James Brindley: The First Canal Builder

by Nick Corble

Overview

It can be said of few men that without them the course of their nation's history would have been very different, yet through the force of his ideas and sheer bloody-mindedness, James Brindley, the first great canal builder, provided the spark that ignited the Industrial Revolution, united the nation and set Britain on course to become the world's first superpower. Born into poverty and barely literate, Brindley had a vision for the country that defied both established society and the natural order, dividing mid-eighteenth-century scientific and political opinion. Crowds flocked to marvel at this new canals and the engineering feats that accompanied them, with Brindley's inventiveness earning him the nickname 'The Schemer'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752472249
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	10/21/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	12 Years

About the Author

NICK CORBLE has written a number of books, including Britain’s Canals: A Handbook and James Brindley: The First Canal Builder, and is editor of the Tempus Towpath Guide series. He lives in Buckinghamshire.

Read an Excerpt

James Brindley

The First Canal Builder

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By Nick Corble

The History Press

Copyright © 2011 Nick Corble
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7224-9

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CHAPTER 1

Family Ties

It is Easter Day, the most significant point in the Church calendar, in the year 1664, the year before the Black Death was set to lay Europe low. The local people are gathering at the local parish church, St Edward's. It is the only church in the Staffordshire town of Leek and it proclaims its position proudly from the top of the hill that is Mill Lane. Solidly built out of local red sandstone it had, until the dissolution of the monasteries, been attached to the local Abbey of Dieulacres whose presence had dominated the local community.

The congregation inside on this unseasonably warm day is obediently silent as the local priest George Rhodes makes the sign of the cross over the sacrament. There is only a slight rustling amongst those standing and crouching on the cold stone floor as they shuffle to get more comfortable.

Motes of dust dance lazily in the rays of sunshine that angle in from the rose window. Although the day outside is a good one, inside the darkness is leavened only by the burst of colour seeping through the stained glass above, an unusually ornate feature for such a plain town. A respectful silence descends. Heightened senses can just detect the scent of the best of what remained of last year's hay, scattered that morning on the floor.

The Reverend Rhodes turns to his flock, raises the host and makes to speak. The next voice everyone hears is not his, however, but that of a young woman, dressed all in black, who has risen from the floor in the centre of the church. A hat hides her hair and her plain long skirt scrapes the floor. The Reverend Rhodes casts his face up to the beautifully crafted ceiling of the nave in frustration. His eyes briefly take in the magnificence of its ornately carved wooden roses sitting at the intersection of solid oak beams, which in turn rest on plain white corbels.

The woman's name is Alice Bowman and she is a known troublemaker. Some know her better as a dissenter. Before that moment few had noticed her, she rarely if ever went to church. The fact that she was there at all should have been enough to signal trouble. Sighs fill the air as she stands and points her finger round the congregation.

'Reject these mere symbols of faith!', she proclaims, her voice strong and absent of doubt. 'Reveal thy inner Christ!'

A few frustrated murmurings echo around the main body of the church. The service is long enough without interruptions, there's much to be done at home, day of rest or not. The Reverend, shaken out of his reverie, begins to recover, but not fast enough. A few of the congregation start to rise. The Reverend pauses.

'Reject this finery and ceremony', Alice continues, gaining yet more confidence despite the gathering menace. 'Ye have no need of priests and robes!' This last pronouncement is, it seems, the final straw for the party advancing towards her, although in truth Alice's fate had probably been sealed the moment she'd stood up. A deep cry goes up, one tinged with anger and venom.

'Grab her!'

Despite the priest's half-hearted protestations half a dozen of the larger members of his flock descend upon Alice and lift her from the ground, two on each thrashing leg and one on each arm. A cheer goes up, destroying the atmosphere of peace and due reverence that had pervaded the church less than a minute before.

There is a loud wooden thump as the door is pulled open and crashes on its jamb. Alice continues to declaim her beliefs, but her voice has become more distant, stop she is pushed face downwards into the soft, drying mud outside. It is only when her infant son, left behind in the melee and stranded on a small knitted rug on the floor, starts to cry that people realise that she had not come alone.

* * *

These days the moorlands of north Staffordshire are a magnet for tourism, but even today it is easy to imagine how, at the end of the seventeenth century, they would have been a bleak and uninviting place, especially if you had to eke a living out of them. Men and women worked hard to ensure survival for themselves and their families and could go for days without seeing someone outside their immediate kin, let alone figures of authority such as the local lord or clergyman. Villages were barely more than loose collections of houses, and towns were an abstract notion for most.

A contemporary record describes the climate of that part of the county as 'cold and wet, like that of the adjacent parts of Derbyshire and Cheshire; snow lies long on the moorlands and the west wind seldom fails to bring rain'. The most noticeable feature to someone new to the area would indeed have been the wind that raged off the moors, a constant whistle oscillating in pitch, that seemed to send a rasping, cleansing draught through the landscape.

