Few people will be sorry to see disgraced banker Sir Fred Goodwin leave Britain (Times report) after pocketing a staggering £700,000 a year pension despite presiding over the collapse of RBS, forcing a government rescue at eye-watering cost to taxpayers.

Is Goodwin Scotland's most high profile disgraced man since Thomas Bouch? Few will have heard of Bouch today, but he was the engineer responsible for the original Tay railway bridge. Bouch was knighted by Queen Victoria, who travelled over the bridge after its official opening. US President Ulysses S Grant, visiting the site, offered the accurate if prosaic comment, 'It's a very long bridge'. But Bouch was ruined when the bridge collapsed in a storm in December 1879, sending a train into the river estuary, killing 75 people.

The tragedy was a tremendous shock to the pride and confidence of Victorian Britain.

Bouch was utterly ruined. The Board of Trade delivered a damning verdict: 'For … defects both in the design, the construction and the maintenance, Sir Thomas Bouch is, in our opinion, mainly to blame. For the faults of design he is entirely responsible.' Bouch was vilified at the official inquiry, dismissed by the railway company and died less than a year after the disaster.

Was the Tay bridge disaster the result of a failure of regulation? The Board of Trade's railway inspectorate had cleared the bridge for passenger traffic, and although the inspector, Major-General Hutchinson had said he would like to see the effect of wind on the bridge, no further analysis took place. The 19th century was the high water mark of laissez faire government, and it took a series of further disasters before the British government introduced a modest degree of statutory regulation of the railways. It came too late for the 75 victims of Sir Thomas Bouch's negligence. 

But at least no one gave him an extravagant pension…