Peter Bruff

Peter Schuyler Bruff (1812 - 1900), born in Portsmouth, England was an astute civil engineer most well known for founding the seaside resort town of Clacton on Sea, Essex, and for improving the lives of residents in the Essex towns of Walton, Colchester and Harwich.

By the time of his death in 1900, Peter Bruff had helped turn what had thirty years before been an empty piece of farmland with a beach into the flourishing seaside town of Clacton on Sea.

As Bruff was growing up the 'seaside' became a fashionable place to visit among the upper classes, it was thought to be healthy and was even prescribed by doctors of the time, and so more and more coastal towns started to appear.

Bruff's first contact with the Essex area came when he was working on the Eastern Counties Line Railway from Shoreditch to Colchester in 1843.

At this time he created one of his most impressive civic engineering projects - The Chappel Viaduct. Built between 1847 and 1849 the Viaduct carries the Marks Tey to Sudbury line across the Colne Valley. It stands 80ft above the river, has 32 arches and is 1,066 ft long. Remarkably, the viaduct contains 4.5 million bricks!

He wanted his railway line to Colchester to carry on as far as Ipswich but the railway company did not have sufficient funds to realize this project.. Bruff made the first of, what were to become, several brave moves ­he formed a new company and did it himself.

At this time Bruff was also the engineer for the Chard Canal, a 13½ mile tub-boat canal with inclined planes and three tunnels, from the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal at Creech St. Michael to Chard.

He also produced a plan for a ship canal to run parallel to the River Colne from Hythe in Colchester to Wivenhoe, when Colchester traders complained that it sometimes took between 5-7 days for ships to get from Wivenhoe to colchester. He also proposed another to run from Hythe to Lexden.

While working on the Ipswich line in 1855 he bought a house, Burnt House Farm, in Walton, an already an established but unremarkable town on the Essex coast near Frinton. He began to work on developing Walton as a recognised seaside resort.

He took a major step in accomplishing this when in 1867, Having accomplished the Ipswich line, he built another railway line, to Walton.

Norman Jacobs, chairman of the Clacton and District Local History Society, said: "His house was a farm with a lot of land. He built a hotel and the pier, some houses and the railway station. All that end of town was all his and he built it up."

"It was his building up that made Walton a fairly substantial seaside resort and a place where people came."

Peter Bruff's pier at Walton replaced an existing smaller pier which was blown down by a storm in 1881.

Bruff was responsible for the building of the Marine Terrace, South Terrace (destroyed by bombing in WWII), Clifton Baths (today the Pier Hotel) and the new pier. His grand vision of Walton connected to Frinton with a tramway along the landscaped cliffs connected to the railway though was never fully realised as he was distracted by a larger project just down the coast.

During this time Clacton was virtually non-existent. the area now known as Clacton on Sea was land belonging to Seaside House Farm, it had two roads, Rosemary Way and Old Road, which led to the much older Great Clacton. The only buildings of note were the Napoleonic Martello Towers, a few cottages and some coastguard properties.

Brighton and Great Yarmouth were already established as popular resorts but the land at clacton was held in trust and the land could not be sold. However, By 1864 when William Watson, the last person who held covenant on the land died and the area was set to be auctioned off.

At this time Peter Bruff stepped in and made a private deal to buy 50 acres, the central part of the town, for around £10,000. The land concerned ran from the pier up to the, present day, Martello Bay estate, the same distance in the other direction, and roughly up to where the town's cinema now stands. Bruff immediately sought authority to build a branch railway line to Clacton beach and to establish a pier there. Permission was granted on condition that he did so within five years.

This was easier said than done, as Bruff simply did not have the funds to finance his ambitious new project and it was with some desperation that nearly five years later he met with William Parry Jackson, chairman of the Woolwich Steam Packet Company. The pair stood on the barren beach and agreed that Jackson would help fund the building of a pier, providing his firm had sole rights to use it.

A year later work began on the seaside resort of Clacton on Sea. The Times in 1871 cooed

"That being an entirely new creation, and not the adaptation of an existing town, none of the evils inseparable from the old watering holes will be allowed to exist in it. There will be no slums, nor any object that can offend the eye."

Not everyone was impressed though. Great Clacton's rural council decided to unanimously dissent from the scheme, and was so miffed it made a point of underlining the word dissent.

In July 1871 the pier, Clacton's first building, was opened and the town was born. It wasn't the amusement emporium of today, it was a long jetty, there so people could get on or off the boats that brought them to town. It was just 160 yards in length and 4 yards wide and, at that time contained no buildings. In it's capacity as a landing stage. A scale of charges had to be laid down, this included gun powder at a cost of 6d, musical instruments at 1d per cubic foot, turtles at 2/6 and corpses at £1 each. The toll for visitors requiring a perambulation along the pier, to partake of the bracing air, was 2d.

Bruff, who also designed the road layout, then started separate companies to build the Royal Hotel in 1872, then a public hall in Pier Avenue ­later destroyed by a fire in 1939, and sold off individual plots of land for people to build on. He laid down strict covenants like drainage and paving, becoming a one-man planning committee. The whole of the town centre, even today, is Bruff's town centre.

The Town indeed did begin as a decorous Victorian resort, in accordance with Bruff's wishes, with villas occupied by genteel families, and hotels and boarding houses visited by good bourgeois folk. But the creation of 'Bank Holidays', also in 1871, were to bring a conflicting element destined to remain, namely the excusionist who found it easy to journey to Bruffs seaside paradise thanks to his own creation 'the East Coast Line'.

Bruff also bought the parish of Frinton but later sold it on.

He founded Tendring Hundred Waterworks in 1887 which supplied water to the richer part of Colchester. When Colchester's planned water tower was suggested by Liberals to supply the poor as well, Bruff, a Conservative, objected. Today the Tendring Hundred Water Services Company still operates and is the smallest water company operating in England.

By the early 1880s he had finished with the Clacton area, and lived mainly in Ipswich, where he designed and built the towns sewer system and the 360 yard railway tunnel through Stoke Hill by the station, and also in Walton where he was responsible for bringing a gasworks to the town.

In 1885 he purchased the, once prestigious, Royal Cauldon pottery company which had been making porcelain services for amongst others, Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. The company had been in a period of marked decline, and although Bruff knew nothing of the technical side of the company, he recognised that, if properly managed, it was a good proposition. This turned out to be true when, upon return from Indian Army Services his son Charles Bruff became Managing director of the company and under his guidance it resumed its honoured place among the great porcelain. Factories of the country.

Peter Bruff died in 1900 having left him mark in just about every area of England, but it is Clacton where he is best remembered as the man who literally built the town and laid the foundations for everything that followed.