Winterstoke

by L. T. C. Rolt

  The completion of this section of the canal was a gesture of confidence on the part of Brindley and Whitworth which the sceptics considered foolhardy. For until the tunnel was completed it could not be used nor even supplied with water. As a temporary measure, so that its puddled bed should not dry out, water was pumped into the pounds from the Lob.

  South of the tunnel, the work of cutting the long summit level from Lobstock proceeded even more rapidly. No sooner was a section completed than water was admitted to it up to a temporary dam or ‘stank’ so that boats could aid the construction work by bringing up loads of gravel, clay or bricks. Owing to Brindley’s practice of following the natural contours, in all the twelve winding miles of canal between Lobstock and Ketton there was no embankment or cutting of note so that the amount of spoil to be moved was negligible. Within two years of the passing of the Act, the canal to the north and south of Ketton had been completed, but the cutting of the great tunnel itself was quite a different proposition.

  Because of their special skill and their knowledge of the local strata, Daniel Leeds reinforced Whitworth’s tunnel construction gangs with miners from his High Hanger pits. Work began on the hilltop where, along the line of the canal, a series of vertical shafts were sunk down to canal level. From the bottom of these shafts headings were then driven north and south towards each other. Above each shaft horse gins kept the workings clear of water, lowered the men to their work and drew up the excavated spoil. Grassgrown spoil mounds, looking not unlike the work of the men of the first Iron Age on High Hanger Down and Summersend, remain to mark to this day the site of these shafts. In one of the headings a spring was struck of a volume which proved quite beyond the power of all the horse pumps which could be mustered. To the chagrin of the construction gang and the delight of the sceptics, the heading had to be abandoned to the victorious waters which rose until the level stood some distance up the shaft. In response to an urgent appeal for help and advice from Whitworth, Brindley himself rode over to inspect the drowned shaft, which appeared to cause him more pleasure than dismay. The engineer welcomed the spring as an additional supply to his canal, indeed he had been counting upon such a discovery. As for the immediate difficulty, a ‘fire engine’ would solve that, he said. So as soon as the weather served a thirty-hundredweight cylinder, a cylinder bottom, pump barrel, bucket, pipes and all the necessary parts and materials to erect a Newcomen pump were dragged from Darley Bank up on to the hills by sweating, struggling horse-teams. Wheezing and clanking, trailing its banners of smoke and steam in the windy upland air, the labouring Newcomen slowly but surely conquered the waters in the drowned heading, and so the work went on. For four years the miners and navigators toiled in the narrow headings, pitting muscles and wits against rock and water, against treacherous shales and heavy, stubborn clays. Then the last two headings met. But the work was by no means over. The completed heading was so narrow that two men could hardly pass in it; so low that it was not possible to stand upright. Three more years went by before the work of opening out the heading and lining walls, roof and invert with millions of bricks was finished. The stop-planks which had for so long stanked off the waters of the summit level at South Ketton Bridge were then lifted. A wavelet of water surged over the new brickwork of the invert and advanced into the darkness of the tunnel. Soon it was lapping against the gates of Winterstoke top lock. The Lobstock Canal had been completed. The sceptics were compelled to eat their words in the general chorus of praise, but James Brindley, the architect of the canal, had not lived to celebrate his victory.

