Underlying and enforcing all these particular economic and social theories was another basic assumption which the machines of the new age helped to foster. This was the belief in automatic progress. Eighteenth-century man was dazzled by his own inventions. He did not see them as the outcome of a particular philosophy whose validity was open to question. Because man had never before harnessed the power of steam, not even in the great civilizations of Greece and Rome, he assumed that he stood upon the topmost pinnacle of human progress. That previous civilizations might have held different views on the relationship between man and his world; that material conquest and civilization might not necessarily mean the same thing—these were doubts which never occurred to him. As invention succeeded invention, each more ingenious than the last, the story of man appeared to him as a continuous forward march from the primeval slime towards some unimaginable goal of peace and prosperity. Because earlier generations of men had not possessed the wit to invent the steam engine, it followed that they were ‘primitive’ and that he was both wiser and better than they were. Later, the Darwinian theory of evolution would be accepted without question as the natural sanction of this belief. The new machines thus represented irrefutable evidence of human progress and ‘natural’ laws could be invented to explain away any awkward facts which seemed to point to the contrary.
It is only when we look at industrial Winterstoke through these contemporary spectacles that we begin to understand it aright and to realize that its rulers were not evil but misguided. A poverty and desperation-driven revolt by the poor must be savagely repressed, not only because it threatened the stability of the state but because their betters, in their superior wisdom, knew that it was contrary to their own interest as well as to that of their employers to run counter to natural economic laws. Jonathan Leeds found nothing in the condition of the employees of his Darley Bank Company to conflict with his religious beliefs or to cause him a single qualm of conscience. He convinced himself, and did his best to convince those recalcitrant workmen of his whom he confronted from time to time from his seat on the magistrate’s bench, that the prospects of the poor were, in the light of eternity, better than his own. It was easier, he would remind them, for the poor than for the rich to enter into the kingdom of Heaven and they should therefore be duly grateful and accept with suitable humility and thankfulness that state of life to which it had pleased Almighty God to call them. To rebel, he would add sternly, against this divine dispensation was an offence against God and man which was punishable by both. He must have found some of the offenders singularly stubborn and deaf to his Christian teaching. For they only knew that they had once possessed freedom and a share in the soil of England and they failed to understand why they should thank their Maker for the fact that both liberty and land had been taken away.
There was no lack of religious activity in the new Winterstoke. The female members of the Leeds family and many other supporters both of dissenting sects and of the established church busied themselves in the work of charity and Bible teaching. These devoted souls were frequently shocked by the scenes of abject poverty and misery which confronted them in the course of their errands of mercy, but they regarded them as we should regard the after-effects of an earthquake and not as symptoms of any social sickness. And if they made gifts of food or clothing they were at pains to make the recipients of their charity realize that they received such gifts by favour and not by any right. Like Jonathan they impressed upon the new poor the importance of resignation if they would enjoy their due reward hereafter, and explained that for this reason Bible reading, by teaching them the virtue of humility, was of much greater value than any earthly reward such as a full belly.
For the murder of ‘Merry England’ the seventeenth-century Puritans are commonly held responsible. To a certain extent this is true. Yet more truly it is to the zeal of these earnest and joyless busybodies of the nineteenth century that we owe, not merely the unrelieved gloom of the English Sunday, but a much darker legacy of rejection and negation. That grim faith which squared so readily with the prevailing commercial philosophy has lost its power to-day, but its blasphemous rejection of the beauties, the joys and the sweetness of life remains. The church music, the church ales of the religious festivals, the trade guild processions, ceremonies and plays of the medieval villages and towns all fulfilled a primary human need to express the savour of life and satisfaction in creative work well done. But in the new Winterstoke of work and want the reformers saw to it that this elemental need was denied and that no stubbornly perpetuated spark of traditional sport, festival or custom should survive to lighten the grey monotony of days. They insisted that Sunday, the one day of the week on which the poor of Winterstoke were free from the iron discipline of mine, rolling mill, forge or furnace, should be exclusively devoted to religious observance, reading or instruction. They even invaded the last strongholds of the public houses to suppress music and singing so that the ‘New Invention’ or the ‘Woodcollier’ became gloomy drink shops where a man could no longer find good fellowship in self-expression but only the solace of liquor in which to drown his sorrows.
Thanks to the untiring efforts of these reformers many did find a consolation in religion which they could find nowhere else. But many more lost all faith in a religion which could so tacitly condone wrongs of which they were most passionately aware. These wrongs were too grievous and too pressing to be withstood. They created a new order of working-class champions who, in the face of every kind of persecution and oppression which their masters could invoke in the name of law and order, advanced the necessity for reform with growing vehemence and authority. Confronted by this increasing and sustained pressure their opponents were forced to yield ground and the philosophy of laissez-faire was gradually modified.
