Gunson's Ride
Created | Updated Jul 1, 2004
Twenty-four hours is time enough to change a city.
Here on the hill stands Gunson, raindrops beading his magnificent beard. His leather greatcoat flaps in a wintry gale. His words are barely audible, but the sweep of his arm demonstrates a vista that explains his project anyway.
Away below us lies a sprawling, smoking city of fire. It's Sheffield, in the reign of Our Glorious Queen Victoria. The tang of the foundry and the clamour of the forge; they draw a procession of humanity to drink at this Fountain of Enterprise. A population doubled in twenty years, all parched by toil and the blistering heat of industry. Gunson's mission is to replenish the Fountain, to ensure that this powerhouse never runs dry.
Our genial host this Friday morning is the Chief Engineer of the Sheffield Waterworks Company. This is the first and greatest of the four huge reservoirs that form the 'Bradfield Scheme'. The marvel of civil engineering on which we stand is the colossal Dale Dyke Dam.
At its foot dances the newly-sprung River Loxley, though this vigorous brook scarcely deserves the name. In better weather, it would sparkle among the stones and babble beneath the little bridges of this tranquil valley.
Not until the stream joins with the Don, eight miles distant on the edge of Hillsborough village, would it cause a purposeful wader the slightest consternation. Even then, his prime concern would be the nameless poisons that foul that sorry watercourse.
It's half an hour after dawn on a sharp and clear Saturday morning in the March of 1864.
On a normal day, Constable Peach would have these streets to himself.
Instead he frets at the press of the crowd on Lady's Bridge.
Those to the fore are pinned against the parapets.
Those at the back ignore the prods of the truncheon, and crane in agitation for a better view.
Mere freshness after rain is insufficient to cleanse the crawling, stinking Don below.
Today, though, the black river has been magically replaced by a pristine cataract.
Impossibly sweet air and hurtling whiteness, like something issuing from a mountain glacier.
The soot-black stones of the Castlegate Wall, untouched by moisture save fog and rain, are dashed by the bright arc of racing water.
Five feet above the crest of the torrent, the gritstone blocks are scoured clean.
The unreal beauty of the scene disguises this remnant of a monster.
A few hours ago, the river was up there where the stones still glisten.
The rattle of the knocker is urgent, and it freezes Gunson's heart.
He pushes aside the stone-cold plate that bears his untouched dinner.
The kitchen chair screeches on the flags as he rises.
Fumbling with the bolt, he can already picture the anxious face behind the door.
Over the last week, as the dam finally filled, John Gunson has come to fear that the puddle wall is slumping. Three years of work will be undone. The company will lose a fortune. His own reputation, after a faultless forty years in service, will be stained forever.
The door swings inward with a sigh.
Sure enough, there stands Stephenson Fountain, soaked to the skin, wide-eyed and pale.
The young man is blowing too hard to speak, but no words are needed here.
Gunson is already clutching his greatcoat and cap.
"A gig's fetched?" he asks, wearily.
The young man nods, tears in his eyes.
"Your father's at the dam, I take it?"
Again Fountain nods. Gunson looks at his great fob watch. Half past eight.
"You'll stay here tonight, boy". The voice is kindly, in spite of its owner's obvious agitation.
"But one more thing. Quick". He draws a notebook from his pocket, and the stub of a pencil.
With the practice of a hundred repetitions, he sketches the embankment.
"Where's the crack?" he demands.
Try telling the Children of this City a thing about the Blade.
They know the edge of steel better than ever you can.
Steel rules their lives.
It rings against the spinning stone, haunting their dreams and caking their lungs.
The knife draws both life and death.
It cuts to the heart of this place, transforming as it cleaves.
It mocks the dark corruption of a thousand tiny workshops with its cold and wondrous purity.
Steel touches the blood.
Who would have guessed, only yesterday, that mere water could do the same?
The liveryman in Barker's Pool leads Fountain's horse away to its respite among the straw, out of this hammering rain. The fresh steed strides out, water spinning from wheelrims as they descend Fargate, heading for the High Street and beyond. Gunson is wondering why he ever came home. A few hours before, he left instructions to send the boy if the prospect at Dale Dyke worsened. Now, he realises, he has known all along that Fountain would come.
