Builders of bowstring bridges

Keeping on the trail of Napier Bridge (Miscellany, November 3) has been reader V.Viswanathan and he has come up with the fact that work on the first bowstring bridge began during the governorship of Lord Erskine and that the bridge was declared open by Governor Sir Arthur Hope. 

The bridge was constructed by Gannon Dunkerley & Co, a major construction company at the time, and the work was supervised by the Madras Port Trust. Who built its clone, inaugurated in 2000, reader Viswanathan is still trying to find out.

Henry Gannon and J H Dunkerley had separate trading establishments in India from 1895. Whether these were in Bombay or Delhi is not very clear, but they were merged in 1918 to become Gannon Dunkerley & Co. (GDC). 

The firm was incorporated as a private limited company in 1924. It passed into Indian hands in 1946 and two years later become a public limited company headquartered in Bombay.

It was in the early 1930s that GDC moved from trading into civil engineering and was particularly active in the South. There it became known for the RCC bowstring bridges it built to its in-house design. 

It also built several other bridges, aqueducts, and civil requirements for irrigation and hydroelectric projects, besides numerous factory buildings. One of the firm’s best known projects was the first ghat road from Tirupati to Tirumalai. During World War II it built several airstrips and runways. 

Then, in the 1950s, it constructed numerous bridges for the Western and Central Railways.

Today, its branch offices in Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and Calcutta handle assignments in their respective regions. But there was in the 1950s a Gannon Dunkerley (Madras).

S . Muthiah, H: 24 Nov 2014