Salt and the salt industry

by Albert Frederick Calvert

But although newspaper representatives could philosophize upon the matter-of-fact spirit in which the inhabitants of the salt towns faced existence in their tumble-down surroundings, and the salt proprietors desired that they should make the best of a condition of things from which they wished them to believe there was absolutely no amelioration or escape, a feeling of resentment was rapidly growing in the neighbourhood. The people of Northwich and Winsford were being pumped out of their houses and out of their lands, and the future held every promise of a continuation and extension of the damage. Lord Delamere, who, as an owner and letter of salt lands, benefited by the brine industry and suffered from the depredation it wrought, admitted the damage and the cause thereof. Indeed, nobody but the salt proprietors doubted that the pumpers were wholly responsible for the destruction, and most people recognized that their wrong-doing was twofold in character. Standing on the ancient assumption in law that everything beneath a man’s property belongs to the owner, the owners of property in the affected districts contended that they were not only being deprived of the rock-salt which legally belonged to them, but were further despoiled by having their land made worthless by the abstraction of the salt for which they received no payment. The justice of the protest was obvious, and it became a public question how far these operations, useful in themselves, but involving consequences of a disastrous nature, should be allowed to proceed. In December, 1880, the Daily News asked who was to compensate the sufferers, who had neither caused nor contributed to the disaster.

Following the failure of the property owners to obtain compensation from the salt proprietors for the damage attributable to the pumping operations, an application was made to the Trustees of the River Weaver to devote a portion of their surplus revenue for compensation purposes. The application was refused, and an appeal to Quarter Sessions failed. The evil was allowed to drag on until 1871, when the Board of Trade, in response to representations made to them by the Northwich Salt Chamber of Commerce, instructed Mr. Joseph Dickinson to report upon the salt districts of Cheshire. Mr. Dickinson, one of the most eminent Inspectors of Mines in the service of the Government, after a prolonged investigation, reported his conclusions that the subsidences and the resulting damages to property were caused by the pumping of brine, which constituted a public danger and inflicted heavy losses upon many persons totally unconnected with the salt industry. A further report by Colonel Cox, corroborating the conclusions arrived at by Mr. Dickinson, came before Parliament in 1879, and upon the recommendation of the Local Government Board, the local Boards decided to promote the Cheshire Salt Districts Compensation Bill, “to make provision for the assessment, levy, and application for compensation for damage by subsidence of land in the salt districts of the County of Cheshire, and for other purposes.”

The salt proprietors exerted every effort to frustrate the plans of the promoters of the Bill; they declared that a tax upon salt would cripple the trade and ruin the entire neighbourhood; they endeavoured to create local ill-feeling by insisting that the movement was an attempt of the property-owners to saddle the ratepayers with the expense of the proposed measure. Briefly stated, the case that the promoters were asked to make required them to prove (a) the subsidence in the salt district; (b) that the subsidence was caused by the pumping of brine for the manufacture of salt; (c) that the subsidence was of a most extensive and serious character, and affected the property of persons deriving no benefit either from the manufacture of salt in the form of compensation from the salt manufacturers for the salt extracted, or for damage done to the property by such abstraction; (d) that there was no legal remedy for the injury suffered; and, finally, (e) that the moneys required to adequately compensate for the injury done, if levied upon the manufacture of salt, would not injuriously affect the salt industry.

A ROW OF OPEN PANS

A copy of the Bill was lodged in December, 1880; it was read a first and second time on 21st January and 4th February, 1881, and referred to a Select Committee, which commenced sitting on 5th May, and on the 20th of the same month announced their unanimous opinion that the preamble of the Bill had not been proved. In the preamble of the Bill it was estimated that a contribution not exceeding threepence for every ton of salt in brine in the district covered by the Act would be sufficient to provide the required compensation. The opponents of the Bill declared that a compensation tax upon the salt trade would severely injure the industry and act as a restraint upon trade; they put forward expert witnesses to contend that if the brine—which they contended was produced by rainfall percolating through the superincumbent strata and reaching the salt—was not pumped out, it would run away to the sea, and the consequent subsidence of land and injury to property would not be arrested. The theory that brine, in quantity sufficient for the manufacture of 1,600,000 tons of salt per annum would, without pumping, have been carried away into the rivers by natural agency and deposited in the sea, was supported by such ingenious misstatement and misrepresentation, and the fictitious instances of brine springs overflowing and causing damage in other parts of the world were quoted with so much specious authority that they succeeded in wrecking the Bill.