It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that Brindley's maternal great-grandparents, Alice and Henry Bowman, were early members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, with its emphasis on the simple life, on unadorned worship and the rejection of creeds and priests. Those who adopted the Society's ways chose also to stand out from the crowd, but the self-righteousness and spiritual certainty of the early Quakers no doubt gave some kind of comfort against their self-inflicted ostracism from their neighbours. They would have needed it. With memories of the Civil War still raw this was not a good time to be different.

What was more, their absence from church and subsequent refusal to pay tithes seemed to accentuate their determination to be seen as somehow special. Although they may have regarded all men as equal, going so far as to refuse to take their hats off in court, this was still an age when some were more equal than others and prudent so-called dissenters would have needed constant looks over their shoulder when they walked home down tracks lit only by the moon. Fatal clashes were not unknown and probably went unpunished.

The Bowmans were not exempt from punishment for challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. Three years before Alice's outburst at St Edward's her husband Henry had spent a year and seven months in jail for refusing to pay tithes. Quakers believed that no man had a prior call on another. Alice's ejection cost her a spell in the local House of Correction and it cost her infant son Matthew, still suckling his mother, his life – prison being no place for an infant. No price, it would seem, was too high for her principles.

This behaviour would have seemed very strange to Alice's father and indeed her grandfather, both of whom could legitimately describe themselves in their lifetimes as Gentlemen. Neither lord nor yeoman, this title described a man of independent means, a sort of incipient middle class. Alice's grandfather Samuel Stubbs had had property to his name and been a relatively wealthy and well-read lawyer, who had practised in Tunstall in Staffordshire and had even represented clients in London. Her father Walter was said to live modestly, but his will showed he had the distinction of owning more animals than his neighbours.

Both had died before Alice married and perhaps it was this freedom from family influence, and the general air of rebelliousness around at the time, that gave her the confidence to make her own mark. It was 1658, when the country was still being ruled as a King-less Commonwealth and at a time when her cousin was a local rector, that Alice had became a Quaker.

Occasional lapses into defiant anarchy beside, despite their aversion to material goods, those of Alice's children who survived infancy and adolescence maintained the family tradition of a steady and unostentatious accumulation of wealth. In time, Alice's sons purchased and developed farms in the surrounding areas, becoming particularly skilled in animal husbandry, notably with sheep, but also with pigs, cows and goats. When he died in 1714, Alice's eldest son was worth over £1,000, twice the amount she herself had left a quarter of a century before.

Her eldest daughter Ellen, however, was another story. It may have been in the blood, because Ellen too appeared determined to plough her own furrow. Her act of rebellion however was to marry beneath her. By so doing she created her own version of the ancient story of maternal disapproval of a daughter's choice of life partner. Although probably a Quaker too – marriage outside the faith would have been a step too far – Ellen's new husband Joseph Brindley was very clearly persona non grata with his mother-in-law. When she died Ellen was left the princely sum of £40 by her mother, and although enough at the time for a working man to just about support a family for a year, this was half the amount left to her unmarried sisters.

On its own this is not that remarkable, after all Ellen had probably already benefited from a marriage settlement. What were unusual, however, were the strings to which the inheritance was very firmly attached. Alice's will stated specifically that the money was to be used solely for the maintenance of Ellen and her children, that it be held by Ellen's brother and that if she went to court to challenge the will she would get nothing. The message could not have been clearer: Joseph was not to be allowed within a mile of the money.

The reasons behind this rift are not known. Little is known of Joseph's background, Brindley actually being a rather common name in Staffordshire at the time. Whatever the reasons, the suspicion must be that Joseph's enthusiasm for Quakerism didn't match that of his wife's family. Ellen was the only one of her siblings not to be buried a Quaker and their oldest son James, father of our James, gained something of a reputation for betting and practising country sports with those who could afford to pursue them, suggesting he was hardly brought up in a strict Quaker household.

Whatever his faults though, James was Ellen's only son and it seems her family was prepared to forgive him his parentage and take him to their bosom, perhaps in the hope of providing the spiritual guidance they suspected he was not getting at home. His predilection for play over work clearly grated with their Quaker ideals. James senior spent some of his boyhood years at the family's modest estate, probably more of a large farm, at Stockley Park in Tutley, Staffordshire and learnt farming from his Uncle Harry, Ellen's older brother.

Despite these good intentions, if the aim was to redeem James it seems they largely failed. At the age of thirty-one he got married to one Susanna Bradbury. This was a rushed affair and a second attempt to complete the ceremony. The first had been scheduled for the famous crooked-spire church of Chesterfield, fully thirty miles away, suggesting a need for secrecy. What is certain is that parental consent was not given and James omitted to bring a friend or relative with him to complete the marriage bond, causing the whole enterprise to be abandoned.

Three months later, in January 1716 they tried again. Once more there was no parental consent, but this time it didn't matter, with Susanna having turned twenty-one in the interim. The reason for this haste became clear when James junior was born a few months later. There is also a suspicion that Susannah wasn't a Quaker, which if true would have cast further despair on his grandmother's family. It was in these unpromising circumstances that the man who transformed his nation, and by extension the world, was born.

