By the end of the century it was no longer possible for a visitor to Winterstoke Park (as it was now called) to remain unaware of the activity beyond the river despite all the skill of Lancelot Brown. Vista and avenue could not shut out the fierce glare of Bedlam and New Bank furnaces which painted the night skies over Darley Bank with the lurid colours of a false, apocalyptic sunset. Like roll of drums and distant gunfire, the tumult of rolling mill and heavy forge brought to the silence of terrace and temple a faint but threatening undercurrent of sound. The installation of each new steam engine meant that another chimney stack added its quota to the fume from furnaces, from lime kilns, from heaps of coking coal and from perpetually burning gob fires which at night seamed the black spoil heaps of High Hanger with veins of scarlet. In still weather the smoke hung over the valley like a thundercloud or tarnished the mists which rose from the river meadows. When the winds blew southerly the sulphur could be tasted as well as smelt. Each raindrop carried its kernel of soot to stain the stonework of Wyatt’s long façade with sad streaks of grime. Even the colours of Brown’s carefully-planned landscape seemed to lose lustre as though seen through a darkened glass.
Perhaps it was this omnipresence which led the sixth Earl and his lady to spend so many months of each year at their town house. Because the enclosures had contributed so much to the growth of the Darley Bank Company it could be said that the Earl was responsible for fouling his own costly nest. But this poetic justice did nothing to compensate those who, robbed of their land, their ancient rights and their liberties, now laboured in the fierce heat of forge, foundry and mill or in the perilous darkness of the deepening mines.
Chapter Six
AS THE Darley Bank Company’s consumption of coal and its output of iron increased, so the traffic over the wooden wagon ways to the pits and to the Company’s wharf on the Wendle grew heavier. To keep them in repair, more and more money had to be expended on scarce timber. In an attempt to reduce this excessive wear and tear, Daniel Leeds tried the experiment of sheathing part of the High Hanger wagon way, which suffered most, with flat plates of iron. In 1766, however, a particular combination of circumstances persuaded Daniel to make a bolder experiment.
Already the iron trade had expanded to such an extent that its ramifications had become sensitive not merely to national but to international events. Though never the overt cause of war, the new fiercely competitive industrial economy acted as an international irritant, while the stature of a nation and its capacity to wage war was coming to depend more and more upon its resources of coal and iron rather than upon the wisdom of its statesmen or the size of its armies. Of all this the miners and iron workers of Winterstoke knew nothing. All they knew was that the old stability of their rural past had gone; that they had become the helpless dependents of an industry which offered them no security at all, so wild and unpredictable were its fluctuations of fortune and so bewildering the changes in food prices which accompanied these alternating booms and slumps. Thus the Seven Years War was a boom period for Darley Bank, but after the Peace of Paris the iron trade slumped and there was a spell of acute depression. To give him his due, Daniel Leeds did what he could to combat a state of affairs which, though he may have understood it more clearly than his men, he was equally powerless to control. But by 1766 the position was so bad that he was forced to consider blowing out Bedlam Furnace. It was at this juncture that it occurred to him to replace the wooden wagon ways with rails of cast iron. This work would keep the furnace in blast for some time and, he argued, the Company could not lose by it. If the experiment was a success its advantages would be great; if it failed the new rails would represent a stock of iron to be drawn upon when trade improved. In the event, however, when war broke out once more in 1775 and the iron trade boomed, the rails were not drawn upon for they had proved themselves far too useful.
In four years over a thousand tons of rails were cast from Bedlam Furnace. The whole of the system which linked the collieries, the ironworks and the wharf was relaid, and numerous short connections were laid in to pits, engine houses and workshops so that in all there were nearly ten miles of the new track. Each rail was a yard long, over an inch thick, and cast with a flange on the inside which guided the unflanged wheels of the wagons. This enabled the existing stock of wagons to be used and also meant that while the work of relaying went slowly but steadily forward, the same wagons could run on either the new track or the old. Besides the rails, thousands of iron chairs were cast which were spiked down to the old wooden cross ties or sleepers to support and locate the rails.
So surely were the wagons guided by the flanges of this iron way and so much more smoothly did they run that a single horse could not only draw a much greater load, but it was only on the route between the collieries and the ironworks that horse haulage had to be used in both directions. Down the gently falling gradients of the lines which led to the Wendle wharf the loaded wagons of coal or iron could run by gravity. Perched on the long arm of a crude wooden brake, the wagoner controlled the speed of his rumbling load while the horse, which would draw the empty wagons back again, trotted behind or, at a later stage, was carried down in a special wagon called a dandy cart.
A tradition lingers at Darley Bank to this day that at some unspecified time at the beginning of the nineteenth century a locomotive designed by Richard Trevithick was built at the works and hauled coals along the tramway from High Hanger to the ironworks. The Company certainly carried out work for Trevithick, but if a locomotive was built on the lines of that engineer’s famous Pennydarran engine it vanished without leaving a trace in the firm’s records. Perhaps its weight destroyed the cast-iron rails. Perhaps an engine which combined the power of locomotion with a boiler pressure so high for those days as to seem positively lethal was considered too fantastic and too dangerous for everyday use. That great Cornish engineer was too far ahead of his time. Over forty years would pass before Winterstoke saw the first practical realization of his dream.
