The material differences in cost of construction and operation between waterways on a low and uniform level and those crossing considerable eminences, by means of locks, were well recognised by Parliament when approving the lists of tolls to be paid on different waterways. On the Aire and Calder the minimum toll, if a boat passed through a lock, was fixed at five shillings. On the Rochdale Canal the minimum toll for a boat crossing the summit level was ten shillings.[49]The reason for this difference is that whereas the Aire and Calder navigation is but little above sea level throughout, the summit of the Rochdale Canal is at a height of 600 feet above sea level, and is crossed by means of ninety-two locks in thirty-two miles.
The reader will see, therefore, that the want of a common gauge in the construction of artificial waterways, mainly designed, at the outset, to supply the needs of particular districts, may often have been due to more practical reasons than simply a lack of combination or a difference of view on the part of canal constructors, the problem of gauge on canals built at varying elevations, and all depending on water supply, being entirely different from any question as to the gauge or the running of railways on the same or similar routes.
"The necessity of a uniform gauge on canals as on railways," says Clifford, "is now clear enough. We need not wonder that, in the eighteenth century, Parliament was no wiser than the engineers, and had not learned this lesson." It was, however, not entirely a matter of wisdom. There were, also, these inherent defects of the canal system itself to be considered. It is very doubtful if even Parliament, had it possessed the greatest foresight, could have forced, or have persuaded, the canal companies to construct locks of precisely the same dimensions at elevations of 400, 500 or 600 feet, where water was difficult to get or costly to pump, as on canals more or less on the sea level, and deriving an abundant water supply from mountain streams or navigable rivers.
Forbes and Ashford, in "Our Waterways," also think it is much to be regretted that in this country no standard dimension was ever fixed for canals, "as has been done in France." But the superficial area of the United Kingdom,with its mountains and valleys, and hills and dales, presents a wholly different problem, in the matter of canal construction, from that offered by the flat surfaces of France, of Holland, of Belgium or of North Germany. In 230 miles of waterway between Hamburg and Berlin there are three locks. In this country there is an average of one lock for every mile and a quarter of canal navigation. The total number of locks is 2,377, and for each of these there must be allowed a capitalised cost of, on an average, £1360.
The fate that overtook the once prosperous canals of South Wales when the railways could no longer be suppressed by the canal companies, and were allowed to compete fairly with them, has been materially due to their own physical disadvantages in respect of the large number of locks they require to overcome the steep inclines of the mountainous district in which they were made. These facts are brought out in the Fourth (Final) Report of the Royal Commission on Canals and Waterways, where it is said:—
"The Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canals were bought by the Marquis of Bute in 1885. They form a continuous narrow waterway with a total length of about 32 miles. In this distance there are 53 locks.... The waterway is used at the Cardiff end by small coasting vessels, but above this point the traffic has fallen off considerably. The total tonnage carried on the canals amounted in 1888 to 660,364 tons; in 1905 to 249,760 tons. Two railways run parallel to the canals and carry almost all the coal brought down from the collieries near the canals. The gradients from these collieries to the port are considerable. This makes the haulage of full railway trucks easy, and, on the other hand, in the case of the canal makes necessary a great number of locks relatively to the mileage, with consequent slowness of transport.
"The Swansea Canal belongs to the Great Western Railway Company. It is a narrow canal, 16½ miles in length, and has 36 locks. The traffic has diminished ... for reasons similar to those given with respect to the Glamorganshire Canal."
Much more, however, than the provision of locks was necessitated by the physical conditions of a country naturally unsuited for artificial waterways. In some instances the canals were taken across broad valleys by means of viaducts designed to allow of the waterway being maintained at the samelevel; and certain of the works thus carried out were, in their day, deservedly regarded as of considerable engineering importance. The Chirk aqueduct, which carries the Ellesmere Canal across a 700-feet stretch in the Ceriog valley, and at a height of 70 feet above the level of the river, and the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, 1007 feet long, which takes the same canal over the river Dee, are spoken of by Phillips, in his "General History of Inland Navigation" (1803), as "among the boldest efforts of human invention in modern times." Elsewhere the canals had to pass along high embankments or through deep cuttings. Canal tunnels of up to three miles in length were not infrequent, though some of these were made so narrow—in the interests of economy—that they had no towing-path, the boats being taken through by men who lay on their backs on the cargo, and pushed against the sides of the tunnel with their feet. Alternatively, it was sometimes possible to avoid rising ground or deep valleys, necessitating locks, by making wide detours in preference to taking the shortest route, as a railway would do. Thus the distance by canal between Liverpool and Wigan is thirty-four miles, as compared with a distance of only nineteen by rail. From Liverpool to Leeds is 128 miles by canal and eighty by rail. These windings made the canal compare still more unfavourably with the railway when it was considered that the speed of transport on the former was only about two and a half miles an hour, without counting delays at the locks; and of these there are, between Liverpool and Leeds, no fewer than ninety-three.