* * *

James Brindley's later success certainly can't be put down to any advantage bestowed at birth. Although his wider family were relatively well to do, they owned their own land and had capital, his parents had cast themselves firmly as the black sheep of the family. They lived more than a full day's walk away from the family farm and not even in the same county – effectively in a different country.

The cottage where James first saw the light of day no longer exists, but its location is marked both by a modest black plaque and a tree, in an unprepossessing hamlet called Tunstead, near Wormhill in north Derbyshire, about three miles outside Buxton. Even three-quarters of a century later Wormhill had only twenty-nine houses and was described as a hamlet with a chapel. Tunstead was appreciably smaller, possibly no more than two or three cottages grouped together for convenience rather than through any true sense of community.

No more than six inches by eight, the plaque in Tunstead has weathered significantly over the years and become quite difficult to read. A small stockade fence has recently been erected to make access easier. When you get closer it is just possible to make out the following words:

James Brindley 1716–1772, Millwright and Civil Engineer.

Here stood the cottage in which James Brindley was born. Of humble birth, he became famous as the pioneer builder of the great canals of England. This plaque was erected by the local history section of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society unveiled by J.L. Longland Esq. MA on November 1st 1958 and Miss Y.H.B. Hartford planted the adjacent ash tree.

Such a message befits the man. It is simple, states the facts and hints at greatness without making any undue claims.

The tree replaced an original ash that had grown up through the flags of the floor of a cottage that long before had fallen derelict. The Brindleys were the last to inhabit this modest dwelling and after they left its stones were ignominiously removed to build cowsheds. At one time a labourer was sent to clear a path to the neighbouring farmhouse but was reluctant to fell a healthy sapling. As a consequence it was left and fittingly acted as Brindley's only memorial for many decades.

Like most at the time, the Brindley's home would have been a modest affair, rented from a local landowner. Its focal point would have been the fire, which was almost a room to itself with seats built into the chimney so all could enjoy what little warmth it threw out. Wood was the primary fuel, coal being a luxury almost unheard of. Peat would have been an option for some, but in the open Derbyshire countryside even that was in short supply, hoarded for use in winter and used only for cooking in summer.

The world James Brindley was born into, or more specifically the country, was still recovering from a period of relative uncertainty. Only fifty years before, the nation had been ravaged by the plague and the population was still only just recovering. Fear of its return still hung over most families' heads, with the young and old the most vulnerable to disease, the great leveller. During Brindley's youth the population of England, around five million at the time, actually fell by 100,000, due in large part to a series of epidemics of influenza and fevers, usually typhoid or smallpox. Rumours of a resurgence of the Black Death, usually centred on France, were commonplace.

And yet there were signs that things were changing. Two years before James' birth the Georgian dynasty had begun with the accession of George I. This was secured a year later with the defeat of the Great Pretender while three years before in 1713 The Treaty of Utrecht had ended the crushingly expensive War of Spanish Succession. London, that great cauldron of activity, was growing at an exponential rate and was already in the process of becoming a consumer-led economic phenomenon.

It would be wrong to say though that England had suddenly become a settled nation, looking forward to a period of unbroken peace and prosperity. For a start the idea of a single nation was an abstract one, with few wandering much beyond a few miles of their birthplace in their entire lifetime. With only a few exceptions, such as Norwich, Bristol or Exeter, London dominated commerce. In population terms alone it dwarfed its nearest rivals by a factor of ten. Few of the market towns that acted as local gathering places had a population of much more than a thousand. The country at this time was like a random ink splat upon a page, the one big dot of London with a series of minor dots representing a series of unconnected communities.

Furthermore, getting around the country was nigh on impossible by any means other than foot or horse, the latter a luxury afforded only to the few. Although there was the semblance of a road system, improving slowly through the introduction of turnpikes, an early form of toll road, the highways were subject to disrepair and vulnerable to crime and adverse weather. They were mud bowls in winter and dust traps in summer.

No one could be sure that the Catholic threat was gone forever and, as we have seen, the presence of non-Conformists such as the Quakers remained disconcerting to many. In addition, the political system was only just beginning to get itself together. It had taken the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 to shock politicians into action. Given the role of many of them in inflating the bubble, it was in the interests of few for the true history of that scandal to be revealed. Accordingly, in-fighting was abandoned in favour of co-operation and self-preservation.

The war, although expensive, had fuelled an economic boom through the demand for naval and military supplies. Suddenly that demand ceased, and with it the good times. As is often the way, the 'peace dividend' proved elusive. One good side-effect of the South Sea Bubble was that it helped to force some realism into the economy.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from James Brindley by Nick Corble. Copyright © 2011 Nick Corble. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Title,
Dedication,
Introduction,
1. Family Ties,
2. From Bungler to Master,
3. The Pull of Water,
4. Patrons and Personalities,
5. The Duke's Cut,
6. Chalk and Cheese,
7. Money Like Water,
8. The Grand Cross,
9. James Brindley – Canal Engineer,
10. Harassed on Every Side,
11. Of Public Utility,
A Note on Sources,
Copyright,