  The official opening of the canal on June 26, 1775, was declared a day of public holiday in Lobstock and Winterstoke and was an occasion destined to live long in memory. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky; hardships and antagonisms were forgotten in a carefree spirit of excited optimism, which seemed to infect everyone from the visiting noblemen to the poorest nailer, who shut his nailshop for the day and tramped with his wife and children to join the cheering throng which lined the towpath. Perhaps this wonderful achievement would indeed mean better times for all. In readiness for the great day a number of the long, narrow canal craft had been assembled at Lobstock Wharf. Here, at 8 a.m. precisely, the canal proprietors, Daniel Leeds, Robert Whitworth, Lord Winterstoke and other local noblemen and gentry with their families stepped aboard the boats Heart of Oak and Britannia, while lesser notables and crowds of ‘navigators’ and other canal workmen packed the craft which were to follow them. The procession then moved away, headed by the Pride which bore in her hold the combined church bands of Winterstoke and Lobstock who scraped their fiddles and viols with a will. The highly polished brasswork on the tackle of the towing horses flashed in the June sunlight and from the procession of boats banners floated which bore such inscriptions as: ‘A Health to the Proprietors’, ‘Success to Navigation’ and ‘Long Live the King’. It was a brave sight, and all along the route, even in the lonely coppices of Deepforest, there were countryfolk to line the banks and cheer the procession on its way. The passage of Ketton tunnel took some time, for here the towing path ended and the towing horses must be detached and led over the hilltop. But in the boatloads of ‘navigators’ there was no lack of willing ‘leggers’ to propel the boats through and at one o’clock precisely the Pride, the Heart of Oak and the Britannia were greeted with a deafening ovation from the assembled crowd of ironworkers and miners, as one by one they emerged from the last lock and sailed into Winterstoke basin. Here the gentry adjourned to a marquee for luncheon while, for the benefit of the crowd, an ox had been roasted and free beer was now liberally distributed at the expense of the Proprietors. In the afternoon the flotilla returned to Lobstock, to be greeted by similar scenes of enthusiasm and the distribution of more beer and beef, while the more select company dined and drank many toasts at the ‘Angel’ in the very same room where the first tentative meeting had been held on that winter’s morning nine years before.

  It was surprising how soon the nine days’ wonder became as much a part of the life of Winterstoke as the river. The ‘navigators’ disappeared as suddenly as they had come and the raw wounds they had made soon healed. Water plants quickly established themselves to soften the margins of the still water, and the hedge which had been planted along the towpath side thickened and grew up. The hollow thud of closing gates and the rattle of falling paddle racks became familiar sounds as the long boats locked down the Winterstoke flight, low loaded with their burdens of ore, limestone or moulding sand for the ironworks, or rose slowly upward, step by step, with return freights of coal or pig and bar iron. The canal became the life of a new community which established itself either on its waters or about its banks, a community of boatmen, horsekeepers, boatbuilders, publicans, farriers, maintenance men and lock keepers who were a world unto themselves.

  The Canal Company did not operate their own boats but were merely toll takers like the Wendle Navigation Company or the Turnpike Trusts. At first the traffic was purely local and consisted of boats operated by or for the Darley Bank Company. Shuttling to and fro between the works and the Deepforest mines, they were worked by the men who had once had charge of the pack-horse trains. But the Lobstock Canal was only one strand of the network of waterways which was spreading across the Midlands to make possible a steadily widening orbit of trade, to break down old local monopolies, to generate new industries upon its banks and to create a more fiercely competitive commerce. Just as the Winterstoke boats began to range farther and farther afield with their freights of coal and iron, so strange boats from parts of England which had hitherto seemed as remote as some foreign country began to appear in the Winterstoke canal basin. With cabins fitted up after the pattern of a gipsy caravan, these far-travelled boats were the homes of that strange nomadic people who had come from who knows where to roam the new water roads wherever the trade took them. Some of them carried cargoes of cloth, foodstuffs or other merchandise which had hitherto been almost unobtainable in Winterstoke but was now being imported by ent
erprising merchants. The task of working this increasing traffic through the dank, dripping cavern of Ketton tunnel became the monopoly of professional ‘leggers’ who lay, two to a boat, on each end of a plank athwart the gunwales to push with their feet against the tunnel walls. Their headquarters were the two alehouses, ‘The Boat’ and ‘Tunnel House’, which stood at each end of the tunnel.