But just because these engineering works had been so bold and so costly, or left so much to be desired in regard to length of route, and just because so many physical difficulties had had to be overcome, it may well have happened that when what was universally considered a better means of transport was presented, general doubts arose as to the wisdom and practicability of reconstructing, in effect, the whole canal system to enable it to compete better with the railways in catering for that through traffic for which the canals themselves were so ill adapted.
Supplementing these considerations as to the physical configuration of the country is the further fact that in the colliery districts the keeping of the canals in working order involves great trouble, incessant watchfulness and veryconsiderable expenditure on account of subsidences due to coal-mining. In my book on "Canals and Traders" (P. S. King & Son) I have told how "throughout practically the whole of the Black Country, the Birmingham Canal, for a total distance of about eighty miles, has been undermined by colliery workings, and is mainly on the top of embankments which have been raised from time to time, in varying stages, to maintain the waterway above the level of the ground that has sunk because of the coal mines underneath." Many of these embankments, as I have had the opportunity of seeing for myself, are now at a height of from twenty to thirty feet above the present surface of the land, and in one instance, at least, the subsidences have been so serious that an embankment twenty feet high and half a mile long has taken the place of what was formerly a cutting. If the Birmingham Canal had not been controlled by the London and North-Western Railway Company, who are under a statutory obligation to keep it in good and effective working condition, it would inevitably have collapsed long ago. No independent canal company, deriving its revenue from canal tolls and charges alone, could have stood the heavy and continuous drain upon its resources which, in these circumstances, the canal would have involved; and like conditions apply to various other railway-owned canals in the north, in Wales, and elsewhere.
Concerning the Glamorganshire Canal, it is said in "Transport Facilities in South Wales and Monmouthshire," by Clarence S. Howells:[50]"The present owners have spent £25,000 on the canal since 1885 in an ineffectual attempt to revive its waning fortunes. One of its many difficulties is the subsidence caused by colliery workings."
Dealing with the general position in regard to canal transport in the United Kingdom, J. S. Jeans remarks in "Waterways and Water Transport" (1890):—
"The railway companies have been accused of acquiring canal property in order that they might destroy it, and thereby get rid of a dangerous rival. This is probably not the case. The railway companies are fully aware of the fact that water transport under suitable conditions is more economical than rail transport. It would therefore have suited them, at thesame rates, to carry by water heavy traffic, in the delivery of which time was not of so much importance. But the canals as they came into their possession were naturally unadapted for such traffic without being more or less remodelled, and this the railway companies have not attempted.
"When we consider the enormous disadvantages under which the majority of the canals of this country now labour, the great matter for wonder is, not that they do not secure the lion's share of the traffic, but that they get any traffic at all."
If, for the sake of argument, we leave out of account all the "enormous disadvantages" here alluded to, and assume that the physical difficulties already detailed could be overcome without much trouble or great expense (though this would, indeed, be a prodigious assumption), we should still have the fact that the number of traders in the country who could hope to benefit from any possible system of internal navigation would necessarily be limited to those in certain districts, whereas the railway can be taken anywhere, and be made to serve the interests of each and every district or community in the country.
It is true that when commodities can be sent direct from an ocean-going vessel to a works situated immediately alongside a canal, the waterway may have the advantage over the railway; and the same may be the case as regards manufactured goods forwarded in the opposite direction. Of the 235,000 tons of flints, clay and other potters' materials brought into the Potteries district of North Staffordshire during 1910, no fewer than 200,000 tons, imported at Runcorn, Ellesmere Port or Weston Port, were taken by canal to pottery works located on or near to the canal banks. In these circumstances the North Staffordshire Railway Company, who also control the Trent and Mersey Navigation, cannot, as railway owners, compete with themselves as canal owners. In the case of the Aire and Calder, the physical conditions of which are exceptionally favourable, coal can readily be sent from the collieries immediately alongside the waterway to the steamers or the coal ships in the port of Goole. On the Birmingham Canal, also, the traffic between collieries and works, or between works and railway transhipping basins, on the same level, is already so considerable that no great increase could be accommodated without carrying out on the canal a wideningwhich would be fabulously costly, and, also, wholly impracticable, on account of the great iron-works and other industrial establishments which line almost the entire twelve-mile route between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, forming, with their hundreds of private basins, the actual boundary of the canal on one side or the other. To "adapt" the Birmingham Canal to through traffic would produce chaos for the local traffic.
