The Famous Tay Whale Dundee city centre. Paul Godfrey described McGonagall on the strength of the "Tay Whale" and other verse as "the worst poet in the English language". Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the "Tay Whale" that "what this [the verses about John Wood and the Tay Whale] amounts to, of course, is simply what quite uneducated and stupid people—the two adjectives by no means necessarily go together, for many uneducated people have great vitality and a raciness of utterance altogether lacking here—would produce if asked to recount something they had read in a newspaper." MacDiarmid continued that "in their retailings of, or comments
Tay Bridge disaster were now constructed by sinking brick-lined wrought-iron caissons onto the riverbed, and filling these with concrete. To reduce the weight these had to support, Bouch used open-lattice iron skeleton piers: each pier had multiple cast-iron columns taking the weight of the bridging girders. Wrought iron horizontal braces and diagonal tiebars linked the columns in each pier to provide rigidity and stability. The basic concept was well known, but for the Tay Bridge, the pier dimensions were constrained by the caisson. For the higher portion of the bridge, there were 13 girder spans. In order to accommodate thermal expansion, at only