There is reason to believe, although actual proof is lacking, that the original design of continuing this tramway to Cardiff was not carried out because of the opposition of the canal company. Certain it is that the project for such a tramway was revived in 1799. Under date February 18, in that year, the "House of Commons Journals" record that William Lewis (Alderley), William Taitt, Thomas Guest, Joseph Cowles, and John Guest, being a firm of ironmasters in the parish of Merthyr Tydvil, known as the Dowlais Iron Company; Jeremiah Homfray, Samuel Homfray, Thomas Homfray and William Forman, ironmasters, of Merthyr Tydvil, known by the name of Jeremiah Homfray and Co.; Richard Hill and William Lewis (Pentyrch Works) petitioned the House for leave to bring in a Bill for the construction of a "dram road" from or near Carno Mill, in the parish of Bedwelty and the county of Monmouth to Cardiff, with branches to Merthyr and Aberdare.[34]
The petitioners declared that such dram-road would "open an easy Communication with several considerable Ironworks, Collieries, Limestone Quarries and extensive Tracks of Land, abounding with Coal, Limestone and other Minerals, whereby the Carriage and Conveyance of Iron, Coal, Lime, Timber and all kinds of Merchandize to or from the different Places bordering on the said intended Road will be greatly facilitated and rendered less expensive than at present, and will tend greatly to improve the Lands and Estates near the said Road, and the said Undertaking will, in other Respects, be of great Public Utility."
The petition was referred to a Committee, who reported favourably on March 8, and the Bill was presented and read afirst time on March 15. Then, however, came the opposition from the canal company. On April 8, as the "Journals" further record, the Commons received a petition from the Company of Proprietors of the Glamorganshire Canal Navigation setting forth that they had been authorised under two Acts to make and maintain a navigable canal from Merthyr to Cardiff; that they had expended on this undertaking a sum of £100,000; that they had seen the Bill above-mentioned, and, they proceed:—
"That the Dram Road or Way, proposed to be made by the said Bill, will pass from one End thereof to the other, nearly parallel, and in almost every Part near to the said Canal; and in some places will cross the same; and that the Petitioners were induced to undertake the making of the said Canal, in hopes of being repaid the Expence thereof, with proper remuneration for the Risk of the said Undertaking, by the Carriage of Coal, Lime, Iron, Timber, and other goods and Merchandizes thereon, but if the said Dram Road or Way should be made as proposed they would be deprived of a great Part of those Advantages which they apprehend they have had granted and secured to them, and are therefore now fully entitled to, by the said Two Acts, without the Country adjacent or the Public in General, receiving any particular Benefit or Advantage."
The company further pleaded that under their Acts they were "restrained from ever receiving more than a moderate Dividend on their Shares, and whenever the Profits of the Canal shall be more than sufficient to pay the same, their Rates of Tonnage are to be lowered;[35]and for that reason, as well as many others, of equal Justice, they conceive they should be secured in the possession of all the advantages proposed to be granted to them by the said Acts."
The House ordered that the petition do lie upon the table until the said Bill be read a second time, and that counsel be then heard on both sides. On May 3 a day was appointed for the second reading, and on May 4 the House received a further petition from landowners, tradesmen and others in support of the Bill. The "Journals," however, contain no record of the second reading having been reached, and theironly further reference at all to the Bill is in the "General Index" to the volumes for 1790-1801, where, under the heading "Navigations: Petitions to make Dram Roads to Canals, &c.," it is said of the Bill in question "Not proceeded in."
There is no reason to doubt that this first scheme for the construction of a railway—even though under the name of a "dram road"—which would have been not only independent of canal transport but in direct competition therewith, was killed through the opposition of the then powerful canal interests. The tradition in Cardiff is that the Glamorganshire Canal Company "got hold" of the leading promoters, and persuaded them to abandon their scheme by electing them members of the managing committee of the canal. Whether or not some additional inducement was offered to them is not known. In any case, there was no further attempt to set up a railway in direct and avowed competition with a canal until the great fight over the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, a quarter of a century later.
The significance of all these facts will be found still greater in the light of what I shall have to say subsequently in regard to the influence of canal interests and canal precedents alike on railway development and on railway legislation.
