Transport and the industrial city: Manchester and the canal age, 1750–1850 9781526130471

Citation preview

Transport and the

industrial city Manchester and the Canal Age, 1750–1850

PETER MAW

Transport and the industrial city

Transport and the industrial city Manchester and the canal age, 1750–1850

Peter Maw

Manchester University Press Manchester

Copyright © Peter Maw 2013 The right of Peter Maw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 8360 0

hardback

First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

Contents

List of tables List of figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations

page vi ix x xi

1 Introduction 2 Manchester canals: trade, commodities and markets 3 Competition and complementarity: canals, roads and railways in Manchester 4 Bringing goods to market: carriers in the canal age 5 On the waterfront: basins, warehouses and wharves in canal-age Manchester 6 The waterfront and the factory 7 Canals, transport and the Industrial Revolution in Manchester 8 Conclusion

1 28

148 200 229 267

Bibliography Index

276 298

69 112

List of tables

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 3.1 3.2 3.3

Bridgewater tonnage, trading receipts and estimated tolls, 1765–1850 (three-year averages) Bridgewater collieries and canal coal trade (three-year averages) Coal distribution via the Bridgewater Canal from the Trustees’ coal mines in Worsley, 1846 Bridgewater Canal, trade by location, 1848 Mersey and Irwell Navigation tonnage, trading receipts and estimated tolls, 1765–1850 (three-year averages) Mersey and Irwell Navigation, trade by location, 1848 Commodity composition of trade on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1847 Tonnages, tolls and dividends on the Rochdale Canal, 1810–54 (three-year averages) Tolls collected on the Rochdale Canal by location, 1815–45 (£) Commodity composition of Rochdale Canal Company’s trade, by tonnage and tolls, 1810–45 (percentage share) Tolls and tonnage on the Ashton, Peak Forest and Huddersfield canals, 1812–50 Tolls by commodity on the Ashton Canal, 1830–47 (three-year averages, £) Tolls by commodity on the Peak Forest Canal, 1830–44 (three-year averages, £) Tolls by commodity on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, 1827–34 (£) Toll collection on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, 1827–34 Manchester turnpikes, 1724–1826 Carriers’ per ton freight charges for merchandise carried between Manchester and English towns in the late eighteenth century Carriers’ per ton freight charges for merchandise carried between Manchester and key English towns, 1825–36

34 35 36 40 41 41 43 44 46 47 49 50 50 51 51 72 76 76

List of tables 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

3.8 3.9 3.10 4.1 4.2

4.3 4.4

4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 5.1 5.2 5.3

vii

Railway authorisation and completion in Manchester, 1826–51 85 Carriers’ per ton freight charges for merchandise carried between Manchester and key English towns in the 1840s 86 Average annual freight trade on Manchester railways and major connections, 1842–44 87 Trading receipts of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1831–45 (£) 90 Ownership and operation of waterways in Manchester and region, 1855 97 Ownership status of canals in the Manchester district, c.1860 98 Rochdale Canal, freight tonnages and toll income, 1831–80 101 Annual average tonnages carried by Bridgewater vessels and public carriers on the Bridgewater Canal, 1791–1810 114 Annual average tonnages carried by Bridgewater vessels and public carriers in the Liverpool–Manchester trade on the Bridgewater Canal, 1815–24 114 Annual tonnages carried and tolls paid by Bridgewater vessels and public carriers on the Bridgewater Canal, 1844–47 116 Annual tonnages carried by the navigation company and public carriers in the Manchester–Liverpool trade on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1838–48 121 Number of public carriers on Manchester’s canals, 1815–55 124 Bridgewater Canal trade to the midlands and south from Manchester, 1845 127 Bridgewater Canal trade to the midlands and south from Liverpool, 1845 127 Major carriers in the Manchester–Liverpool trade on the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1765–1825 129 Major carriers in the Liverpool–Manchester trade, 1849 130 Tolls paid by major public carriers on the Rochdale Canal, 1806–55 (£) 133 Tonnages hauled by private carriers in the Salford coal trade on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, 1834–37 138 Tolls paid by private carriers on the Rochdale Canal, 1815–55 (£) 140 Warehouse development on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in Manchester, c.1740–1840 154 Warehouses in the Bridgewater Canal basin, c.1770–1840 157 Warehouses in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1807–41 166

viii

5.4

List of tables

Warehouses in the Ashton Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1798–1838 172 5.5 Warehouse receipts on the Bridgewater Canal, 1786–1810 (three-year averages, £) 175 5.6 Occupancy and rateable value of the Rochdale Canal Company’s warehouses in Piccadilly basin, 1842 176 5.7 Warehouse occupancy in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1857 177 5.8 Wharf use in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1857 181 5.9 Occupancy and usage of the Brownsfield wharves, Piccadilly, 1837–57 184 5.10 Usage and location of wharves and yards in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford, 1850 (detailing sites located within 20 yards of a waterway) 185 5.11 Location of wharves and yards in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford, 1850 (detailing sites located within 175 yards of a waterway) 187 5.12 Rateable value (£) of property in Manchester’s water navigation companies’ canal basins, 1800–55 188 6.1 Distribution of industrial sites relative to the waterfront in Manchester, 1850 203 6.2 Rateable value of industrial sites relative to distance from the waterfront in Manchester, 1850 (£) 204 6.3 Locations of cotton factories in Manchester and Salford, 1850 206 6.4 Location of metal/engineering works in Manchester and Salford, 1850 208 6.5 Cotton factories in Manchester parish, 1840 218 6.6 Cotton/smallwares factories in Manchester and Salford, 1850 219 6.7 Factory industry in Manchester by sector, c.1850 220

List of figures

1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2 6.3

Major canal and river navigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire, 1850 Urban extent and waterfront in Manchester, c.1760 Urban extent and waterfront in Manchester, c.1850 Tonnage data for Manchester’s canals and their connections, 1791–1850 (three-year averages) Income from tolls on Manchester’s canals 1765–1850 (three-year averages) Commodities carried on the Rochdale Canal 1810–49 (tons) Tolls paid on the Rochdale Canal by commodity 1810–49 (£) Turnpike roads in Manchester, 1724–1826 The major railways of Lancashire and their connections, 1845 The Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company’s basin in Manchester, 1850 The Bridgewater Canal’s Castlefield/Hulme basin, 1850 The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal’s Salford basin, 1850 The Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1850 The Ashton Canal’s Piccadilly basin, 1850 Cotton factories and engineering works in Ancoats, 1850 Cotton factories and engineering works around Oxford Street, 1850 Cotton factories and engineering works in Piccadilly, 1850

xii 7 10 30 31 45 46 73 84 151 155 161 165 171 205 206 207

Acknowledgements

This book had its origins in a three-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship held at Manchester Metropolitan University from 2007 to 2009. This project was funded by English Heritage and to them I owe the most sincere and abundant thanks, as I do to Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke who supervised the project at MMU. I thank Alan and Terry for stimulating my interest in Manchester’s rich canal heritage and for continuing to support me and the project during my time at Northumbria University. I also thank them for allowing me to draw extensively on a collaboratively written article produced for the Economic History Review (chapter 6). I would also like to thank Northumbria University for granting me research leave in order to complete the manuscript and for their active encouragement in all aspects of my scholarly development. This book has benefited from the intellectual support and encouragement of friends and colleagues. I would particularly like to thank Norris, Martin, Dan, Claire and Ruchi for all their help in formulating ideas, arguments and sentences. To Ruth, I thank you for everything, especially for your patience and for your belief. Peter Maw Manchester, February 2012

Abbreviations

CL GMCRO JRL LCRO LMR MALSU MBBCC NA RCCP RV UMAU WLLS

Chetham’s Library Greater Manchester County Record Office John Rylands Library Lancashire County Record Office Liverpool and Manchester Railway Manchester Archives and Local Studies Unit Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company National Archives, London Rochdale Canal Company Papers Rateable Values University of Manchester Archaeological Unit Wakefield Libraries and Local Studies

Figure 1 Major canal and river navigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire, 1850 Source: RCCP, B2/ Plans of the Rochdale Canal, Box 9, Item 7, Map of the Navigations and Railways between Liverpool and Hull

1

Introduction

This is a study of canal transport during the British Industrial Revolution. Focusing on Manchester, this book will provide the first detailed regional history of canals, their trade and their economic impact during the first Industrial Revolution. Manchester provides an ideal case study for analysing the interplay between canals, transport and industrialisation. Not only was Manchester the industrial and commercial hub of the British cotton industry and the most innovative and fastest-growing manufacturing centre, but the town was also a pioneer developer of the new transport systems that carried the escalating local, national and international commodity flows generated by this period of significant industrial, commercial and urban development. In the Bridgewater Canal of 1765, Manchester developed the first ‘true’ canal of Britain’s industrial age, while some five decades later the Liverpool and Manchester Railway became the world’s first inter-city railway.1 Despite the concurrence of industrial and transport developments, there have been few attempts to explore the inter-relationships between transport and the Industrial Revolution in Britain’s key regions or urban spaces. The current view that canals were merely an accompaniment to, and not a major stimulus of, the Industrial Revolution stems from three principal macro-level research findings. First, it is argued that transport improvements arose in response to growing demands from industry rather than being independent stimuli to economic development.2 Second, it has been shown that canals often provided slow and unreliable services and were introduced alongside extensions of traditional methods of distribution by river and coastal vessels, as well as by road wagons. The decisive revolution in transport provision, it is argued, had to await the arrival of railway locomotives and steamships.3 Third, it is suggested that the reductions in freight costs achieved by canals were small in relation to aggregate productivity improvements in the national economy.4 However, accurate assessments of the economic function of canals in industrialising Britain, as Crompton, Turnbull and Herson have argued, are impeded by the lack of micro-studies of traffic by commodity or contextualising accounts of their impact on industrial and urban development.5

2

Transport and the industrial city

The only canal trade that has attracted close investigation is that in coal. Turnbull’s classic study has shown that canals decisively reduced the price of coal in northern and midland industrial regions and thus played a key role in establishing the location of the core sites of British industrialisation.6 We still lack comparable studies of the canal trades in non-coal heavy minerals, in building materials, in foodstuffs and in finished (and semi-finished) manufactured goods. This is problematic, as it was precisely these inter-regional trades that underpinned regional economic specialisation, now widely recognised as one of the key dynamic processes of the first Industrial Revolution.7 This book explores the full scope of the commodity composition of trade on Manchester canals. The analysis of Manchester presented here shows that the intra-regional trade in coal, although a key aspect of canal trade, should not be allowed to eclipse the equally important inter-regional trade on canals before the coming of the railways. Historical studies of canals are mainly concerned with their internal history, with their construction, engineering and finance, and pay little attention to their trade or to their impact on the wider economy.8 Our understanding of the history of canals in north-west England is largely shaped by a seminal two-volume study co-written by Charles Hadfield and Gordon Biddle and published in 1970 as part of a larger series of narrative regional histories of British canals. This invaluable work provides detailed synoptic accounts of the building, ownership and management of all of Manchester’s pre-1850 canals and their major waterway connections. The two volumes also contain a range of valuable trade and passenger data, although the uneven coverage of this evidence reflects the fact that the research was limited to more accessible canal company and parliamentary papers.9 The pioneering researches of Hadfield and Biddle have generated further work on canals, which has generally taken one of four directions. The most important work is the monographic literature focused on particular canals. Frederick C. Mather’s After the canal duke is by far the best of these microstudies. This provides a comprehensive account of the management of the Bridgewater Canal from 1825 to 1872, focusing on the challenges faced by the canal interest in the early years of Britain’s railway age.10 Other scholarly book-length studies of canals have focused on the late nineteenth-century period that witnessed the development of the Manchester Ship Canal rather than on the formative period of the canal age,11 while there are a number of useful, but largely narrative, accounts of individual canals.12 Second, research has focused on canal restoration projects. David E. Owen’s general study of Manchester canals, published in 1977, provides a snapshot of how canals were perceived prior to their regeneration in the last two decades of the twentieth century, while two recent books by Keith Gibson have provided detailed accounts of the chronology and finance of the restoration of two of

Introduction

3

the Manchester region’s canals.13 Third, transport history textbooks also offer useful introductions to British canal history; the best of these accounts provide comparative analyses of canals’ relationships with other modes of transport and make extensive use of original source materials.14 An important final development is a recent re-awakening of interest in the transport history of industrialising Manchester that is reflected in a collection of essays edited by Derek Brumhead and Terry Wyke, which features a useful introduction and two chapters on Manchester waterways.15 Much of this recent research has been undertaken by industrial archaeologists rather than historians, who have taken advantage of a rapid phase of land redevelopment in central Manchester in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to provide new archaeological surveys of some of the city’s key historical manufacturing and commercial sites. This research has greatly extended our knowledge of the full range of Manchester’s industrial and commercial investments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including cotton factories, textile-finishing works and canal warehouses.16 Research on the economic history of British canals, however, has lacked the theoretical sophistication of the more conceptually and methodologically advanced work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roads and railways. Since the 1960s, the history of road and rail transport has been analysed through a range of innovative quantitative approaches. Railway historians, for example, pioneered ‘social savings’ methodologies, which explored railways’ contribution to national economic growth by estimating the costsavings brought about by railways compared with the next best transport alternatives. Although this approach was controversial, it was widely applied to test the importance of other economic sectors to national economic growth by proponents of the ‘New Economic History’, who dominated the discipline of economic history from the 1960s to the 1980s.17 Quantitative research on railways remains active, especially on the issues of the profitability and management quality of British railways in the Victorian period.18 Research on roads has, meanwhile, successfully questioned the once-prevailing view that British roads were in a deplorable state during the early stages of industrialisation, showing that the costs of road haulage, as well as the length of journey times by road, fell significantly during the ‘canal age’; roads remained key conveyances for the increasing trade of industrialising Britain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before commanding an even more important position in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.19 Despite this valuable work on roads and railways, transport has increasingly found itself on the periphery of historical research. A recent and explicitly inter-disciplinary framework has been developed in order to broaden the scope of transport history from a largely supply-side, economic history discipline to one that also embraces the social and cultural aspects of

4

Transport and the industrial city

transport development, such as tourism, travel culture and environmental concerns, as well as including analyses of transport’s role in wider social processes. This work, known as ‘mobility history’ or ‘T2M [transport, traffic and mobility] studies’, explicitly rejects a ‘Whiggish’ narrative by which the history of transport is reduced to the linear succession of transport modes. The approach places strong emphasis on the intermodality of transport provision and the means by which different transport modes could offer complementary, as well as competing, services.20 Self-organised individual mobility, for example that achieved through bicycles and cars, and the development of transport infrastructure (harbours, airports etc.) to channel trade flows also receives greater levels of attention than in traditional transport history. Still an emerging field, T2M approaches have been most widely applied to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in automobilisation, air transport, and travel and tourism.21 This book provides a new look at the economic history of Manchester’s canals in a way that is informed by T2M approaches. Three particular objectives can be specified. First, the book develops our knowledge of quantitative dimensions of the Manchester canal trade, drawing on a range of historical source materials to provide new estimates of the size and commodity configuration of Manchester’s canals. The new data are expressed in two forms: the weight of goods carried by particular canals and the toll income that these trades earned for canal companies. Where possible, the book provides additional quantitative analyses of trades by commodity and location. A more precise measurement of the transport provision for Britain’s key modernising regions during the Industrial Revolution, as Herson has recently argued, would allow further ‘exploration of the relationship between economic activity and transport flows and the nature of links between producers, distributors, and consumers … [as well as] help to assess the costs and benefits of transport to the national economy’.22 Second, the book evaluates the intermodality of transport provision in Manchester. It emphasises the strengths and weaknesses of canals relative to rail and road transport, as well as the volumes of trades carried by particular carriers at particular periods. It shows that, for Manchester, the most telling evidence of the beneficent complementarity between transport modes is found between roads and canals (as well as between roads and rail); conversely, canals and railways competed for traffic on Manchester’s key transport routes to and from port and market locations. The key sites for inter-modal transhipment were canal company basins, along with railway stations, which became crucial centres of urban activity at the major termini. Third, the book offers a new analysis of the impact of canals on the major processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and consumerism in Manchester. It pays particular attention to the role played by waterways in shaping the spatial dynamics of Manchester’s

