Stephen K. Jones, Fellow of the Institute of Civil Engineers, author and expert on the life and works of the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, came recently to Cowbridge u3a’s History Group, where he gave an interesting talk on the astonishing achievements of several generations of this celebrated family, concentrating in particular on what remains of their legacy in South Wales.

He began by talking about Marc Isambard Brunel, Isambard’s father, who was born in Normandy in 1769, and how he became interested in engineering by seeing iron cylinders for fire pumping in Rouen docks, marked ‘Made in England’. He vowed that he would one day go to England.

After joining the French Navy, he eventually fled the French Revolution to get to New York, where he worked on port fortifications. He learnt that the English victory against Napoleon had been hampered by a lack of ships’ pulley blocks which had all been made by hand. He had the idea to design a machine to mass-produce these items and to bring his plan to Britain; he also had the ulterior motives of escaping the new political regime in France, and meeting up with an English lady whom he had met in Normandy.

He managed to achieve his aims; he went on to propose to Sophie Kingdom who came from Plymouth, and to get his machine designs accepted for manufacture in Portsmouth.

Marc and Sophie were soon married, and went on to have two daughters and one son, named Isambard Kingdom after his parents, born in 1806.

Marc’s projects included plans for sawmills, a boot factory, and the Thames Tunnel. He had noticed how the home-made boots of returning troops in Portsmouth were falling apart, and developed machines for the mass production of boots for the military. However, after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 when Napoleon was no longer a threat, the British Army cancelled its order for boots, leaving Marc Brunel bankrupt and in debtors’ prison. It was only after he was invited by the Tsar of Russia to go and work there, that the British authorities decided that we could ill afford to lose him.

The Thames Tunnel, originally built for carriages, now carries the London Underground between Rotherhithe and Wapping. There were frequent problems when the river breached the tunnel, including one incident in which son Isambard almost drowned. It was while the latter was recuperating in Devon that he heard about a competition to design a bridge to span the Avon Gorge at Clifton in Bristol. He was helped by his father, who had already engineered 2 suspension bridges, to complete what is probably his best known and most iconic construction, still in use today.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel worked extensively in South Wales, especially on railways and their viaducts. He was asked to engineer such a transport link to bring the products of Dowlais Ironworks to the docks in Cardiff. This line, becoming the Taff Vale Railway, necessitated the building of 2 viaducts, because of the relief of the land and to cross a river; this caused considerable complications, solved by his innovative engineering genius.

He in fact designed many railways in Wales, part of one still being the main line across the principality, as well as taking on other engineering projects here. His timber viaduct across the Lougher estuary was only replaced in 2013.

Isambard Brunel famously used The Brown Lenox Chainworks near Pontypridd to produce chains for his ships, of which the S.S. Great Britain, which can be visited in Bristol Harbour, is just one example.

It is not surprising given this man’s many and incredible achievements that his statue now stands in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, nor that in a BBC television poll held in 2002 about who was the greatest Briton of all time, he should have come second, pipped only by more recent war-time hero Churchill.

VEM