From this time forward to the present day this story of Winterstoke must be read against the background of what came to be called ‘the Class war’, a war in which both sides changed their ground as was only to be expected in a campaign which was carried on for a hundred and fifty years. As they lost their faith in the philosophy of ‘enlightened self-interest’ it was the forces of the Right who ultimately became the reactionaries, the defenders of individual liberties. Finally, the horrors revealed by the second world war and its aftermath caused many of them to doubt even their cherished belief in automatic progress. It became apparent to them that science and technology were not, after all, synonyms for civilization but were compatible with a barbarism far more inhuman that any which existed in the past. The old confidence of the Victorian era gave way to bewilderment and doubt. Meanwhile it was the labour movement which, as it grew in strength, succeeded its rival as the champion of material progress. It ceased to look back to liberties lost; it accepted the industrial machine and fought on only over the question of who should control it. By the same method that the early industrialists used to justify their belief that the self-interest of the individual would automatically benefit the community, the labour movement, from the writings of Karl Marx and others, justified its ‘gospel’ that the self-interest of the community would automatically benefit the individual. Let the State, representing the community, take over the control of the industrial machine and all would be well. Thus the Utopian dream of the Socialist State came into being as the new religion of the poor of Winterstoke.
What appeared to prove beyond question the truth of this political theory was the progressive decline in the value of money which accompanied the whole course of this social war. No matter how hard the workers of Winterstoke fought for increased wages, prices forever moved up ahead of them with the result that they found themselves little or no better off. Hard-won gains were persistently nullified in this way so that they must perforce join battle with their employers again. It was easy to believe that the sinister and insatiable figure of the Capitalist was solely responsible for this state of affairs and that as soon as he was removed, the gap between wages and prices would close. Over a hundred years were to pass be
fore the labour movement would achieve the power and the opportunity to translate theory into practice by making this experiment. Meanwhile there were many immediate wrongs to be righted.
The first victory was won in 1825 when the right of workmen to combine was at last reluctantly conceded by the repeal of the Combination Laws and the Winterstoke Mechanics Union was officially recognized. Two years later the Winterstoke Mechanics Institute was opened and became the headquarters of Union activity. Even more momentous was the struggle for Parliamentary reform which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832. This was the first decisive blow struck by the new industrial England against an ancient régime which had refused to acknowledge its existence. It sealed the fate of the great landowners just as surely as it curbed their power. With the passing of the Bill, the fact that Winterstoke was no longer a village but a large town was belatedly accepted. Winterstoke became a borough, governed by Mayor, Aldermen and Counsellors and returning a member to Parliament. As the criminal statistics show, this new form of local government was little less harsh and repressive than the old. Nor was it much more representative for it was controlled by a narrow oligarchy of burgesses and freemen who allowed the majority of the inhabitants of Winterstoke no say in local affairs. Nevertheless it was an improvement upon its predecessor and paved the way for further reform. Under the Municipal Corporations Act which followed three years later, all the ratepayers of Winterstoke were enfranchised. The inhabitants of the new town began to acquire a civic consciousness and its administration a civic dignity which gradually mitigated the old corruption and oppression. The last important step in this process was made during the Victorian era when the Local Government Act of 1888 established the present form of local administration under which Winterstoke became a County Borough free from the Midshire County Rate, its population by that time being well in excess of the minimum of 50,000 stipulated by the Act.
In a society which accepts technical and scientific developments as indisputable evidence of human progress and therefore intrinsically good, men must necessarily struggle along in the wake of an implacable machine, adjusting their lives, their social order and their philosophy as best they may to the pace which its giant strides dictate. Hence the fact that the technician and the scientist have between them dominated the history of Winterstoke for two hundred years. Hardly had the first reforms of the eighteen-thirties been achieved than Winterstoke began to hear rumours of a new invention which was destined to inaugurate another and much greater wave of industrial and social expansion. Away to the north, men said, an engineer named George Stephenson had given the steam engine wings and sent it hurtling down an iron road.
Chapter Eight
IT WAS THE TIDINGS of the new railways in the north and the rumours of further railway schemes which roused the Proprietors of the Wendle Navigation and the Lobstock Canal from their lethargy. In the face of this threat to the monopoly which they had enjoyed and abused for so long the old feud between the two Companies was forgotten and they set to work belatedly to put their respective waterways in order. New and larger locks were built on the river and the two old navigation weirs which had proved such a hindrance to traffic in the reaches above and below Abel’s Gullet, were demolished. Despite the protests of the bow hauliers, the Company obtained powers to construct a horse towing-path from Darley Bank Wharf to Westerport and completed the work in twelve months. Meanwhile a great deal of overdue dredging was done on the river.
