To understand the sources of this wealth, and the way in which it was made, we shall have to go back again to the middle of the eighteenth century, and tell the story of a great Industrial Revolution, a revolution without war and bloodshed indeed, but one that brought with it the greatest changes perhaps that Cheshire had yet seen. What these changes were, and how they affected the lives of Cheshire men and women, you will read in the succeeding chapters.
CHAPTER XXX
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. I
The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century laid the foundation of modern manufacturing England. With remarkable rapidity great industries came into being, and new methods of making all kinds of manufactured goods. And the first cause of this revolution was the discovery of coal, or rather the discovery of what you could do with coal. For coal was all at once in great demand to provide the power of steam, and in 1769 James Watt, the discoverer of the power of steam, showed that the steam engine could be used to drive machinery hitherto worked by hand.
Coal was first found in Cheshire about the year 1750. A colliery was opened at Denhall in Wirral, where coal is worked to this day. In East Cheshire coal was found by an accident. A farmer near Poynton had to fetch his water from a considerable distance, and asked his landlord, Sir George Warren of Poynton Hall, to sink him a well on his land. While the workmen were boring the well they came across a seam of fine coal quite near to the surface. Many other collieries have since that time been started in the same neighbourhood, and now coal is taken out of the earth nearly all the way from Stockport to Macclesfield. There are pits at Norbury, Middlewood, and Bakestonedale. The coal-field extends northwards also, and all along the Tame valley there are pits, and especially in the neighbourhood of Dukinfield, where some of the workings reach a depth of over two thousand feet below the surface of the land.
The earlier Cheshire canals were made as a result of the discovery of coal. The Duke of Bridgwater, who owned rich coal-mines at Worsley near Manchester, made very little profit out of them on account of the expense of carrying the coal by carriage to the shipping ports. A clever engineer named James Brindley was the first to suggest to him the making of a canal by which barges might take the coal to the river Irwell. This was the first canal made in England, and was finished in the year 1761.
The Bridgwater Canal was afterwards extended and carried over the Irwell by an aqueduct. It enters Cheshire at Stretford, and passing through Altrincham and Lymm extends a distance of twenty-four miles to Runcorn, where it descends by a series of locks to the tidal waters of the Mersey.
An Old Canal: Marple
The canal turned out so successful that the manufacturers in the Potteries of Staffordshire asked Brindley to make a canal across the Cheshire plain to unite the rivers Trent and Mersey. This was the beginning of the Grand Trunk Canal, which now winds through the heart of England and connects the great industrial towns of Lancashire and Cheshire with the metropolis.