Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marc Brunel’s drawing showing his son, Isambard Kingdom, surveying a flood in the Thames Tunnel.

“Mad bastard”, Robert Hulse said fondly, looking at an ant-sized figure in a painting celebrating one of the engineering triumphs and near greatest disasters of the 19th century, the Brunels’ construction of the world’s first road tunnel under a navigable river.

The watercolour is from a unique album including drawings by Marc and his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, kept in the family for almost 200 years and recently acquired by the Brunel Museum housed in the Brunels’ engine house and the shaft originally intended as the Grand Entrance Hall.

The tiny museum, at Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames, raised more than £200,000, including a major grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to buy the album at a recent Bonhams auction.

Thousands of London commuters pass unwittingly every day through the Brunels’ twin tunnels. They were intended for the carts and carriages which caused massive traffic jams at the London Bridge crossing, but the money ran out before the spiral ramps could be built, and the coming of the railways destroyed the original purpose. The Thames Tunnel became a disreputable tourist attraction for years before being adapted for trains.

The album includes beautiful drawings intended for fundraising by the Brunels’ prizewinning draftsman, Joseph Pinchback, and drawings by the Brunel father and son showing the reality.

Tunnelling – using a movable shield for the miners designed by Marc, which would inspire the design of the Channel Tunnel diggers – began in 1825. A drawing shows the aftermath of the first major collapse, in May 1827 with the tunnel almost halfway across the river, after days when the smell of sewage and methane had grown stronger and bits of broken crockery were proving the leaking water was coming through from the river bed. Marc’s drawing shows his 21-year-old son surveying the wreckage.



“The Thames is in spate a few feet over his head and he’s been rowed through the flood, then he’s wriggled through a gap barely bigger than he is, and they’re holding up a lamp from the boat as he’s crawling around in the muck inspecting the damage,” Hulse, the director of the Brunel Museum, said affectionately. “Mind you, somebody had to do it and he probably thought he had the best chance of surviving – it was a PR disaster which risked sinking the whole project.”

Another drawing, by Isambard, shows how they carried out the repairs: sinking a diving bell into the collapsed riverbed, filling the hole in the tunnel roof and pumping out the tunnel. A banquet was held in the tunnel to reassure investors that the project was back on track.

Isambard very nearly died in the next major collapse, in January 1828: he was washed back into the shaft and hauled out through an emergency exit, but six men did drown. His father sent him to Bristol – where the SS Great Britain also bought drawings from the sale for its own Brunel museum – after Brighton proved too much of a party town for a convalescent. He never returned to the tunnel: while lying in his sickbed Isambard heard of a competition to design a bridge across the Avon Gorge, and embarked on one of his most famous projects, the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The next project for the museum is to raise £4.5m to expand the museum with a new gallery to display the drawings.