Introduction

5

expanding urban core, as well as the extensive use of canal banks to site the factory clusters that made Manchester the ‘shock city’ of the early Victorian age.23 Manchester in the canal age The industrial history of Manchester is interwoven with the history of textiles, the manufacture of which formed the backbone of the economy of south-east Lancashire from the fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.24 By 1750, Manchester was already the focal point of a thriving regional textile industry engaged in the production of ‘Manchester goods’; a diverse range of cotton, linen, silk and worsted textiles and trimmings. Manchester’s position in the early modern textile industry was embedded in two functions. First, the town’s merchants co-ordinated flows of raw materials into south-east Lancashire (especially raw cotton from Asia and the Americas, and linen yarn from Ireland, Germany and the Low Countries) and distributed them to spinners and weavers in their employ or to independent manufacturers in the surrounding villages and towns. Second, Manchester provided the principal regional market for Lancashire textiles by the mideighteenth century, as well as the largest concentration of the ancillary finishing facilities required to ready textiles for consumption.25 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Manchester firms established a series of new and direct marketing links with importing merchants in Europe and the Americas, a development that strengthened Manchester’s commercial connections with the major Lancashire and Yorkshire outports of Liverpool and Hull.26 Manchester’s industrial hinterland by the late eighteenth century already comprised the fustian-weaving towns of Bolton, Bury, Leigh and Oldham and the check-weaving villages around Ashton and within the Manchester parish.27 North Lancashire woollens and west Lancashire linens were only loosely integrated into the Manchester industrial district in the late eighteenth century and developed many of their own manufacturing, marketing and transport networks.28 As cotton production increased in importance in the late eighteenth century, Manchester’s industrial region expanded, drawing towns in north-east Cheshire (especially Stockport, Hyde and Stalybridge), north-west Derbyshire (Mottram and Glossop) and north Lancashire (Blackburn, Rochdale, Burnley and Preston) into its commercial orbit.29 By the early 1850s, Manchester’s palazzo warehouses marketed the output of almost 1,000 manufacturers from the satellite cotton towns, the market turning over more than £1m per week.30 The raw cotton import figures remain the best indicator of the phenomenal expansion of the cotton industry, retained imports rising from 6 million lbs in 1775–76 to 621 million

6

Transport and the industrial city

lbs in 1849–50, when the UK housed 60 per cent of the world’s cotton-factory spindlage.31 It was, of course, the introduction of powered machinery that led to unparalleled increases in cotton output. The well-known triumvirate of cotton-spinning inventions developed by Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton, as well as machinery used in the preparatory and finishing processes, were introduced in domestic and factory settings both in the traditional cotton-using regions and further afield in the last three decades of the eighteenth century.32 The development of powered spinning initially generated demand for cotton handloom weavers, whose numbers peaked at 170,000 in c.1825. However, weaving by powered machinery made rapid progress in the next two decades. By 1845, there were almost four times as many British powerlooms as handloom weavers, whose numbers had fallen precipitously to 60,000.33 When the cotton industry began to mechanise in the 1770s, Manchester was not initially a major mill location. Aspin has shown that Manchester, Salford and their immediately adjacent townships contained only eight of the 101 water-frame spinning factories in Lancashire built before 1794.34 It was the cotton-spinning industry’s shift from Arkwright water-frame factories to the use of Crompton’s mule powered by condensing steam engines that allowed cotton factories to proliferate in central Manchester and in other urban locations. Crompton’s mule census of 1811 reveals that Manchester already operated 31 per cent of the mule spindles identified in cotton factories in Lancashire and adjacent counties.35 The factory returns, available from the early 1830s, confirm Manchester’s role as the largest factory town in Britain, a position it retained until the late 1850s.36 By the latter date, Manchester contained a growing number of factories that combined powered spinning with powered weaving.37 Although it was cotton that powered Manchester’s industrial growth from the late 1790s, Manchester was not just a factory town. Manchester capitalists made a host of additional investments in domestic housing, textile warehouses, public houses and retail shops, providing a huge stimulus to the town’s building industry.38 Manchester also developed other industries that, initially at least, owed their expansion to the rising fortunes of the cotton industry. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Manchester became Britain’s primary centre of mechanical engineering. The principal stimulus came from the cotton industry’s demands for machinery, steam engines and boilers, although the sector later produced locomotives, bridges and machine tools, as well as a range of metalwares.39 Manchester’s chemical industries were attracted to the town because of its proximity to the great source of demand for chemicals: the Lancashire cotton industry.40 Moreover, one should not overlook the older forms of textile production: smallwares,

Introduction

7

woollens and silks retained a place in Manchester’s industrial sector, the latter developing considerably after 1820.41 Industrial changes led to a dramatic increase in population: the population of the immediate urban core of Manchester and Salford climbed from 27,000 in 1773 to 94,000 in 1801 and 250,000 in 1851.42 This book assesses the contribution of canals to this rapid phase of industrial and urban expansion. In 1700, Manchester’s waterfront was limited to the three non-navigable rivers that formed its administrative borders: the Irwell separating the townships of Manchester and Salford; the Irk dividing Manchester from Cheetham in the north; and the Medlock forming Manchester’s southerly boundary with the townships of Hulme, Chorltonon-Medlock and Ardwick (see Fig. 1.1). In 1838, the townships of Manchester, Cheetham, Hulme, Chorlton-on-Medlock and Ardwick together formed the

Figure 1.1 Urban extent and waterfront in Manchester, c.1760 Source: J. Berry and R. Casson, A plan of the towns of Manchester and Salford in the County Palatine of Lancaster (Manchester: John Berry and Russell Casson, 1746), with detail added from C. Laurent, A topographical plan of Manchester and Salford: with the adjacent parts (Manchester: C. Laurent, 1793)

8

Transport and the industrial city

parliamentary borough of Manchester; in 1844, Salford and part of the township of Broughton joined to produce the new borough of Salford.43 The year 1721, however, initiated a new phase of transport improvement, marking the beginning of Manchester’s water transport age. In this year, Manchester’s industrial and commercial interests obtained an Act of Parliament to allow the construction of the eight locks and other improvements required to make the rivers Irwell and Mersey navigable from Manchester to Warrington. This opened up, on the navigation’s completion in the late 1730s, a reliable water-transport route from Manchester (via the Mersey estuary) to the rapidly emerging western outport of Liverpool. From 1799 to 1804, the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company, by then known as the Old Quay Company, built a new 8-mile cut from Latchford to Runcorn, which bypassed the Mersey estuary between Warrington and Runcorn Gap, where boats had often been delayed during neap tides.44 It was, nevertheless, the canal age that firmly anchored Manchester’s position at the heart of the north-west’s water-transport system (Fig. 1). Francis Egerton – the third duke of Bridgewater – took the earliest initiatives. By the mid-1760s, he had completed an 8-mile canal from his Worsley coal mines to Manchester; a subsequent phase, opened by 1776, established a second water route from Manchester to Liverpool, by way of the estuarial Mersey at Runcorn. In 1779, a connection was made between the Bridgewater Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal at Preston Brook in Cheshire; this linked Manchester’s first canal to the extensive web of canals that were being constructed in the east and west midlands. A through canal route from the midlands to London was available from 1786 but it was not until the completion of the Grand Junction Canal in 1805 that a reliable and direct water link was established between Manchester and the capital. The final section of the Bridgewater Canal, complete by 1800, was a 6-mile extension of the Worsley end of the canal to the Leigh coalfield. By 1821, a branch of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal locked into the Bridgewater Canal at Leigh, providing Manchester with a third water route to Liverpool, as well as access to the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile towns served by the former canal.45 The ‘canal mania’ of the 1790s brought about a second rapid phase of canal construction, one which turned the focus away from western routes to Liverpool and led to the creation of a nation-wide water-transport network that linked Manchester to all its major markets: by 1796, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal linked Salford to the canal’s two south-east Lancashire termini; by 1799, the Ashton Canal joined Ashton-under-Lyne, Stockport and Hollinwood with Manchester; and, by 1804, the Rochdale Canal was complete from Manchester to Sowerby Bridge via Newton Heath, Failsworth, Middleton, Rochdale and Todmorden. The latter two canals developed a series of important connections. The Rochdale Canal locked into

Introduction

9

the Calder and Hebble Navigation at Sowerby Bridge, providing access via the Aire and Calder Navigation to Leeds and Hull, while the Ashton connected to the Huddersfield Canal, providing a second route to the river navigations of Yorkshire and to the Peak Forest Canal, which passed Hyde and Marple on the way to the stone quarries of the Derbyshire peaks. From 1831, the Macclesfield Canal linked Marple on the Peak Forest Canal to Kidsgrove on the Trent and Mersey Canal, providing Manchester with a second route to the midlands and south to compete with the Bridgewater Canal link at Preston Brook. Finally, in 1838, the short Manchester and Salford Junction Canal linked the Mersey and Irwell Navigation to the Rochdale Canal through central Manchester.46 The summation of these developments was a transport network that provided navigable water routes between Manchester and its major trading regions. River navigations and canals had established water-transport routes from Manchester to Warrington and Liverpool by 1740; to London, Bristol, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Leeds, Wakefield, Hull, Bolton, Bury, Ashton, Stockport and Rochdale by 1805; and to Huddersfield, Halifax, Blackburn, Preston, Burnley and Bradford by 1830. By the latter date, when railway projects began to proliferate in Manchester, there were few significant urban locations in England that could not be reached by water navigation; north-east England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were accessed by a combination of inland waterways and coastal shipping. Canals greatly extended the provision for water transport in Manchester but they also opened up a much larger urban waterfront in Manchester itself (Fig. 1.2). Canal companies developed extensive basins and transhipment facilities around the built-up fringes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Manchester. To the west, the operators of the Bridgewater and Bolton and Bury canals developed basins at Castlefield and Salford, respectively. To the east, the Ashton and Rochdale companies established adjoining basins at Piccadilly.47 The Rochdale Canal also ran through Manchester to join the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield, opening up a new section of waterfront in the south and east of the Manchester township. This 1.1-mile section of the canal through Manchester, in turn, led to further extensions to the waterfront by allowing the construction of private canal branches within the town. While public canals were projected by industrial and commercial interests to improve transport links between Manchester and its satellite textile towns, these private canal branches were built by urban landowners seeking to improve the sale and rental values of land contiguous to canals within Manchester. The opportunity afforded by canal construction, indeed, added a new element to an already active phase of urban development in Manchester. Rapid population growth and rising land prices in the late eighteenth century had encouraged developers to establish new streets for housing, commerce

10

Transport and the industrial city

and industry, stimulating the break up and re-sale of many of the larger estates around the town.48 Landowners were quick to see the economic potential of developing land adjoining canals. In May 1794, before the construction of the Rochdale Canal had even begun, land was offered for sale at Piccadilly that was ‘so nearly contiguous to the intended basons [sic] of the Rochdale and Ashton Canals, that they must in a little time become very valuable for the purposes of erecting warehouses or Repositories upon’.49 The sections of the Rochdale and Ashton canals through Manchester were complete by 1800, encouraging developers to accommodate private canals within their estates. This occurred rapidly. As early as 1808, ten private canal branches had been constructed, with further branches being added in the trading booms of 1815–16, the mid-1820s, the early 1830s and the mid1840s.50 By 1851, there were no fewer than 23 private canal branches in Manchester, adding at least 3.4 miles to Manchester’s waterfront (see Fig. 1.2).51 Private canal branches became magnets for industrial and commercial

Figure 1.2 Urban extent and waterfront in Manchester, c.1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851); Adshead’s twenty-four illustrated plans of Manchester (1851)

Introduction

11

activity; by 1850, the factory districts of Manchester were all defined by waterside locations and were especially dense in the south and east of the township close to the routes of the Rochdale and Ashton canals and their private branches. The centre, north and north-east of the township, including the main commercial area around the Exchange, remained at some remove from the new canal network. While these latter districts expanded their marketing and residential functions after 1800, it was the canalside areas of Ancoats, Piccadilly and around Oxford Street, largely undeveloped in the late eighteenth century, that became the main focus of factory industry in Manchester. Manchester, canals and the character of industrial revolution The scale and scope of the industrial and transport developments taking place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ensure that Manchester commands a prominent place in the historiographical debate on the significance and character of the world’s first industrial revolution. This debate is as old as the discipline of economic history, and historiographical cycles have closely followed the economic and political circumstances in which historians have written.52 In this long-running debate, historians have taken variants of two basic positions. First, they have presented ‘cataclysmic’ accounts, which identify the Industrial Revolution as the major watershed in economic and indeed human history. Economic growth in this decisive phase was impelled by revolutionary technological changes throughout industry, and applied across a broad range of economic sectors, with accompanying radical shifts in society and in social relations.53 The second major interpretation of the Industrial Revolution may be termed the ‘gradualist’ view, which finds no decisive discontinuity in Britain’s economic and social experience from 1770 to 1850: no fundamental shift from the traditional to the modern. These interpretations emphasise that growth and change in Britain began long before the ‘classic’ Industrial Revolution period and that many aspects of British life remained untouched by new forms of economic and social relations in 1850.54 In the latest phase of the historiography cycle, historians have evaluated the relative strengths of the ‘Crafts–Harley’ and ‘Berg–Hudson’ views of the Industrial Revolution. The first, and most widely accepted, is known as the ‘Crafts–Harley’ view. This account associates the first Industrial Revolution with a decisive shift in economic resources from agriculture to industry, but one that was accompanied by relatively moderate rates of national economic growth. Productivity growth, it is argued, was confined to a small number of ‘modernised’ sectors whose weight in the aggregate economy was small compared with an enduring ‘traditional’ industrial sector. The core of Crafts

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and Harley’s research was a reworking of Deane and Cole’s pioneering estimates of national economic growth, which had provided qualified support to the notion of a rapidly growing economy after 1780. Two revisions made by Crafts and Harley were crucial. First, they argued, following the work of Lindert and Williamson, that Deane and Cole had overestimated the size of the agricultural sector in c.1700. This had led to a corresponding underestimation of the size of the industrial sector in the early eighteenth century, so that the pace of change to the small agriculture sector revealed by the British census in 1851 had been exaggerated.55 Second, Crafts and Harley found that Deane and Cole had placed too much weight on to the leading sectors of ‘modernising’ industry, especially the cotton industry. When Crafts and Harley assigned an appropriately smaller weight to these rapidly growing industries to represent their share of total output in benchmark years, their contribution to rates of output growth was correspondingly reduced. This further dampened the high rates of economic growth found by Deane and Cole, smoothing out the discontinuity they found in the late eighteenth century when cottons still comprised a small share of aggregate industrial output.56 Crafts and Harley’s revisions resonate with Clapham’s much earlier work on the 1851 census. He found that only 10 per cent of the adult labour force worked in ‘modernised’ sites of industry (factories, foundries and so on) and the bulk of the population engaged in traditional work for local markets (domestic servitude, shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry etc.).57 Berg and Hudson have provided an alternative conceptualisation of the Industrial Revolution. This view characterises the Industrial Revolution as a period of ‘fundamental and unique change’ manifested in, among other things, the greater use of female and child labour, the growing regional specialisation of the economy, and a rapidly growing and restructuring population. Berg and Hudson, building on earlier reservations expressed by Hoppit, also argued that the underlying data used by Crafts and Harley were not sufficiently reliable to accept their conclusions with confidence. The evidential problems are manifold: the data exhibit a strong adult male bias; the trade and excise data used to measure the performance of individual sectors are not always dependable indicators of the development of that sector; and most importantly, large sectors of the eighteenth-century industrial economy (including glass, pottery, food, metalworking, salt, chemicals and distilling) have left no statistical footprint at all and are thus not included in Crafts and Harley’s calculations.58 Berg and Hudson further argued that Crafts and Harley introduced an artificial distinction between ‘modernised’ and ‘traditional’ industry: even the most technologically advanced sectors (including cotton) did not entirely dispense with traditional handicraft methods, while productivity growth was also achieved in ‘traditional’ settings using hand tools. Temin later endorsed aspects of the ‘Berg–Hudson’ critique