Mr Jeans thus goes a little too far when he makes the sweeping statement that "Canals as they were built a century ago have no longer any function to fulfil that is worthy of serious consideration. Their mission is ended, their use is an anachronism." Even the title given to the present chapter, "Decline of Canals," is to be read subject to the exceptions represented by those of the waterways that still answer these useful local purposes and should have every encouragement therein. Mr Jeans is, however, fully warranted in declaring that "it would be the idlest of idle dreams to expect that the canal system of this or any other country as originally constructed can be resuscitated, or even temporarily galvanised into activity, in competition with the railways."
There is a still further consideration.
Whatever the prospective advantages of resuscitation when the point of despatch and the point of delivery are both on the same canal—and especially when both are on the same level of the canal, so that passage through locks is unnecessary—it must be obvious that when commodities are despatched from, or consigned to, places situate at such a distance from a canal that supplementary transport is necessary, the cost thereof must be added to the amount of the canal charges. The sum of the two may then be so little below the cost of rail transport that the latter—coupled with the greater speed and the greater convenience in the way, perhaps, of sidings or of lines of rails coming right into the works—will be preferred. Academic theories, on paper, as to the comparative costs of hauling given weights of commodities on water and rail respectively may, in fact, be rendered futile by (1) the supplementary cost of transport to or from the waterway and of various services or conveniences included in the railway rate but not included in the canal charges; and (2) the consideration that if a large sum of money be spent onimproving the canals the interest thereon must either be met by means of increased canal charges—in which event the canal-users would have no advantage over the railway-users—or remain as a permanent burden on the community.
How the cost of the supplementary charges and services operates in practice may be shown by a reference to the London coal trade, coal being a commodity which is regarded by those who favour State ownership of the canals as one specially adapted for waterway transport.
Except as regards the consignments of sea-borne coal, the domestic coal supply of London is carried almost exclusively by rail. The trucks can generally go right up to the collieries; they convey the coal to special and extensive railway sidings, there to await orders; and they proceed thence, as required, to the suburban railway station or depôt nearest to the premises of the actual consumer, in any part of the country; whereas coal sent by canal would first have to be taken from the colliery to the canal, and there be discharged into the boat, then be conveyed, say, to the Thames, next be transferred from boat to cart, and finally be taken by road across London to destination, with the subsidiary considerations (1) that with each fresh handling the coal would deteriorate in value; (2) that the traders would lose the advantage of railway coal sidings and station depots; and (3) that the railway truck is a better unit than the canal boat for the various descriptions or qualities of coal dealt in by the average coal merchant, whose prejudices in favour of rail transport over canal transport, when the consumers are not actually located on or quite close to the waterway, can thus be accounted for by strictly business considerations.
The conclusion is forced upon one that, notwithstanding the useful purposes which a certain number of canals are still serving, any resuscitation of canals in general, or even any provision of improved cross-country canal routes passing over the "grand ridge," at the cost of an indefinite number of millions to the country, can hardly be regarded as coming within the range of sound economics. It certainly is favoured by a larger number of traders than the comparatively small proportion who would be able, or willing, to use the canals when they had been improved; but this support is directly due to a belief that nationalisation—though what is proposedis only a partial nationalisation—of the canals would tend towards keeping down railway rates.
In other words, the scheme is but a further development of that policy which aims at enforcing the principle of competition irrespective of cost, and without regard for the capital expenditure on which a fair return ought to be assured. One of the witnesses examined before the Royal Commission on Canals and Waterways said there was a local feeling against the Wilts and Berks Canal being taken in hand by the county council "because," he said, "we are all afraid of the rates; but," he added, "from what I have heard from traders and others, they would like to see it back again, mainly as a means of cutting down railway rates." Mr Remnant, one of the Commissioners, says in his separate report, in alluding to import and export traffic, that most of the evidence given on this question "seemed to point to a desire on the traders' part, not so much for the waterways as for lower railway rates, in order to enable them to face foreign competition"; while Mr Davison, another of the Commissioners, who also dissents from the recommendations of the Majority Report, speaks of many of the canals as being "of little economic value to the trade of the country, apart from whatever influence they may have in keeping down railway rates," though he adds: "If this latter result were otherwise secured their continued existence could not be justified on economic grounds."
Any effect which the carrying out of the Majority Report scheme of canal improvementmighthave on railway rates would, all the same, be felt only in the towns or localities directly concerned. Benefit would result to (1) those traders who could use the canals, and (2) those who, though not using the canals, obtained the lower railway rates, if reductions really were secured through the canal competition; while traders at a distance from the waterways would not only have to help to pay the cost, though themselves deriving no benefit therefrom, but might even see two classes of their own competitors in the favoured districts gain an advantage over them—one set from State-owned and State-aided canals, and another from the local reductions in railway rates to which those canals might be expected to lead.
