Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  Despite the proliferation of tolls and turnpikes, roads were not always kept in good condition. Travelling any distance remained an arduous affair and it was clear that to carry wagons and carriages effectively better roads would need to be built. One of the pioneers of road construction was the extraordinary figure of Jack Metcalf from Knaresborough in Yorkshire.4 Blind from the age of six, Metcalf already had a colourful career as a fiddle-player, soldier, gambler and trader before setting up in the 1740s as a haulier of goods from Leeds to Manchester and Knaresborough to York. He had developed a stagecoach line in the north of England when a turnpike trust was set up in his area in 1765; the trust commissioned Metcalf to build a series of roads that were able to carry heavy wagons and withstand wet weather. His innovation was to build strong foundations under the road surface, and to use a convex surface to enhance drainage, with gutters running down either side. Metcalf used rafts to build roads across bogs and was an astute surveyor, able to calculate materials and costs accurately. He went on building roads across the north of England, giving manufacturers and commercial travellers easier access to markets and canals and ports. When Metcalf died in 1810 aged ninety-three he was a hero in his hometown, if little known outside Yorkshire. Others followed in his footsteps including Thomas Telford and the Scottish engineer John McAdam, who developed new methods when working on the Bristol Turnpike from 1816. McAdam managed to do away with massive foundations by creating a tough, well-draining ‘crust’ made of small stones lying on a bed of larger stones. But while road-making improved, the upkeep of roads often fell behind. As Arthur Young noted in 1770: ‘Rotherham to Sheffield excruciably bad, very stony and excessively full of holes . . . To Lancaster (turnpike) and to Preston (turnpike) and again to Wigan (turnpike) very bad with ruts which measured 4 foot deep and floating with mud only from a wet summer.’5

  Turnpikes in 1740 (above) and 1770 (opposite): In the thirty years from 1740 road-building extended turnpikes from occasional highways to a system linking almost all the major towns and cities of England and Wales.

  Nevertheless coach transport began to improve. While in 1700 the trip from Norwich to London took fifty hours, by 1800 the journey had been reduced to nineteen hours; over the same period the coach journey from Manchester to London was reduced from ninety hours to thirty hours. As well as shorter journey times, comfort was improved as leather strap suspension was replaced by metal springs in 1706, followed by superior axles and wheel bearings. Horse-breeding produced the Cleveland Bay, the classic carriage horse that could maintain a steady and rapid pace for the twenty miles between staging posts. Mail coaches were introduced in 1784 that could travel the 120 miles from Bristol to London, for example, in sixteen hours.6 By 1800 every town and village east of the Severn and south of the Trent was within a day’s journey of the capital. The mail coaches provided regular services for passengers and also marked the beginning of a reliable national postal service, which gave a further boost to trade and commerce.

  For most of human history travel by water has been far easier, quicker and a lot more comfortable than journeys overland. The coast of Britain is dotted with inlets and estuaries that offer shelter to coastal shipping as well as loading and embarkation points, while its rivers reach deep into the heart of the island. Great efforts were made in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to make rivers navigable and by 1725 few people in Britain lived more than fifteen miles from a waterway that carried some kind of transport. While passenger traffic was important, the main function of waterways was to carry goods, with inland ports thriving as centres of trade. Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, for example, was an important shipping point on the River Trent, where coastal carriers offloaded goods to be taken on to Lincoln and Derby by smaller craft or by road. A good example of improvement in river transport came in 1740 with the clearing of the Medway in Kent. Before then iron and iron products like cannon from the smelting district of the Weald had been taken down to the ports on the Kent coast and then shipped up to merchants in London; after 1740 goods could be sent straight north along the Medway to the Thames.