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of the gradualist accounts of the Industrial Revolution. He used export data to suggest that Britain’s industrial strength arose not just from a handful of core industries but across a broad range of manufacturing enterprises.59 The balance of subsequent research has favoured the ‘Crafts–Harley’ rather than the ‘Berg–Hudson’ account of the Industrial Revolution. Recent quantitative research has endorsed the pattern of slow national growth found by Crafts and Harley. Feinstein’s estimates of British real wages show only modest increases until the mid-1840s, which is consistent with slow aggregate economic growth, while Antràs and Voth, using new methods and data, have confirmed Crafts and Harley’s view that productivity growth was slow from 1770 to 1860.60 Crafts and Harley, meanwhile, argued that the gaps in the statistical record did not significantly bias their more gradual estimates of economic growth; in fact, they argued that if more data were available, growth estimates would more probably be lower rather than higher because the unobserved sectors changed more slowly than did cotton. CuencaEsteban re-opened the question of the weighting of cotton but Crafts and Harley defended their estimates and Cuenca-Esteban’s alternative index is not accepted as a superior measure of changing cotton prices: a return to the higher estimates of Deane and Cole seems unlikely unless new data are found.61 Nevertheless, Berg and Hudson’s regional approach to the study of British economic development is now recognised as one that leads to an equally valid conceptualisation of the Industrial Revolution as one measured by national economic growth: Crafts and Harley conceded that their distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ industry was an oversimplification and that a study of regional developments ‘offers the potential of a set of quite different and valuable insights into the experience of the industrial revolution’.62 When viewed from the perspective of Manchester, the differences in the ‘Crafts–Harley’ and ‘Berg–Hudson’ interpretations of the Industrial Revolution are at their least noticeable. Manchester, the hub of the cotton industry, assumes a major role in both accounts. For Crafts, cotton was the fastest-developing ‘modern’ industrial sector, growing at the exceptional rate of 13 per cent per annum from 1780 to 1790 and at a brisk 7 per cent per annum from 1821 to 1831. This growth pattern was much faster than all industries in the late eighteenth century and only rivalled by iron and silk for the 1820s.63 Thus, Crafts and Harley identified the mainspring of the modest national economic growth during the Industrial Revolution as ‘the rapid growth of the urban based textile industries’, as well as the precocious modernisation of agriculture; together these developments produced ‘the first urban industrial economy’.64 Berg and Hudson locate the emergence of specialised and internally integrated industrial regions in the midlands and north of England at the centre

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Transport and the industrial city

of their account of the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of distinct manufacturing regions was a unique feature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British economy, ‘never experienced before nor to be experienced again after the growth of intra-sectoral spatial hierarchies during the twentieth century’. The characteristic features of these industrialising regions were the extent to which they focused on a core industrial activity and utilised supplies of labour, capital and credit generated internally to that region.65 This framework fits well the development of the Manchester industrial district, which by 1835 produced more than 90 per cent of Britain’s cotton output.66 The capital that underpinned the mechanisation of Manchester’s cotton industry was largely raised internally to the region and, with the highest birth rate in England from 1740 to 1850, Lancashire created much of its factory labour force through natural reproduction rather than drawing significant numbers of migrant labourers from other parts of Britain.67 The main discrepancy between the ‘Crafts–Harley’ and ‘Berg– Hudson’ representations of Manchester’s industrial revolution is the extent to which the town’s experience conformed to, or diverged from, the pattern of growth in the rest of the industrial sector. For Crafts and Harley, the cotton industry was, with a small number of other industries, marooned in a sea of industrial tradition, whereas for Berg and Hudson the Manchester industrial region was one of a large number of core manufacturing sites capable of generating significant productivity advances. What is clear is that in whichever way the Industrial Revolution is conceptualised, Manchester and cotton must take a conspicuous position. The extent to which canals were an important component of the Industrial Revolution is less securely established. While Deane has argued that canals were among ‘the most spectacular and typical innovations of this period’ and were even of the ‘essence of the industrial revolution’, Mokyr has described canals as a ‘costly dead end’.68 Crafts and Harley classify transport as one of the ‘modernised’ sectors of the Industrial Revolution. Crafts’ estimates of the contribution of various sectors of the British economy to national productivity growth from 1780 to 1860 suggest that transport contributed a massive 32 per cent of the total; Ville repeated this procedure in 2004 using new data that slightly raised transport’s contribution to 33 per cent. To put transport’s share of national productivity growth during the Industrial Revolution into context, the contribution of the cotton industry in the two sets of estimates was 25 per cent and 21 per cent respectively. Unfortunately, the precise contribution of canals cannot be specified because, in these quantitative exercises, canals are grouped with railways. Thus, in Ville’s calculation canals and railways together generated 15 per cent of national productivity growth from 1780 to 1860; the shares of shipping and roads were 13 per cent and 5 per cent respectively.69

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Studies of capital formation offer further evidence that transport developments were at the centre of economic developments in industrialising Britain. Feinstein has estimated that transport’s share of gross domestic capital formation ranged between 15 and 21 per cent from the 1760s to the 1820s, with peaks in the key canal construction decades of the 1760s and 1790s, before climbing to 30–40 per cent during the railway mania of the 1840s.70 Chapman has estimated that the fixed capital invested in the Lancashire cotton industry was roughly £1.25m by 1795; the canal mania of 1790–94 alone authorised more than £6m of waterway expenditure. The cost of completing the eight canals most directly associated with Manchester amounted to £1.6m.71 Transport thus attracted a great deal of British investible funds during the Industrial Revolution and these resources were used to increase national productivity. Despite these key points, however, most transport historians have disputed that canals were a radical departure in Britain’s transport history. This gradualism is rooted in the rejection of a reductionist narrative whereby transport history becomes the story of successive transport modes replacing, and rendering obsolete, earlier transport systems. As early as 1936, T.S. Willan argued that canals should not be seen as a fundamental discontinuity in British transport provision; instead, he portrayed canals as the natural outcome of more than one hundred years of river improvement. Many canals, indeed, were built to link stretches of navigable river and were not entirely independent of other forms of transport.72 More recent studies have reinforced this representation of continuity in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury transport provision, especially when compared with the transformative power of railways in the Victorian era. Freeman argues that ‘transition’ is a better term than ‘revolution’ to describe transport development before the application of steam power to land and oceanic transport from c.1820. The fifty years after 1770, he argues, were not a decisive break from the past but the ‘culmination of a long, at times uneven but nevertheless perceptible movement towards greater efficiency’.73 T.C. Barker has also argued that the arrival of steam power was the most decisive transport development.74 In purely technological terms, indeed, canals were not a fundamental breakthrough. Canals, like road and river transport, relied on the motive power of horses and, although canal construction did showcase the skills of eighteenth-century British civil engineers, and provided the best opportunity to apply them in lengthy, high-cost settings, the techniques used in their construction, including the building of bridges, tunnels, locks, aqueducts, pound sluices and reservoirs, were all well known in the early modern period and were mostly imported from continental Europe.75 The greater significance of railways rather than canals is manifested in their stronger backward links to the economy: Gourvish has estimated that the

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Transport and the industrial city

British railway industry consumed 39 per cent of pig iron production in 1844–51 and 6–10 per cent of coal output. Canals did not generate this extent of derived demand, although they must have been a major stimulus to the building industry during their lengthy period of construction.76 Turnbull, in contrast, argues that canals comprised ‘far more than a single step along a logical progression of waterway technology’. Most importantly, he contends that canals freed English industry ‘from the tyranny of natural hydrology’ which led industry and towns to be clustered in locations where navigable water was available. Canals, by contrast, allowed industry to thrive in places where industry made sense in terms of ‘rational economic calculation’. Canals thus reversed the innate relationship between water transport and the economy; water transport was brought to appropriate manufacturing sites and not vice versa.77 Thus, while canals were not a fundamental technological break from the past, they did significantly build on the water resources conferred by nature. Structure This book is divided into two parts. The first (chapters 2–4) analyses the trade on Manchester’s canals before 1850. Chapter 2 presents new quantitative data on the geographical and commodity composition of Manchester’s canal and river trades. It stresses the diversity of goods carried on Manchester canals, emphasising not just the well-known intra-regional shipments of Lancashire coal and Pennine stone but also inter-regional movements of Irish, Lincolnshire and East Anglian corn, of American raw cotton, of Canadian and Baltic timber, and of Lancashire cotton yarns and piece goods. Those navigations with the most extensive inter-regional trades generated much higher levels of trading income than those that primarily focused on short-haul movements of heavy goods. The chapter concludes that tonnage data, the most conventional measure of the extent of a canal’s trade, seldom offers, on its own, a reliable indicator of a canal’s economic function or vitality. The traditional emphasis on the carriage of heavy minerals disguises the fact that the incomes of canal companies derived much more from the trade in lightweight, high-value goods. Chapter 3 analyses the canals’ relationships with other modes of transport. Refining Duckham’s metaphor of transport as a ‘garment’ in which differing modes threaded together to produce a whole, the chapter assesses the interplay between canal, road, rail and coastal transport in handling the commodity trade of industrialising Manchester. The intermodality of transport provision reflected the contrasting strengths and weaknesses of services by canals, roads and rail: canals hauled goods cheaply but provided slow services on a confined number of trunk routes; road transport was

Introduction

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expensive but had by the far the most extensive network; while railways were cheap and reliable but had a limited national coverage until 1850. Until c.1840, canals provided Manchester’s most effective modes of conveyance for raw materials, foodstuffs and cotton yarn and piece goods along Manchester’s busiest trade routes: to and from the ports of London, Liverpool and Hull. At the same time, roads provided the key transport links within Manchester’s industrial district, and within the town itself, except for the carriage of coal, stone and timber. Railways dramatically arrived in Manchester in 1830 but it was not until the mid-1840s that they began to assert their primacy over other transport providers. Chapter 4 analyses the organisation of the carrying trade on Manchester canals. With the notable exception of Turnbull’s study of Pickford & Co., historians have paid scant attention to the role played by canal carriers during Britain’s industrialisation.78 This chapter highlights the division of the carrying trade between three major types of businesses: canal companies carrying goods on their own canals (and sometimes those adjoining thereto); public carriers operating regular, scheduled services between specified towns, specialising in distributing high-value raw materials and manufactures; and private carriers, primarily colliery, quarry or corn mill proprietors, who carried the canal’s bulk traffics and distributed them to their own premises and to factories and wharves on canal banks. The second part of the book (chapters 5–7) analyses the impact of canals on Manchester’s industrial, commercial and urban development. Chapter 5 outlines the massive extensions to Manchester’s urban waterfront in the first half of the nineteenth century, analysing the development of Manchester’s five canal and river basins, as well as the building of private canal branches within the town. The corporate canal basins were dominated by large-scale multi-storey warehouses – the largest of their kind in Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century. Less visible, but no less economically significant, were the basins’ wharves for coal, stone and timber. The warehouses and wharves handled the key commodities of Manchester’s expanding local, national and international trades, providing the link between local road traffic and bulk water transport along the trunk canal routes. The final elements in Manchester’s expanded nineteenth-century waterfront were the 23 private canal branches built by individual landowners. These canal branches became key sites for commercial wharfage for coal and stone. Manchester’s warehousing and wharfage facilities allowed the town to become a major port in its own right half a century before the completion of the Manchester Ship Canal in the 1890s. Chapter 6 will evaluate the spatial location of Manchester’s factory sector, quantitatively demonstrating the striking clustering of textile factories, engineering/glass works and sawmills alongside canals, a development largely

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Transport and the industrial city

overlooked in studies of the topography of British industrialisation. The chapter presents a full reconstruction of Manchester’s factory sector in 1850, based on a new dataset derived from town plans, trade directories and rate books. It highlights that, even in an age of steam- rather than water-powered factories, canals and rivers remained the most important sites for factory development in the world’s leading industrial city. These engines required water to raise and condense steam, and without effective municipal supplies, canals became the best-available water source for Manchester factories. The shift from water to steam power during the Industrial Revolution introduced new patterns of industrial water use rather than the relocation of factories from waterways. Chapter 7 provides a full assessment of the canals’ contribution to Manchester’s industrial and urban growth during the Industrial Revolution. While it argues that canals were not a major cause of Manchester’s industrial revolution, it shows that canals played a key role in supporting the town’s industrial growth from the early nineteenth century to the 1840s. The canals’ contribution to Manchester’s economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century lay in providing cheaper access to the town’s leading markets in the ports of Liverpool, London and Hull. The chapter thus questions the view that canals strengthened the internal integration of industrial regions but played a limited role in promoting national trade. In fact, for Manchester, the chapter shows the opposite: coal and stone aside, canals had relatively weak trading connections within the Manchester cotton district but developed significant trading links beyond the region. Canal conveyances thus assisted Manchester’s specialisation in a core manufacturing activity by cheapening access to a range of essential national and international commodities. The final chapter summarises the book’s key arguments and concludes that further research on the methods of distribution and commodity flows on other canals, as well as micro-studies of transport infrastructure and industrial location in other industrialising regions, would result in a more nuanced assessment of the significance of the economic contribution made by canals to the industrialisation of Britain. Primary sources This book uses historical source materials to complement the recent work on Manchester undertaken by industrial archaeologists. There are five important sets of historical primary sources for the study of Manchester’s canals and the economic functions of the town’s waterfront.79 Canal company papers are the most informative type of source material. There are extensive surviving records relating to Manchester’s five major navigation companies, as well as their adjoining canals. These corporate archives are the key source

Introduction

19

for the study of canal history and include detailed data on trade, the development of warehouses and wharves, and relations with canalside businesses/ other transport modes. Railway company papers provide vital contextual primary materials relating to competition with canals, as well as for canal operations in the post-1845 period, when many of Manchester’s canals fell into railway ownership/lease. Published and unpublished parliamentary papers provide a range of useful data on Manchester canals and include compendious transcripts of interviews with the canals’ corporate leaders, carriers, industrialists and merchants, especially during the period of railway competition and amalgamation of the 1830s and 1840s. The book also makes extensive use of urban history sources for Manchester, especially trade directories, rate books, newspapers, property records and town plans to explore the historical development of the urban waterfront and the economic functions of canals. Finally, surviving business and estate records are used to track Manchester’s canal history. These records are few in number but provide crucial insights into the nature of the relationships maintained between canals and individual industrial firms, as well as the operation and management of private canal branches. One particular aspect of Manchester’s canal history that is not covered in the book requires a few words of explanation at the outset: the omission of the history of the Manchester Ship Canal. This giant among canals belongs to an era that was largely discrete from the Industrial Revolution period analysed in this book. The Ship Canal rose to prominence just as Manchester’s late eighteenth-century canals had endured half a century of stagnation and were about to enter a prolonged phase of decline and disuse, one that was only to come to an end during the canal restorations of the late twentieth century. The Ship Canal was also an undertaking of an entirely different scale to the ‘first-generation’ canals considered in this book. Completed in 1894, the Ship Canal cost more than £15m to build, a sum that was roughly ten times greater than the combined cost of constructing the earlier Manchester canals. The largest craft on Manchester’s pre-1850 canals, furthermore, could haul loads of up to 50 tons; in its early years of operation the Ship Canal could accommodate vessels of more than 7,500 tons burthen. By 1907, the Ship Canal carried in excess of 5m tons; this was a much larger haulage than had ever been carried on Manchester’s earlier canals. The Ship Canal transported Manchester’s canal history into a new phase of development.80

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Notes 1 The best general work on Manchester’s history in this period is A. Kidd, Manchester, 4th edition (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2006). 2 J.R. Ward, The finance of canal building in eighteenth-century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); M.J. Freeman, ‘Introduction’, in D.H. Aldcroft and M.J. Freeman (eds), Transport and the industrial revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 1–30. 3 T.S. Willan, River navigation in England, 1660–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 130–42; M.J. Freeman, ‘Road transport during the English industrial revolution: an interim reassessment’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 6 (1980); Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–17; T.C. Barker, ‘Transport: the survival of the old besides the new’, in P. Mathias and J.A. Davis (eds), The first industrial revolutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 86–100. 4 G.R. Hawke and J.P.P. Higgins, ‘Transport and social overhead capital’, in R.C. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (eds), The economic history of Britain since 1700, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 249; B.F. Duckham, ‘Canals and river navigations’, in D.H. Aldcroft and M.J. Freeman (eds), Transport and the industrial revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 128; S. Ville, ‘Transport’, in R.C. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain, 1700–1860, Volume 1: industrialisation, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 328–30. 5 G.W. Crompton, ‘Canals and the industrial revolution’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 14 (1993), pp. 108–9; G.L. Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth during the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 40 (1987), p. 543; J. Herson, ‘Estimating traffic: a case study of the Chester sub-region in 1827– 8’, Journal of Transport History, Vol. 23 (2002), pp. 113–46. 6 Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, pp. 537–60. 7 P. Hudson, ‘The regional perspective’, in P. Hudson (ed.), Regions and industries: a perspective on the industrial revolution in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 13–18; J. Stobart, The first industrial region: north-west England, c.1700–1760 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); P. Maw, ‘Yorkshire and Lancashire ascendant: England’s textile exports to New York and Philadelphia, 1750-1805’, Economic History Review, Vol. 63 (2010), pp. 734–68. 8 This literature is well summarised in Duckham, ‘Canals’, pp. 100–41 and Crompton, ‘Canals’, pp. 93–110. 9 C. Hadfield and G. Biddle, The canals of north west England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970). See also much relevant information and analysis in C. Hadfield, The canals of the west midlands (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1968). C. Hadfield, The canals of Yorkshire and north-east England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973). 10 F.C. Mather, After the canal duke: a study of the industrial estates administered by the trustees of the third Duke of Bridgewater in the age of railway building 1825–1872 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). For the early history of the duke of Bridgewater’s canal, see H. Malet, Bridgewater: the canal duke, 1736–1803 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977).