The proposals of the Royal Commission may well be approved by certain localities or individual traders on the lineof route of the canals proposed to be taken in hand. They are hardly likely, however, to commend themselves to the traders and taxpayers of the country in general.
My own view is that if the State is prepared to find money for the purpose of cheapening the cost of transport, it could do so to better advantage if, instead of spending millions on an impracticable and partial scheme of canal resuscitation, it lightened the burden of taxation now falling on the railway companies, and thus improved their position in regard, not merely to traders in particular districts, but to the trade and industries of the United Kingdom as a whole.
DECLINE OF TURNPIKES
The inherent defects of the turnpike system must in themselves have been fatal to its permanent continuance, irrespective of the influence of the railways, which did not kill the turnpikes so much as merely give them thecoup de grace.
No one can deny the adequacy of the time that Parliament had devoted to the kindred subjects of roads and waggons. By 1838—and only a few years, therefore, later than the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway—Parliament had passed no fewer than 3800 private and local turnpike Acts, and had authorised the creation in England and Wales of 1116 turnpike trusts, controlling 22,000 miles of road. But the whole system was hopelessly inefficient, wasteful and burdensome, besides being as unsatisfactory in its administration as it was in its results.
Managed or directed by trustees and surveyors under the conditions detailed in Chapter X, the actual work on the turnpike roads was mainly carried out by statute labour, pauper labour or labour paid for out of the tolls, out of the receipts from the composition for statute duty, or, as a last resource, at the direct cost of the ratepayers, who were thus made responsible for the turnpike as well as for the parish roads.
Statute labour was a positive burlesque of English local government. Archdeacon Plymley says in his "General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire" (1803): "There is no trick, evasion or idleness that shall be deemed too mean to avoid working on the road: sometimes the worst horses are sent; at others a broken cart, or a boy, or an old man past labour, to fill: they are sometimes sent an hour or two too late in the morning, or they leave off much sooner than the proper time, unless the surveyor watch the whole day."
In the article already quoted from the "WestminsterReview" for October, 1825, it is said: "Statute labour on the parish roads is limited to six days work and on the turnpikes to three. But it is now found generally expedient to demand or take money in lieu of labour, according to a rate to be fixed by the justices in different places.... In practice the statute labour was frequently a farce, half of the time being spent in going and returning and in conversation and idleness."
An authority referred to in Postlethwayt's "Dictionary" (1745) had suggested that criminals condemned to death for minor offences should, instead of being transported, be ordered to do a year's work on the highway. He further recommended, in all seriousness, that arrangements should be made with the African Company for the importation of 200 negroes as road-repairers, they being, as he said, "generally persons to do a great deal of work." Failing criminals and negroes, some of the parishes did employ paupers, gangs of whom were to be seen pretending to work at road-mending, and getting far more degeneration for themselves than they did good for the roads.
In 1835 Parliament abolished both statute labour and statute labour composition, thenceforward wholly superseded by highway rates as applying to the whole of the minor roads for which the parish was responsible.
Bad as the statute labour system had been, its abolition involved a loss to the turnpike trusts estimated at about £200,000 a year; and this was a serious matter to trustees whose financial position was becoming hopeless in view of their liabilities and the discouraging nature of their outlook. Such discouragement was due in great part to the advent of the railways, but not entirely so, the Select Committee of 1839 on Turnpike Trusts saying in their report that "the gradual decline in the transit on turnpike roads in some parts of the country arises not only from the railways formed but from steam vessels plying on rivers and as coasting traders"; and they added: "Whenever mechanical power has been substituted for animal power, the result has hitherto been that the labour is performed at a cheaper rate."
The cost of making and repairing turnpike roads, especially under the primitive conditions still widely retained, notwithstanding the improved methods introduced by Telfordand McAdam, was in itself a most serious item, apart from the excessive expenditure on administration. Dr James Anderson says on this subject in the issue of his "Recreations" for November, 1800:—
"I have been assured, and believe it to be true, though I cannot pledge myself for the certainty of the fact, that there is annually laid out on repairs upon the road from Hyde Park to Hounslow considerably above £1000 a mile. A turnpike road cannot be made in almost any situation for less, as I am told, than £1000 per mile; but where it is of considerable width, as near great towns, it will run from £1500 to £2000 per mile; and in annual repairs, including the purchase price of materials, carting them to the road, spreading, raking off, and carting away again, from £100 to £1000 a mile."