On the improvement of their canal the Lobstock Company consulted the last of the great canal engineers—Thomas Telford. After he had carried out a survey, Telford made two proposals; first, the construction of a second parallel tunnel at Ketton to relieve the congestion and traffic delays due to the restricted size of Brindley’s original bore; second, new cuts to reduce the length of the tortuous summit level between Ketton and Lobstock. The Company rejected the first proposal as too costly, but they directed Telford to proceed with the second with the result that the canal distance between Lobstock and the south end of Ketton Tunnel was reduced by three miles.
With the original work of James Brindley, these new cuts planned by Thomas Telford present a striking contrast; they show how much progress the civil engineer had already made in the campaign against nature. They also reveal that the canal engineers were responsible for developing those constructional techniques which would presently be employed by the railway builders to such great effect. With the exception of his Ketton tunnel, Brindley had bowed to nature and his canal had, so to speak, followed the grain of the country. As a result, when the scars of construction had healed, his winding summit level looked more like a natural watercourse than a man-made channel. For example, at one point near the village of Bowford Priors his canal made a wayward loop, over a mile long, round the flanks of a modest promontory of high ground which at this place thrusts eastwards into the Deepforest country. Telford beheaded this loop by means of a short but deep cutting through the high ground. At Barnby Moors where the canal encounters the valley of the little river Dargle there is another similar contrast. Brindley carried his canal up to the head of the valley where it tapped the source of the river, made an acute turn, and then followed the contours of the opposite side until it could resume its true direction. Telford’s new cut, on the other hand, marched boldly across the valley on a high embankment, spanning the Dargle by a cast iron aqueduct.
In his Dargle aqueduct, in his road bridges which bestride the deep canyons of his cuttings, even in the light, elegant spans by which he carried his towing-path over the old discarded loops of Brindley’s canal, Thomas Telford shows us that he was not only a great engineer but the architectural master of a new medium. Like the great beam engines of the early nineteenth century, these cast-iron bridges of Telford’s are classic in their form and proportion. While the last of the architects abandoned their birthright for a mess of Gothic pottage, the first great engineers, Telford, the Stephensons, Isambard Brunel, became the last heirs to the tradition and the craftsmanship of the golden age. Using new materials in new forms for new purposes, their achievements were daring architectural adventures monumental in conception. But this marriage between architecture and engineering was dissolved all too soon by an unbridled commercialism that could see no profit in the graces of a previous age.
The reforms carried out by the proprietors of inland navigations were too belated. Traders had suffered too long from their high toll charges and from their failure to improve their waterways. An expanding commerce demanded some reliable, nation-wide system of transport whereas the outlook of the navigation companies had remained parochial. If they had not abused their monopoly, if they had co-operated one with another instead of being divided by petty rivalries and jealousies such as had marred the relationship between the Lobstock Canal Company and the proprietors of the Wendle Navigation, then the victory of the new railways would not have been so swift and absolute and England might have possessed an inland waterway system of more lasting value. As it was, the country was ripe for the new railways, and once proud canal companies soon found themselves suing their rivals for a mercy they did not receive in an age when all the spoils went to the strong.
Winterstoke’s interest in the new railways was first actively aroused by the proposal to build a great trunk line from Earlspool in the north-east to London. In these early days when engineers doubted the adhesive powers of the new locomotives on smooth rails, a level road was considered all-important and in spite of the size and industrial stature of the new town, it had been suggested that the line should leave Winterstoke to the west, running by way of Lobstock and Coltisham. The advocates of this proposal pointed out that it was not only the most direct but also the easiest route between the two cities. Winterstoke, they argued, could most conveniently be served by a branch line down the Wendle valley from Coltisham. In the heated railway debate which developed, the two great families of Hanmer and Leeds found themselves in opposition to one another. Jonathan Leeds died shortly before the
argument began, but his brother Peter and Peter’s son Thomas played the same part in it as their ancestor Daniel had done when the Lobstock Canal scheme was mooted and with the same interest in mind—that of the Darley Bank Company. Peter Leeds, the far-sighted industrialist, realized that the new transport possessed unlimited possibilities. It was of the utmost importance, in his view, that the Company should be served directly by a great trunk line of railway. If Winterstoke was relegated to the backwater of a branch line, the new town might suffer and its trade begin to ebb away to Lobstock or to Coltisham. The Company’s trade with Deepforest, Lobstock and districts to the north-east and north-west was now well enough served by the Lobstock Canal and its connections, thanks to the recent improvements. In any case, a proposal that the new railway should follow the course of the canal would not only be fiercely opposed by the Canal Company, but rejected on the score of construction cost. The Darley Bank Company’s greatest need was for better long-distance communications with the north and south of England than the canal system could offer, and that was precisely what this new railway promised. Peter Leeds therefore urged upon the promoters his view that the line should turn west into the Wendle valley at Coltisham, pass through Winterstoke and then resume its due southerly course at Westerport. The increase in mileage over the Lobstock-Coltisham route would not be great and the cost of construction would be lower along the easy levels of the valley. Moreover, Peter argued that this route promised greater traffic revenue.
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