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11 B. Leech, History of the Manchester Ship Canal: from its inception to its completion; with personal reminiscences, 2 vols (Manchester: Sherratt & Hughes, 1907); D.A. Farnie, The Manchester Ship Canal and the rise of the port of Manchester, 1894–1975 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); D.E. Owen, The Manchester Ship Canal (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). 12 V.I. Tomlinson, ‘The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Navigation and Railway Company, 1780–1845 (Part 1: the canal)’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 75–6 (1965–66), pp. 231–99; E. Keaveny and D.L. Brown, The Ashton Canal: a history of the Ashton-under-Lyne Canal (Cheshire: M. Matthews, 1974); M.T. Greenwood, The Rochdale: an illustrated history of trans-Pennine canal traffic (Royton: M.T. Greenwood, 1978); O. Bowyer, The Peak Forest Canal: its construction and later development (New Mills: New Mills Local History Society, 1990). 13 D.E. Owen, Canals to Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977). See K. Gibson, The Huddersfield Narrow Canal: Pennine dreams (Stroud: The History Press, 2002) and K. Gibson, Pennine pioneer: the story of the Rochdale Canal (Stroud: The History Press, 2004). 14 For outstanding textbook accounts of Britain’s transport history, including canal trade, see W.T. Jackman, The development of transport in modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916) and P.S. Bagwell, The transport revolution from 1770 (London: Batsford, 1974); D.H. Aldcroft and M.J. Freeman (eds), Transport in the industrial revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); and D.H. Aldcroft and M.J. Freeman (eds), Transport in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). Other very useful textbooks include H.J. Dyos and D.H. Aldcroft, British transport: an economic survey from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969); T.C. Barker and C.I. Savage, An economic history of transport in Britain, 3rd edition (London: Hutchinson, 1974); P.S. Bagwell and P. Lyth, Transport in Britain 1750–2000: from canal lock to gridlock (London: Hambledon & London, 2002). 15 D. Brumhead and T. Wyke (eds), Moving Manchester: aspects of the history of transport in the city and region since 1700 (Manchester: Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 2004). 16 This work is presented in its most accessible form in M. Nevell, Manchester: the hidden history (Stroud: The History Press, 2008) but also see excellent works by M. Williams with D.A. Farnie, Cotton mills in Greater Manchester (Preston: Carnegie Publishing, 1992) and I. Miller and C. Wild, with S. Little, R. McNeil and K. Moth, A. & G. Murray and the cotton mills of Ancoats (Lancaster: Oxford Archaeology North, 2007). 17 R.W. Fogel, Railroads and American economic growth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); G.R. Hawke, Railways and economic growth in England and Wales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); P.K. O’Brien, The new economic history of the railways (London: Croom Helm, 1977); P.K. O’Brien (ed.), Railways and the economic development of western Europe, 1830–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1983); J. Foreman-Peck, ‘Railways and late Victorian economic growth’, in J. Foreman-Peck (ed.), New perspectives on the late Victorian economy (Cambridge:

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Transport and the industrial city Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 73–95; T. Leunig, ‘Time is money: a reassessment of passenger social savings from Victorian British railways’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 66 (2006), pp. 635–73. A.J. Arnold and S. McCartney, ‘Rates of return, concentration levels and strategic change in the British railway industry, 1830–1912’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 26 (2005), pp. 41–60; N.F.R. Crafts, T.C. Mills and A. Mulatu, ‘Total factor productivity growth on British railways, 1852–1912: a reappraisal of the evidence’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 44 (2007), pp. 608–34; N.F.R. Crafts, T. Leunig and A. Mulatu, ‘Were British railway companies well managed in the early twentieth century?’, Economic History Review, Vol. 61 (2008), pp. 842–66; B. Mitchell, D. Chambers and N.F.R. Crafts, ‘How good was the profitability of British railways, 1870–1912?’, Economic History Review, Vol. 64 (2011), pp. 798–831. For a recent study of accounting and profitability on England’s canals, see A.J. Arnold and S. McCartney, ‘Veritable gold mines before the arrival of railway competition: but did dividends signal rates of return in the English canal industry?’, Economic History Review, Vol. 64 (2011), pp. 214–36. W. Albert, The turnpike road system in England, 1663–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Nineteenth-century horse sense’, Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 29 (1976), pp. 60–81; E. Pawson, Transport and economy: the turnpike roads of eighteenth-century Britain (London: Academic Press, 1977); Freeman, ‘Road transport’; J. Chartres and G.L. Turnbull, ‘Road transport’, in D.H. Aldcroft and M.J. Freeman (eds), Transport in the industrial revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 64–99; D. Gerhold, ‘The growth of the London carrying trade, 1681–1838’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 41 (1988), pp. 392–410; T.C. Barker and D. Gerhold, The rise and rise of road transport (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); P. Scott, ‘The growth of road haulage, 1921–58: an estimate’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 19 (1998), pp. 138–55; P. Scott, ‘British railways and the challenge from road haulage: 1919–39’, Twentieth-Century British History, Vol. 13 (2002), pp. 101–20; D. Bogart, ‘Turnpike trusts and the transport revolution in 18th-century England’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 42 (2005), pp. 479–508; D. Bogart, ‘Did turnpike trusts increase transportation investment in eighteenth-century England?’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 65, No. 2 (June 2005), pp. 439–68. In this endeavour, T2M historians were anticipated by historians of eighteenthand nineteenth-century roads and canals; see Duckham, ‘Canals’, p. 135 and Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–17. G. Moms, ‘What kind of transport history did we get?’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 24 (2003), pp. 121–38; C. Divall and G. Revill, ‘Cultures of transport: representation, practice and technology’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 26 (2006), pp. 99–111; and G. Moms, G. Pirie and L. Tissot (eds), Mobility in history: the state of the art in the history of transport, traffic and mobility (Neuchâtel: Editions Alphil, 2009). Herson, ‘Estimating traffic’, p. 114 (including quote). The phrase ‘shock city’ is taken from A. Briggs, Victorian cities (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 56.

Introduction

23

24 N. Lowe, The Lancashire textile industry in the sixteenth century (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1972); G. Timmins, Four centuries of Lancashire cotton (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996), pp. 3–6; J. Singleton, Lancashire on the scrapheap: the cotton industry 1945–1970 (Oxford: Pasold Research Fund and Oxford University Press, 1991); Miller et al., A & G Murray, pp. 7–8. 25 G.W. Daniels, The early English cotton industry: with some unpublished letters of Samuel Crompton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920), pp. 67–71; A.P. Wadsworth, and J. de Lacy Mann, The cotton trade and industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), pp. 23–5, 173–83. 26 Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, pp. 167–9; A. Redford, Manchester merchants and foreign trade, 1794–1858 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934), pp. 169–75; M.M. Edwards, The growth of the British cotton trade, 1780–1815 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), pp. 51–74, 163–81; G. Jackson, Hull in the eighteenth century: an economic and social history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 1–25; S.D. Chapman, ‘The commercial sector’, in M.B. Rose (ed.), The Lancashire cotton industry since 1700 (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996), pp. 63–93; Maw, ‘Yorkshire and Lancashire ascendant’, pp. 747–51. 27 Most fustians were cotton–linen composites, using linen warps and cotton wefts. Checks were made in both all-linen and cotton–linen varieties. Textile weaving in Manchester itself was largely restricted to manufacture of worsted, linen and cotton smallwares. 28 C.F. Foster, Capital and innovation: how Britain became the first industrial nation (Northwich: Arley Hall Press, 2004), pp. 271–310; P. Maw, ‘Anglo-American trade during the industrial revolution: a study of the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile industries’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Manchester, 2005), pp. 103–9, 124–31, 143–9; J. Stobart, ‘Manchester and its region: networks and boundaries in the eighteenth century’, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. 19 (2008), pp. 71–4. 29 Daniels, Early English cotton industry, pp. 30–70; Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, pp. vi, vii, 140, 305–8, 492–3; Stobart, First industrial region, pp. 66–76. 30 M.B. Rose, Firms, networks and business values: the British and American cotton industries since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 73. 31 Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, p. 521; P. Deane and W.A. Cole, British economic growth 1688–1959: Trends and structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 187; D. Farnie, The English cotton industry and the world market, 1815–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 180. 32 Wadworth and Mann, Cotton trade, pp. 472–503; Daniels, Early English cotton industry, pp. 72–91, 113–48; S.D. Chapman, ‘Fixed capital formation in the British cotton industry, 1770–1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 23 (1970), pp. 235–66; G.T. Timmins, ‘Technological change’, in M.B. Rose (ed.), The Lancashire cotton industry since 1700 (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996), pp. 31, 50–2; C. Aspin, The water-spinners: a new look at the early cotton trade (Helmshore: Helmshore Local History Society, 2003). 33 D. Bythell, The handloom weavers: a study of the English cotton industry during the industrial revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); G.T. Timmins, The last shift: the decline of handloom weaving in nineteenth-century

24

34

35 36

37 38 39 40

41

42

43 44

45 46 47

48 49 50

Transport and the industrial city Lancashire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); F. Crouzet, The Victorian economy (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 199. Aspin, Water-spinners, pp. 452–68. The figures do not include hand-powered jenny or mule workshops or the small number of steam-powered mills built in Manchester before c.1795. On the former, see Miller et al., A & G Murray, pp. 14–16; on the latter, see Nevell, Manchester, pp. 90–2. Bolton Archives and Local Studies Unit, Samuel Crompton Papers, ZCR/16. Cotton, woollen, worsted, flax and silk factories (P.P. 1839, Vol. XLII), pp. 1–135; Return of the number of cotton, woollen, worsted, flax and silk factories subject to the Factories Acts in the United Kingdom (P.P. 1850, Vol. XLII), pp. 453–75. See chapter 6, below. R. Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis, Manchester in the age of the factory: the business structure of cottonopolis in the industrial revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1988). A.E. Musson and E. Robinson, ‘The origins of engineering in Lancashire’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 20 (1960), pp. 209–33. A.E. Musson, The growth of British industry (London: Batsford, 1978), pp. 121–4; G.T. Timmins, Made in Lancashire: a history of regional industrialisation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 114–15. F. Warner, The silk industry of the United Kingdom: its origin and development (London: Drane’s, 1921), p. 158; H.B. Rogers, ‘The Lancashire cotton industry in 1840’, Transactions and Papers of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 28 (1960), p. 148. T. Percival, ‘Observations on the state of the population of Manchester and other adjacent places’, Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 64 (1774), p. 55; W. Farrer and J. Brownbill (eds), The Victoria history of the county of Lancaster, Vol. II (London: Constable, 1906), p. 349. D. Foster, ‘Class and county government in early-nineteenth century Lancashire’, Northern History, Vol. 9 (1974), p. 56. Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 15–18, 86–7; D. Vale, ‘Connecting Manchester to the sea: the origins and early years of the Mersey and Irwell Navigation’, in D. Brumhead and T. Wyke (eds), Moving Manchester: aspects of the history of transport in the city and region since 1700 (Manchester: Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 2004), pp. 54–7. Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, p. 465; Mather, After the canal duke, p. xvii. Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 15–38, 85–131 and Vol. II, pp. 245–321, 353–75, 430–8. P. Maw, T. Wyke and A. Kidd, ‘Warehouses, wharves and transport infrastructure in Manchester during the industrial revolution: the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1792–1856’, Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. 31 (2009), pp. 28–9. C.W. Chalklin, The provincial towns of Georgian England: a study of the building process 1740–1820 (London: Arnold, 1974), pp. 36–7, 63, 89–98. Manchester Mercury, 20 May 1794 (original italics). A plan of Manchester and Salford 1808, in R. Dean and W. Dean, Deans’ Manchester and Salford directory for 1808 and 1809 (Manchester: R. & W. Dean,

Introduction

51 52 53

54

25

1809); A new plan of Manchester and Salford, in J. Pigot, R. Dean and W. Dean, Pigot and Deans’ directory of Manchester and Salford for 1819 and 1820 (Manchester: R. & W. Dean and J. Pigot, 1819); Bancks & Co., Bancks & Co.’s plan of Manchester & Salford, with their environs: Shewing the division of property and the length of each street, from an actual survey by Richard Thornton, the survey completed in the year 1831 (Manchester: Bancks & Co., 1832); A plan of Manchester and Salford with their vicinities, embracing every improvement, from actual survey, in J. Pigot and I. Slater, Pigot & Slater’s general, classified and street directory of Manchester and Salford, including the adjacent townships (Manchester: Pigot & Slater, 1840); Ordnance Survey 60 inch to 1 mile town plans of Manchester and Salford 1844–49 (First published 1851. Reproduced on CD-Rom, Warrington: Digital Archives Association, 2004); Adshead’s twenty-four illustrated plans of the township of Manchester divided into municipal wards: corrected to the 1st May 1851 (Manchester: Joseph Adshead, 1851). Nevell, Manchester, pp. 105–8. D. Cannadine, ‘The present and the past in the industrial revolution’, Past and Present, Vol. 103 (1984), pp. 131–72. For variants of this view, see F. Engels, The condition of the working classes in England, ed. with preface by F.K. Wischnewetzky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); A. Toynbee, Lectures on the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, ed. with introduction by B. Jowett (London: Longman, 1902); P. Mantoux, The industrial revolution in the eighteenth century: an outline of the beginnings of the modern factory system (Oxford: Taylor & Francis, repr. 2006); W.W. Rostow, The stages of economic growth: a non-communist manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); T.S. Ashton, An economic history of England: the eighteenth century (London: Methuen, 1955); D.S. Landes, The unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); E. Hobsbawm, Industry and empire: from 1750 to the present day (London: Penguin, 1969); M. Berg and P. Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 25 (1992), pp. 24–50; P. Temin, ‘Two views of the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 57 (1997), pp. 63–82. The term ‘cataclysmic’ is borrowed from Musson, Growth, p. 61. On this view, in various forms, see A. Redford, The economic history of England 1760–1830 (London: Longman, 1931); H. Heaton, ‘Industrial Revolution’, in R.M. Hartwell (ed.), The causes of the industrial revolution (London: Methuen, 1967); J.H. Clapham, An economic history of modern Britain, Vol. I: The early railway age, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930); R. Samuel, ‘Workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 3 (1977), pp. 6–72; R. Cameron, A concise economic history of the world from Palaeolithic times to the present, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); N.F.R. Crafts and C.K. Harley, ‘Output growth in the industrial revolution: a restatement of the Crafts–Harley view’, Economic History Review, Vol. 45 (1992), pp. 703–30. The term ‘gradualist’ is taken

