WORK on the Forth Road Bridge began on the first day of September, 1958. It was, said this newspaper in an editorial, “the first of the really big projects which are intended to give Scotland a road network commensurate with the needs of the mid-twentieth century”. That day, one of our reporters visited South Queensferry, a burgh of some 2,700 inhabitants. He found a sense of quiet optimism in the air, an impression reinforced when, as he examined a scale model of the bridge in the town clerk’s office, he happened to run into Provost James A. Lawson, who had been a member of the original Forth road bridge promotion committee in 1930.