  But of all the rivers in Britain the most important for the industrialisation of the country was the Severn. In 1766 Richard Whitworth wrote: ‘There is no river that has such a length of navigation as the Severn; you may navigate a vessel of fifty tons, and not a lock the whole way, two hundred miles up to Welch Pool, except in an excessive drought.’7 In the eighteenth century half the ironworks in Britain were within the Severn drainage basin, using the river as their trading highway. On the Severn and the lower reaches of the Thames barges and frigates could carry twenty to forty tons, while flat-bottomed trows carried eighty tons. These used sails when possible and horses or men to tow them when there was no wind.

  In 1779 Dr T. Nash described Wribbenhall, the old centre of the iron industry near the confluence of the Severn and Stour, on the edge of the Wyre Forest:

  Navigable waterways in England and Wales, 1750: Before the age of canals, rivers had been improved to provide inland waterways into the heart of the island of Britain.

  Wribbenhall, from its excellent quays and vicinity to Bewdley was long the prinicipal port of Worcestershire. From Manchester, Stourbridge, Dudley and the ironworks of the Stour, innumerable pack-horses came laden with the manufactures of these places to be put on board the barges and sent to their various destinations . . . At a spring tide I have been told 400 pack horses have been for several nights quartered in this neighbourhood, and in consequence Bewdley was a rich and very trading town.’8

  Iron bought here was taken to the slitting forges and nail-makers of the Stour region and their products brought back. Bewdley was then such an important trading centre that ‘Bewdley prices’ were quoted by ironmasters all over the country. Why, then, is Bewdley not a major town today? In 1766 the Duke of Bridgewater planned the Wolverhampton canal to have a basin at Bewdley but the townspeople objected and instead it was built at Stourbridge, which then thrived as the main centre for trade from the Black Country. Birmingham rather than Bewdley then became the fashionable residence for many ironmasters: Richard Baddley, Richard Parkes, John Fidoe, William Hunt and Samuel Garbett all took up residence in the Old Square in Birmingham.

  In the other major centre of iron and steel production, South Yorkshire, the problem was that communication between Sheffield and Hull, the major east coast port, was impossible by water. Boats made it as far as Bawtry via the Trent and the Idle, and goods such as Swedish iron were then hauled overland. In 1726 and 1727 plans were laid before Parliament to improve the Don, allowing traffic as far as Tinsley, three miles from Sheffield, and by 1739 most of the traffic had been deflected from Bawtry on to the new route. But it wasn’t until 1819 that a canal from Tinsley to Sheffield gave the city a direct route to the sea at Hull.

  While the Severn was the centre of the iron trade, it was the Tyne that was the main artery for Britain’s coal trade, with 1,400 or so colliers plying the trade from Newcastle to London in 1700. The capacities of the colliers had quadrupled from fifty to 210 tons from 1574 and imports of coal into London increased from around 50,000 tons in 1587 to around 500,000 tons in 1700.9 Ports all along the east coast benefitted from the trade. In 1724 Daniel Defoe described Ipswich as:

  the greatest town in England for large colliers or coal-ships, employed between New Castle and London. They built also there so prodigious strong, that it was an ordinary thing for an Ipswich collier, if no disaster happened to him, to reign (as seamen call it) forty or fifty years, and more. In the town of Ipswich the masters of these ships generally dwelt, and there were, as they then told me, above a hundred sail of them, belonging to the town at one time, the least of which carried . . . 300 chaldron of coals; this was about the year 1668 (when I first knew the place). This made the town be at that time so populous, for those masters, as they had good ships at sea, so they had large families, who lived plentifully, and in very good houses in the town, and several streets were inhabited by such.10r />
  The development of the Tyne also showed that improving waterways for industrial traffic was far from simple. A thirteenth-century bridge across the river at Newcastle was washed away by floods in 1771 and its replacement was soon shown to be inadequate. The river was narrow with sandbanks and had been further restricted by tons of debris dumped from quays, staithes and salt pans. This became critical as the colliers that took coal from Newcastle down the east coast, returned with ballast which they dumped in the river. They could not dock directly on to the jetties and staithes, and had to be loaded from keels; now the low stone arches of the new bridge put a limit on how far colliers could go upstream and even the keels needed removable masts to make it upstream. As a result the coal-shipping trade moved downstream when colliers started mooring at North and South Shields and insisted that the coal be brought to them there.