26

55 56

57 58 59 60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69 70

71

Transport and the industrial city from J. Mokyr, ‘The industrial revolution and the New Economic History’, in J. Mokyr (ed.), The economics of the industrial revolution (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), p. 3. P.H. Lindert and J.G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s social tables’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 19 (1982), pp. 385–408. C.K. Harley, ‘British industrialisation before 1841: evidence of slower growth during the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 42 (1982), pp. 267–89. J.H. Clapham, An economic history of modern Britain, Vol. II: Free trade and steel, 1850–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 24–35. Berg and Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating’; J. Hoppit, ‘Counting the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 43 (1990), pp. 173–93. Temin, ‘Two views’. C.H. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History Vol. 58 (1998), pp. 625–58; P. Antràs and H-J. Voth, ‘Factor prices and productivity growth during the British industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 40 (2003), pp. 52–77. J. Cuenca-Esteban, ‘British textile prices, 1770–1831: are British growth rates worth revising once again?’, Economic History Review, Vol. 47 (1994), pp. 66–105; C.K. Harley and N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Cotton textiles and industrial output growth during the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol. 48 (1995), pp. 756–65; J. Cuenca-Esteban, ‘Further evidence of falling prices of cotton cloth’, Economic History Review, Vol. 48, (1995), pp. 145–50; Antràs and Voth ‘Factor prices’. Crafts and Harley, ‘Output growth’, p. 721. N.F.R. Crafts, British economic growth during the industrial revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 22. Crafts and Harley, ‘Output growth’, p. 705 (including quote). Berg and Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating’, pp. 38–9 (quote p. 38). R. Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis, British industrial capitalism since the industrial revolution (London: UCL Press, 1998), p. 42. J. Walton, Lancashire: a social history, 1558–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 76–7, 123–4; M.B. Rose, ‘Introduction: the rise of the cotton industry in Lancashire to 1830’, in M.B. Rose (ed.), The Lancashire cotton industry: a history since 1700 (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996), pp. 3–6. P. Deane, The first industrial revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 74–5; J. Mokyr, The enlightened economy: an economic history of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 211. Crafts, British economic growth, p. 86; Ville, ‘Transport’, p. 323. C.H. Feinstein, ‘Capital accumulation and the industrial revolution’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds), The economic history of Britain since 1700, Vol. I: 1700– 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 132–4. Chapman, ‘Fixed capital formation’; Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 17; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, pp. 462–73. The waterways included are the Mersey and Irwell; the Bridgewater; the Manchester, Bolton and

Introduction

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

27

Bury; the Ashton; the Rochdale; the Peak Forest; the Huddersfield; and the Manchester and Salford Junction. Willan, River navigation. Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–3 (quote p. 3). Barker, ‘Transport’. Bagwell and Lyth, Transport in Britain, pp. 3–5. Ville, ‘Transport’, p. 326. Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’. The quotations are taken from pp. 539–40. G.L. Turnbull, Traffic and transport: an economic history of Pickfords (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979). The full list of sources consulted is provided in the bibliography. The history of the Ship Canal is well told by Leech, History of the Manchester Ship Canal and by Farnie, Manchester Ship Canal.

2

Manchester canals: trade, commodities and markets

Establishing patterns of trade is essential to a nuanced understanding of the significance of canals to the first Industrial Revolution. However, there have been few attempts to reconstruct systematically the trades of individual canals or of regional groups of canals in industrialising Britain. Turnbull has indeed complained that the ‘composition and contours of canal traffic has yet to be adequately researched’.1 In fact, our understanding of the scale and scope of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British canal trade relies to a surprising degree on two related generalisations: first, that canals were particularly suited to the conveyance of heavy, low-cost goods, such as coal and stone; and, second, that most canal trade was intra-regional and took the form of shorthaul conveyances of bulky raw materials.2 Aside from these considerations of the coal trade, historians have provided lengthy and unweighted lists of the broad range of commodities carried by particular canals.3 This chapter presents new quantitative data on the trade of Manchester canals drawn from a number of corporate and institutional sources and will highlight the remarkable diversity of commodities carried on the canals, emphasising not just intra-regional shipments of coal and stone but also inter-regional conveyances of high-value raw materials, foodstuffs and manufactures. The first section explains the data sources and compares the relative extent of the trade on Manchester canals. Section two provides a detailed examination of trade from the point of view of each of Manchester’s canals, before section three examines Manchester’s waterborne trade by commodity. The chapter concludes that micro-research can yield detailed estimates of the quantitative dimensions of canal trade and that Manchester’s canals earned the bulk of their incomes from the long-distance, extraregional trade in industrial inputs, foodstuffs and manufactures rather than in short-haul movements of heavy minerals. Only the well-documented trade in coal conforms to prevailing characterisations of a highly localised canal trade.

Trade, commodities and markets

29

Manchester canals: trade data Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British canal companies recorded their traffic in two ways: the weight of goods carried (in tons) and the tolls received (in pounds sterling).4 Figures 2.1 and 2.2 summarise the available data for Manchester canals (as well as the major adjoining canals and navigations) for both measures. The data are somewhat patchy and discontinuous; nevertheless, when brought together, they permit us to present new estimates of the volume of trade and toll income on each canal from c.1770 to 1850, although these data cannot support the estimation of ton-miles indexes for Manchester’s canal trade as a whole. Herson has recently produced such indexes for Chester for 1827–28, adducing ton-mile estimates on three canal routes and a range of other transport links. However, his useful methodology cannot be reliably applied to Manchester during this period due to the multiplicity of destinations served by Manchester canals, the lack of data on particular routes (as opposed to particular canals), and the very frequent transhipment of goods from one canal to another.5 As outlined in chapter 1, five major waterways served Manchester by the early nineteenth century. The Mersey and Irwell Navigation and the Bridgewater Canal established water-transport routes to the west of Manchester, while the Ashton and the Rochdale developed waterways to the east. The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal handled traffic flows to the north and west. The Bridgewater, the Rochdale and the Ashton all developed important inter-regional trades. The Bridgewater formed two important connections: first, with the Trent and Mersey at Preston Brook, which linked Manchester to the waterways of the midlands and southern England, and second, with the Leeds and Liverpool at Leigh, which opened up water communication between Manchester and a succession of Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns to the north. The Rochdale Canal, meanwhile, linked the Bridgewater Canal to the key river navigations of Yorkshire (the Calder and Hebble and Aire and Calder), allowing uninterrupted water transport from Liverpool to Hull. The Ashton made two connections to the east of Manchester: to the Huddersfield Canal, which provided an alternate route through the Pennines to that of the Rochdale, and to the Peak Forest Canal, which served the limestone quarries of the High Peak. Figure 2.1 shows the extant tonnage data for all of these canals. The data show constant increases in the volumes of goods carried on all Manchester canals until the late 1830s, before tonnage levels fluctuated on all canals except the Bridgewater in the 1840s, reflecting competition from the expanding railway system. Over the sixty-year period represented in Figure 2.1, the Bridgewater carried the largest trade of Manchester’s canals, justifying its position as the region’s most celebrated waterway. Its ascendancy, in

1791–1793 1794–1796 1797–1799 1800–1802 1803–1805 1806–1808 1809–1811 1812–1814 1815–1817 1818–1820 1821–1823 1824–1826 1827–1829 1830–1832 1833–1835 1836–1838 1839–1841 1842–1844 1845–1847 1848–1850

Bridgewater Canal

Rochdale Canal

267,563 271,417 287,467 326,628 345,193 346,005 410,799 430,224 479,378 518,172 603,093 674,509 713,814 709,882 820,946 928,335 985,196 1,096,006 1,435,017 1,452,687

223,032 287,841 332,848 406,952 487,819 498,402 539,081 677,043 828,926 839,640 751,269 914,924 769,316

Calder and Hebble Navigation

Ashton Canal

Peak Forest Canal

Mersey and Irwell Navigation

Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal

Huddersfield Canal

40,460 31,946

96,975 115,716 126,512 274,629 758,738 839,102 724,833 743,516

514,241

442,254

590,332 483,632

454,942 360,734

119,359 147,530 136,386 146,430 195,172 148,626

151,653 196,138 228,157 125,182 143,849 169,487

Figure 2.1 Tonnage data for Manchester’s canals and their connections, 1791–1850 (three-year averages). Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Trust, General Accounts, 1791–1810 and 1844–50; MALSU, Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company, Minute Book 1834–38, 4 November 1835, 5 September 1836; GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Vol. 14; NA, RAIL 458/4–7, MBBCC, Minute Books, 1824–31, 1831–33, 1833–35, 1835–37; WLLS, John Goodchild collection, GB 0740, W. Aldam MSS; Report of the commissioners of the railways (P.P. 1850, Vol. XXXI), pp. 352–3; Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal Bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), pp. 25–6; Return relating to inland navigation and canal companies in England and Wales (P.P. 1870, Vol. LVI), pp. 680–1, 692–3; Parliamentary Archives, London, HC/CL/PB/2/14/90–3; Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 340–9; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 102–3 and Vol. II, pp. 280, 330–1

1765–1766 1767–1769 1770–1772 1773–1775 1776–1778 1779–1781 1782–1784 1785–1787 1788–1790 1791–1793 1794–1796 1797–1799 1800–1802 1803–1805 1806–1808 1809–1811 1812–1814 1815–1817 1818–1820 1821–1823 1824–1826 1827–1829 1830–1832 1833–1835 1836–1838 1839–1841 1842–1844 1845–1847

Bridgewater Canal (trade receipts)

Bridgewater Canal (tolls)

2,409 5,212 10,685 14,500 19,608 20,192 25,949 38,301 49,005 60,357 58,266 63,085 92,930 107,021 105,777 121,192

33,176 32,015 34,118 40,273 46,271 50,164 62,568

Ashton Canal

Huddersfield Canal

Peak Forest Canal

Rochdale Canal

11,229 14,848 19,700 19,357 12,345 16,350

13,187 17,666 19,352 19,712 22,658 27,201 37,593 36,794 40,132 49,875 59,174 53,838 26,901 29,438

7,924 12,284

97,377 95,356 108,197 100,720

Mersey and Irwell Navigation (tolls)

Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal

Calder and Hebble Navigation

1,294 1,782 6,501

175,997 142,251 139,058 139,091 140,469 154,802

Mersey and Irwell Navigation (trade receipts)

10,736 12,734 16,105 18,538 19,319 14,427 15,246

7,536 7,536

4,934 6,507 8,575 10,712

55,155 46,444 56,251

24,633 31,555

57,341 60,834 35,515 38,146

Figure 2.2 Income from tolls on Manchester’s canals, 1765–1850 (three-year averages) Source: Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Trust, General Accounts, 1791–1810 and 1844–50; MALSU, Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company, Minute Book 1834– 38, 4 November 1835, 5 September 1836; GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Vol. 14; NA, RAIL 458/4–7, MBBCC, Minute Books, 1824–31, 1831–33, 1833–35, 1835–37; WLLS, John Goodchild collection, GB 0740, W. Aldam MSS; Report of the commissioners of the railways (P.P. 1850, Vol. XXXI), pp. 352–3; Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal Bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), pp. 25–6; Return relating to inland navigation and canal companies in England and Wales (P.P. 1870, Vol. LVI), pp. 680–1, 692–3; Parliamentary Archives, London, HC/CL/PB/2/14/90–3; Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 340–9; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 102–3 and Vol. II, pp. 280, 330–1

32

Transport and the industrial city

terms of aggregate tonnage carried, can be seen in the early nineteenth century, when the first tonnage comparisons with other canals are possible. In 1821–23, the Bridgewater carried an annual average freight of 603,093 tons, the Rochdale hauled 406,952 tons and the Mersey and Irwell carried just 126,512 tons. A second comparison in 1836–38 reveals that the Bridgewater remained the region’s busiest waterway, carrying goods of an average annual weight of 928,335 tons, although its absolute share of trade fell as canal activity increased in the region. The Rochdale and the Calder and Hebble both then carried slightly more than 750,000 tons, while the Ashton and the Peak Forest carried 514,241 tons and 442,254 tons, respectively. The Mersey and Irwell and the Manchester, Bolton and Bury hauled the lowest annual tonnage of Manchester waterways at this time, neither carrying more than 250,000 tons of goods per annum. In 1848–50, the Bridgewater’s ascendancy persisted and its annual average freight of 1.5 million tons amounted to an increased relative share of canal traffic. By this date, the Rochdale and the Calder and Hebble each carried approximately half the amount of the Bridgewater; the Ashton carried 466,188 tons and the Peak Forest 343,549 tons. The Mersey and Irwell carried 259,339 tons and the Huddersfield Canal 169,487 tons. Figure 2.2 plots canal company income from canal trade. Like the tonnage series, growth is largely smooth and continuous on all canals until the late 1830s. The setbacks of the 1840s, however, are much more marked than was the case with tonnages, especially on the canals serving markets to the east of Manchester. Even the Bridgewater generated smaller trading incomes in this decade, despite steeply rising tonnages, as tolls on all classes of goods were reduced to match the lower charges introduced by railways. Nonetheless, from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Bridgewater generated the most traffic income of all of Manchester’s waterways. The trading income of the Bridgewater (like the Mersey and Irwell Navigation) came from two sources: first, from the tolls paid by independent carrying firms and, second, from the charges paid by the customers of the two waterways’ own carrying services.6 Taken together, these two flows of income are referred to here as ‘trading receipts’. Manchester’s other canals did not develop significant carrying institutions, restricting the bulk of their income to the tolls paid by independent canal carriers. For purposes of comparison, Figure 2.2 includes the total trading receipts earned by the Bridgewater and the Mersey and Irwell, as well as estimates of tolls (trading receipts minus Bridgewater/Mersey and Irwell’s carriers’ income) earned from the trade carried on the canal.7 In 1806–08, when data are available for the Bridgewater and the Rochdale, the former canal’s trading receipts stood at £121,192, a sum that included estimated tolls of £62,568. At this time, the Rochdale’s toll income was only

Trade, commodities and markets

33

£13,187. By the mid-1830s, the Rochdale’s annual tolls had reached approximately £60,000 but this was less than half of the total trading receipts then generated by the Bridgewater (£139,058, approximately £97,377 of which was tolls) but a larger sum than the Calder and Hebble’s toll income of £57,341 and the Mersey and Irwell’s trading receipts of £55,000 (less than £20,000 of which can be estimated as tolls). Manchester’s remaining canals generated much lower toll incomes in the mid-1830s: the Ashton and Peak Forest canals each earned tolls of around £16,000 per annum, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury took approximately £10,000 in tolls and the Huddersfield Canal £7,500. In the late 1840s, the yearly toll income of the Bridgewater Canal had reached slightly more than £100,000, the Rochdale and the Mersey and Irwell received tolls of slightly below £25,000, while the Peak Forest and Ashton canals each earned just over £10,000 from tolls. Manchester’s canal trade thus grew steeply from small beginnings in the late eighteenth century. The smooth growth trend was interrupted in the 1840s, when railway competition emerged. The fluctuations of the 1840s were especially marked in terms of toll income, while some canals were able to increase the overall volume of their traffic. The next section takes a closer look at the trade of individual canals, starting with the Bridgewater Canal, which was Manchester’s premier waterway in this period both in terms of tonnage carried and in terms of income generated. Trade: individual canals Bridgewater Canal From 1791, we can provide detailed information on the Bridgewater Canal’s tonnage and canal trade income. In that year, the Bridgewater’s income was £57,706 (an estimated £31,855 of which was tolls), generated from a total freight of 267,563 tons. Trade sustained similar levels for the remainder of the 1790s (except for the boom year of 1792), before breaking 300,000 tons in 1800 and 350,000 in 1802. In the latter year, the Bridgewater’s trading receipts reached £94,947 (£45,894 in tolls). Trade flattened during the trading disruptions of 1803–08, before rising to 423,707 tons in 1810, when total trading receipts were £127,332. Tonnage expanded rapidly in the 1810s and 1820s. By 1830, the year that the Liverpool and Manchester Railway established a competing service, total freight on the canal exceeded 700,000 tons and trading receipts stood at more than £175,000. Despite the onset of railway competition, tonnage doubled over the next twenty years. This secular increase in the volume of canal freights was, however, accompanied by a fall in canal income as railway competition forced down freight rates on the canal. Trading receipts fell slightly from their 1830 peak, landing at c.£130,000– £150,000 in the late 1840s (£100,000–£110,000 of which was tolls).