After a further ten years of continued subsidences and attendant damage to public and private property, the Brine Pumping (Compensation for Subsidence) Bill was introduced in 1891, to authorize the formation of Compensation Districts and Boards, with power to levy a yearly rate not exceeding threepence per 1,000 gallons of brine pumped. Shortly after the passing of the Bill, the action of Northwich, which memorialized for the formation of the whole of the County of Cheshire into one district for purposes of compensation, led to an inquiry by the Local Government Board, as the result of which Middlewich and Sandbach were excluded. The Provisional Order uniting Northwich and Winsford in one area was opposed by Winsford, and a Select Committee of the House, in 1893, quashed the Provisional Order and made Northwich an independent compensation district.

The next great struggle in the salt district, known locally as the Battle of the Brine, arose out of the action of the Salt Union, which, in 1909, enlarged its works at Weston Point with the intention of manufacturing salt at that place from brine pumped at Marston, near Northwich, 11 miles distant. In pursuance of their policy of stalling off competition and safeguarding their monopoly, the Salt Union, in 1890, had successfully petitioned against the Bill that was promoted to obtain powers to convey brine from Cheshire to be made into salt at Widnes, in Lancashire, and at Middlewich they had obtained an injunction to restrain trade competitors from laying pipes under one of the streets of the town for the conveyance of brine from their own pumps to their own salt-pans. In 1766, 1833, and 1861, the Trent and Mersey Canal, the Grand Junction Railway, and the West Cheshire Railway, respectively, received authorizations from Parliament, but in each instance a clause was inserted prohibiting the several companies from conveying or permitting to be conveyed in or upon any part of their properties, any brine for the making of salt to any district beyond the district in which salt was then made. In 1884, when the London and North-Western Railway sought to gain the repeal of the brine clause in order to enable brine to be carried from one salt township to another adjoining, Parliament refused to sanction even such a limited modification of the prohibition. The logical objection which the salt districts opposed to the removal from the several pumping centres of the brine upon which the prosperity of the towns entirely depended, had thus consistently been upheld by Parliament, but in the face of these facts, and of their previous attitude on the subject, the Salt Union insisted upon their right to carry brine from Marston to Weston Point, and announced their intention to defend their position to the utmost of their power.

It must be explained that the Marbury Pipe Line had been laid in 1882 by the Mersey Salt & Brine Company, who carried it, by agreement, across lands belonging to private landowners and over a canal belonging to the North Stafford Railway. The railway made a formal protest, but an amicable settlement was ultimately reached by which the Mersey Salt Company agreed to pay the North Stafford Company £5 a year and to remove the pipe on receipt of a three months’ notice. The railway company appear to have persisted with their opposition in order to force an admission from the Mersey Company that they possessed no permanent right to carry the pipe across their canal, but the concern was of such trifling importance that it was practically ignored by the people of the district, and for twenty years after the property of the Mersey Salt Company and the Marbury Brine Pipe had been acquired by the Salt Union, the question of the removal of brine from the neighbourhood in which it was raised had found all classes of the salt community united against such proposals. But with the completion of the works at Weston Point, and the enlargement of the Marbury Pipe and the installation of powerful engines, capable of driving millions of gallons of brine from Marbury to be converted into salt at the sea-board, a new menace was organized against which the Urban Authorities and Local Councils made a long and spirited, if fruitless, resistance.

In the autumn of 1910, the North Stafford Railway served the Salt Union with a notice to remove their pipe line from the Trent and Mersey Canal by the end of the following March, and the Salt Union proving obdurate, the towns of Northwich, Winsford, and Middlewich promoted the Brine Pumping (Cheshire) Bill, “to regulate the conveyance of brine pumped, raised and gotten” in the county. The original draft, which proposed to permit the removal of brine by pipe to a distance of three miles within the county from the place at which it was raised, was amended to permit manufacturers to carry brine by pipe from one set of works to another in their own occupation, and they further attempted to meet the alleged rights of the Salt Union by the insertion of a clause allowing the Marbury Pipe to be used for the conveyance of brine to the extent of 250 million gallons a year. But the Salt Union declined all conciliatory overtures, and combated the Bill before the Select Committee on the grounds that it was a proposal to alter the common law of England and interfere with the sacred rights of property. The injury that was sought to be done, not only to the Salt Union but to the export trade of the country, was enlarged upon, and the Committee may have been impressed by the assurance that the Union, so far from intending to leave Winsford and Northwich, expected to do an even greater trade in those districts in the future than had been done there in the past. In the result, the Salt Union’s insistence upon the legality of a course of action which they had previously denounced and opposed as totally illegal, carried so much weight with the Select Committee, that they made an unsavoury meal of the Parliamentary decisions of 1766, 1833, 1861, 1890, 1891, and 1893, and announced that the Bill could not proceed.