The new iron tramways solved the Company’s internal transport problem for many years, but there still remained the problem of improving transport over greater distances. Here the immediate question was how to improve and cheapen the supply of iron ore and limestone from the mines and quarries of Deepforest and Lobstock beyond the hills which hemmed in the Lob valley. This traffic had increased enormously but it was still handled by pack-horses as in medieval times. A well-used pack-horse track soon wore down until it became a mud-filled ditch on level ground or a stony, rapidly eroding watercourse on the hills. The pack-trains would then leave it and repeat the process nearby. As a result, by the middle of the eighteenth century this route over the hills looked, in a bird’s-eye view, like a series of slug trails which crawled and meandered haphazard across the green. Landowners along the route not unnaturally protested against this state of affairs and the Darley Bank Company became involved in many disputes over wayleaves. Yet this was only the most pressing part of the general problem of handling the imports and exports of a growing industry. The Wendle Navigation and the coastal shipping trade from Westerport had provided a partial solution, but the problem of transport to or from any area far from the sea or from a navigable river remained. For an overland haul of more than fifteen miles the cost of pack-horse transport became almost prohibitive, while over most of the so-called roads of Middle England reliable transport by wagon was usually impossible for at least eight months out of the twelve. The only road worthy of the name at Winterstoke was that from Westerport to Coltisham which crossed the Wendle at St. John’s. Its upkeep was the responsibility of the parish, but the method of repair consisted of tipping a load of ungraded stone into the ruts when they became axle deep. In 1772, at the instigation of Ernest Hanmer, a Turnpike Act was passed and the road became the responsibility of a Turnpike Trust who were empowered to erect gates and houses in order to levy tolls for maintenance. This provoked almost as much resentment as the Enclosure Acts. The new gates at St. John’s were several times to
rn down or damaged in the night, for the villagers looked upon them as an encroachment upon their freedom of movement and alleged that the tolls were merely enriching the Trust. Certainly it was some years before there was any marked improvement in the condition of the road, and until the end of the century its value for goods transport remained extremely limited.
It was one bitter winter’s morning in January of the same year that was to see the start of his successful wagonway experiment, that Daniel Leeds mounted his cob and rode over the snow-powdered hills to Lobstock to attend a meeting of mine proprietors and landowners which would have a vital effect on the history of Winterstoke. Present at this meeting at the ‘Angel’ in Lobstock was James Brindley, the Derbyshire millwright who had just successfully completed the canal from Worsley to Manchester for the Duke of Bridgwater. It was known that a second and much longer canal was now projected, and had already been surveyed by Brindley, which would unite the eastern and western coasts of England and pass a few miles to the south of Lobstock. The meeting had been organized to discuss the possibility of constructing a navigable waterway from a junction with this proposed coast to coast canal, through Lobstock and the Deepforest district to join the Wendle Navigation. Finger-low Mill in the flat lands of the lower valley had been suggested as the obvious point of junction with the river, but Daniel Leeds was concerned to urge that, despite the greater physical difficulties, the canal should join the head of the navigation at Winterstoke. He foresaw that the canal would then connect directly with the ironworks, whereas for the purpose of his traffic the other route would be very circuitous. This view had brought Daniel into conflict with the Wendle bargemasters and, with the exception of Lord Winterstoke, with his fellow proprietors of the Navigation Company. At a stormy meeting in Westerport they had argued that they would enjoy a share in all the traffic which the new canal might bring to Fingerlow whereas if it joined the river at Winterstoke they were as likely to lose traffic as to gain it. Even in Lobstock and Deepforest opinions were sharply divided. Those who did most business with the Darley Bank Company supported Daniel; others maintained that the Winterstoke scheme would either prove impracticable or extravagantly costly and that the Fingerlow route would not only be cheaper to construct but would give Lobstock a more direct outlet to the sea at Westerport.
Now, over glasses of port or pots of mulled ale, the protagonists argued afresh and submitted their rival schemes to the arbitrament of the engineer. That unlettered genius refused to commit himself until he had made a survey of the suggested routes, although he shocked into silence the spokesman of the Wendle Navigation Company with the gruff remark, made in a dialect so broad that some of those present could scarcely follow it, that if he had his way he would build a canal down the Wendle valley and be done with the river. It was upon Brindley’s assurance that he would examine and report upon the proposed canal that the meeting came to an end.
Two months later, Brindley completed what he described in his diary as ‘an ochilor survey’ of the country between Lobstock and the Wendle. Forcing his way by mazy, ill-defined trackways through the brakes and spinneys which hid the Deepforest mines; striking across country over fields sodden by February rains, where his horse floundered in the heavy Midland clay; standing at last at gaze like some eighteenth-century Cortez on the crest of the camp on High Hanger Down, the first of the great civil engineers mapped out his route with little to aid him except his two eyes and his own self-taught gifts. As the windy dusk was falling he walked his tired horse into the stableyard of Darley Bank House and was hospitably received by the Leeds family. Having done excellent justice to the substantial meal which was quickly provided, he surprised his host and hostess by promptly retiring to bed and not reappearing until noon on the following day. They did not realize that this was their strange guest’s invariable method of working out his problems.