Transport and the industrial city

34

Table 2.1 Bridgewater tonnage, trading receipts and estimated tolls, 1765–1850 (three-year averages) Period

Freight (tons) Total trading Income per ton Estimated receipts (£) (trading receipts) tolls (£)

1765–66 1767–69 1770–72 1773–75 1776–78 1779–81 1782–84 1785–87 1788–90 1791–93 1794–96 1797–99 1800–02 1803–05 1806–08 1809–11 1812–14 1815–17 1818–20 1821–23 1824–26 1827–29 1830–32 1833–35 1836–38 1839–41 1842–44 1845–47 1848–50

– – – – – – – – – 267,563 271,417 287,467 326,628 345,193 346,005 410,799 430,224 479,378 518,172 603,093 674,509 713,814 709,882 820,946 928,335 985,196 1,096,006 1,435,017 1,452,687

2,409 5,212 10,685 14,500 19,608 20,192 25,949 38,301 49,005 60,357 58,266 63,085 92,930 107,021 105,777 121,192 – – – – – – 175,997 142,251 139,058 139,091 140,469 154,802 132,978

– – – – – – – – – 4s. 7d. 4s. 2d. 4s. 5d. 5s. 7d. 6s. 2d. 6s. 2d. 6s. 2d. – – – – – – 5s. 3s. 5d. 3s. 2s. 10d. 2s. 7d. 2s. 2d. 1s. 10d.

– – – – – – – – – 33,176 32,015 34,118 40,273 46,271 50,164 62,568 – – – – – – – – 97,377 95,356 108,197 100,720a –

Income per ton (tolls) – – – – – – – – – 2s. 5d. 2s. 5d. 2s. 5d. 2s. 5d. 2s. 7d. 2s. 10d. 3s. – – – – – – – – 2s. 2s. 2s. 1s. 5d. –

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Trust, General Accounts, 1791–1810 and 1844–1850; University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/831, A statement on the trades on the Bridgewater Canal and Old Quay Navigations, 1838–48; Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal bills (P.P., 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), pp. 202–3; F.C. Mather, After the canal duke: a study of the industrial estates administered by the trustees of the third duke of Bridgewater in the age of railway building 1825–1872 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 362–5; C. Hadfield and G. Biddle, The canals of north west England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), Vol. I, p. 116. Notes: Trading receipts refers to all canal income except from warehousing and passengers. It includes the duke’s receipts as carrier, as well as tolls paid by independent carriers. Estimated tolls calculated using procedure outlined in note 7. Figures for 1830–32 relate to 1830 only; similarly for 1833–35 (1833 only) and 1836–38 (1838 only). a = actual tolls, not an estimate.

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Trade on the Bridgewater Canal comprised three key constituents: the trade in coal, the Liverpool–Manchester trade and the interchange trade with the Trent and Mersey Canal at Preston Brook. Coal has attracted the most attention. The duke himself claimed that every canal needed coal ‘at the heels of it’, while John Philips, the canal pamphleteer of the 1790s, asserted that 90 out of 130 canals were built primarily to carry coal.8 The first phase of the Bridgewater Canal from the Worsley collieries to Manchester, completed in the mid-1760s, was established to carry coal to meet Manchester’s growing industrial and domestic fuel needs, the selling price of this commodity falling from 7½d. per cwt (12½s. per ton) to 4d. per cwt (62/3s. per ton). The coal carried on the Bridgewater Canal came from two main sources: first, the Bridgewater collieries around Worsley and, second, and ultimately most importantly, the coalfields around Wigan, which became accessible after 1821 via the connection between the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the Bridgewater Canal at Leigh. Table 2.2 Bridgewater collieries and canal coal trade (three-year averages) Period

Colliery output

1766–75 1776–85 1786–95 1796–05 1806–15 1816–25 1826–28 1845–46

– – – – – – 153,630a 311,994

Sale price (£)

9,854 14,549 21,416 42,469 45,633 – – 123,662

Colliery coal carried on the canal (tons)

Estimated tolls (£)

30,126 47,978 64,022 94,483 88,610 100,706 103,975 102,686

904 1,439 1,921 2,834 2,568 3,021 3,119 2,944b

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Trust, General Accounts, 1791–1810 and 1844–1850; Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal bills (P.P., 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), pp. 202–3; F.C. Mather, After the canal duke: a study of the industrial estates administered by the trustees of the third duke of Bridgewater in the age of railway building 1825–1872 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 340–9; C. Hadfield and G. Biddle, The canals of north west England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), Vol. I, pp. 102–3. Notes: Estimated tolls calculated using procedure outlined in note 7. a = figure for 1829. b = actual tolls, not an estimate.

The Bridgewater Canal’s coal tonnage more than doubled from an annual average of 30,000 tons per year in the ten years following 1766 to 64,000 tons in the mid-1780s. In 1787, Worsley coal comprised 25 per cent of the total tonnage carried on the canal; by 1800, coal freight had increased to 100,000 tons per year, one-third of the canal’s overall tonnage account. The level

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of approximately 100,000 tons per year of Worsley coal was sustained throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, lagging behind, in relative terms, other trades on the canal. By 1844, indeed, Bridgewater coal comprised just 7 per cent of total tonnage on the canal.9 By the latter date, it is evident that much Bridgewater coal was destined for markets other than Manchester. Indeed, Table 2.3 shows that roughly 40 per cent of Bridgewater coal was brought to Manchester – the largest single destination – in the mid1840s but there were other important markets for Worsley coal along the line of the canal at Patricroft, Stretford, Broadheath, Lymm and Warrington, as well as interchange trade at Preston Brook (to the Trent and Mersey) and at Runcorn (for Liverpool and coastal trade). Table 2.3 Coal distribution via the Bridgewater Canal from the Trustees’ coal mines in Worsley, 1846 Point of delivery Rochdale Canal (Manchester) Manchester Stretford and Broadheath Runcorn Trent and Mersey Canal (Preston Brook) Barton and Patricroft Trustees’ works (location unknown) Lymm Stockton Quay (Warrington) Total

Tons

Distance carried (miles)

Percentage of trade

22,846 20,225 19,374 14,792

more than 8 8 6–10 31

20.9 18.5 17.8 13.6

11,483 7,330

26 2

10.5 6.7

7,146 5,395

20 15–16

6.6 4.9

485

21

0.4

109,076

100

Source: University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/833a. Note: George Loch, one of the Bridgewater Trustees, presented a statement to a parliamentary Select Committee in 1846 that the Trustees carried 128,379 tons of their own coal on the canal. See Third report from the Select Committee on railways and canal bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, p. 203.

From 1821, the connection made between the Bridgewater and the Leeds and Liverpool at Leigh provided access to the most important part of the Lancashire coalfield around Wigan. Until the end of our period, there are no separate figures for non-Bridgewater coal carried on the canal but, by the late 1840s, it is clear that a great quantity of Wigan coal was carried. In 1848, the canal carried just over 650,000 tons of coal – approximately 40 per cent of the canal’s total trade by weight – but only 110,000 tons came from the Worsley coal mines. The remaining 540,000 tons were classified as ‘Wigan coal’:

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roughly half of this (272,000 tons) went to Manchester, a further 146,000 tons reached Runcorn and Liverpool, while 42,000 tons were transhipped to the Trent and Mersey at Preston Brook. The remainder was distributed at various points along the line. Rochdale Canal Company data for the 1840s confirm that almost 300,000 tons per year of Wigan coal transhipped from the Bridgewater Canal on to the Rochdale Canal in Manchester. In 1849, for example, the Rochdale Canal received 315,000 tons of coal from the Bridgewater. In that year, we know that approximately 27,000 tons of this coal came from the Bridgewater colliery. Thus, at least 288,000 tons of nonBridgewater (i.e. Wigan) coal was carried on the canal in this year.10 The other two major traffics on the Bridgewater were the through trades with the Trent and Mersey and the direct Liverpool–Manchester trade. From 1791 to 1810, we can provide a good account of the development of these trades. In the early 1790s, each comprised roughly one-quarter of the total tonnage on the canal. By 1810, however, the Trent and Mersey trade had increased sharply to take more than half of the canal’s total tonnage, while the direct Manchester–Liverpool trade had fallen to just 10 per cent of the tonnage account, although a further 10 per cent of the canal’s tonnage was made up of goods despatched from Manchester and Liverpool to intermediate places along the canal. The rapidly growing Trent and Mersey through trades fell into two roughly equal parts. The first was the ‘Liverpool trade’, a route comprising a 16-mile estuary link between Liverpool and Runcorn in the duke’s flats and six miles along the Bridgewater Canal between Runcorn and the Trent and Mersey junction at Preston Brook. This exchange between Liverpool and the Trent and Mersey, independent of Manchester, was chiefly made up of clay and flints to the Potteries, the return leg being largely composed of earthenware from Staffordshire and metal goods from Staffordshire and the west Midlands.11 In 1791, the Liverpool branch of the Trent and Mersey interchange trade comprised 33,788 tons (14,482 tons arriving at Liverpool, 19,306 tons departing). By 1810, the freight was 101,033 tons (36,868 tons to, and 64,167 tons from, Liverpool). The shortness of the distance of goods carried on the Bridgewater Canal, however, made this trade only a minor part of the Bridgewater’s trading receipts, which amounted to £5,723 in 1791 (9.9 per cent of the total) and £31,528 in 1810 (24.8 per cent). The second sub-branch of the Trent and Mersey through trade was that to and from Manchester itself, including the latter town’s long-distance trades with London and the south. This branch of trade grew sharply from the 1790s, reaching 36,456 tons in 1791, 65,128 in 1800 and 136,253 in 1810. This Manchester–Trent and Mersey interchange trade provided, by the latter date, almost one-third of total tonnage on the canal. The third major trade on the Bridgewater Canal was the trade between Manchester and Liverpool. When measured purely in terms of tonnage

38

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carried, this was, in fact, the smallest of the three branches in the early nineteenth century. Tonnage on this route actually fell from almost 60,000 tons in 1791 to 35,128 tons in 1800, before climbing rapidly to more than 68,000 tons in 1802 and then falling again to fewer than 37,000 tons by 1810.12 This was, moreover, a very one-sided exchange in which the vast bulk of trade was carried in one direction: the Liverpool to Manchester component comprised 88 per cent of the total bilateral tonnage between the two towns from 1791 to 1810. But the true value of the Manchester and Liverpool trade to the Bridgewater was in its toll income rather than its weight: in 1791 the trade generated 7s. 7d. per ton, including the duke’s income as carriers, increasing to 14s. 2d. per ton in 1801 and 15s. 5d. per ton in 1810. Thus, in 1810, the carriage of just 12.5 per cent of the canal’s freight earned the Bridgewater Trustees 32.1 per cent of their trading receipts. This trading pattern reflected both the high values of the cargoes hauled and the distance that they were carried. The Liverpool–Manchester trade chiefly comprised raw cotton, corn and timber, ‘the three great staple Articles’ of Liverpool’s Atlantic imports,13 while the Manchester–Liverpool leg mainly consisted of finished textile goods.14 All of these commodities, except timber, commanded high tolls (7s.– 10s. 6d. per ton in the late eighteenth century and 13s.–20s. per ton in 1810).15 As far as can be ascertained, the Bridgewater Canal’s tonnage and income continued to increase from 1810 to 1830. By the mid-1820s, the only extensively documented branch of trade, the Liverpool–Manchester trade, had more than trebled in volume from 1810 to reach around 115,000 tons per year. The all-important leg from Liverpool to Manchester was distributed in the following approximate proportions: one-half timber (67,500 tons), onequarter cotton (28,750 tons), one-eighth grain (14,375 tons) and one-eighth sundries (14,375 tons). The Manchester to Liverpool leg added a further 20,000 tons and was, of course, mainly made up of cotton yarn and textiles. 16 By 1830–32, the Bridgewater Canal’s total trading receipts had reached £175,000, an income generated from a total freight of c.710,000 tons. This amounted to 5s. per ton, only slightly lower than that of the prosperous years of the first decade of the century. The impact of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, however, was not long delayed. From the early 1830s, the Bridgewater Canal vastly increased the volume of its trade but suffered a fall in earnings. Thus, the tonnage carried on the canal roughly doubled from 1830–32 to 1845–47, while annual trading receipts fell by more than £20,000. By the latter period, the Bridgewater’s per ton trading receipts had more than halved from 5s. per ton in the early 1830s to 2s. 4d., a development that reflected the lower toll rates produced by competitive pressures, as well as a greater proportion of traffic being handled by independent carriers rather than Bridgewater vessels (see chapter 4). Detailed information is available for the volume of all of the Bridgewater

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Canal traffics in 1846.17 The importance of the three key branches of trade is even more marked than it was in the early nineteenth century. In this year, the canal carried slightly more than 1.4m tons, of which coal made up 651,861 tons: some 109,000 tons (16.7 per cent) came from the Bridgewater pits, while the remaining c.550,000 tons was classified as ‘Wigan coal’, half of which was carried to Manchester and the bulk of the remainder to Runcorn. In total, coal comprised 46 per cent of the canal’s freight in this year. The 775,696 tons of non-coal trade was mainly taken up by the Liverpool– Manchester trade (360,855 tons) and the Trent and Mersey interchange trade (330,856 tons). The Liverpool to Manchester leg of the Manchester– Liverpool trade still accounted for 90 per cent of the trade between the towns. The through trade between Liverpool and the west midlands via Preston Brook, a trade that bypassed Manchester, meanwhile, took the largest share of the Trent and Mersey interchange goods, with only 30 per cent of volume of goods in this segment carried to and from Manchester and Preston Brook.18 Data on the types of commodities traded between Liverpool and the Trent and Mersey for 1846 break down as follows: from Liverpool, 60 per cent corn and groceries, 31 per cent timber and 9 per cent cotton; to Liverpool, 47 per cent wrought iron, 31 per cent metal goods, 15 per cent ale, 6 per cent salt and 2 per cent ‘London goods’.19 The only other trades of note on the Bridgewater at this time were market goods from Cheshire to Manchester (around 20,000 tons) and around the same quantity of goods from Liverpool to Worsley. In terms of income generated, the non-coal trade accounted for more than 80 per cent of total toll income.20 Table 2.4 provides a breakdown of the tolls collected at various points on the Bridgewater Canal in 1848 (the data refer to independent carriers). This shows that Manchester was the primary destination for canal traffic, taking 54 per cent of the Bridgewater’s tonnage and almost 70 per cent of its tolls. The terminal basin at Runcorn took a further quarter of the canal tonnage (the bulk of course transhipped to and from Liverpool), with no other location taking more than 7 per cent in tonnage and 5 per cent in tolls. Mersey and Irwell Navigation Despite being Manchester’s first navigable waterway, trading data for the Mersey and Irwell Navigation are lacking for the eighteenth century and are rather patchy for the nineteenth century. The best data describe the volume of traffic measured in tons. Thus, as Table 2.5 shows, the tonnage on the navigation rose from approximately 97,000 tons in 1815–17 to 125,000 tons in 1821–23, before reaching 150,000–200,000 tons in the mid-to-late 1830s. Following a dip in trade in the early 1840s, tonnage rose again to exceed 300,000 tons in 1845–47.

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Table 2.4 Bridgewater Canal, trade by location, 1848 Point of delivery

Manchester Runcorn Preston Brook Leigh Worsley Stockton Quay Broadheath Stretford Lymm Total

Tonnage delivered

Percentage of total

Tolls collected (£)

Percentage of total

566,961 270,822 70,499 61,091 57,080 16,009 2,634 993 391

54.2 25.9 6.7 5.8 5.5 1.5 0.3 0.1 0.0

49,170 14,264 3,460 1,838 1,925 525 121 44 23

68.9 20.0 4.8 2.6 2.7 0.7 0.2 0.1 0.0

1,046,680

100

71,370

100

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Collieries Ltd, NCBw 6/3.