  Parliamentary Acts to improve harbours and to make rivers navigable – for example, the Mersey and Irwell in 1720, and the Douglas in 1757 – were mostly sponsored by coal owners while the mineral trade also supported the building of harbours. But all these improvements were quickly overtaken by the increasing amount of goods that needed to be moved. The demand for coal, in particular, continued to grow and it was the ever-increasing need to move it that impelled a double revolution in transport – first the building of canals and then the construction of railways.

  19. Canals and Locomotives

  UP UNTIL THE 1750s improvements to rivers and harbours, as well as the building of trackways, helped to improve the movement of bulk goods including, most crucially, coal. The rate of improvements increased as trade picked up but the real revolution in transport began in 1759. Two years previously the Duke of Bridgewater, then only twenty-one, returned from a tour of Europe where he saw the famous Canal du Midi which, since 1680, had joined the Atlantic to the Mediterranean via the Garonne River and the Étang du Thau. Inspired by this extraordinary piece of engineering – and by the canalisation of Sankey Brook near his home – he decided to build a new canal to connect his coal mines at Worsley with Manchester. This was a massive undertaking involving huge engineering works and financial commitment (the debts on the Canal du Midi were still outstanding eighty years after its completion). But there was money to be made too: the duke’s initial proposal to Parliament was supported by merchants in Manchester on condition that the price of coal delivered to them would drop to 4d per hundredweight.

  The bill was approved in March 1759 and work began. James Brindley was brought in as engineer and proposed that the canal should cross the Irwell River on an aqueduct. The idea was ridiculed at the time but gave birth to one of the great wonders of industrial engineering. The route to Stretford was completed by 1761 and the connection with Manchester made the following year, with a tunnel carrying the coal into Deansgate in the heart of the city. At the other end the canal entered the mine itself, as described by the writer and industrial enthusiast Samuel Smiles:

  It is at Worsley basin that the canal enters the bottom of the hill by a subterranean channel which extends to a great distance – connecting the different workings of the mine – so that the coals can be readily transported in boats to their place of sale . . . In Brindley’s time this subterranean canal, hewn out of the rock, was only about a mile in length, but now extends to nearly forty miles underground in all directions. Where the tunnel passed through earth or coal, the arching was of brickwork; but where it passed through rock, it was simply hewn out. This tunnel acts not only as a drain and water-feeder for the canal itself, but as a means of carrying the facilities of the navigation through the very heart of the collieries; and it will readily be seen of how great a value it must have proved in the economical working of the navigation, as well as of the mines, as far as the traffic in coals was concerned.1

  The duke immediately began work on taking his canal in the other direction to link it with the Mersey. Though beset with difficulties this branch, which connected Manchester to Liverpool and the sea, was opened in 1776. The Bridgewater canal was an instant success – though the duke himself had to wait decades for a return on his huge investments, the price of coal in Manchester dropped by two-thirds while people came from across the country to admire the aqueduct and tunnels. Other industrialists immediately saw the benefits of building canals and there was a scramble to get routes approved by Parliament, accelerated by fierce competition between rival groups of investors. Josiah Wedgwood had built up a huge pottery business in Stoke and became the chief sponsor of a scheme to build a canal linking the Mersey to the Trent, which would run past his works; his chief concern was that a rival project would leave his business isolated. Typical of the entrepreneurs of the period, Wedgwood knew that he needed to go beyond the bounds of his business in order to create the necessary infrastructure: ‘I scarcely know without a good deal of recollection whether I am a Landed gentleman, an Engineer or a Potter, for indeed I am all three by turns, pray heaven I may settle to something earnest at last.’2