Although Daniel Leeds had stubbornly promoted the Winterstoke scheme in public, in private he had felt by no means certain that the physical difficulties of the route could be overcome. But in his writing-room that afternoon the engineer reassured him. True, the idea of tunnelling through the watershed at the head of the Lob valley which Brindley proposed so calmly daunted even his adventurous mind. Yet it was precisely the matter-of-fact way in which Brindley outlined his scheme which inspired confidence and, as events proved, that confidence was not misplaced.
The Lobstock Canal Bill was bitterly but unsuccessfully opposed by those who had favoured the Fingerlow route and by landowners who objected to the passage of a canal through their property. But the Company of Proprietors of the Lobstock Canal Navigation finally won the day and in the spring of 1768 their Bill received the Royal Assent.
It was the construction of the canals which first made the people of England aware of the achievements of the men of the new age and conscious of the revolution which was taking place in their midst. Travellers were rare in eighteenth-century England; observant and inquiring travellers who recorded their experiences like Defoe and Arthur Young were even rarer. The small black patches in the Midlands and the North which marked the new industrial areas on a map of England still predominantly green were as yet terra incognita to the majority. Even those in their immediate vicinity saw only the outward shape of things and knew nothing of the technical miracles which were being performed within the new mills, ironworks and mines. But to build the canals the engineer left the dark obscurity of his workshop and invaded the country, weaving, like some industrious spider, a web of silver threads over the green map. Fine as gossamer though these narrow water lanes might appear on the map, they nevertheless knit together as strongly and surely as links of steel those dark areas which had hitherto been isolated one from another.
Whereas the improvement for navigation of natural channels such as the Wendle had occasioned little remark, these wholly artificial waterways which strode over rivers on aqueducts, climbed ladders of locks or burrowed under the hills, were hailed as the wonder of the age. In an area extending for several miles round Winterstoke there were few people who did not at one time or another drive, ride or walk, according to their station, to gaze in awe and amazement at the works of the celebrated James Brindley. It was the task of driving the great Ketton Tunnel, over a mile in length, which occasioned most wonder, and speculation was rife as to whether the work would succeed or fail. A few expressed confidence; many more scoffed and dismissed the enterprise as fantastic folly. But in spite of these doubters the work went steadily on.
No sooner had construction been authorized than the ‘navigators’ invaded Winterstoke like a dense flock of chattering, brawling starlings swooping on stubble in autumn. A ragged army of Irishmen, gipsies and dispossessed countrymen from every county in the Midlands and the North, they encamped in a meadow below Ketton Farm, building themselves rough huts from whatever materials they could lay hands on. The scenes of drunkenness and brawling and the babel of dialects when their overseers paid them their wages at the ‘Woodcollier’ defied description. But when landlord Blenkinsop contemplated the trampled compost of clay, beer slops, spittle, blood and broken glass which they left on his sanded floors and then tallied his takings, he reflected that it was worth it.
It was the ‘navigators’ who dug the deep trench which followed the winding contours of the hills and who made its bed watertight with Brindley’s infallible specific of puddled clay. Then there were the horse-keepers whose pack-trains were the supply lines of the construction gangs, and finally the aristocrats of the labour force, the skilled masons and carpenters who built culverts and bridges, lock chambers and lock gates. The whole of this army was under the command of Brindley’s able pupil Robert Whitworth who made his headquarters at Darley Bank House while the northern end of the canal was building.
Brindley had planned the Lobstock Canal on the characteristic lines which he always favoured: concentrations of locks at Lobstock and Winterstoke leading up to a long, devious summit level which included Ketton Tunnel and which tapped the
headwaters of numerous small streams and springs. In dry seasons this long summit would itself hold a great store of lockage water but, to provide additional reserves, reservoirs would be formed on the watershed, feeding the summit through open leats. With the exception of Ketton Tunnel the works presented no particular difficulty and proceeded with remarkable speed. To form the northern terminal a great rectangular basin was dug beside the Wendle at Darley Bank Wharf. Because the engineer heartily mistrusted and disliked the vagaries of rivers, the basin was situated well above the level of the highest flood, access to it from the Wendle being provided by a lock large enough to admit the river barges. From this basin the invading army left behind them a gash of raw earth and muddy water, stopped at regular intervals by the flight of twenty new narrow locks, which looped away southwards up the Lob valley. With their curving wing walls, their deep chambers of brick and stone seventy feet long but little more than seven feet wide and their gates with outspread balance beams and rack and pinion paddle gear, these new locks looked very different from their predecessors on the Wendle. From one of the ‘pounds’ between these locks a short branch canal crossed the Lob on a culverted embankment to bring the new transport into the heart of the ironworks.
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