In some instances the railways belonging to the period here under review were constructed by the canal companies not merely as feeders to the canals but as substitutes for lengths of canal where the making of an artificial waterway presented special difficulties. The Lancashire Canal Company, incorporated in 1792, laid a line of railway for five miles, passing through the town of Preston, to connect two sections of canal. The Ashby Canal Company, under an Act of 1794, avoided a considerable expense in the construction of locks by supplementing thirty miles of canal on the level with intermediate lengths of railway to the extent of another twenty miles. Writing in 1884, Clement E. Stretton says, in his "Notes on Early Railway History," concerning these old tram-roads of the Ashby Canal Company: "One part has since been altered and absorbed into the Ashby and Worthington Railway;[36]but the branch from Ticknalltramway wharf to Tucknall has never been relaid or altered in any way, and, therefore, is a most interesting relic of ancient times. To see waggons with flat wheels drawn over cast-iron rails one yard long by a horse, cannot fail to interest those who watch the workings of railways, and it most clearly shows the great improvements made and the perseverance which has been required to develop the present gigantic railway system out of such small beginnings."
The Charnwood Forest Canal, again, concerning which I shall have more to say later, was a connecting link between two lines of edge-railway, the purpose of the combined land and water route being to enable Leicestershire coal to reach the Leicester market.
It will thus be seen that, whilst the coalowners introduced railways in the first instance, it was the canal companies themselves who, in the days before locomotives, mainly developed and established the utility of a new mode of traction which was eventually to supersede to so material an extent the inland navigation they favoured. It was open to those companies to adapt their undertakings much more completely to the new conditions, if they had had sufficient foresight and enterprise so to do.
The signs of the times were obvious enough to those who were able and willing to read them, and there were many indications that canals would assuredly be not only supplemented, but supplanted, by railways. An impartial authority like Thomas Telford, in adding a postscript to an article on "Canals" which he had contributed to Archdeacon Plymley's "General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire," wrote under date November 13, 1800:—
"Since the year 1797, when the above account of the inland navigation of the county of Salop was made out, another mode of conveyance has frequently been adopted in this country to a considerable extent; I mean that of forming roads with iron rails laid along them, upon which the articles are conveyed on waggons, containing from six to thirty cwt.; experience has now convinced us that in countries whose surfaces are rugged, or where it is difficult to obtain water for lockage, where the weight of the articles of produce is great in comparison with their bulk, and where they are mostly to be conveyed from a higher to a lowerlevel,—that in those cases, iron rail-ways are in general preferable to a canal navigation.
"On a rail-way well constructed, and laid with a declivity of 55 feet in a mile, one horse will readily take down waggons containing from 12 to 15 tons, and bring back the same waggons with four tons in them....
"This useful contrivance may be varied so as to suit the surface of many different countries at a comparatively moderate expense. It may be constructed in a manner much more expeditious than navigable canals; it may be introduced into many districts where canals are wholly inapplicable; and in case of any change in the working of the mines or manufactures, the rails may be taken up and put down again, in a new situation, at a moderate expense."
Thomas Gray, writing in 1821, warned investors in canal shares that the time was "fast approaching when rail-ways must, from their manifest superiority in every respect, supersede the necessity both of canals and turnpike roads, so far as the general commerce of the country was concerned." He further expressed the conviction that "were canal proprietors sensible how much their respective shares would be improved in value by converting all the canals into rail-ways, there would not, perhaps, in the space of ten or twenty years remain a single canal in the country."
Blinded by their prosperity, however, the canal companies failed to adopt the necessary measures for ensuring its continuance, though the Duke of Bridgewater himself saw sufficient of the new rival to get an uneasy suspicion of what might happen. "We may do very well," he is reported to have said to Lord Kenyon, when asked about the prospects of his canals, "if we can keep clear of those —— tram-roads." Unfortunately for the canal interests, though fortunately for the country, the qualified tram-roads were not to be kept clear of, but, with the encouragement they got from those they afterwards impoverished, were to bring the Canal Era to a close, and to inaugurate the Railway Era in its place.
THE RAILWAY ERA
Between 1801 and 1825 no fewer than twenty-nine "iron railways" were either opened or begun in various parts of Great Britain. The full list is given by John Francis in his "History of the English Railway." It shows, as Francis points out, that from Plymouth to Glasgow, and from Carnarvon to Surrey, "there was scarcely a county where some form of the railway was not used." Most of these new railways were, however, still operated in conjunction with collieries or ironworks and canals or rivers, as the following typical examples show:—
1802: Sirhowey Tramroad, built by the Monmouthshire Canal Company in conjunction with the Tredegar Iron-works; length, eleven miles; cost £45,000.
