THE FORTH BRIDGE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 52, 1 February 1932, Page 2

THE FORTH BRIDGE.

ONE-LEG BALANCE. “Charley swung nimbly from a narrow steel ledge on the topmost girder of the Forth Bridge and, with a sheer drop of .360 ft within two inches of his right foot, took a cigarette I offered him,” says the correspondent of a London paper. Then, standing storlf:like on one foot, he struck a match on the sole of the other. f “Charley” is Mr Clarkson, wjio has been cleaning and painting the bridge for 30 Veers. I had seen him an hour before.from the deck of the ferry-boat-. Ho looked like a fly. but he is, in fact, a sturdily built; fellow with greying hair and the surefootedness of a mountain goat. He says he lost his nerve as a boy and has never felt the need of it since. The Aberdoen-Penzance express passed below, and the girder I was sitting on trembled. Charley told me that the steel trembles evory time a train passes, and between 160 and 200 trains pass each day. The top of the bridge, he said, sways four inches, but it felt like four yards. It takes Charley and his 17 . workmates three years to paint the bridge from end to end. Then they start all over again. There is neither lift nor stairway to the cantilever peak. I went up by what Charley calls the safe way. I climbed, bent double, up a girder slanting away into the clouds, with only the depths of the Firth below. Charley goes up the vertical stair of 20ft. wooden ladders tied to the steel struts of the bridge’s cross members.

“I was once going down the lattice work to dinner with my mate,” Charley told me, “when I saw two men trespassing on the girders. My mate did not see them, and when one of them shouted: ‘What is the average number of deaths on the bridge each year?’ he nearly fell into the river. “I caught him just in time, and when he recovered his breath lie told those men what ho thought about them. Ho took ten minutes and made a thorough job of it. “It is a bit windy up here sometimes. The wind reached 102 miles, an hour during the great storm of 1927, and we got down by crawling flat along the girders.”