The trustees generally raised loans to meet their first expenses, payment of interest being guaranteed out of the tolls levied; but though, at one time, and especially before the competition of railways became active, the security was regarded as adequate, an unduly costly management, combined with decreasing receipts from tolls, resulted in the piling up of huge financial liabilities which the trusts found it impossible to clear off in addition to meeting current expenditure. The Select Committee on Turnpike Trusts in 1839 reported on this subject: "The present debt of the turnpike trusts in England and Wales exceeds £9,000,000, and it is annually increasing, in consequence of the practice prevailing in several of the trusts of converting the unpaid interest into principal, the trustees giving bonds bearing interest for the amount of interest due." At this time there were no fewer than eighty-four trusts which had paid no interest on loans for several years, and there were said to be some trusts which had paid no interest for sixty years. Sir James McAdam, son of John Loudon McAdam, informed the Select Committee of 1839 that the amount of unpaid interest on the trusts at that time was £1,031,096.
In order to improve their financial position, the trustees generally adopted the expedient either of seeking Parliamentary authority to increase their tolls or of setting up the largest possible number of toll-gates along their own particular bit of road. In either case it was the road-user who paid.
The Select Committee of 1819 reported that in the threepreceding Sessions ninety turnpike trusts, seeking renewal of their Acts, had asked for authority to increase their tolls on the ground that they could not pay their debts without the assistance of Parliament. The alternative to an increase of tolls was carried so far that it became customary for the trusts to set up a toll-gate wherever there was the slightest excuse for so doing.
"In some places," says J. Kearsley Fowler, in "Records of Old Times," "as, for instance, my native town of Aylesbury, the place was literally hemmed in like a fortified city,—not even an outlet to exercise a horse without paying a toll." There were, he tells us, seven different trusts to maintain at Aylesbury alone.
Mr George Masefield, a solicitor residing at Ledbury, Herefordshire, said when giving evidence before the Select Committee on Turnpike Trusts in 1864 that in the twenty-one miles between Ledbury and Kingston, a journey he frequently made, he had to go through eight turnpike gates. In the eight miles' journey to Newent he passed through four gates and paid three times; and in the thirteen miles to Worcester he went through six gates and paid at five.
In Gloucestershire, said the "Morning Star" of September 30, 1856, "it sometimes happens you have to pay five turnpikes in twelve miles"; though such were the inequalities of the burden that in some other counties, said the same paper, one could go for miles without paying anything.
These inequalities had been previously pointed out in the "Westminster Review" article. In speaking of the practice followed in the location of turnpikes, the writer declared that "gates are sometimes placed so as to tax one portion and exempt another, so as to make strangers and travellers pay, while those who chiefly profit by the roads, and who destroy them most, are exempted." He further said that "the Welsh, with their characteristic cunning, have contrived to exempt their own heavy carts and to levy their tolls on the light barouches of unlucky visitors"; that one might see, in Scotland, three toll-gates, and all to be paid, in the space of a hundred yards; that one might, as against this, ride thirty miles without paying one toll; and that "the inhabitants of Greenwich pay the tolls for the half of Kent."
London in 1818 had twelve turnpike trusts for 210 miles ofroad. The tolls they collected in that year amounted to £97,482; the expenses were £98,856, and the accumulated debt of the dozen trusts was £62,658.
On the Middlesex side of London there were 87 turnpike gates and bars within four miles of Charing Cross, or, including the Surrey side, a total of 100 within a four-mile radius. "Let the traveller drive through the Walworth gate southward," says J. E. Bradfield, in his "Notes on Toll Reform" (1856), "and note how every road, every alley, every passage has its 'bar.' The inhabitants cannot move north, east, south, or west without paying one toll; and some of them cannot get out of the parish without two tolls. The cry at every corner of Camberwell is 'Toll.'" The position of Walworth and Camberwell does not, however, appear to have been at all exceptional. In Besant's "Survey of London" it is stated that a map of London and its environs, published in 1835, shows that it was then impossible to get away from town without going through turnpikes. On every side they barred the way.
In the case of a stage-coach with four horses running every day between London and Birmingham, the tolls paid amounted to £1428 in the year. At one gate on the Brighton road the tolls collected came to £2400 in the year, and of this amount £1600 was from coaches. The payment of these tolls was a serious tax on the coaches, though an important source of revenue for the turnpike trustees; and in proportion as the coaches were taken off the roads, owing to the competition of the railways, the financial position of the trusts became still worse. Mail-coaches were exempted from tolls in England, though they had to pay them in Scotland.