1809: Forest of Dean Railway, for conveying coals, timber, ore, etc., to the Severn for shipment; length, seven and a half miles; cost £125,000.
1809: Severn and Wye Railway, connecting those rivers; length, 26 miles; cost £110,000.
1812: Penrhynmaur Railway, Anglesey; a colliery line, seven miles long, consisting of a series of inclined planes.
1815: Gloucester and Cheltenham Railway, connecting with the Berkeley Canal at Gloucester.
1817: Mansfield and Pinxton Railway, connecting the town of Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, with the Cromford Canal at Pinxton basin, near Alfreton, Derbyshire; cost £32,800.
1819: Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway; length 30 miles; cost £35,000.
1825: Cromford and High Peak Railway, connecting the Cromford and Peak Forest Canals, and rising, by a series of elevations, 990 feet; length 34 miles; cost £164,000.
The first Act for a reallypublicrailway, in the sense in which that term is understood to-day, and as distinct fromrailways serving mainly or exclusively the interests of collieries, iron-works and canal navigations, was granted by Parliament in 1801 for the Surrey Iron Rail-way, which established a rail connection between the Thames at Wandsworth and the town of Croydon, with a branch to some mills on the river Wandle whose owners were the leaders in the enterprise. The total length was about nine and a half miles. According to the Act, the line was designed for "the advantage of carrying coals, corn and all goods and merchandise to and from the Metropolis." Constructed with flanged rails, or "plates," fixed on stone blocks, the line was available for any ordinary cart or waggon of the requisite gauge. The conveyances mostly used on it were four-wheeled trucks, about the size of railway contractors' waggons. They belonged either to local traders or to carriers who let them out on hire, it being doubtful whether the company had any rolling stock of their own. The motive power was supplied by horses, mules or donkeys. Chalk, flint, fire-stone, fuller's earth and agricultural produce were sent from Croydon—then a town of 5700 inhabitants—to the Thames for conveyance to London. The return loading from the Thames was mainly coal and manure. Two sets of rails were provided, and there was a path on each side for the men in charge of the horses.
Referring to the Surrey Iron Rail-way in his "History of Private Bill Legislation," Clifford says:—
"The Act of 1801, upon which the rest of this early railway legislation was framed, follows the canal precedents in their provision for managing the company's affairs, for raising share and loan capital, and for compensating landowners. Only the use of horse power was contemplated. The tracks, when laid down, were meant, like canals, for general use by carriers and freighters. The companies did not provide rolling stock; any person might construct carriages adapted to run upon the rails, and if these carriages were approved certain maximum tolls applied to the freight they might carry.... Passenger traffic was not expected or provided for.... Such was the first Railway Act, passed at the beginning of the century with little notice by Parliament or people, but now a social landmark, prominent in that stormy period of history."
This was, however, in point of fact, only a further development of the still earlier railway legislation (see page210), which required the proprietors of lines laid down for general traffic to allow anyone who pleased to run his own vehicles thereon, subject to certain regulations and to the payment of specified tolls.
The Surrey Iron Rail-way was also a landmark in railway history because, although in itself of very small extent, it was originally designed to serve as the first section of a railway which, made by different companies, as capital could be raised, would eventually have extended from the Thames to Portsmouth.[37]The second section was the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Iron Railway, which Parliament sanctioned in 1803. From Croydon this further railway was to carry the lines on to Reigate, with a branch from Merstham to Godstone Green, a total distance of sixteen miles in addition, that is, to the nine and a half miles of the Surrey Iron Rail-way. Both companies, however, drifted into financial difficulties, and had to apply to Parliament again, in 1806, for fresh powers, while the lines of the second company never got beyond the chalk quarries at Merstham.
In the absence of the through traffic it had been hoped eventually to secure, the local business alone available was evidently inadequate to meet the charges on a capital outlay which, at that time, may have been regarded as not inconsiderable, inasmuch as the Surrey Iron Rail-way attained to a good elevation at its southern end, while the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone line went through a cutting thirty feet deep, and crossed a valley by an embankment twenty feet high. After a chequered career, the Merstham line was acquired by the Brighton Railway Company in 1838 and closed, being then no longer required. The Surrey line lingered on till 1846, when, with the sanction of Parliament, its operation was discontinued, the rails being taken up and sold by auction.
