The Manchester and Glasgow Road, Volume 2 (of 2) / This Way to Gretna Green

by Charles G. Harper

THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL

At this time, the consumption of coal was growing so fast in Manchester, and the difficulties of marketing it were so great that the wealthy Duke of Bridgewater, owner of the pits at Worsley, conceived the idea of enriching himself still further, and at the same time helping the growth of Manchester, by means of constructing a canal from Worsley, by which coals could be carried cheaply and expeditiously. It was necessary to secure the support of the people of Manchester, before he could present a Bill to Parliament for this purpose, and he accordingly undertook, if the canal were made, to sell his coal at 4d. per hundred in the town—less than half the usual price—or to charge not more than half-a-crown a ton freight. The Bill was introduced and passed in 1759, without opposition, and by July 1761 the canal was opened. This first section of what eventually became the great Bridgewater Canal, extended to Runcorn in 1773, was the first step towards the making of modern Manchester, and was rendered possible only by the homely genius of James Brindley, the self-taught engineer, whose works were justly considered marvels in their day. He designed and originated all the novel and ingenious contrivances that were features of the undertaking, and did it all on wages not exceeding a guinea a week, a rate of pay he continued to receive for years of unremitting toil, until his death. The canals at length brought the Duke an income of £80,000 a year, but at Brindley’s untimely death in 1776 the stingy peer owed him some hundreds of pounds, on account of salary, which he was so incredibly mean as not to pay.

This enterprise was remarkable in more than the engineering difficulties overcome. Several canals had already been made in various parts of the country by deepening and straightening the channels of streams and rivers, and the first ship canal was that constructed in 1566, on the Exe, from Topsham to Exeter; but the Bridgewater Canal was the first to be dug in dry ground. Its extension across country, to the Mersey at Runcorn, was undertaken for the purpose of cheapening and expediting traffic in raw and manufactured cotton and other goods, between Manchester and Liverpool, and was thus the precursor, by a hundred and twenty years, of the Manchester Ship Canal, which aims to make Manchester a port entirely independent of its great seaboard neighbour.

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. In 1768 his cotton-spinning machine, which performed the work of sixteen or twenty men, was set up at Preston, and in 1707 was patented. His first spinning-mill was erected at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, and was entirely successful. In 1786 he was knighted, and in 1792 he died, leaving a fortune of close upon half a million sterling.

The fickleness and waywardness of fortune are proverbial, but nowhere else so marked as in the struggles of inventors. In 1779, eleven years after Arkwright had set up his spinning-jenny, Samuel Crompton, of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, near Bolton, invented the hybrid “Spinning Mule,” combining the useful features of Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s machines. He was an exceptionally poor man, and partly earned his living by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre.

THE FACTORY SYSTEM

A great step forward was Cartwright’s power-loom, invented in 1785, and the Government in 1809 granted him £10,000, in recognition of his usefulness to the advancement of commerce. With the same year that witnessed Cartwright’s invention, steam was first employed in weaving, by Boulton and Watt, and the history of the cotton industry has been, since that day, a long record of improvements, until nowadays factories are equipped with the most beautiful and complicated contrivances—the outcome of a hundred and seventy years of invention—that seem themselves almost sentient and understanding.

IV

This long succession of mechanical improvements brought immense wealth to the manufacturers and helped to tide England’s credit over the exhausting years of the American Rebellion and continual Continental wars; but it brought the original foul blight of the factory system, which replaced the spinning once done in cottage homes. Industry was stived up in overcrowded workshops, the slums came into existence, and under-paid, over-worked, and cruelly treated child-labour characterised the days before the passing of the Factory Acts.

A distinguished Spaniard, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, visiting England in 1807, and coming to Manchester, was truly horrified by what he saw here. It seemed to him that “a place more destitute of all interesting objects than Manchester it would not be easy to conceive. In size and population it is the second city in the kingdom, containing about fourscore thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where you hear from within the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers.” Here you perceive the conflict of ideals between a priest-ridden country and a land of commerce: with the telling of beads pre-eminent in the one, and the counting of gold equally prominent in the other.