The amount of the tolls varied according to the trusts or the locality. Kearsley Fowler says that in Aylesbury for a horse ridden or led, passing through the gates, the toll was 1½d.; for a vehicle drawn by one horse, 4½d.; for a carriage and pair, 9d., and so on. The tolls, he adds, fell with particular hardship on farmers, and became a tax on their trade. When sending away their corn or other produce with a waggon and four horses they paid, in some instances, 1s. 6d. or 2s. 3d. If, as often occurred, the waggon passed through two gates in eight or nine miles, the payments came to 3s. or 4s. 6d. If the waggon returned with coal or feeding stuffs it had to pay the same tolls over again.
Nor did the toll-payers get anything like value for their money. About fifty per cent of the amount received by the trustees, either direct from the tolls or from the persons farming them, went in interest and management expenses; and although the remainder might be spent on road repairs, a good proportion of this was wasted because of the inefficient way in which the work was too often done. Mr Wrightson, a member of the Special Committee of 1864, declared that every toll-gate cost on an average £25 a year, and that every turnpike trust had, on an average, five toll-gates. The total number of trusts in 1864 was stated in the Fifteenth Annual Report of the Local Government Board (1886) to be 1048. An average of five toll-gates for each would give them a total of 5240; and an average cost of maintenance of £25 a year for this number of toll-gates gives a total of £131,000 a year as the cost simply of toll-gate maintenance, apart from salaries of official staff and other items. Mr R. M. Brereton, surveyor for the county of Norfolk, said in the course of his evidence before the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Highway Acts (1881): "In Norfolk we collected £15,000 a year for tolls, but we only spent £7000 a year of that actually on the roads."
It might even happen that, after costs of management and payment of interest had been met, there was no balance left for road maintenance. In the Report of the Select Committee of 1839 on Turnpike Trusts it is stated that in several instances the creditors of the trusts had exercised the power given to them under the General Turnpike Act (3 Geo. IV., c. 126) of taking possession of the tolls to secure payment of their mortgage or bonded securities and the interest due to them. "The result," says the report, "must be to throw the burden of repairs and of the maintenance of such roads on the several parishes through which they pass. Should such measures now taken by some creditors become general throughout the kingdom, the proprietors and holders of land will not only have to pay the tolls as usual, but must also be called on to defray the expense of keeping the road in a proper state for the public use, by an additional highway rate to be levied on the parishes where the tolls paid by the public are seized by the creditor."
In addition to management expenses, expenditure on the roads and payment of interest, allowance had to be madefor the profits expected by those to whom the trustees farmed the tolls, offering them by auction to the highest bidder. The contractors generally had a private understanding among themselves as to the terms they were prepared to give. One of them, Lewis Levy by name, farmed from £400,000 to £500,000 of turnpike tolls within a radius of from sixty to eighty miles of London; and we may assume that he would not have gone into the business on so large a scale as this unless it had brought him an adequate return.
The ultimate result of these various conditions was that the sum total of the indirect taxation thus collected from the public was not only great in itself, and out of all proportion to the benefits received, but was inadequate to cover an expenditure already swollen to abnormal proportions. In his evidence before the Select Committee of 1839 Sir James McAdam stated that in 1836 the gross income of the different roads was £1,776,586, and the expenditure for the year was £1,780,349, exceeding by £3,763 the whole of the income. In Lancashire alone the turnpike tolls came to £123,000 a year.
Collection of this considerable revenue from the community had, of course, been duly authorised by Parliament; yet the trustees were under no obligation to account for the moneys they received. Not only was there free scope given for jobbery, embezzlement and malpractices in general, but the turnpike commissioners could, as the "Edinburgh Review" pointed out in 1819, abuse their trust and yet go on levying tolls, keeping possession of the road and defying complaints. The writer on "Roads" in "Rees' Cyclopædia" (1819) further declares that "either from bad management, from party influence or from chicanery and ignorance of surveyors and contractors, the roads in many places are not only laid out in the most absurd direction but are so badly constructed and kept in so wretched a state of repair that they are almost impassable."
On the other hand, the great advancement in coaching, and the higher speeds attained by the coaches during the first three decades of the nineteenth century suggest that the improvements introduced by Telford and McAdam could not have been without good effect on the chief of the main roads, at least, however inefficient the making and repairing of the turnpike and parish roads in general may still have remained.All the same, and in spite of the greater road traffic, the financial difficulties into which the trusts drifted and the burdensome nature of the tax imposed by the toll-system on traders, agriculturists and the public were beyond all doubt.
Various attempts were made to improve the position of the trusts.
A Committee of the House of Commons recommended in 1821 that Continuance Bills for the periodical renewal of Turnpike Acts should be exempted from fees. Another Committee made a like recommendation in 1827, and subsequently a measure was passed scheduling in an annual public statute the continuation of any trusts on the point of expiring.
