Of might and men: 50 years of the Forth Road Bridge

According to later newspaper reports, the mist cancelled a fly-past and even halted the ferries (the bridge spelled the end for the ferry service that ran between North and South Queensferry). Many of the huge crowd of spectators - variously put at between 50,000 and 100,000 - had arrived at the site to discover the bridge had disappeared. But then, just as the Queen was making her opening speech, the sun broke through, and all was well.

Over 18 months, Brian Donald had watched the bridge slowly take shape, though his work duties that September day 50 years ago meant he had to watch the opening on BBC television. "Like millions of other people, I tuned in early on to watch Richard Dimbleby present the coverage, but all you could hear and see at first was his disembodied voice," recalls Donald, who is now 72. "There was a strong haar obscuring everything which, when combined with the black-and-white TV picture, made for very poor viewing. Luckily, by the time the Queen arrived the haar had virtually disappeared."

Since October 1963, Donald had been Ministry of Defence police constable N2721 at the then Nato/Royal Navy minesweeper base at Port Edgar in South Queensferry. He remembers well the sound of the squads of workmen hammering and drilling away as they built what would be - for 78 days, at least, until New York opened its Verrazano-Narrows Bridge - the world's fourth-longest suspension bridge.

"At first it was like a giant, half-finished Meccano model - there was a yawning gap separating the two halves, from Fife and Edinburgh," he says. "Inch by inch by inch, the two sides kept getting closer. At the Edinburgh side, the two main pillars before you went on the actual bridge were both anchored on my beat. When it rained, I would shelter under them.

"That was where I got the news that President Kennedy had been killed, in November 1963. I was on back shift and was standing under the pillars when a sailor came up to me and said, 'I see Kennedy's been shot, Jock.' Because this was a Friday night I thought he had been at the local pub, but of course it turned out that Kennedy had been shot."

Seven workmen were killed during the bridge construction. After one accident, Donald remembers being asked by his inspector to join the search for bodies on the sea foreshore at Port Edgar and the two long breakwaters where minesweepers were anchored. No bodies were found.

Donald, who today is The Herald's boxing obituarist, adds, "I remember the great excitement on the day the two sides of the bridge were finally joined. For the first time, I was able to look up and not see daylight."

Three weeks after the opening, Donald left the MoD police to begin life as a mature student. "I'll always cherish my time at Port Edgar," he says. "It allowed me to witness a big part of Scottish transport history."

George Barnett remembers seeing the giant concrete towers taking shape beside his house at South Queensferry. It was an inspiring sight. The project seemed immense and made him want to be part of it. He got his wish. Barnett, now 69, was just 15 when he started working on the bridge.

"That was my first job," he says. "I left school on the Friday and started there on the Monday. At the time, I lived across the railway embankment from where the main offices were, and every night for three weeks before I left school I went down, and eventually they said, 'Come down when you leave school, and we'll just start you.' I was dying to get started on the bridge. Working there was really good. I was fair proud of working on it - I was there the entire time."

His very first job was as a tea boy in the office. He later switched to the fitting shop, where he made huge numbers of shims - "bags and bags of them, hundreds of them". Shims, he explains, are spacers that fit between wires to keep them separate.

Barnett remembers seeing the bridge's towers slowly taking shape, section being added on to section. The main tower had just been built when it began swaying "six feet either way - the American workers on the site thought it was going to collapse".

There were lots of characters among the workers, he says. "We had a great laugh, but there were also one or two fatalities on the site. He remembers the death of one tea boy, and talking to an older worker a few hours before the man died in an accident. "It was a toss-up between him and another guy from Bo'ness - I told him, 'Bobby, you watch yourself up there.' He said, 'I'll be all right.'"

Eventually, the bridge was complete. Because Barnett was the youngest worker on the site, he was given the honour of hoisting the flag when the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh drove across the bridge. "I was fair proud of that, too," he says. "I remember the opening day was very foggy. We were up on top of the tower. When the Queen and the Duke went across at 11am, the fog was just starting to lift. The sun was shining at the top of the tower - we could look down and see her going right across the bridge. That was when we hoisted the flag. Each side of the road bridge was lined with people, as far as you could see."