  Surrounded by warehouses, by the slipways of a boat-building dock and by the great stables of ‘The Navigation’ inn, whither landlord Amos Blenkinsop had transported himself with an astute eye to further business, the new basin at Darley Bank Wharf soon became a flourishing inland port. Boats and barges jostled each other in the basin as they waited their turn to move under the hoists of the warehouses or within range of the massive wooden jib of the crane which swung the corves of coal out of the tramway wagons from High Hanger. There was an almost continuous procession of horses to or from the stables as boats arrived or moved off, and the Inn had a brisk trade in fodder as well as beer. Increasing traffic made business in the boatyard equally brisk. Caulking mallets clattered continuously, the pungent smell of hot tar was always in the air, and every now and again another long black hull slid sideways down the slipway into her element. Row after row of new buildings ringed this busy nucleus and these were soon linked by Daniel Leeds’ great iron bridge with the Earl’s new Winterstoke across the river.

  Between canal and river there was little love lost at any level. The Wendle bargemen and their bow-hauliers despised and disliked the new ‘dry land sailors’, the former because canal navigation seemed to them an unskilled job and the latter because they feared that the canal system of horse towage threatened their livelihood. The Wendle barges were too broad of beam to pass through the canal locks, and the canal boats too long for those on the river even if their captains had been willing to face hazards of current and shoal of which they knew nothing. So the two worlds only met, frequently with violence, at Darley Bank basin and in the tap room of the ‘Navigation’.

  The relations between the Proprietors of the two Navigations were no better. The forebodings of those who had opposed the Winterstoke canal scheme and argued in favour of the junction at Fingerlow proved well founded. The canal did not bring any immediate increase of trade on the Wendle, and in some cases trade was lost. To some areas where the Darley Bank Company had previously consigned goods by Wendle barge and coasting vessel, Daniel Leeds now found it cheaper and quicker to consign by the new canal system which was far less subject to delays by drought, flood or storm. Nevertheless the Wendle remained Winterstoke’s vital trade route to the sea, and Daniel repeatedly urged upon the Company the necessity of improving their river works if they would retain and expand their trade. Their navigation must, he argued, be brought up to the new standard of efficiency which the canals had set. Let them rebuild and improve the locks to a size which would enable the canal boats to work on to the river and so avoid the necessity for transhipment. Let them dredge the shoals and replace the old Navigation weirs by locks to save delays. Let them provide a horse-towing path throughout. But Daniel’s arguments were in vain. The proposal to make the river suitable for canal craft was furiously assailed by the bargemasters who saw it as a threat to their monopoly, while the idea of a horse towing path nearly caused a riot among the bow hauliers with the result that the alarmed Company dropped it like a hot coal.

  This conflict was still proceeding when the success of the new water transport led to a speculative boom in canal projects. All over the country canal schemes were promoted, many of them quite worthless and conceived without regard either for engineering difficulties or for the traffic they would yield. Of these paper schemes Winterstoke had its share. A canal which involved a tunnel two miles long under the Emberley hills was even proposed for the sole purpose of linking Winterstoke with Church Ambling, a sleepy market town which had long ago forgotten its bygone wool trade. Needless to say the scheme collapsed. The only local promotion of this period for which an Act was obtained and construction actually started was the Winterstoke & Coltisham Canal, but in the unsettled period of the Napoleonic war the undertakers came to grief. All that remains of their scheme to-day is a few miles of grass-grown earthwork which winds along through the watermeadows of the upper Wendle like some prehistoric dyke.

  By this time old Daniel Leeds had ended his long career at Darley Bank, but his son Jonathan Leeds was carrying on his father’s struggle against the inertia of the Wendle Navigation Company, and when a canal was proposed which would run parallel with the old river navigation down to Westerport he seized upon it as a useful weapon. Resigning his seat on the river Company’s board he lent his full weight to the canal scheme, not because he had any faith in it but because he hoped by this means to force the Company to put its house in order. To a limited extent he succeeded. The river was dredged, locks were repaired, and freight charges were reduced, so in consideration for these measures, all of which were of great benefit to the Darley Bank Company, the canal project was dropped. Yet the bargemasters and bow hauliers still held their monopoly. Nor was the Lobstock Canal Company innocent of abusing its comfortable monopoly, for as the time went on there were frequent protests by carriers and merchants against its high toll charges. For the present, however, the two navigation Companies held the whip hand and they knew it. They only settled their long-standing differences, reduced their charges and carried out long overdue improvements when it was too late and when they were threatened by a common enemy. But that is another story.