Then, as there was so obviously an excessive number of trusts, with a consequent undue expenditure on management, a Committee which sat in 1820 strongly recommended the consolidation of turnpike trusts around London. An Act consolidating those on the north of the Thames was passed, the preamble thereof reciting no fewer than 120 other Acts of Parliament which the new measure superseded.
In 1833, 1836 and 1839 other Committees recommended a general consolidation of trusts; but little, apparently, was done in this direction in England, though in several counties of Scotland, as mentioned in the Report of the Select Committee of 1864, the system was greatly improved by the appointment of Road Boards which, by a consolidation of various trusts and the association of several counties for the repair and maintenance of roads, effected a material diminution in the expenses. In Ireland, also, the abolition of the system of statute labour in 1763, the placing of the business of roadmaking under the control of the grand juries, and the meeting both of the cost of road repairs and the payment of interest on the existing debts out of the rates of the counties and baronies led to better roads being provided at a less burdensome cost.
By a General Turnpike Act passed in 1841, justices were authorised, on proof being given to them of a deficiency in the revenue of a turnpike trust, to order the parish surveyor to pay to the trust a portion of the highway rates, to be laid out in actual repairs on parts of the turnpike road within the parish.
Bondholders petitioned Parliament that any deficiencyin their profits owing to railway competition should be made good by the railway companies; but although this principle was already being enforced, in effect, in the case of many of the canal companies, it was not adopted in that of the turnpike trusts.
The various measures resorted to did no more than afford temporary relief to the trusts, and, in the meantime, the obligation cast upon the community of having to support so inefficient and so wasteful a system was found to be intolerably vexatious and burdensome.
While some persons were praising turnpikes because of such improvement as they had effected on the roads, the "Gentleman's Magazine" of May, 1749, had spoken of them as "a great disadvantage in our competition for trade with France, where they have excellent roads without turnpikes, which are no small tax on travellers and carriers." Not only were the tolls a tax on all commodities carried by road, but they constituted, to a large extent, an unprofitable tax, because so considerable a proportion of the total amount collected went to the support of officials, contractors, lessees, toll-gate keepers and others, who lived on the system, and so small a proportion—after allowing for money wasted—was usefully spent to the direct advantage of the traders in facilitating actual transport. The Committee of 1864 condemned the whole system of turnpike tolls as "unequal in pressure, costly in collection, inconvenient to the public, and injurious as causing a serious impediment to intercourse and traffic."
In Wales popular dissatisfaction with the great increase of toll-gates had led in 1843-4 to the "Rebecca riots," bands of men 500 strong, their leaders disguised in women's clothes, promenading the roads of Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire and Breconshire at night and throwing down the offending gates. It was only with considerable difficulty and much bloodshed that the disturbances were eventually suppressed by a strong force of soldiers. A commission appointed to inquire into the matter found there was a genuine grievance, and an Act of Parliament was passed which consolidated the trusts in South Wales, regulated the number of toll-gates there, and provided for the extinction of the debt on the roads by the advance of about £200,000, at three per cent interest, by thePublic Works Loan Commissioners, to be repaid by terminable annuities within thirty years. The loan was duly paid off by 1876.
Inasmuch as English traders and travellers simply grumbled and paid, and refrained from demonstrating as the more emotional Welshmen had done, they had to wait longer for any material relief from the grievances from which they, also, were suffering.
Down to 1864 the duty of deciding in what order turnpike Acts should be permitted to expire, instead of being renewed, was, as Mr George Sclater-Booth (Lord Basing), formerly President of the Local Government Board, informed the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Highway Acts, when giving evidence before them in 1880, one of the functions of the Home Office, and the Home Office, he said, "was timid at that time in allowing these turnpike trusts to lapse." Pressure was brought to bear on the department with a view to effecting a more rapid extinction of the trusts; though the ratepayers had not then realised the results to themselves of the cost of maintenance of disturnpiked roads being thrown on the parish.
Following on the report of a Special Committee of the House of Commons, recommending that the Turnpike Acts should be allowed to expire as rapidly as possible, a House of Commons Turnpike Committee was appointed in 1864 to take over the whole business from the Home Office. Thenceforward this Committee prepared every year a schedule of turnpike trusts which they thought should expire, the schedule being embodied in an annual Turnpike Acts Continuance Bill which was duly passed by Parliament. So great was the zeal shown by the Committee that from 1864 roads were disturnpiked at the rate of from 1000 to 1700 or 1800 miles a year. "This," said Mr Sclater-Booth, "has been most distinctly the policy of representative members of the House of Commons, and not the policy of the Government of the day, except in so far as the Government of the day has foreborne to exercise any interference with the Turnpike Continuance Act in Parliament."