Three weeks after the bridge was opened, the workers were laid off. Barnett spent the rest of his career as a steel erector, working on everything from footbridges over dual carriageways at Cumbernauld to Glasgow's St Enoch Centre and two tower projects in London's Canary Wharf.

Like Barnett, Alan MacDonald feels a sense of pride whenever he drives over the bridge today. Half a century ago, while in his early 20s, he worked for the consulting engineers Mott, Hay and Anderson, who, with Freeman Fox & Partners, had been chosen to oversee the bridge's design and supervise its construction.

MacDonald was a section engineer, supervising the construction of the south side towers and the south anchorages and, latterly, the approach viaducts on both sides of the river. "It was my first outside job, and it was a unique job to be involved in," he recalls. "It was a great opportunity, as well as a very interesting civil engineering project.

"Suspension bridges were the means of crossing large spaces in those days, though that has now changed. They don't build suspension bridges now, because of the problem of corrosion in the cables, and these sorts of things. The new generation of bridges are of a totally different design.

"The new design is known as cable-stayed. It doesn't have suspension cables across the river, it has straight cables that come down from towers to support the deck. These cables can be easily changed at a later date if they get a corrosion problem, whereas if suspension cables get corrosion they are in a terrible mess."

MacDonald worked from the on-site engineers' office. "There was quite a big staff, maybe 30 of us, spread out throughout the approach roads as well as the bridge. It was a wonderful experience. There was a great camaraderie between all the people who worked on the bridge. We had a great social life, as well as working hard. It was in many ways a unique experience."

MacDonald, who is now 78, retired 12 years ago as a contracts manager. "Some of my neighbours have sometimes asked me, 'Are you not ashamed, with the various problems on the Forth Road Bridge?' but I simply say, 'Not at all - we didn't design the bridge, we just built it.' There was corrosion in the main cables but I understand they have resolved that now, with a sort of air-conditioning system that blows air through the cables.

"But, yes, I do get a sense of pride whenever I drive over the bridge. It's very nice to be able to tell your grandchildren you were involved. It does look magnificent and hasn't really dated. Neither has the railway bridge. It's full of character, and the new road bridge will, I'm sure, look equally fine."

The new bridge, the Queensferry Crossing, is due to open in 2016. The 1.7-mile (2.7km) structure will be the longest three-tower, cable-stayed bridge in the world. When the new crossing opens, the Forth Road Bridge will become dedicated for public transport use, cycling and walking.

Tomorrow night a documentary on BBC One will give an arresting picture of the construction and the history of the road bridge. The Bridge: Fifty Years Across The Forth is narrated by theatre director and actress Cora Bissett and includes interviews with MacDonald and Barnett. It also features archive cine film of the construction process shot by Jim Hendry, an enthusiastic amateur cameraman, which is getting its first television screening.

"I had a cine camera and was interested in making films," Hendry says in the documentary. "I heard the big scheme of a new bridge across the Forth was coming up, so I thought I'd try to record it. I would go down occasionally, probably at the weekend, and see what was happening, and just take what was going on at the time." But all that changed when he struck up a friendship with an engineer, Jack Hamilton, who would take him across the river in his boat. Thanks to Hamilton, Hendry got superb access to the project over its six-year duration, from 1958 to 1964.

"I have got quite a good head for heights," he says over a segment of film shot high above the water, "so it doesn't worry me too much. Remember, I was 30 then - not 88 as I am now."

Speaking of having a head for heights … Bridgemaster and chief engineer Barry Colford and engineering manager Chris Tracey are shown making their way along the huge cable from which the road is suspended. "There is always a wee shiver of fear before you start," says Colford. "Not fear, just a bit of anticipation." At this height, the views are stupendous, though not as stupendous as most people's sense of vertigo.

The celebrations for the bridge's 50th birthday include a Forth Bridges Festival at North and South Queensferry from September 4-13, and a birthday party and torchlit procession on September 13. As for what the bridge has managed to achieve, the bridge historian Lillian King is in little doubt. "It absolutely transformed the country, it transformed trade," she says in the documentary. "When you think of the volume of traffic that goes across that bridge and did from the very beginning, people must have been just desperate to get this bridge open." n

The Bridge: Fifty Years Across The Forth is on BBC One tomorrow at 7pm.