Today, Londoners take for granted the large number of bridges that traverse the nation’s capital river, but until the early eighteenth century there was only one bridge that crossed the Thames –– London Bridge. Although several bridges have spanned the Thames since Roman times only a single bridge existed at any one time and it was not until the 1730s that construction began on a second bridge, one that connected Westminster with the Surrey bank.
     The man chosen by the specially established Bridge Commission to oversee the construction of this new edifice spanning the Thames was Charles Labelye, an émigré Huguenot, a mathematician, engineer and surveyor; he was also a prominent Freemason.
     Charles Labelye was born circa 1705 and was the son of François Dangeau La Belye, a French Protestant refugee who came from the small Swiss town of Vevey. Little is known of his early life except that he is known to have arrived in England around 1725 without knowing a word of English.
     One thing however is certain, soon after his arrival he became a Freemason for on 27 November 1725 one ‘Charles de L’Abelye’ was listed as a member of ‘a French lodge’ which met at Solomon’s Temple on the comer of Castle Street and Hemming’s Row, London. And it seems that, in becoming a Freemason, Labelye made some invaluable social connections for his lodge not only included several fellow Huguenots but its master in 1725 was the influential Newtonian experimentalist, Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a past Grand Master of the infant Grand Lodge in London (1719-20), and a man Labelye would subsequently work with.
     Details of Labelye’s early employment are scanty although it is known that he worked for the British Royal Navy for a time, teaching mathematics. It is also known that between 1727 and 1728 he was in Madrid where he befriended a group of Freemasons associated with the exiled Jacobite peer and former Grand Master, Philip, 1st Duke of Wharton. Labelye subsequently wrote to the Grand Lodge in London stating that the Madrid lodge of which he was Master, wished to receive recognition, and, as a consequence, it subsequently became the first official foreign warranted lodge.
     By the autumn of 1728 Labelye was back in England and was practicing as an expert in harbours and waterways. It was in this capacity that during 1734 Labelye was asked to supply plans and maps of the Thames for those involved in planning a new bridge at Westminster. In June 1737 he was again involved in surveying the river and the following month his plan for a wooden bridge was one of several submitted to the Commissioners who had been appointed by an Act of Parliament to oversee the building a new bridge. On 10 May 1738 he was appointed senior ‘engineer’ in charge of the bridge-building project, a position that carried a salary of £100 a year and an allowance of ten shillings per day.
     However, his appointment over several native English architects such as John James, Batty Langley and Edward Oakley was controversial, and even though they were all fellow Freemasons, the intensity of ill feeling between the various rival parties was such that a fierce pamphlet war ensued.
     It has been suggested that Labelye’s appointment as senior engineer on the building of Westminster Bridge may be attributable to the influence of Dr. Desaguliers. If correct, this would have been somewhat ironic in that the construction work necessitated the demolition of Desagulier’s house in Channel Row. Evidently the two men were close, as Desaguliers described Labelye as ‘my Disciple and my Assistant’ and in April 1735 Labelye also wrote a letter to Desaguliers concerning the laws of motion which was subsequently published in the 1745 edition of Desaguliers’ Course of Experimental Philosophy.
     Labelye also enjoyed the support of the influential Henry Herbert, ninth Earl of Pembroke, another fellow Freemason and by far the most active of the Bridge commissioners; indeed, it was Pembroke who laid the first stone on the bridge on 29 January 1739. Richard Graham acted as ‘surveyor and comptroller of the works’, and the mason contractors were Andrew Jelfe and Samuel Tufnell - chief master mason at Westminster Abbey and a senior member of two London lodges.
     Labelye, who had made a study of various bridges across Europe, appears to have followed the round-arch type of bridge introduced to Paris during the reign of King Henri IV. And when the actual construction work got underway, the various mechanical devices and structural innovations were largely due to his own invention; he even authored a pamphlet on the project ‘by order’ of the commissioners in an attempt to answer his critics by explaining his innovative methods of construction. Several years later The Gentleman’s Magazine (December 1746) published an illustrated account of the new bridge, and in 1751, a year after its completion, Labelye republished an enlarged edition of his 1739 pamphlet.
     For his services Labelye was officially naturalized a British subject by Act of Parliament in 1746. However, later the same year he had to oversee a costly repair programme on the piers of Westminster Bridge and he once again found himself the focus of a vitriolic campaign. The bridge was finally opened to the public in November 1750 and for his great ‘skill and diligence’ the commissioners presented him with the princely sum of £2,000 in February 1751. But despite their generosity, Labelye was by now deeply unsettled by his critics and his health was also on the wane. Consequently, in 1752 he left England and travelled to southern France and Naples, before finally settling in Paris.
     It is reported that Labelye built a house for himself in Parisian suburb of Passy, where, unmarried and childless, he died in 1781. He left his portfolios and models, including one of Westminster Bridge, to his friend and compatriot, Jean-Rodolphe Perronet. And upon the latter’s death these were gifted to the l’École impériale des ponts et chausses (‘Imperial School of bridges and roads’), of which Perronet had been director (1747-1794).

Matthew Scanlan © April, 2009