Data on income for the Mersey and Irwell are much less extensive and are complicated by the fact that the navigation’s owner (the Old Quay Company, 1773–1844) undertook much of the carriage on the navigation itself, perhaps as much as nine-tenths in 1825, although a much smaller proportion in the 1840s.21 So, in the 1820s trading income stood at approximately £55,000 but by the early 1840s, despite the higher tonnages carried, trading receipts had fallen to roughly £45,000, with estimated tolls of £25,000. The direct Liverpool–Manchester trade comprised most of the navigation’s business, although the Old Quay Company did operate through services on the Bolton and Bury Canal. In the mid-1820s, the Liverpool to Manchester leg accounted for 81 per cent of the navigation’s tonnage. At this time, James Cropper, a leading Liverpool merchant in the US trade, effectively described the importance of the waterways in distributing incoming commodities from the Liverpool docks to the growing industrial centre of Manchester: Nearly all the Cotton goes [from Liverpool to Manchester] … a large proportion of the Timber goes to Manchester and the Neighbourhood, and a very large Quantity of Corn; and looking to the immensely thick population around Manchester, I have thought it not an unreasonable Calculation to suppose that One-Third of the Amount of Goods imported into Liverpool went to Manchester.

Disaggregating further, timber comprised half of total tonnage on the Liverpool to Manchester trade, cotton one-quarter, corn one-eighth, with the remaining one-twentieth made up of ‘Dry Salteries, Drugs, Dye Woods, Flour and Paving Stones’.22

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Table 2.5 Mersey and Irwell Navigation tonnage, trading receipts and estimated tolls, 1765–1850 (three-year averages) Period

Freight (tons)

Trading Income per ton receipts (£) (trading receipts)

1815–17 1818–20 1821–23 1824–26 1827–29 1830–32 1833–35 1836–38 1839–41 1842–44 1845–47 1848–50

96,975 115,716 126,512 – – – 119,359 147,530 205,460 141,813 337,960 247,449

– – 57,019 – – – 55,155 – – 46,444 56,251 41,965

– – 9s. – – – 9s. 2d. – – 6s. 7d. 3s. 5d. 3s. 5d.

Estimated tolls (£)

Income per ton (tolls)

– – 24,000 – – – 22,062 – – 24,633 31,555 24,526

– – 3s. 10d. – – – 3s. 7d. – – 3s. 5d. 1s. 10d. 2s.

Source: MALSU, Mersey and Irwell Navigation Companny, Minute Book 1834–38, 4 November 1835, 5 September 1836; LCRO, Bridgewater Trust, General Accounts, 1844–50; University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/831, A statement on the trades on the Bridgewater Canal and Old Quay Navigations, 1838–48. Notes: Trading receipts refers to all canal income except from warehousing and passengers. It includes the duke’s receipts as carrier, as well as tolls paid by independent carriers. Trading receipts for 1821–23 is an estimate based on divisions of trade of one-half timber (8s. per ton), one-quarter cotton (15s. per ton), one-eighth corn (10s. per ton) and one-twentieth other goods (15s. per ton); tolls are estimated at 3s. per ton. For information on freight and toll charges, see House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, pp. 280–90. Trading receipts for 1833–35 is based on a figure for nine months of trade cited in the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Minute Book for 1835, inflated to produce a figure for twelve months. Estimated tolls for the same year based on the assumption that three-quarters of trade on the navigation was carried by the Old Quay Company and that tolls comprised 22 per cent of carriers’ charges (3s. 4d. : 15s.). Estimated tolls for 1842–50 calculated using procedure outlined in note 7.

Table 2.6 Mersey and Irwell Navigation, trade by location, 1848 Point of delivery

Tonnage delivered

Percentage of total

Trading receipts (£)

Percentage of total

Manchester Warrington Liverpool Runcorn Cadishead

35,665 14,831 7,913 5,130 623

55.6 23.1 12.3 8.0 1.0

14,763 3,681 3,379 1,121 177

63.9 15.9 14.6 4.8 0.8

Total

64,162

100

23,321

100

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Collieries Ltd, NCBw 6/3. Note: Refers to trade of Old Quay Company’s own vessels.

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Table 2.6 shows that Manchester was the prime destination for the navigation’s trade, accounting for 55 per cent of total tonnage and almost 65 per cent of trading income. Warrington was the destination of almost a quarter of tonnage, with the terminal points at Liverpool and Runcorn adding an additional 20 per cent. Good data are available on the direction of the navigation’s traffic in 1836 and the commodity composition of the navigation’s trade in 1847. In the former year, the navigation carried approximately 170,000 tons. The company itself carried 100,000 tons between Liverpool and Manchester in the Old Quay Company flats, as well as return cargoes from Manchester to Liverpool of 20,000 tons. The New Quay Company, an independent carrier, hauled a further 20,000 tons both ways, making a total for the Liverpool–Manchester trade of 140,000 tons. In addition, 30,000 tons was carried by coastal vessels from the Manchester Dock at Liverpool to the Old Quay’s Runcorn basin.23 The data for 1847 are more detailed but only relate to one month’s trade.24 Table 2.7 shows the continuing importance of the incoming trade to Manchester on the navigation, which took three-quarters of aggregate tonnage, of which slightly more than two-thirds came from Liverpool and the remainder from Runcorn. In the Liverpool–Manchester trade, the triumvirate of corn, cotton and timber retained the ascendancy, comprising 84 per cent of this branch of trade. The Runcorn–Manchester trade consisted of a wholly different category of commodities, mainly stone (flags and slate), as well as un-manufactured iron and clay. The trade from Manchester to Liverpool consisted largely of manufactures, the bulk, of course, cotton textiles. The Mersey and Irwell Navigation had a negligible coal trade. Rochdale Canal While Manchester’s first two waterways had developed water transport links to the west, the ‘canal mania’ cuts of the 1790s established a broader geographical reach, in which routes to the east were prominent. The most important of these latter canals, the Rochdale Canal, became a central subdivision of a trans-Pennine waterway link between Liverpool and Hull. This canal has the most complete traffic data of any of Manchester’s canals. It is possible to furnish a detailed analysis of its traffic for all but the earliest years of its trade (Table 2.8).25 The Rochdale Canal Company rarely operated as a carrier on the canal before the late nineteenth century: tolls paid by independent firms made up 95 per cent of the company’s total income in 1808 and, as late as 1842, the corresponding figure was 90 per cent. The remainder of the Rochdale Canal Company’s income in this period was accrued from land, warehouse, wharf and water rents.26

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Table 2.7 Commodity composition of trade on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1847 Branch and commodity One month figures (tons)

Twelve-month Percentage of equivalent of trade (tons) of branch

Percentage of total trade

Liverpool–Manchester Corn Timber Cotton Dry salteries Groceries Dyewoods Sundries Subtotal

3,226 2,361 1,953 385 359 108 638 9,030

38,712 28,332 23,436 4,620 4,308 1,296 7,656 108,360

36 26 22 4 4 1 7 100

19 14 12 2 2 1 4 54

1,385 1,285 1,145 34 3,849

16,620 15,420 13,740 408 46,188

36 33 30 1 100

8 8 7 0 23

3,119 860 3,979

37,428 10,320 47,748

78 22 100

19 5 24

16,858

202,296

Runcorn–Manchester Flags and road materials Iron Slates Clay Subtotal Manchester–Liverpool Manufactures Sundries Subtotal Total

101

Source: S. Salt, Facts and figures, principally relating to railways and commerce (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1848), pp. 38–9.

From 1810, detailed information is available on both tonnages and tolls. In that year, the Rochdale Canal Company’s toll income was £20,179, earned from a total freight of 236,293 tons. Until 1815, trade was sluggish, before growing rapidly in the 1820s and 1830s, the halcyon years of the canal’s business. Trade peaked in 1825, when the weight of goods carried reached 526,062 tons, producing a toll income of £41,079. Trade increased sharply throughout the 1830s and, by 1839, the canal carried 867,248 tons of goods, earning £62,712 for the company. Leaner years followed the opening of the Manchester and Leeds Railway in 1841. This is not immediately obvious in the tonnage figures. The weight of goods carried on the canal, indeed, remained in the 750,000–900,000 tons range until as late as the 1880s.27 It is the precipitous fall in toll income that reveals the true impact of railway

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Table 2.8 Tonnages, tolls and dividends on the Rochdale Canal, 1810–54 (three-year averages) Period

Freight (tons)

Tolls (£)

Income per ton

1810–12 1813–15 1816–18 1819–21 1822–24 1825–27 1828–30 1831–33 1834–36 1837–39 1840–42 1843–45 1846–48 1849–51 1852–54

211,545 248,382 303,011 336,459 461,648 468,237 516,744 561,511 751,207 821,222 764,785 843,412 825,528 818,756 864,108

18,216 20,134 22,482 24,250 34,217 36,754 39,457 42,069 54,860 60,135 42,022 27,710 28,570 23,567 27,209

1s. 10d. 1s. 7d. 1s. 5d. 1s. 5d. 1s. 5d. 1s. 7d. 1s. 7d. 1s. 5d. 1s. 5d. 1s. 5d. 1s. 7d. 7d. 7d. 7d.

Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Vol. 14.

competition. By 1842, tolls had fallen to £27,264, less than one-half of the 1839 peak, as the remunerative trades in corn and manufactured goods shifted to the railway.28 This caused a substantial decline in the canal’s per ton income, which fell from 1s. 5d.–1s. 7d. in the 1820s and 1830s to just 7d. in the 1840s (Table 2.8). Income from tolls remained in the £25,000–£30,000 range in the 1840s and 1850s. Hence, the railway companies’ proposition to lease the canal for £37,652 per annum was an attractive one, and unanimously approved by the Rochdale Canal Company in 1855.29 Figures 2.3 and 2.4 show the commodity composition of the Rochdale Canal’s trade from 1810 to 1849, the former detailing each commodity by weight, the latter identifying income from tolls. The most notable feature of Figure 2.3 is the extent to which coal dominated tonnage, accounting for 45 per cent of all freight on this canal in 1845. Figure 2.4, however, shows that coal contributed a much smaller part of the canal’s income, the bulk of which, until 1840, was provided by three commodity classifications: corn, sundries and manufactured goods. This highlights an essential distinction between the two major types of goods traded on the Rochdale Canal: lightweight but expensive goods accrued the bulk of income, while heavy, low-value goods dominated tonnage. This was reflected in a sliding scale of toll charges. Thus, from 1820 to 1835, the Rochdale Canal Company earned an average of 3s. 7d. per ton on corn and 3s. 5d. per ton on manufactured goods but only 2d. per ton on coal. The onset of railway competition

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Figure 2.3 Commodities carried on the Rochdale Canal, 1810–49 (tons) Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. 14 Note: Salt and wool are excluded because of the small amounts carried.

compelled the company to reduce its tolls on high-value goods. As a result, in 1845, per ton income on corn had halved to 1s. 10d. and that on manufactured goods had fallen to 1s. The income from the coal trade, where railways generated no serious competition, remained steady at only 2d. per ton.30 The Piccadilly basin in Manchester was at the heart of the Rochdale Canal Company’s operations, generating more than half of all toll income from 1815 to 1845 (Table 2.9). At Manchester, corn carried from the eastern agricultural districts, or their markets at Hull and Wakefield, was the principal source of the Rochdale Canal Company’s income, with stone, coal, manufactured goods and sundries providing the major part of the remainder. Up to the mid-1840s, Sowerby Bridge was the second most important toll-collection point, the majority of its tolls deriving from eastward-moving cotton yarn and textiles destined for exportation at Hull. These high-earning trades

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Figure 2.4 Tolls paid on the Rochdale Canal by commodity, 1810–49 (£) Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. 14

Table 2.9 Tolls collected on the Rochdale Canal by location, 1815–45 (£) Location

1815

1825

1835

1845

Manchester (Piccadilly) Sowerby Bridge Rochdale Gauxholme Manchester (Castlefield) Heywood

10,448 6,294 2,416 950 721 0

19,782 9,241 7,089 2,658 2,302 0

26,451 12,215 8,137 3,069 2,467 578

14,648 4,258 5,440 1,942 2,459 891

Total

20,829

41,072

55,488

29,638

Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/4/1/1/6, 11, 13, 17, 20, 25, 27, 29 and 30. Note: Only refers to tolls paid by carriers on credit.

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Table 2.10 Commodity composition of Rochdale Canal Company’s trade, by tonnage and tolls, 1810–45 (percentage share) Commodity

Coal Corn Goods Stone Sundries Timber Lime Wool Salt

1810 1815 1825 1835 1845 Tonnage Tolls Tonnage Tolls Tonnage Tolls Tonnage Tolls Tonnage Tolls 24 18 2 7 42 1 5 1 0

6 23 5 6 53 2 2 3 0

27 12 9 13 23 2 10 3 1

5 30 11 13 31 3 2 5 1

30 14 6 13 23 7 5 1 1

5 32 13 17 21 7 1 2 1

33 12 11 16 18 5 4 1 1

8 30 19 16 19 5 0 1 1

45 7 2 14 23 6 4 0 1

13 20 3 28 28 5 1 0 2

Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Vol. 14.

were to be lost to the railway from 1841, resulting in a sudden and substantial reduction in Sowerby Bridge’s toll income by 1845. Rochdale subsequently became the second most important station, generating most of its income from corn.31 Ashton, Peak Forest and Huddersfield canals The Ashton, the Peak Forest and the Huddersfield canals were three adjoining narrow-gauge canals, the only ones of their kind in the textile regions of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Like the Rochdale, they provided water transport to markets to the east of Manchester, most importantly to Ashton, Huddersfield and the limestone quarries of the Derbyshire peaks. The three companies had similar shareholders; in fact, the Ashton Canal Company originally intended to build the Peak Forest Canal as a branch of its own canal before resolving that a second company would be required to complete the undertaking.32 The three companies maintained close relationships until the 1840s, each establishing warehouses and wharves in a jointly operated canal basin at Piccadilly in Manchester. The Ashton Canal linked Manchester with Ashton-under-Lyne, Stockport and Hollinwood (two miles to the south-west of Oldham), passing concentrations of population at Beswick, Clayton, Dukinfield, Openshaw, Gorton, Heaton Norris and Reddish. The canal served these local markets, as well as forming part of a number of through routes: to the High Peak (via the Peak Forest Canal), to Yorkshire (via the Huddersfield Canal) and to Liverpool via the Rochdale and Bridgewater canals. From 1831, the completion of the Macclesfield Canal from the Peak Forest Canal at Marple to the Trent and

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Mersey near Kidsgrove provided Manchester with a new, shorter connection with the midlands narrow-canal network. This briefly became part of an important through-canal route from Manchester to London (via the Trent and Mersey and Grand Junction canals). The broad pattern of trade on the Ashton and Peak Forest canals can be ascertained from the late 1820s (Table 2.11). In 1827–29, the Ashton carried, in round per annum figures, 275,000 tons, earning tolls of £10,736. Trade increased rapidly over the next decade, with both tonnages and tolls almost doubling. By 1836–38, then, the Ashton’s freight of 514,241 tons generated an income of £18,538. At this time, the Peak Forest Canal generated a slightly higher per ton income, netting £20,418 from a freight of roughly 450,000 tons. The peak trading years were 1837 on the Peak Forest and 1839 on the Ashton, before trade on both canals fell sharply in the 1840s. By the close of that decade, in 1848–50, the Ashton earned £12,159 from a tonnage of 483,632, while the Peak Forest earned £11,734 from a haul of 360,704 tons. The third of these narrow canals, the Huddersfield, carried a much smaller volume of trade than the Ashton and the Peak Forest, reflecting the problems it faced in competing with the Rochdale Canal on the Pennine routes between Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as its unusually small, indeed negligible, coal trade. So, aggregate tonnage on the canal increased from just 40,460 tons in 1810–12 to 169,487 tons in the late 1840s, its income from tolls remaining in the £6,000–8,000 range. Good commodity data for the Ashton and Peak Forest canals are available for the 1830s and 1840s (Tables 2.12 and 2.13). For the Ashton, in income terms, the leading trades were in coal and ‘merchandise’, a category that included raw cotton and finished textiles, as well as high-value goods, such as dye wares and comestibles. In 1830, coal comprised 53 per cent of the canal company’s income, with merchandise accounting for a further 29 per cent.33 The remainder was made up of limestone (transported via the Peak Forest Canal), stone, manure and sundries. After 1830, the trade in merchandise expanded rapidly, the timing being suggestive of the importance of the completion of the Macclesfield Canal in 1831, which created a shorter route from Manchester to the Trent and Mersey Canal (and from there to the west midlands and the south) than that on the established route via the Bridgewater Canal.34 Thus, tolls on merchandise more than doubled from £3,737 in 1832 to c.£8,000 in the late 1830s. However, tolls on both coal and merchandise fell back in the 1840s, owing to the advent of railway competition, the Ashton’s overall income decreasing to pre-1832 levels. The commodity trade of the Peak Forest was centred on the trades in limestone and lime, derived from the limestone quarries owned and leased by the company at Dove Holes in the High Peak, as well as their kilns at Marple.35 This trade provided the Peak Forest Canal Company with 62 per

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Table 2.11 Tolls and tonnage on the Ashton, Peak Forest and Huddersfield canals, 1812–50 Period

Ashton Canal Peak Forest Canal Huddersfield Canal Tonnage Tolls Income Tonnage Tolls Income Tonnage Tolls Income (£) per ton (£) per ton (£) per ton

1812–14 1827–29 1830–32 1833–35 1836–38 1839–41 1842–44 1845–47 1848–50

– 274,629 – – 514,241 – – 590,332 483,632

– 10,736 12,734 16,105 18,538 19,319 14,427 14,890 12,159

– 10d. – – 10d. – – 7d. 7d.