While the reduction in the number of turnpike trusts had been an undoubted boon to users of the roads, it had thrown heavy burdens on the local ratepayers. For a period of acentury, at least, most of them had, in effect, and except in certain circumstances, been relieved by the turnpike system of their common law obligation to keep main roads in repair; but in proportion as the trusts expired the obligations in respect to maintenance fell back again on the parishes. Under, also, old enactments which still remained in force, not only land and houses but many other kinds of property—stock-in-trade, timber and "personal estate" generally—were assessed for highways and other purposes. These conditions remained until 1840, when an Exemption Act suspended the power of levying rates on stock-in-trade, and other changes in the law of assessment were made subsequently.
With the greater activity, from the year 1864, of the House of Commons Turnpike Committee the burdens on the unfortunate parishioners became heavier than before; and in the Turnpike Continuance Act of 1870 there was inserted a clause to the effect that the cost of repairing any roads disturnpiked after the passing of that Act should be borne by the highway district, where there was one, and not by the parish. In 1874 and 1875 the House of Commons Turnpike Committee "made very strong complaints," Mr Sclater-Booth stated in his evidence, that they would not have proceeded so fast as they had done, and would not have recommended Parliament to allow so many miles of road to be disturnpiked year by year, if they had not felt satisfied that the Government would have provided some remedy for the injustice they occasioned. "They seemed to me," the witness continued, "to have had no compunction in causing the injustice to be occasioned before any remedy was provided for it; but, having permitted that injustice to take place, they complained year after year of the action, or, rather, of the non-action, of the Government in not applying a remedy for these grievances."
No effective remedy was, in fact, provided until 1882. Early in the Session of that year notice was given in the House of Commons of a resolution which declared that "in the opinion of this House immediate relief should in some form be afforded to ratepayers from the present unjust incidence of rates appropriated for the maintenance of main roads in England." Mr Gladstone undertook that something should be done in conformity with the spirit of this resolution, and thereupon a grant designed to cover one-fourth of the cost of maintainingdisturnpiked roads was made annually by Parliament down to the year 1888, when the relief granted was increased to one-half of the total cost by a further sum of £256,000 allocated by Mr Goschen to the same purpose from his Budget for that year.
The actual expenditure under these successive grants is shown in a Report on Local Taxation made, in 1893, by Mr H. H. Fowler (afterwards Lord Wolverhampton). The amounts there given are as follows:—
After the passing of the Local Government Act of 1888 the grants were discontinued, the said Act providing that from the 1st of April, 1889, all main and disturnpiked roads should, with certain exceptions (and as distinct from parish highways), be maintained by the county councils.
Parliament had thus at least broadened out the ratepayers' burden in respect to road maintenance by spreading the charges over a larger area; and it was, also, affording a very considerable measure of relief to the road-users in freeing them from the obligations to pay tolls for the keeping up, not simply of the roads, but of a machinery as costly as it was inefficient. There was still a third set of interests to be considered, as represented by those who had lent money to the turnpike trusts for road construction or repairs, in the expectation of getting a fair return. The proportions of the turnpike debt, the falling-off in tolls, and the mismanagement of the system generally made the outlook for the bondholders very unfavourable; but the best that was possible, in the circumstances, was done for them.
Under an Act passed in 1872 it was laid down that, for the purpose of facilitating the abolition of tolls on any turnpikeroad, the highway board and the trustees might mutually agree that the former should take upon itself the maintenance and repair of such road, and, also, pay off and discharge either the entire debt in respect thereto or such sum by way of compensation as the Local Government Board, after an inquiry, might determine. By a further Act, passed in 1873, highway boards were authorised to raise loans for the more effective carrying out of this arrangement, while Clifford states in his "History of Private Bill Legislation" that "there have, also, been Acts confirming more than 200 Provisional Orders passed to arrange the debts of these unlucky trusts, extinguish arrears of interest, allow compositions, and generally make the best of some very disastrous investments."[51]
How rapid the actual decline in the number of trusts was from the year 1864, when the House of Commons Turnpike Committee came into existence, is shown by the following figures, taken from the annual reports of the Local Government Board for 1886 and 1890:—
Of the five survivals on January 1, 1890, three were to expire in that same year and one in 1896, leaving only one the fate of which was then undecided. It may be assumed that by the end of 1896 the system of turnpikes on public (as distinct from private) roads, which had for so long a period played so prominent, so vexatious, and, in many respects, so unsatisfactory a rôle in inland communication, had wholly disappeared.
Turnpike roads, no less than canals, undoubtedly conferred great advantages on the growing trade and industries of the country. Each, however, had its serious drawbacks and disadvantages, and, in the result, the shortcomings of the turnpikes, added to the shortcomings of the canals, gave still greater emphasis to the welcome offered by traders to the railways which were to become, to so large an extent, substitutes for both.