It was unfortunate that these two pioneer public railways were a failure because, had they succeeded, and had they really formed the first sections of a through line of communication between the Thames and Portsmouth, there would have been established a further precedent—and one of much greater value than that of a common user—the precedent, namely, of a trunk line made by companies co-operating with one another to give continuous communication on a well-organised system, in place of collections of disconnected lines designed, at the outset, to serve the interests only of particular localities, with little or no attempt at co-ordination.
Yet the principle of a general public railway had, at least, been established by the Surrey and Merstham lines, and this principle underwent further important development by the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first Act for which was obtained in 1821.
The only purpose originally intended to be served by the Stockton and Darlington Railway was the finding of a better outlet for coal from the South Durham coalfield. A company, with Edward Pease as the moving spirit, was formed in 1816, but two years later the projectors were still undecided whether to make a canal or "a rail or tramway." George Overton, who preceded George Stephenson as a distinguished railway engineer, wrote to them, however, advising the latter course. "Railways," he said, "are now generally adopted, and the cutting of canals nearly discontinued"; and he told them, further, that within the last fifteen years the great improvements made in the construction of tram-roads had led to the application of the principle to a number of new roads. His advice was adopted, and the first Act, obtained after several unsuccessful efforts, authorised the making and maintaining of "a railway or tramroad" from the river Tees, at Stockton, to Witton Park Colliery, with various branches therefrom. The line would, the Act said, be "of great public utility by facilitating the conveyance of coal, iron, lime, corn and other commodities from the interior of the county of Durham to the town of Darlington and the town and port of Stockton," etc.
It was first intended to use wooden rails, and to rely on horse-power, no authority for the employment of locomotives being obtained under the Act of 1821; but GeorgeStephenson, on being appointed engineer to the line, persuaded the company to adopt iron rails in preference to wooden ones, and to provide a locomotive such as he had already constructed and successfully employed at Killingworth Colliery. Two-thirds of the rails laid were of malleable iron and one-third of cast iron. It was not, however, until September, 1824, that the order was actually given for a locomotive, some of the promoters having still shown a strong preference for the use of stationary engines and ropes.
The line was opened for traffic on September 27, 1825, and the locomotive which had been ordered—the "Locomotion" as it was called—was ready for the occasion. It weighed seven tons, and had perpendicular cylinders and a boiler provided with only a single flue, or tube, 10 inches in diameter and 10 feet in length, the heat being abstracted therefrom so imperfectly that when the locomotive was working the chimney soon became red-hot.[38]The usual speed was from four to six miles an hour, with a highest possible of eight miles an hour on the level.
The company made provision for the anticipated goods traffic by having 150 waggons built; but they started with no idea of themselves undertaking passenger traffic. Their first Act had laid down that "Any person is at liberty to use and run a carriage on the railway, provided he complies with the bye-laws of the company"; and J. S. Jeans, in his history of the Stockton and Darlington Railway published (1875) under the title of "Jubilee Memorial of the Railway System," says: "It was originally intended to allow the proprietors of stage-coaches or other conveyances plying on the route of the proposed new railway to make use of the line on certain specified conditions." This, too, is what actually happened; for although, a fortnight after the opening of the line, the railway company themselves put on the line a springless "coach," known as the "Experiment," and drawn by a horse, several coach proprietors in the district availed themselves of their statutory right to run their own coaches on the railway, first, of course, providing them with wheels adapted to the rails. They paid the railway companythe stipulated tolls, and had the advantage of requiring to use no more than a single horse for each coach. These horse coaches for passengers seem to have run in the intervals when the lines were not occupied by the locomotive engaged in drawing the coal waggons.
In a letter published in the "Railway Herald" of April 27, 1889, John Wesley Hackworth, whose father, Timothy Hackworth, was for some time engineer on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, says that twenty miles of the line were at first worked by horses and locomotive in competition, and at the end of eighteen months it was found that horse traction was costing only a little over one-third of the traction by locomotive. Meanwhile, also, the value of the £100 shares had fallen to £50. In view of these results the directors had decided to abandon locomotive power, and depend entirely on horses; but Timothy Hackworth said to them, "If you will allow me to construct an engine in my own way I will engage it shall work cheaper than animal power." He received the desired authority, and the "Royal George," built by him, was put into operation in September, 1827. It confirmed the assurance which had been given, and, says Timothy Hackworth's son, "finally and for ever" settled the question of the respective merits of horse and steam traction on railways.
