects resting on future tolls, and the sheer size of Burdon’s holding made a sale difficult. The bank’s assignees sought novel ways to capitalize on the asset. In 1809 they launched a tontine, a form of sweepstake subsequently made illegal, in which members inherited the shares of those they outlived. Subscribing £100 each, participants could gamble on their own life or that of a nominee, and they were grouped into five classes each of sixty members, according to the age of the nominated life. The investment would pay five per cent interest until only six survivors were left in each class, at which point £6,000 would be divided between them.[xviii]
The tontine evidently proving unsuccessful, there was then an attempt to dispose of Burdon’s holding by lottery, for which an Act of Parliament was obtained in 1814.[xix] Tickets were offered at £5 each, with 150 prizes of shares ranging in value from one of £5,000 down to 120 of £100.[xx] Throughout all this, perhaps surprisingly, Burdon continued as chairman of the bridge commissioners, though complaining to Soane that he was forced to stand aside and ‘see my income misapplied’, the assignees having sold the lottery to one Sivewright, a lottery office keeper, ‘who has contrived to sell the tickets, or the greater part of them, and to retain the prizes’.[xxi] Sivewright and his family retained most of the shares into the 1830s, to Burdon’s frustration.[xxii]
Burdon’s survival as chairman can be attributed to his popularity and to his determination to settle his debts. He lived on at Castle Eden, which friends had bought from his creditors, though much more quietly and economically than before. His ability to repay everything was achieved ‘by the greatest self-denial and economy’, and helped by the £40,000 fortune of his second wife.[xxiii] His son later described Burdon’s life after bankruptcy as ‘one constant struggle with pecuniary difficulties’, while ‘the ambition of his nature was subdued… thoroughly’.[xxiv] Burdon himself, whose pride in the bridge revived as its value to the community grew and revenues rose,[xxv] gave a more upbeat account in letters to Soane. He wrote in 1821 that he expected to discharge the remainder of his personal debt before long,[xxvi] and in 1824, ‘I find my affairs in pretty good light, though I am not so opulent as when I began the world’.[xxvii]
Bridge receipts fell in the 1830s as tolls were reduced, with the debt continuing to fall, from an estimated £41,300 in 1796, to £19,611 in 1833.[xxviii] In one six month period for which figures survive, 1839-40, £3,000 principal and £301 interest were paid off.[xxix] The bridge tolls were let at £3,220 a year in 1842, and the ferry tolls too had risen considerably in value, to £610 annually in 1826.[xxx] Total receipts 1796-1846 were later calculated as £116,301 in bridge tolls and £30,743 for the ferries.[xxxi] In 1844 Sunday tolls were abandoned, followed in 1846 by all passenger tolls.[xxxii] The bridge was completely freed of tolls in 1885.[xxxiii]
Cookson Page 4 Bridge Opening and in Operation
[i] Gateshead Observer, 14 Nov. 1846.
[ii] Garbutt 1819, 317; James, Cast Iron Bridge, 26-7; Warwicks RO, CR2017/C244/486; Northumbs RO, SANT/PRUS/1/O11F.
[iii] BL, 010360.e.56; Freemasons' Magazine, vii (Aug. 1796), 135-6; (Oct. 1796), 234; (Nov. 1796), 303-5.
[iv] Sunderland Lib., scrapbook 32.
[v] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 26, 55; Garbutt 1819, 317; Potts, Sunderland, 281.
[vi] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 55.
[vii] Durham Chapter Lib., Sharp 2, facing p. 227.
[viii] DULASC CCB B/184/177. (34458); Public Act, 36 George III, c. 136 - ref. HL/PO/PU/1/1796/36G3n53 - date: 1796
[ix] T&WA, IC/WBR/1, pp. 8, 11.
[x] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 16, 50.
[xi] T&WA, IC/WBR/1, passim; James, Cast Iron Bridge, 40.
[xii] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 57.
[xiii] Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres. III.B.2/31, 27 July[?] 1814; James, Cast Iron Bridge, 39.
[xiv] Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres. III.B.2/12, 9 May 1818; Bolton (ed.), Portrait of Sir John Soane, 304.
[xv] Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres. III.B.2/13, 5 Dec. 1818; Bolton (ed.), Portrait of Sir John Soane, 305.
[xvi] E. A. Burdon, Before my Time and Since (1922), 5-6; James, Cast Iron Bridge, 37.
[xvii] Herts Archives and Local Studies, Ashridge II Collection, AH 2224-5.
[xviii] BL, 10351.d.42; J. Bainbridge, Plan for the Disposal of Thirty Thousand Pounds, secured by way of mortgage ... upon the tolls arising from the Cast Iron Bridge and Ferry Boats, across the River Wear, near Sunderland ... by way of Tontine, etc. (1809).
[xix] Local and Personal Act, 54 George III, c. cxvii
[xx] Sunderland Antiq. Soc., Wearmouth Bridge box, Sunderland bridge lottery ticket, n.d.; Northumbs. RO, SANT/GEN/DUR/2/3, ticket for Sunderland bridge lottery, 1825.
[xxi] Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres. III.B.2/13, 5 Dec. 1818; Bolton (ed.), Portrait of Sir John Soane, 305.
[xxii] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 38.
[xxiii] Burdon, Before my Time, 6-7.
[xxiv] Burdon, Letter to the Wearmouth Bridge Committee, 3-4.
[xxv] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 38; Sir John Soane’s Museum, Soane Case 11, 13 Aug. 1836; Bolton (ed.), Portrait of Sir John Soane, 532.
[xxvi] Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres. III.B.2/19, 19 Nov. 1821; Bolton (ed.), Portrait of Sir John Soane, 308.
[xxvii] Sir John Soane’s Museum, Private Corres. III.B.2/34, 9 Apr. 1824.
[xxviii] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 40.
[xxix] Sunderland Antiq. Soc., Wearmouth Bridge box, printed half yearly account.
[xxx] Sunderland Antiq. Soc., Wearmouth Bridge box, printed notices.
[xxxi] Sunderland Antiq. Soc., Wearmouth Bridge box, bundle of newspaper cutting, undated; Sunderland & Durham Co. Friday Herald, 20 Nov. 1846.
[xxxii] Sunderland Antiq. Soc., Wearmouth Bridge box, notice Nov. 1844; Durham Chronicle, 21 & 28 Aug. 1846; Gateshead Observer, 14 Nov. 1846; Sunderland Lib., Scrapbook 32; James, Cast Iron Bridge, 40.
[xxxiii] James, Cast Iron Bridge, 41-2; Potts, Sunderland, 281.