The gig clatters past Lady's Bridge and away out on the high road along the river. Rain lashes on the canopy above Gunson's head. A half-mile more, and Craven will be waiting at the Barracks. As another fleeting pool of light escapes its factory window, Gunson glances at the sketch in the notebook. Fountain's line stares back at him, a stark horizontal dash across the draft of the embankment, spanning half its width.
"Nonsense", Gunson had grunted when the young man marked it. "That would be under the water".
"On this side", was Fountain's simple reply. The older man had regarded him incredulously, before shaking his head. "That would mean that the wall's slanting into the pressure", he had said. "No such thing's ever been heard of". His intonation had invited a response, but Fountain offered none. "It must be a frost-crack", Gunson had declared, "and a good deal shorter than your mark".
Now as he squints through squall and darkness, John Gunson is trying to make himself believe it. If there'd been such a crack, though, it would have formed last night, and the engineer knows that he'd have noticed it himself.
The story intrigues and disturbs you?
If you would know, then look.
It's all there, all recorded.
You did not know? Of course you did not know.
This is an insignificant time in an insignificant place.
At Hillsborough Barracks, Craven scrambles into the seat alongside Gunson. Alerted by Fountain as the young man rode through, there was then no time for explanation. The contractor is now eager to hear one. The sentry in his box is intrigued too, at these men travelling in haste on such a foul evening. The waiting Craven has begun the tale. "Are we safe from flood here, Sir?" asks the anxious guardsman.
"If you're not safe", says Gunson, sternly, "then God help hundreds farther west".
They travel in silence for a while. "Do you believe there's a chance that the dam may fail?" Craven asks finally. Gunson shakes his head. "But we'll have to drain six months of rain out of her", he says wearily. "The best we can hope for is to find that we needn't have, and then to start all over again".
But think, Reader : you should have known. Your prosperity was fashioned in places like this one. Your present comfort is founded in the anguish of poor souls like these, among these pitiful terraces, those that lived and those that died.
The events described here were a singular calamity. All over this land, many thousand times this number died more slowly, broken by toil and poverty, instead of a torrent's wrath.
Remember them, if you would find respite from your ignorance and shame.
At Malin Bridge, the waters of the Loxley are lapping over the rocks, little white crests glimmering in the darkness. The wind howls down the valley and the travellers are hunched against its fury. A cottager's dog chases them along the uneven road, barking wildly. The windows of the Stag Inn reveal the silhouettes of roistering townsfolk. Before them, the hill rises to Loxley village and down again to Damflask. The water is soon a silver thread in its ravine, illuminated by the lights of the myriad grinding-shops and wheel-houses that punctuate this valley.
Samuel Harrison, would-be poet and industrious editor of the Sheffield Times, prepares for bed.
Unlike some others, his repose this night will be unbroken.
Like everyone, the revelation of the morning will weigh on his heart.
His time will come.
It will be his part to recount this tale.
The storm shows no sign of relenting, but there is commotion in Damflask village. People are on the roads, whole families in the carts, driving their cattle before them. There are lanterns on the high hillsides. Gunson calls out to those who will listen, and is told that a young man rode through saying that the dam was about to burst. He quietly despairs of Fountain, but makes no effort to dissuade these frantic people of their fears.
At Bradfield too, some of the inhabitants are on the move. Now at last, at about ten o'clock, the travellers can see lights moving on the embankment of the reservoir high above. Ten minutes later, and Gunson and Craven alight from the gig, grimacing against the lashings of cold rain and ready to hear the worst.
This is a bad city.
There is danger in these streets.
Nightime is pregnant with menace.
So tuck your children into their beds.
Surely no harm can befall them there?
Gunson stares in trepidation at the crack, which is just as young Fountain described it. Span-wide in places, it has opened some inches in the last hour. His mind races for an explanation, anything at all that will give him options. The crack can only mean that this outer face of the embankment is being stretched. That implies in turn that the twelve-foot thick wall of puddled clay which seals this great earthwork at its heart is curling inward towards the water on the other side. The pressure of water in the near-full reservoir should, according to all logic and experience, be pushing the puddle wall the other way. Nobody here can understand what is going on. Most of them are becoming very frightened.
It will be a hundred years before anyone does satisfactorily explain what is now happening to the Dale Dyke Dam. Its doom was sealed early in its construction, when the footings of the puddle wall seventy feet below the soil were made too close to a fault in the bedrock. The vital seal of the puddle wall has never been sound : there is a crack near its base on the reservoir side, close to the centre of its span.