Horse coaches still continued to run on the lines, however, in addition to the mineral and goods trains, and in January, 1830, the company had to draw up a time-table fixing the hours of departure for the coaches, thus ensuring a better service for the public, and, also, protecting travellers against any possible encounter with the locomotive as the horse ambled along with them on the railway.
By October, 1832, seven coaches, belonging to various proprietors, were doing fifty journeys a week between different places on the line; so that thus far the original idea of Parliament, in enforcing against railways the principle of a common user of their lines by the public, had appeared to be warranted. A year later, however, the railway company, finding, as Jeans tells us, that it would be more convenient and more advantageous for them to take the whole carrying trade in their own hands and supersede the horses by steam locomotives, bought out, on what were considered generous terms,the interests of the four coach proprietors then carrying passengers on their own account on the lines.
Actual experience had thus nullified the expectation that a railway would be simply a rail-road upon which anyone would be able to run his own conveyances as on an ordinary turnpike road.
From October, 1833, the whole of the passenger traffic (then undergoing rapid expansion) was conducted by the company. In April, 1834, the directors, who had by this time acquired some other and better engines, announced that they had commenced to run, six times a day, both "coaches" (for passengers) and "carriages" (for goods) by locomotives; and this date, probably, marks the final disappearance of the horse as a means of traction for passenger traffic on public railways in England, though the word "coaches," introduced into the railway vocabulary under the circumstances here narrated, has remained in use ever since among railway men as applied to rolling stock for passenger traffic.
Unlike its predecessors in Surrey, and though facing various difficulties at the outset, the Stockton and Darlington line attained to a considerable degree of prosperity. After undergoing various extensions from time to time, and playing a leading part in the industrial expansion of the district it served, it was incorporated into what is now the North-Eastern Railway system.
Summing up the respects in which the Stockton and Darlington line had carried forward the story of railway development, we find that it (1) established the practicability of substituting locomotive for horse traction on railways; (2) introduced the provision of waggons by the railway company, instead of leaving these to be found by carriers and traders; (3) proved that railways were as well adapted to the transport of passengers as they were to the carriage of goods; (4) showed by actual experience that the idea of a common user of railways was impracticable; and (5) prepared the way for the eventual recognition, even by Parliament itself, of the principle that transport on a line of railway operated by locomotives must, in the nature of things, be the monopoly of the owning and responsible railway company.
While the Surrey Iron Rail-way and the Stockton andDarlington Railway had been thus seeking to establish themselves as public railways, there was no lack of advocates of what were then called "general rail-ways," to be laid either on the ordinary roads or on roads made for the purpose; and such general railways were especially advocated for districts where canals could not be made available.
Dr James Anderson, writing on "Cast Iron Rail-ways" in the issue of his "Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History," etc., for November, 1800, had already strongly recommended them as "an eligible mode of conveyance where canals cannot be conveniently adopted"; and he especially advised the construction of one railway in London, from the new docks on the Isle of Dogs to Bishopsgate Street, and another between London and Bath, "for the purpose of conveying unsightly loads, leaving the roads, as at present, open for coaches and light carriages." Such railways, he argued, would render great service in relieving the ordinary road of heavy traffic, and help to solve the road problem of that day—all the more acute because McAdam had not yet shown the country how roads could and should be made or repaired.
On February 11, 1800, Mr Thomas, of Denton, read a paper before the Newcastle Literary Society recommending the introduction of railways, on the colliery principle, for the general carriage of goods; and R. L. Edgeworth urged, in "Nicholson's Journal," in 1802, that for a distance of ten miles or more one of the great roads out of London should be provided with four tracks of railway operated by stationary engines and circulating chains for fast and slow traffic in each direction.
But the most strenuous advocate of all was Thomas Gray. Both before and subsequent to the publication, in 1820, of the first edition of his "Observations on a General Rail-way," he had been pressing his views, in the form of petitions, letters or articles, on members of the Government, peers of the realm, M.P.'s, corporations, capitalists, reviews and newspapers. His idea was that there should be six trunk lines of railway radiating from London, with branch lines linking up towns and villages off these main routes; but he was looked upon as a visionary, if not as a crank and a bore whose impracticable proposals were not deserving of seriousconsideration. It was evidently Thomas Gray whom the "Quarterly Review" had in mind when it said, in March, 1825: "As to those persons who speculate on making railways general throughout the Kingdom, and superseding all the canals, all the waggons, mail and stage-coaches, post-chaises, and, in short, every other mode of conveyance by land and water, we deem them and their visionary schemes unworthy of notice."
