The Brunel Institute – The Brunel Legacy – Tim Bryan The New UK-based Global Centre

Tim Bryan

Director of the Brunel Institute at the SS Great Britain in Bristol

In this, the first of a series of features about Brunel and his work, Tim describes the collections held at the Institute that tell the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his life and work.

Of all the Victorian engineers, Brunel is probably the best represented in terms of surviving archive material about his life and career; in April 1910 the Great Western Railway Magazine recorded that the Brunel family had presented a large collection of material to the Great Western Railway, which was kept at Paddington for many years, but is now preserved at the National Archives at Kew. In 1950, Brunel’s grand-daughter Lady Celia Noble presented the University of Bristol with a priceless collection of letter books, sketchbooks, calculation books, documents and drawing instruments that had been retained by the family until that point. The collection grew further as more material become available through donations and auction purchases by the University.

In 2010, the collection was moved to the Brunel Institute, to become part a new collaborative venture between the SS Great Britain Trust and the University of Bristol that sits alongside Brunel’s engineering masterpiece, the SS Great Britain. The Institute now houses one of the world’s finest collection of Brunelrelated material which includes not only the material formerly held at the University of Bristol Library, on long term deposit, but many other important items from the Trust’s own National Brunel Collection relating to the engineer and his family, making it one of the most significant collections of its type in the world.

The collection spans all aspects of Brunel’s career, covering bridges (including the Clifton Suspension bridge), railways, steamships, tunnels and other miscellaneous projects such as his designs for a

Detail of a lamp post at Bath station from Brunel’s sketchbook

Sketch of a horse by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, aged 6

prefabricated Crimean War hospital, but naturally there is much of interest to the Great Western enthusiast and historian!

Most importantly, the collection includes Brunel’s original sketchbooks and notebooks and there are eighteen sketchbooks dedicated to the Great Western Railway alone, covering the period 1836 - 1842. The sketchbooks often show preliminary ideas for structures which look quite different to the finished product, and include bridges, stations, tunnels and much else besides. They also reveal not only Brunel’s drawing skills, but also an incredible attention to detail. Brunel’s artistic talent was apparent from a very young age – the National Brunel collection also contains a drawing of a horse he completed in 1812 at the age of 6 that shows the confidence and skill being nurtured by his father Marc.

Many of the completed engineering drawings for GWR structures are now cared for at the Network Rail archive, and some can be viewed online at:

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-are/ourhistory/the-network-rail-archive/

The Brunel Institute archive also houses Brunel’s diaries and notebooks which reveal much about the man as well as his work! Many of the well-known biographies of the engineer have this primary material at their core. One of the most interesting items is the famous ‘locked diary’ in which the young Brunel recorded his thoughts and insecurities as he struggled in the early years of his career. There are also thirteen bank passbooks revealing something of his financial affairs!

Brunel was an inveterate correspondent and received and wrote many letters; the collection contains letter books covering personal and office correspondence between 1832 and 1859. There are also fifty-six original letters from Brunel to Daniel Gooch and Charles Alexander Saunders together with other documents concerning the Great Western Railway from 1837 to 1857.

Further details of the Brunel archive collection can be found at: https://archives.bristol.ac.uk/Record. aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=DM162

The 60,000 items in the Trust collection also includes GWR-related material and prints, paintings and photographs relating to Brunel, as well as the MacGregor Library housing more than 7,000 books on Brunel, industrial, transport and maritime history. Particularly striking are stereoscopic images taken at the end of Brunel’s career (and during the earliest years of photography) which feature some of his later work such as the SS Great Eastern and his masterpiece the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash.

The Brunel collections are housed in a stateof-the-art purpose built archive vault which securely conserves the historic material in the best environmental conditions; the Brunel Institute is however one of the few archives in the world to offer access ‘on demand’ which means that anyone with an interest in Brunel, the SS Great Britain or maritime history can normally view the collections Tuesday-Friday every week; not surprisingly, the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that we have not been able to offer this level of access, but we hope that in the coming months, like many organisations, we will be able to open up the collections again.

Brunel Institute staff and volunteers normally offer ‘Archive in 5’ sessions for visitors every day – these are short talks featuring original material from the collection that people can get up close and personal to. As access to the SS Great Britain and the Institute is still restricted, a selection of these talks are now available virtually at:

https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/brunel-institute/ learning/stuff-do-home/virtual-archive-five.

More information about material from the collection can also be found online at:

https://www.ssgreatbritain.org/your-visit/ collection-stories

More original material from the archive and railway-related Brunel artefacts including a section of South Devon Railway atmospheric railway pipe can be seen in ‘Being Brunel’, a new museum created by the SS Great Britain in 2018 which explores the story of the engineer and his life and legacy.

This brief introduction to the Institute can only give a hint of the treasures it contains, and in forthcoming issues of the Great Western Star, we hope to highlight some of the most interesting objects from the collections and the stories behind them. In the meantime, if you would like to find out more, visit the SS Great Britain web site at www.ssgreatbritain.org.