  Chapter Seven

  IN 1700 WINTERSTOKE was still a village, or rather it was two villages: the old medieval settlement by St. John’s Bridge, and the community of common-squatting ironworkers and coal-getters which had sprung up haphazard and mushroom-like across the river and which, like a cuckoo in a small bird’s nest was rapidly outgrowing its ancient neighbour. Its growth was such that by the mid-century the population of Winterstoke was equal to that of the old town of Church Ambling, while between 1760 and 1830 it more than doubled itself. Such was the tremendous impetus which enclosure, steam power and canal transport gave to the pace of industrial revolution. Lord Winterstoke’s new village, the settlement about the canal basin, the iron and coal communities of Darley Bank and Hanger Lane all grew until they formed one dense warren of bricks and mortar lining both banks of the Wendle and crawling up the lower slopes of the hills. Like a blot of ink spilled on to virgin blotting paper, each year the black of slate roof and spoil tip spread further over the valley’s green floor. Yet this stain became deeper as it spread. In the early years of the nineteenth century speculators began to take advantage of the insatiable demand for house-room by building the maximum number of houses in the minimum of space. The green oases of garden, orchard or paddock disappeared and the old detached cottages of earlier immigrants were either overwhelmed or swept away. In their place grew back-to-back houses, terrace by terrace and court beyond narrow court. Yet even these squalid rookeries could not satisfy the demand. Whole families occupied single rooms worse than prison cells, so cabined and confined were they and so cut off from every green and living thing. Most of them were denied even the benefit of the wan sunlight which filtered through the pall of smoke which overhung the valley. For their windows looked out upon enclosed courts scarcely wide enough to provide space for stinking communal privies and garbage heaps.

  The population of this new Winterstoke soon exceeded that of any town in the county and yet it could not be called a town in any hitherto accepted sense of the word. Its neighbours, the ancient medieval towns of Church Ambling and Coltisham, like the old village of Winterstoke, possessed a traditional corporate life which had been the fruit of a slow process of organic growth intimately associated with their rural environment. They were self-governing communities proud of their customary civic rights and responsibilities and practising those arts and crafts which are, or should be, the particular contribution of the town, not only to its immediate neighbourhood but to the history
of civilized living. A vital part of the corporate life of Church Ambling and Coltisham throughout the Middle Ages had been the trade guilds whose function it had been to preserve by regulation the balance of trade between the husbandman of the country and the craftsman of the town. We have already seen how, after the dissolution, these guilds and the balance of trade which they had for so long maintained were gradually destroyed. The new Winterstoke of the early eighteen hundreds represented the consummation, the ultimate victory, of the new laissez faire philosophy which had been two centuries agrowing. It was not so much a town as what modern planners, in their ugly jargon, would call a ‘conurbation’; an amorphous mass of uprooted humanity struggling to win a livelihood from coal and iron under appalling conditions of hardship, squalor and grinding poverty. Here there was no corporate life, no communal pride, no civic rights or responsibilities, no attempt at regulation of any kind, only the remorseless whip of economic necessity. Except for the fact that coal seams, iron lodes and water power had originally determined its location, the fierce activity of this new town and the inexorable economic forces which drove it were in no way related to its environment. Its inhabitants were wholly dependent on the world market which the new philosophy had won and were the helpless victims of the vagaries of a bitterly competitive trade. By 1800, two-thirds of the army of nailers and other domestic smiths in Winterstoke parish were working for the American market alone, and the decline of that trade after 1810, competition from Belgium and the introduction of machine-made nails brought untold misery to this overcrowded industry. Yet these hard-pressed domestic workers did at least succeed in preserving some shreds of their old rural independence. They still worked at hours of their own choosing in the familiar surroundings of their own homes, while in many cases they still possessed patches of garden which had not yet been engulfed by the rising tide of bricks and mortar.