In the result Gray was left to spend the last years of his life in obscurity and poverty, and the further development of the railway system of the country was proceeded with on lines altogether different from, and far less efficient, than those he had recommended.
The greatest impetus to the movement was now to come, not from any individual pioneer, but from the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; and this line, in turn, was due far more to purely local conditions and circumstances than to any idea of encouraging the creation of a network of railways on some approach, however remote, to a national or "general" system. The original cause of the Liverpool and Manchester line being undertaken was, in fact, nothing less than extreme dissatisfaction among the traders both of Liverpool and of Manchester with the then existing transport arrangements between these two places.
Just as the Duke of Bridgewater had drawn his strongest arguments in favour of a canal from the shortcomings of the Irwell and Mersey navigation, so now did the traders base their case for a railway mainly on the deficiencies and shortcomings alike of the river navigation and of the canal by which the rivers had been supplemented.
There were, in the first place, physical difficulties. By whichever of the two water routes goods were sent from Liverpool to Manchester, the barges had first to go about eighteen miles along the Mersey to Runcorn, being thus exposed for that distance to the possibly adverse winds and strong tides of an open estuary. The boats often got aground, and many wrecks occurred during stormy weather. On the canal itself the boats could often go with only half loads in the summer, and they were liable to be stopped by frost in winter, while the canal was closed altogether for ten days every year for repairs.
Supplementing these physical disadvantages of the navigation was the attitude of the waterway interests towards the traders whom they held at their mercy. Theoretically there was competition between the rivers and the canal; but the agents of both extorted from the traders the highest possible charges for a most inefficient service.
Joseph Sandars, who was to take a leading part in the movement for a railway between Liverpool and Manchester, has some strong things to say about the "exorbitant and unjust charges of the water carriers" in a "Letter" on the subject of the proposed railway which he published in 1824. He alleged that, whereas the Duke of Bridgewater had been authorised by his Acts to charge not more than two shillings and sixpence per ton for canal dues, his agents had, by various devices, which Sandars details, exacted five shillings and twopence per ton. The trustees had, also, obtained possession of all the warehouses alongside the canal at Manchester, and they were thus able to exact whatever terms they pleased from the bye-carriers and traders. If the canal trustees carried the goods in their own vessels they were entitled to charge six shillings per ton; and their aim seems to have been to render it impossible for the independent carriers to do their business at a lower rate than this. When the carriers, using boats of their own, would not pay the same rate as if the trustees had themselves done the carrying, they were not allowed to land the goods.
Then, by acquiring all the warehouses and all the available land at Preston Brook and Runcorn, the trustees had likewise got control over navigation on the Trent and Mersey Canal, which joins the Bridgewater Canal at Preston Brook. Sandars speaks of Mr Bradshaw, to whom the Duke of Bridgewater had, by his will, given absolute control of his undertakings, as a dictator of canal transport. "No man," he says, in giving examples of the wide extent of the interests that Bradshaw controlled or sought to influence, "can bring a Bill forward for a canal in any part of the Kingdom but Mr Bradshaw interferes as a sort of canal Neptune, directing where, how, and at what price it shall run. He has tortured the trade of the country to become tributory to him in all directions. Every man, every corporate body, seems spellbound the moment Mr Bradshaw interposes his authority."As for the profits of the undertaking, Sandars says: "There is good reason to believe that the nett income of the Duke's canal has, for the last twenty years, averaged nearly £100,000 per annum."
The Old Quay Company had refrained from exceeding the amounts they were authorised to charge for tolls on the Irwell and the Mersey; but there was no restriction on them in regard to traffic they themselves carried, and Sandars alleges that they, also, had secured all the warehouse accommodation on their own line of route, and had almost monopolised the carrying trade, since a bye-carrier's business could hardly be conducted without warehouses. They were thus making far more money than they could have got from the statutory tolls alone. So profitable had the undertaking become that the thirty-nine original proprietors had, Sandars continues, "been paid every other year, for nearly half a century, the total amount of their investment." An immense revenue was being raised at the expense of the merchants and manufacturers, "and for no other purpose than to enrich a few individuals who were daily violating Acts of Parliament, Acts which, by a long course of cunning policy," they had contrived to convert into "the most oppressive and unjust monopoly known to the trade of this Kingdom—a monopoly which," Sandars goes on to declare, "there is every reason to believe compels the public to pay, in one shape or another, £100,000 more per annum than they ought to pay."
