CHAPTER II
EARLY DAYS
It seems to be customary with writers on the subject of canals and waterways to begin with the Egyptians, to detail the achievements of the Chinese, to record the doings of the Greeks, and then to pass on to the Romans, before even beginning their account of what has been done in Great Britain. Here, however, I propose to leave alone all this ancient history, which, to my mind, has no more to do with existing conditions in our own country than the system of inland navigation adopted by Noah, or the character of the canals which are supposed to exist in the planet of Mars.
For the purposes of the present work it will suffice if I go no further back than what I would call the "pack-horse period" in the development of transport in England. This was the period immediately preceding the introduction of artificial canals, which had their rise in this country about 1760-70. It preceded, also, the advent of John Loudon McAdam, that great reformer of our roads, whose name has been immortalised in the verb "to macadamise." Born in 1756, it was not until the early days of the nineteenth century that McAdam really started on his beneficent mission, and even then the high-roads of England—and especially of Scotland—were, as a rule, deplorably bad, "being at once loose, rough, and perishable, expensive, tedious and dangerous to travel on, and very costly to repair." Pending those improvements which McAdam brought about, adapting them to the better use of stage-coaches and carriers' waggons, the few roads already existing were practically available—as regards the transport of merchandise—for pack-horses only. Even coal was then carried by pack-horse, the cost working out at about 2s. 6d. per mile for as much as a horse could carry.
It was from these conditions that canals saved the country—long, of course, before the locomotive came into vogue. As it happened, too, it was this very question of coal transport that led to their earliest development. There is quite an element of romance in the story. Francis Egerton, third and last Duke of Bridgewater (born 1736), had an unfortunate love affair in London when he reached the age of twenty-three, and, apparently in disgust with the world, he retired to his Lancashire property, where he found solace to his wounded feelings by devoting himself to the development of the Worsley coal mines. As a boy he had been so feeble-minded that the doubt arose whether he would be capable of managing his own affairs. As a young man disappointed in love, he applied himself to business in a manner so eminently practical that he deservedly became famous as a pioneer of improved transport. He saw that if only the cost of carriage could be reduced, a most valuable market for coal from his Worsley mines could be opened up in Manchester.
It is true that, in this particular instance, the pack-horse had been supplemented by the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, established as the result of Parliamentary powers obtained in 1733. This navigation was conducted almost entirely by natural waterways, but it had many drawbacks and inconveniences, while the freight for general merchandise between Liverpool and Manchester by this route came to 12s. per ton. The Duke's new scheme was one for the construction of an artificial waterway which could be carried over the Irwell at Barton by means of an aqueduct. This idea he got from the aqueduct on the Languedoc Canal, in the south of France.
But the Duke required a practical man to help him, and such a man he found in James Brindley. Born in 1716, Brindley was the son of a small farmer in Derbyshire—a dissolute sort of fellow, who neglected his children, did little or no work, and devoted his chief energies to the then popular sport of bull-baiting. In the circumstances James Brindley's school-teaching was wholly neglected. He could no more have passed an examination in the Sixth Standard than he could have flown over the Irwell with some of his ducal patron's coals. "He remained to the last illiterate, hardly able to write, and quite unable to spell. He did most of his work in his head, without written calculations or drawings, and when he had a puzzling bit of work he would go to bed, and think it out." From the point of view of present day Board School inspectors, and of the worthy magistrates who, with varied moral reflections, remorselessly enforce the principles of compulsory education, such an individual ought to have come to a bad end. But he didn't. He became, instead, "the father of inland navigation."
James Brindley had served his apprenticeship to a millwright, or engineer; he had started a little business as a repairer of old machinery and a maker of new; and he had in various ways given proof of his possession of mechanical skill. The Duke—evidently a reader of men—saw in him the possibility of better things, took him over, and appointed him his right-hand man in constructing the proposed canal. After much active opposition from the proprietors of the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, and also from various landowners and others, the Duke got his first Act, to which the Royal assent was given in 1762, and the work was begun. It presented many difficulties, for the canal had to be carried over streams and bogs, and through tunnels costly to make, and the time came when the Duke's financial resources were almost exhausted. Brindley's wages were not extravagant. They amounted, in fact, to £1 a week—substantially less than the minimum wage that would be paid to-day to a municipal road-sweeper. But the costs of construction were heavy, and the landowners had unduly big ideas of the value of the land compulsorily acquired from them, so that the Duke's steward sometimes had to ride about among the tenantry and borrow a few pounds from one and another in order to pay the week's wages. When the Worsley section had been completed, and had become remunerative, the Duke pledged it to Messrs Child, the London bankers, for £25,000, and with the money thus raised he pushed on with the remainder of the canal, seeing it finally extended to Liverpool in 1772. Altogether he expended on his own canals no less than £220,000; but he lived to derive from them a revenue of £80,000 a year.
The Duke of Bridgewater's schemes gave a great impetus to canal construction in Great Britain, though it was only natural that a good deal of opposition should be raised, as well. About the year 1765 numerous pamphlets were published to show the danger and impolicy of canals. Turnpike trustees were afraid the canals would divert traffic from the roads. Owners of pack-horses fancied that ruin stared them in the face. Thereupon the turnpike trustees and the pack-horse owners sought the further support of the agricultural interests, representing that, when the demand for pack-horses fell off, there would be less need for hay and oats, and the welfare of British agriculture would be prejudiced. So the farmers joined in, and the three parties combined in an effort to arouse the country. Canals, it was said, would involve a great waste of land; they would destroy the breed of draught horses; they would produce noxious or humid vapours; they would encourage pilfering; they would injure old mines and works by allowing of new ones being opened; and they would destroy the coasting trade, and, consequently, "the nursery for seamen."
By arguments such as these the opposition actually checked for some years the carrying out of several important undertakings, including the Trent and Mersey Navigation. But, when once the movement had fairly started, it made rapid progress. James Brindley's energy, down to the time of his death in 1772, was especially indomitable. Having ensured the success of the Bridgewater Canal, he turned his attention to a scheme for linking up the four ports of Liverpool, Hull, Bristol, and London by a system of main waterways, connected by branch canals with leading industrial centres off the chief lines of route. Other projects followed, as it was seen that the earlier ventures were yielding substantial profits, and in 1790 a canal mania began. In 1792 no fewer than eighteen new canals were promoted. In 1793 and 1794 the number of canal and navigation Acts passed was forty-five, increasing to eighty-one the total number which had been obtained since 1790. So great was the public anxiety to invest in canals that new ones were projected on all hands, and, though many of them were of a useful type, others were purely speculative, were doomed to failure from the start, and occasioned serious losses to thousands of investors. In certain instances existing canals were granted the right to levy tolls upon new-comers, as compensation for prospective loss of traffic—even when the new canals were to be 4 or 5 miles away—fresh schemes being actually undertaken on this basis.