British Canals: Is their resuscitation practicable?

by Edwin A. Pratt

"Canals have done well for the country, just as high roads and pack-horses had done before canals were established; but the country has now presented to it cheaper and more expeditious means of conveyance, and the attempt to prevent its adoption is utterly hopeless."

All that the canal companies did, in the first instance, was to attempt the very thing which Mr Sandars considered "utterly hopeless." They adopted a policy of blind and narrow-minded hostility. They seemed to think that, if they only fought them vigorously enough, they could drive the railways off the field; and fight them they did, at every possible point. In those days many of the canal companies were still wealthy concerns, and what their opposition might mean has been already shown in the case of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The newcomers had thus to concentrate their efforts and meet the opposition as best they could.

For a time the canal companies clung obstinately to their high tolls and charges, in the hope that they would still be able to pay their big dividends. But, when the superiority of the railways over the waterways became more and more manifest, and when the canal companies saw greater and still greater quantities of traffic being diverted from them by their opponents, in fair competition, they realised the situation at last, and brought down their tolls with a rush. The reductions made were so substantial that they would have been thought incredible a few years previously.

In the result, benefits were gained by all classes of traders, for those who still patronised the canals were charged much more reasonable tolls than they had ever paid before. But even the adoption of this belated policy by the canal companies did not help them very much. The diversion of the stream of traffic to the railways had become too pronounced to be checked by even the most substantial of reductions in canal charges. With the increasing industrial and commercial development of the country it was seen that the new means of transport offered advantages of even greater weight than cost of transport, namely, speed and certainty of delivery. For the average trader it was essentially a case of time meaning money. The canal companies might now reduce their tolls so much that, instead of being substantially in excess of the railway rates, as they were at first, they would fall considerably below; but they still could not offer those other all-important advantages.

As the canal companies found that the struggle was, indeed, "utterly hopeless," some of them adopted new lines of policy. Either they proposed to build railways themselves, or they tried to dispose of their canal property to the newcomers. In some instances the route of a canal, no longer of much value, was really wanted for the route of a proposed railway, and an arrangement was easily made. In others, where the railway promoters did not wish to buy, opposition to their schemes was offered by the canal companies with the idea of forcing them either so to do, or, alternatively, to make such terms with them as would be to the advantage of the canal shareholders.

The tendency in this direction is shown by the extract already given from the Quarterly Review; and I may repeat here the passage in which the writer suggested that some of the canal companies "would do well to transfer their interests from a bad concern into one whose superiority must be thus established," and added: "Indeed, we understand that this has already been proposed to a very considerable extent, and that the level beds of certain unproductive canals have been offered for the reception of rail-ways." This was as early as 1825. Later on the tendency became still more pronounced as pressure was put on the railway companies, or as promoters, in days when plenty of money was available for railway schemes, thought the easiest way to overcome actual or prospective opposition was to buy it off by making the best terms they could. So far, in fact, was the principle recognised that in 1845 Parliament expressly sanctioned the control of canals by railway companies, whether by amalgamation, lease, purchase, or guarantee, and a considerable amount of canal mileage thus came into the possession, or under the control, of railway companies, especially in the years 1845, 1846, and 1847. This sanction was practically repealed by the Railway and Traffic Acts of 1873 and 1888. By that time about one-third of the existing canals had been either voluntarily acquired by, or forced upon, the railway companies. It is obvious, however, that the responsibility for what was done rests with Parliament itself, and that in many cases, probably, the railway companies, instead of being arch-conspirators, anxious to spend their money in killing off moribund competitors, who were generally considered to be on the point of dying a natural death, were, at times, victims of the situation, being practically driven into purchases or guarantees which, had they been perfectly free agents, they might not have cared to touch.

The general position was, perhaps, very fairly indicated by the late Sir James Allport, at one time General Manager of the Midland Railway Company, in the evidence he gave before the Select Committee on Canals in 1883.

"I doubt (he said) if Parliament ever, at that time of day, came to any deliberate decision as to the advisability or otherwise of railways possessing canals; but I presume that they did not do so without the fullest evidence before them, and no doubt canal companies were very anxious to get rid of their property to railways, and they opposed their Bills, and, in the desire to obtain their Bills, railway companies purchased their canals. That, I think, would be found to be the fact, if it were possible to trace them out in every case. I do not believe that the London and North-Western would have bought the Birmingham Canal but for this circumstance. I have no doubt that the Birmingham Canal, when the Stour Valley line was projected, felt that their property was jeopardised, and that it was then that the arrangement was made by which the London and North-Western Railway Company guaranteed them 4 per cent."

The bargains thus effected, either voluntarily or otherwise (and mostly otherwise), were not necessarily to the advantage of the railway companies, who might often have done better for themselves if they had fought out the fight at the time with their antagonists, and left the canal companies to their fate, instead of taking over waterways which have been more or less of a loss to them ever since. Considering the condition into which many of the canals had already drifted, or were then drifting, there is very little room for doubt what their fate would have been if the railway companies had left them severely alone. Indeed, there are various canals whose continued operation to-day, in spite of the losses on their wholly unremunerative traffic, is due exclusively to the fact that they are owned or controlled by railway companies. Independent proprietors, looking to them for dividends, and not under any statutory obligations (as the railway companies are) to keep them going, would long ago have abandoned such canals entirely, and allowed them to be numbered among the derelicts.