The agents of the two companies not only agreed between themselves what charges they would impose but, autocrats as they were, they established a despotic sway over the traders. They set up, says Francis, "a rotation by which they sent as much or as little as suited them, and shipped it how or when they pleased. They held levees, attended by crowds who, admitted one by one, almost implored them to forward their goods. One firm was thus limited by the supreme wisdom of the canal managers to sixty or seventy bags a day. The effects were really disastrous; mills stood still for want of material; machines were stopped for lack of food. Of 5000 feet of pine timber required in Manchester by one house, 2000 remained unshipped from November, 1824, to March, 1825."
Merchants whose timber was thus delayed in transit were fined for allowing it to obstruct the quays; and Sandars tells of one who paid £69 in fines on this account during the course of two months. It was less costly and more convenient to leave the delayed timber where it was, and pay the fines, than to keep moving it to and fro between quay and timber yard; though the effect—especially as the imports of timber increased—was to block up, not only the quays, but the neighbouring streets, which thus became almost impassable for carts and carriages.
Corn and other commodities had often to be kept back eight or ten days on account of a lack of vessels. It sometimes happened that commodities brought across the Atlantic in three weeks were detained in Liverpool for six weeks before they could be sent on to Manchester. The agents would not carry certain kinds of merchandise or particular descriptions of cotton at all. Alternatively they would tell a trader: "We took so much for you yesterday, and we can take only so much for you to-day." "They limited the quantity," says Francis, "they appointed the time, until the difficulties of transit became a public talk and the abuse of power a public trouble. The Exchange of Liverpool resounded with merchants' complaints; the counting-houses of Manchester re-echoed the murmurs of manufacturers."
To avoid serious delays either to raw materials or to manufactured articles the traders were often forced to resort to road transport "because," says Sandars, "speed and certainty as to delivery are of the first importance"; and he adds on this point, "Packages of goods sent from Manchester, for immediate shipment at Liverpool, often pay two or three pounds per ton; and yet there are those who assert that the difference of a few hours in speed can be no object. The merchants know better."
The example already set in so many different parts of the country in the provision of rail-ways, or railways, as they were now being generally called, may well have suggested that in a resort to this expedient would be found the most practical solution of the problem which had caused so much trouble to the traders. Sandars himself says that inasmuch as the two companies were "deaf to all remonstrances, to all entreaties," and were "actuated solely by a spirit ofmonopoly and extortion," the only remedy the public had left was to go to Parliament and ask for permission to establish a new line of conveyance—and one, also, that possessed decided advantages over canal or river transport.
But here there arose a consideration which had a material bearing on the problem immediately concerned, and was to affect the further development of the railway system in general.
Numerous as were the lines already existing at this time, none of them directly competed with the waterways. They were feeders rather than rivals of the canals. Even the Surrey Iron Rail-way and the Stockton and Darlington line, though operating independently of the canal companies, had not come into conflict with them. In the one instance—that of the Merthyr and Cardiff dram-road—in which a railway had hitherto been projected in direct competition with a canal the scheme had been either killed or bought off by the canal interests. But the proposed Liverpool and Manchester Railway was avowedly and expressly designed to compete with the existing water services. It was not simply to supplement the waterways. It threatened to supplant them.
So the waterway companies, representing very powerful interests—inasmuch as by 1824 the amount invested in canal and navigation schemes was about £14,000,000—might well think it necessary to take action in defence of their own position. Down to this time they had regarded the railway as either a friend or a non-competitor, and they had either extended to it a sympathetic support or had, at least, regarded it with a feeling of equanimity. Henceforward they had to look upon it as an opponent.
The project for a Liverpool and Manchester Railway would seem to have first begun to assume definite shape in or about 1822, when William James, a London engineer, who had already proposed a "Central Junction Rail-way or Tram-road" from Stratford-on-Avon to London, made surveys between Liverpool and Manchester, and prepared a set of plans. The certain prospect, however, of vigorous opposition from the waterway interests led some of the traders to think they had better make terms with the men in possession, if they could; and in that same year the corn merchants of Liverpool memorialised the Bridgewater trustees, asking bothfor a reduction in the rate of freight and for better accommodation. Bradshaw replied with an unqualified refusal, and he treated as idle talk the then much-discussed project of a line of railway.
