The railways have brought town and country into closer touch with one another, and both have gained. Farmers and market gardeners can send their produce quickly and cheaply to the great markets of Stockport and Birkenhead. Coals and salt, machinery and manufactured goods, can be distributed easily from the great towns that produce them. Moreover, many people whose daily life is spent in the crowded cities are able to live away from their places of business and, for a portion of the day at least, breathe the purer air of the country.
Two residential districts of Cheshire are supported mainly by the merchants and manufacturers of Manchester and Liverpool. In East Cheshire, Altrincham and Bowdon, Knutsford, Alderley, Cheadle, and Lymm are practically suburbs of Manchester. In the Wirral, Hoylake, West Kirby, and New Brighton owe their present prosperity to the business men of Birkenhead and Liverpool who have built their homes on the Cheshire seaboard.
In all these places you may see the mingling of the old and the new, the older portions clustering round the parish church, the brand new villas and mansions of the rich spreading on all sides into the surrounding country. New towns spring up round the railway stations, as at Alderley Edge, which is two miles from the older village of Nether Alderley.
With the railways came also the 'penny post', for letters could now be carried cheaply and quickly to and from all parts of the country.
CHAPTER XXXIII
PROGRESS AND REFORM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Twenty years before steam locomotives were used to draw passenger trains over the earliest railways in Cheshire, a steam packet boat had been built to ply between Liverpool and the Cheshire port of Runcorn. This boat was called simply 'The Steam Boat', and was the first steamer ever seen in the River Mersey. The sailing packets were frequently becalmed, but the new ship could make her voyage in all weathers.
A number of steam-tugs were built soon afterwards to tow the big sailing-ships that entered the Mersey to the ports to which they were bound, and the first steam ferry-boat crossed the Mersey from Liverpool to Tranmere. In a few years the Cheshire shore of the Mersey was lined with docks and quays at Birkenhead, Seacombe, Woodside, Tranmere, and Eastham. At the last-named port Liverpool passengers could get on the coach for Chester and the midland towns.
In 1819, the year in which Queen Victoria was born, the Savannah, the first steamship that crossed the Atlantic, was seen in the River Mersey. The Savannah took twenty-eight days over the passage, lowering by many days the record of the fastest sailing-vessels hitherto. This was thought a great feat in those days, but the huge 'ocean greyhounds' that the boys and girls of Wirral see riding at anchor off Birkenhead, now make four or five crossings in the same period of time.
Just as Crewe owes its rapid rise to the coming of the railways, so Birkenhead's prosperity dates from the beginnings of steam navigation. Both of these towns are growths of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century Birkenhead was a small village of less than a hundred inhabitants. It is now Cheshire's greatest town, and contains a population of more than 100,000, or, if we include the populous suburbs which have sprung up on either side of it, nearly twice this number.