In Scotland during the Second World War it was estimated just one farm in six, and one croft in a hundred had mains electricity. Today, virtually every home and business in the country is connected to the grid.
This is thanks, in no small part, to a group of workers – known as the “Tunnel Tigers” who helped forge the hydro electric revolution when they set the world record for rock breaking on 27th October 1955.
“The staccato bark of the drills became louder. My boots were heavy with mud and the air vibrated. The atmosphere grew heavier with sulphur fumes…Then we came upon the borers suddenly. The noise was appalling… it was an all enveloping, all encompassing racket, in which sensation was drowned for the first few minutes….
It takes the borers several hours to finish the drilling. That done they take down the electric fittings, clear away all their gear, put a stick of gelignite in each hole, retire at least 800 feet, then blow the fuses. The resultant explosion can be heard on the surface more than a mile away.”
This was an account by a Glasgow Weekly Herald reporter as he descended into the tunnel being created at Loch Ericht in 1936.
Advances in drilling techniques and improved training over the next 20 years would increase the speed of tunnelling, but ultimately it was the very same methods that allowed the Tunnel Tigers to break that rock tunnelling speed world record.
Three crews of 14 men worked eight hour shifts to clear over 557 feet of rock in just seven days, creating part of a tunnel system that would eventually provide water to St Fillans power station.
The working conditions in the tunnels would have been very poor; dark, cramped, filled with fumes and noise. The work was dangerous and on occasion proved fatal. Outside the tunnel the wet, windy and bitterly cold Highland weather was there to meet the miners.
The benefit of this was that the pay was far higher than the men would expect working elsewhere. The miners at St Fillans could expect around £5 a week, but for breaking the record the men were given pay of £60 and a £20 bonus, a huge sum of money at the time.
The promise of large bonuses encouraged huge numbers of labourers to work on the hydro schemes, and there was a good amount of friendly rivalry between tunnelling teams to see who could dig through their section quickest.
The Glentarken tunnel where the record was set.
Many of the them brought their tunnelling skills from as far afield as Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.
General works map which shows the Glentarken tunnel section which the record was broken in. Image from SSE’s Corporate Archive.
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One of the watches that were gifted to the tunnellers that we now hold in our collection. Images from SSE’s Corporate Archive.
Reflecting on the achievement of the Tunnel Tigers, Heritage Development Officer, Holly Cammidge said:
“It’s brilliant to see the impact of the Tunnellers’ hard work, 70 years on. These men would have had no idea that they were laying the foundations for cleaner and safer energy—work that has gone on to have far-reaching consequences down the decades and through the generations.”
St Fillans power station, which was completed in 1957 is an underground power station on the shores of Loch Earn, in Perthshire.
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