There is no doubt that if, at this period, reasonable concessions had been made to the traders the building of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, although, of course, inevitable, would have been delayed to a later period. The traders shrank, at first, from an open fight, and the project of 1822 was allowed to drop for a time. The situation was found to be so hopeless, however, that in 1824 they decided that mere concessions from the waterway interests would no longer suffice, and that the provision of an alternative means of transport had become imperative. A Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company was now formed, and on October 29, 1824, there was issued a prospectus which was, in effect, a declaration of war against the waterway parties who had so mercilessly abused the situation they thought they controlled. This document, after mentioning that the total quantity of merchandise then passing between Liverpool and Manchester was estimated at 1000 tons a day, proceeded:—
"The committee are aware that it will not immediately be understood by the public how the proprietors of a railroad, requiring an invested capital of £400,000 can afford to carry goods at so great a reduction upon the charge of the present water companies. But the problem is easily solved. It is not that the water companies have not been able to carry goods on reasonable terms, but that, strong in the enjoyment of their monopoly, they have not thought proper to do so. Against the most arbitrary exactions the public have hitherto had no protection, and against the indefinite continuance or recurrence of the evil they have but one security.It is competition that is wanted, and the proof of this assertion may be adduced from the fact that shares in the Old Quay Navigation, of which the original cost was £70, have been sold as high as £1250 each!"
The canal interests in general had, however, anticipated the definite challenge thus given, and there had already been a call to arms in defence of common interests. In a postscript to the prospectus just referred to it was mentioned thatthe Leeds and Liverpool, the Birmingham, the Grand Trunk and other canal companies had issued circulars calling upon "every canal and navigation company in the Kingdom to opposein limine, and by a united effort, the establishment of railroads wherever contemplated."[39]
By this time, therefore, the projectors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway were threatened with the opposition, not alone of the Bridgewater trustees and of the Old Quay Navigation trustees, but of the canal and river navigation interests throughout the country. As Thomas Baines well describes the position in his "History of Liverpool," "The canal proprietors, with an instinctive sense of danger, justly appreciated what they affected to despise, and, with one accord, and with one heart and mind, resolved to crush the rival project which threatened to interrupt, if not to destroy the hopes of prescription and the dreams of a sanguine avarice."
The real strength of the opposition thus being worked up against not only the Liverpool and Manchester Railway but public railways in general will be better understood if I supplement the references I have already made to the shares of canal and navigation companies by a few further figures, showing the financial position to which the waterways had attained, and the extent of the vested interests they represented at the particular period now in question.
In a pamphlet published in 1824, under the title of "A Statement of the Claim of the Subscribers to the Birmingham and Liverpool Rail-road to an Act of Parliament; in reply to the Opposition of the Canal Companies" (quoted in the fifth, or 1825, edition of Thomas Gray's "Observations on a General Iron Rail-way"), it is stated that the amount of capital originally subscribed for the old Birmingham Canal Company was about £55,000, in shares of £100, subject to a stipulation that no one person should hold more than ten shares. The pamphlet proceeds:—
"By various subsequent Acts and collateral cuts, this canal, which has now changed its name to the style of the 'Birmingham Canal Navigation Company,' is extended to a distance of about 60 miles of water, containing 99 locks or thereabouts, 10 fire engines to raise water, number of bridges not known to the present writer.
"The original shares are computed to have cost the proprietors £140 each. In 1782 they were marketably worth £370, and in 1792, £1110. In 1811 an Act increased the shares 500 to 1000, or, in other words, for marketable convenience divided them. In 1813 the half share was sold as high as £585. In 1818 power was given to the company of proprietors further to subdivide the shares as they should deem advisable, on due public notice, etc. The shares are now in eighths. Thus at the present time, and at the last quoted prices in Wetenhall's list, there are 4000 shares of eighths, marketably worth £360 per eighth, each receiving an annual dividend of £12-10-0. Thus the original cost, compared with the present value of the 500 shares, is as £70,000 to £1,444,000, the original share having risen from £140 sterling (or thereabouts) to the sum of £2840."
Shares in the Loughborough Navigation cost the first holders £142-17-0 each. In the "European Magazine" for June, 1821, they are quoted at £2600 a share, and the dividend then being paid is given as 170 per cent. In the issue of the same magazine for November, 1824, the price per share is £4700, and the dividend is shown to have risen to 200 per cent.
Among other canal shares quoted in the "European Magazine" for the dates mentioned are the following:—