Brunel archive reveals hidden treasures

[John Ashworth]

Brunel archive reveals hidden treasures in show-and-tell at Bristol docks

Enthusiasts can inspect one new item from engineer's collection every Tuesday and Wednesday at SS Great Britain

Maev Kennedy
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 August 2011 20.36 BST

Hailed as Britain's greatest engineering genius, he revolutionised rail travel, built bridges over land, dug tunnels under it, and constructed vast ocean-going ships.

Now anyone with an interest in the workings of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's mind can drop into an archive in Bristol's docks and see treasures never exhibited before: drawings, photographs, diaries and letters associated with one of the most important figures of the 19th century.

The archive is housed beside Brunel's restored ship, the SS Great Britain – the world's first ocean-going, propellor-driven iron ship in 1838, now a museum in its original dry dock. The archive includes family papers, diaries, letters, childhood drawings, carefully preserved by his father and fellow engineer Marc, and technical drawings for famous projects including the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Great Western Railway and his last project, the enormous Great Eastern ship.

For the first time on Tuesday, and then every Tuesday and Wednesday, the archivists will choose one piece from the collection and bring it into the adjoining library for one hour, where anyone can drop in for free to see what's on show.

Brunel's genius shines through on almost every page. If he needed something, he invented it: he created forceps to extract a coin after swallowing and choking on it while trying to show a conjuring trick to his children. Little caricatures, doodles, and sketches for entirely unrelated projects turn up in the margins of his papers.Complex engineering problems sit side by side with designs for wrought-iron curlicues for decorative metalwork.

"It's as if when he started on a project he had the entire scheme down to the most minute detail already in his head, and all he had to do was get it down on paper," museum curator Rhian Tritton said.

There are also poignantly personal documents, such as the galloping horse, drawn when he was six, and a tiny notebook with detailed designs and planting schemes for a beautiful garden at Watcombe in Devon, his planned retirement home. Sadly, the peaceful years of leisure never happened, as he died following a stroke aged 53.

Some papers, including those from the University of Bristol, bequeathed by Brunel's granddaughter and moved to the Brunel Institute last year, have been studied by academics but never exhibited. Others, including personal papers and objects preserved by his sister Sophia have scarcely been seen by anyone since they were carefully stored after his death.

Although the library is open to all, curators have found that most visitors peer through the windows but are shy of coming in unless engaged on some academic project. They hope the displays will tempt many more in.

"People will have no idea what they will see, because we are only going to decide at the last moment ourselves," explained Tritton. "It could be something beautiful like his drawings, or an object intimately associated with him like his drawing instruments, they will just have to come in and see what's out – and we hope they'll be curious enough to come back again."

The first display which has already been decided upon will be Victorian stereo photographs issued in the 1850s, showing work on the Great Eastern, designed to be the largest ship in the world capable of carrying 4,000 passengers to Australia, a project which helped kill him from overwork.

Beautiful drawings will also appear for one of his most famous projects, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which won the design competition in 1829. The bridge, 61 metres above the Avon, had the longest span of any in the world. It is still used by 4m vehicles a year. The bridge wasn't finished until 1864, five years after the death of the little genius.

Archive in Five, Brunel Institute, Tuesday, Wednesday and two Saturdays a month