  The Trent and Mersey canal was begun on 26 July 1766 when Wedgwood ceremonially dug out the first sod of earth and James Brindley carried it away in a wheelbarrow. Groups of wealthy men lobbied hard for their own routes, but if their plans were approved by Parliament they had to spend a lot of capital before they saw any returns. The Trent and Mersey canal consumed £130,000 up front, with two further injections of £70,000. Shares for £200 were issued, the money being recouped through tolls set at 1½d per mile (freight costs by road were typically 10d a mile). The route included the Harecastle Tunnel which, at over a mile and a half long (2,880 yards), was more than double the length of any other tunnel in the world. British industrialists were showing enormous ambition undaunted by costs.

  In 1793–4 alone, thirty new canal projects were launched and canal fever saw Midlands towns like Tipton criss-crossed by canals run by different companies. However, of the 165 canal Acts passed between 1758 and 1801, ninety had coal carriage as their main interest. In Birmingham in 1800 the transport of coal by road cost thirteen shillings a ton; once the Wednesbury canal opened this was reduced to 6s 8d, and by the early nineteenth century 1,500 collieries and ironworks faced on to Birmingham’s system of canals, where 68,000 long boats transported over 2 million tons of coal per year.3 Production of the famous anthracite or steam coal from Wales was boosted by the building of a canal to the Neath Valley and beyond, opening up the western coalfield. And the portion of the Yorkshire coalfield between Sheffield and Barnsley, which had suffered from being away from a navigable river, benefitted from the Dearne and Dove canal, which was built in 1793 specifically to serve the needs of the South Yorkshire collieries.4

  Britain’s canals were built by squads of mobile labourers, known as navigators or navvies, working their way across the countryside and bringing an entirely new world to previously isolated communities. Using just picks and shovels they dug trenches four feet deep and fifteen feet wide (to allow two boats to pass). Tunnels and occasional cuttings were made with the help of gunpowder, making canal work dangerous as well as physically hard. Every canal was lined with clay, which was then puddled into a hard non-porous layer by cattle or barefoot labourers.

  It was colliery owners and iron-makers who drove the canal-building boom in order to get their goods to market, but there were profound effects on the social and commercial cohesion of the country. In his 1779 account, The Journey From Chester to London, Thomas Pennant describes the difference a canal could make to all aspects of life:

  The cottage, instead of being covered with miserable thatch, is now secured with a substantial covering of tiles or slates, brought from the distant hills of Wales or Cumberland. The fields, which before were barren, are now drained, and, by the assistance of manure, conveyed on the canal toll-free, are cloathed with a beautiful verdure. Places which rarely knew the use of coal are plentifully supplied with that essential article upon reasonable terms.’6

  Canals and waterways, 1810: By the end of the canal boom, every major industr
ial centre in England was connected to the system.

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  William Smith: Reading the Rocks

  One of the best canal surveyors was an Oxfordshire man called William Smith.5 Born in 1769, Smith gained a reputation in Somerset for surveying areas with potential coal seams, and giving sound advice to landowners. His eye for the land led him to draw up plans for water supplies and drainage. In the 1790s he was taken on by the Somerset Coal Canal Company as a surveyor and in his work Smith noticed more and more evidence of a regular order within the layers of rock. The cuttings and tunnels opened by the canal builders exposed the bands or strata of rock and Smith was the first to understand that the different rock types were not random occurrences but followed a regular pattern that was repeated across the country. He drew charts of rock layers, but then he began to notice that particular types of fossils were regularly found in particular layers, so that the fossil type rather than the physical character of the rock was the surest guide to the position of the strata within the overall scheme.

  A journey across England from Somerset to the Midlands, Yorkshire and the north-east, made at the behest of the canal company, confirmed Smith in his beliefs; he understood that England was underlain by a regular pattern of rock types and he was able to draw some of the earliest geological maps to illustrate his ideas.