A perfect little boy.
Fresh-born here in Bradfield, the new son of the village tailor.
He is a Dawson, too young for another name.
He will be the first to leave us.
He will not blink at a second dawn.
The backfill of stone and soil began to be eroded as the reservoir filled. There was flow down there, eating away at material, but there should have been none. Water was being forced through the crack as the head mounted, leeching away unseen into the valley, deep underground.
'Sheffield Harry' of Damflask, rolling drunk as usual.
Too drunk to heed the screams of warning.
He is rolling now all right, rolling, rolling.
Far away downstream.
A cavity formed at the crack. Its roof crumbled. Over several days or weeks, the void migrated upward. The puddle wall's support on its wrong side has been deteriorating, and it is slumping further and further in the direction that no Victorian engineer is trained to expect. In the early evening of 11th March, the tension in the outer embankment became sufficient to initiate Fountain's crack.
Mankind overrates himself.
He presumes a capacity for destruction, whereas in truth he can only harness the merest stirrings of nature.
Soft rain on the hillside, minuscule droplets, tiny impulses at the threshold of sensation.
What happens if you gather it, garner it, this stuff that sums to mighty oceans? What happens then if you let it go?
This time, mankind never intended to rival the earthquake or the volcano.
The most violent man-fashioned release of energy in the history of the world is about to take place.
Unseen and unsuspected by the engineers and contractors, the void on the reservoir side has almost reached the top of the earthwork, and the crown of the bank is about to collapse into a swallow-hole. Storm waves are breaking against the very top of the embankment, ready to tear mercilessly at any breach.
London's Great Fire at its hungriest consumed a household a minute at walking pace.
This monster will level streets in seconds, and nothing on legs could escape it.
It will be unleashed upon a sleeping valley, and on the city beyond.
These stupid creatures will not soon surpass their folly.
The next time the hammer falls so hard? It will be a lifetime away, half the world away.
There will be nothing like this until the cherry blossom burns in Hiroshima prefecture.
The labourers had the foresight to open the sluice valves many hours ago. A thousand gallons of water has rushed away into the valley in every second of time since, little by little relieving the terrible pressure on this faltering structure.
Twenty-five million gallons of water seen off. Only another seven hundred million to go.
Brick Row, Hillsborough.
Three storeys above the ground, Vincent Dyson shrieks.
Tearing with bare hands at the very roof-slates.
Chased into the rafters, blind with terror.
Gunson knows that he must speed up the waters' escape tenfold. This eventuality is prepared for, after a fashion. In dire emergency, they must blow up the weir. The gunpowder has been laid in the notches cut for the purpose, and Gunson lights the taper. The men run back, but the explosion never comes. Perhaps the rain has soaked the charge. They hesitate, in mounting panic. Suddenly there is an unearthly light. The embankment has taken on a ghostly sheen amid the blackness of this terrible night.
Malin Bridge, where the gorge gives way to open ground.
The terrible wave till now backed up, pent up, finally released.
Everything has gone save the broad chimney-stack of the Cleakum Inn.
Knee-deep rubble in a swathe a hundred yards wide.
Within it, no-one stood a chance.
Gunson stands outside the valve-house, watching in disbelief as the crest of the dam opens like a wound. Thirty feet and widening, the water plunging through in a skyward plume. There is a gut-churning concussion as the powder blows, mockingly late. John Gunson straightens his proud back and resolves to stand. If he is safe here, then those thousands below may yet have hope. If he is swept away, then he deserves to share their fate. But Fountain Senior is more pragmatic, and drags his master up the bank.
There are people in the streets.
Their attitudes are strange.
It is cold and sharp this morning after, but these people do not shiver.
Some have no clothes.
Some have no faces either.
The breach grows and becomes a chasm, but one hundred and fourteen million cubic feet of water do not relent. The embankment sinks, and the whole mountain is on the move. In the space of five minutes a million tons of ice-cold death thunders into the valley, three times that again in the half-hour after. It will be long after midnight that the ruin of the dam falls silent. Silent save for the wailing of the engineer.
The Sheffield Flood - 12th March, 1864
Michael Armitage's (very fine) Site - including Harrison's full transcript
Channel 4 - Time Team