– – – – 442,254 – – 454,942 360,704

– – 11,229 14,848 20,418 19,357 12,345 15,593 11,734

– – – – 1s. – – 7d. 7d.

40,460 – – – – – 125,182 143,849 169,487

6,501 – – – – – 7,536 – –

3s. 2d. – – – – – 1s. 2d. – –

Sources: Ashton Canal: 1828 and 1836 from Return relating to inland navigation and canal companies in England and Wales (P.P. 1870, Vol. LVI), pp. 680–701; 1845–1850 from Report of the Commissioners of the Railways (P.P. 1850, Vol. XXXI), pp. 352–3; tolls for 1830–44, from WLLS, John Goodchild collection, W. Aldam MSS. Peak Forest Canal: 1836 from Return relating to inland navigation and canal companies in England and Wales (P.P. 1870, Vol. LVI), 680–701; tolls for 1830–44 from W. Aldam MSS. Huddersfield Canal: C. Hadfield and G. Biddle, The canals of north west England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), Vol. II, pp. 280, 330–1. Notes: Ashton Canal, tonnage and tolls for 1827–29 refer to 1828 only; tonnage for 1836–38 refers to 1838 only; tonnage and tolls for 1848–50 refers to 1848 and 1849 only. Peak Forest Canal, tolls for 1830–32 refers to 1832 only; tonnage for 1836–38 refers to 1836 only. Huddersfield Canal, tolls and tonnage for 1812–14 refers to 1812 only; similarly 1842–44 (1844 only), 1845–47 (1845 only) and 1848–50 (1848 only).

cent of tolls in 1832–34, although this had been reduced to 54 per cent in 1842–44. As on the Ashton, merchandise was the second largest category of the Peak Forest’s commodity trade, increasing markedly as a source of income in the 1830s, before falling back in the 1840s. Heavy minerals, such as coal and stone, occupied a lesser role on the canal.36 On the Huddersfield Canal, the bulk of tolls were received for merchandise, earning, in 1813 for example, tolls of £5,211 out of a total of £6,501 (80.2 per cent). In this year, coal provided the next largest share of toll income, although it only netted the company £391 (6 per cent), followed by corn at £269 (4.1 per cent), and lime and limestone at £189 (2.9 per cent).37 Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal The completion of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal in 1797 offered water transport to the two key textile towns of Bolton and Bury, via a number of important collieries, especially around Pendleton, Clifton and Pendlebury. Despite many attempts, the canal was able to make only one connection with another navigable waterway: the link with the Mersey and Irwell Navigation

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Table 2.12 Tolls by commodity on the Ashton Canal, 1830–47 (three-year averages, £) Commodity

1830–32 1833–35 1836–38 1839–41 1842–44 1845–47

Coal Merchandise Stone Limestone and lime Manure, sand, gravel Sundries and wharfage Total

Total

6,803 3,737 631

7,434 6,081 865

6,950 8,005 1,406

8,150 7,869 1,452

6,430 5,284 907

5,645 41,412 6,211 37,187 1,443 6,704

762

910

1,110

983

727

865

5,357

242

218

278

162

396

306

1,602

559

596

788

703

684

777

4,107

12,734

16,104

18,537

19,319

14,428

15,247 96,369

Source: WLLS, John Goodchild collection, W. Aldam MSS.

Table 2.13 Tolls by commodity on the Peak Forest Canal, 1830–44 (three-year averages, £) Commodity Limestone and lime Merchandise Coal Stone Sundries Total

1830–32 1833–35

1836–38

1839–41

1842–44

Total

7,009 1,916 1,954 285 65

8,593 3,745 1,858 540 113

10,769 4,787 3,113 855 176

9,483 5,231 3,393 1,059 191

6,689 3,086 1,438 956 176

42,543 18,765 11,756 3,695 721

11,229

14,849

19,700

19,357

12,345

77,480

Source: WLLS, John Goodchild collection, W. Aldam MSS.

at Manchester established in 1809. The canal’s relative isolation prevented the development of significant through trades until the opening of the Hulme Locks on the Bridgewater Canal in 1838 and the completion of the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal in 1839. While tonnage data are limited, a continuous series of tolls exists for 1824–36, a period when the canal’s annual income more than doubled from just below £5,000 to slightly more than £10,000. The commodity data for 1827–34, reported in Table 2.14, highlight the canal’s overwhelming concentration on coal, which yielded more than 70 per cent of canal income in this period. Only stone and merchandise provided any significant additional income, and even for these commodities annual tolls averaged only £606 and £508 respectively in this period. Before the company completed its own railway to Bolton in 1838, it attracted only a small fraction of the region’s trade in cotton, yarn and piece goods from the

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turnpike roads.38 The canal’s Salford basin was the chief destination for the canal’s trade, taking two-thirds of toll income (Table 2.15). At Salford, 82 per cent of tolls were paid on coal, with 15.3 per cent on Pennine stone and 2.4 per cent on manufactures. Table 2.14 Tolls by commodity on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, 1827–34 (£) 1827

1828

1829

1830

1831

1832

1833

1834

Total

Coal Stone Merchandise Iron Timber Slate Grain

2,999 128 471 78 87 13 0

3,621 157 541 160 226 14 0

4,368 389 353 156 346 23 108

4,593 1,292 400 108 280 13 149

3,643 716 373 121 331 39 131

4,500 591 467 134 282 29 114

4,976 684 710 210 283 70 66

5,030 887 748 188 282 141 40

33,730 4,844 4,063 1,155 2,117 342 608

Total Estimated tonnage

3,776

4,719

5,743

6,835

5,354

6,117

6,999

7,316

46,859

119,587 150,087 185,287 220,513 171,747 196,153 222,953 233,360 1,499,687

Source: NA, RAIL, 458/7, MBBCC, Minute Book 1835–37, 21 October 1835.

Table 2.15 Toll collection on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, 1827–34 Basin

Tolls collected (£)

Percentage of total

Salford Bury Bolton

31,266 10,603 4,990

66.7 22.6 10.6

Total

46,859

99.9

Source: NA, RAIL, 458/7, MBBCC, Minute Book 1835–37, 21 October 1835.

Commodities Coal Canals dominated the supply of coal to Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the 1760s, virtually of all Manchester’s coal supply had been carried by roads from pits within a ten-mile radius of the town. The Bridgewater Canal, the first phase of which was completed by 1765, provided a cheaper mode of conveyance for Worsley coal to Manchester, immediately reducing its price in Manchester to approximately 6s. per ton.39 By the early nineteenth century, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury, the Ashton and the

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Rochdale further improved Manchester’s canal links with the Lancashire coalfield. Coal traffic is at the heart of Turnbull’s argument that canals were vital to Britain’s industrialisation. Canals, he argues, reduced the price of coal in England’s manufacturing regions both by lowering transport costs and by allowing the richest coal seams to be more extensively exploited.40 Contemporary estimates of Manchester’s coal supply range from 737,008 to 913,991 tons in the mid-1830s, the supply increasing to one million tons in the early 1840s and 1.2m tons in the late 1840s, when the town consumed approximately one-fifth of Lancashire’s coal production.41 Historians have not examined the supply of coal to Manchester in detail, making it difficult to weight the importance of the four major coal-carrying canals. Nevertheless, patterns of extraction and distribution can be reconstructed from studies of coal mining in Lancashire and the extant commodity data arising from canal company accounts and contemporary estimates.42 Coal was a leading tonnage commodity on most of the canals in the Manchester district. The importance of coal was clearest for the Manchester, Bolton and Bury, while the Bridgewater, the Rochdale and the Ashton canals carried significant proportions of the raw material, with relatively little coal carried to Manchester on the Peak Forest, the Huddersfield and the Mersey and Irwell. In 1836, a contemporary estimate suggested that 570,628 tons of coal was brought to Manchester by canal, two-thirds of the town’s supply: 200,400 tons on the Ashton, 194,288 tons on the Bridgewater (including 43,305 from the Wigan area), 120,552 tons on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury and 55,388 tons on the Rochdale. Roads carried an additional 316,258 tons: 214,604 from Pendleton, just two miles from central Manchester, 81,354 tons from Oldham, 9,100 tons from Rochdale, 6,000 tons from Bradford (Lancashire) and 5,200 tons from Hyde. At this time, just 27,103 tons of coal was brought to Manchester by rail.43 In the 1840s, the Wigan area became the pre-eminent source of supply, its coal mines trebling in number in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1842, there were at least 53 collieries in and around Wigan, outnumbering those in Oldham (27), Rochdale (24), Bolton (15), Worsley (8), Ashton (5), Manchester and Salford (3) and Middleton (3).44 From 1821, Wigan coal was carried to Manchester on the Bridgewater Canal via its junction with the Leeds and Liverpool at Leigh. This had a major impact on Manchester’s coal supply from the mid-1830s and, by 1850, firms from the Wigan area occupied the bulk of coal wharves in central Manchester.45 When data become available at the end of the latter decade, approximately 300,000 tons of ‘Wigan’ coal was carried to Manchester, one-quarter of Manchester’s total supply at this time.

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The Ashton Canal improved access to the important collieries to the east of Manchester, especially the mines in and around Oldham (28 mines) and Ashton (8 mines). In 1824, Baines noted that the quality of Oldham coal ‘obtains for it a preference in the Manchester market’, while, in 1848, Cowling-Taylor stated that one Oldham colliery sent 150,000–170,000 tons to Manchester per year.46 Coal tonnages on the Ashton Canal can only be estimated from toll revenues but in c.1835–45 probably stood at 200,000–230,000, for which Manchester was likely to have been the largest market. Roads carried a further 80,000 tons of Oldham coal to Manchester in the mid-1830s.47 The Manchester, Bolton and Bury and Rochdale canals supplied the bulk of the remaining canal coal. The Manchester, Bolton and Bury provided access to an important cluster of coal mines, especially in and around Darcy Lever, Little Lever, Kearsley, Clifton and Prestwich. These areas supplied Manchester with around 120,000 tons per year in the mid-1830s.48 The Rochdale Canal also contributed to Manchester’s coal supply, the route passing close to collieries at Middleton, Heywood, Rochdale and Todmorden. Coal tonnage progressively increased on the Rochdale, climbing from 55,728 tons in 1810 to 155,577 tons in 1825 and 249,441 tons in 1835, before peaking at 430,027 tons in 1845. Not all the coal carried on the canal, however, represented a net addition to Manchester’s coal supply because a large proportion of the coal tonnage was transhipped from the Bridgewater Canal and carried only a short distance through the centre of Manchester.49 In 1845, the Rochdale Canal carried 92,923 tons from pits east of Manchester, approximately 10 per cent of Manchester’s coal supply. In the same year, the canal carried 131,092 tons of coal that had been transhipped from the Bridgewater. Supplies from eastern pits, moreover, subsequently declined to 43,674 tons in 1842 and 11,928 tons in 1849, while coal transhipped from the Bridgewater increased dramatically, reaching 314,301 tons in 1849.50 Thus, while the Rochdale had played an important role in supplying coal to Manchester, by the end of the 1840s its main role was carrying coal within Manchester, to coal wharves in the city centre or to the factory areas of Piccadilly and Ancoats in the east. By 1855, 73 per cent of the canal’s coal tonnage arrived from the Bridgewater Canal, 24 per cent was carried only short distances at various points along the line, with only 3 per cent reaching Manchester from the east.51 In sum, canals were the principal mode of conveyance for Manchester coal in the first half of the nineteenth century. Canals initially enabled cheaper access to Manchester’s traditional sources of coal supply from pits located within a ten-mile radius of Manchester (especially in Worsley, Bolton, Ashton and Oldham) before canal-borne coal from the more distant Wigan collieries achieved a pre-eminence in the Manchester market in the 1840s. Railways

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were not significant coal carriers until the second half of the nineteenth century. Corn Scola’s analysis of Manchester’s food supply during the Industrial Revolution highlights the significant contribution of canals, especially the Bridgewater, in supplying vegetables, butter, milk and other foodstuffs to Manchester. However, Scola does not discuss in detail the supply of corn to the Manchester market, noting only that the leading sources of supply were Liverpool and Wakefield, ‘the two great northern corn centres’.52 Scola’s emphasis on canal trade, and on the two key corn markets, is appropriate; before the arrival of the railways, the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation provided the leading conveyance for Liverpool corn to Manchester, while the Rochdale Canal (in conjunction with the Calder and Hebble Navigation) opened up water transport from Manchester to the Wakefield corn market, reputed to be second in size only to Mark Lane in London.53 Until the 1820s, the Liverpool corn market was mainly stocked from Ireland: ‘the natural granary of the manufacturing districts of this country [England]’.54 So, in 1825, the Bridgewater and Mersey and Irwell each brought approximately 15,000 tons of corn to Manchester, more than half of the Irish corn imported at Liverpool. Both carriers loaded their estuary flats directly from sea-going vessels in the Liverpool docks.55 The Rochdale Canal from its opening in 1804 provided competition to corn carried to Manchester on the Mersey and Irwell and the Bridgewater from Liverpool. As early as 1807, the Mersey and Irwell was pointing to the Rochdale to account for a reduction in its own corn-carrying trade.56 In the following year, the Rochdale Canal Company appointed an agent at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire to co-ordinate grain and flour shipments to Manchester via the Trent, the Aire and Calder and the Calder and Hebble, making agreements with the navigation companies to encourage traffic to Manchester.57 Corn shipments, the Rochdale Canal Company’s most remunerative trade before 1840, consisted of wheat, barley, oats, hops, beans and peas, as well as malt, linseed, rapeseed, flour and bran.58 In 1810, the trade provided almost onequarter of the Rochdale’s canal tolls. By 1825, the corn trade had climbed to 73,873 tons, providing £13,197 in tolls, approximately one-third of the total. From 1832, we can provide firm data on the extent of corn shipments brought to Manchester on the Rochdale Canal. In this year, the canal brought 21,263 tons to Manchester from the east, as well as unloading 20,000 tons of corn at Piccadilly that had been transhipped from the Bridgewater Canal.59 The trade peaked in 1841, when 40,000 tons of corn was brought to Manchester on the Rochdale Canal.60

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Despite this major growth in corn supplies from the east, the amount of corn arriving from the west remained larger in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1847, indeed, the Mersey and Irwell’s corn trade from Liverpool to Manchester had reached c.40,000 tons per year, and, assuming the Bridgewater Canal carried a similar quantity, we can infer that western waterways carried approximately 80,000 tons of corn to Manchester. Thus, we can surmise that in the 1840s roughly two-thirds of Manchester’s corn supply came from the west and one-third from the east. The railways ruthlessly targeted the trade in grain from the east and within a few years had commandeered much of the trade. As early as 1842, Thompson, M’Kay & Co., the largest of the public carriers trading on the Rochdale Canal, informed the Rochdale Canal Company that they could carry Lincolnshire grain by rail one-fifth more cheaply than by water.61 By 1849, corn tonnage on the Rochdale had already fallen to approximately half of its 1840 level, while the Manchester and Leeds Railway, now part of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway, had established five acres of warehousing space in Manchester dedicated to the grain and flour trade.62 During the 1850s, the haemorrhaging of the Rochdale’s corn trade continued, compounded by Wakefield’s decline as a centre of the trade. Thus, by 1856, the Rochdale Canal Company’s principal agent could state that it was Liverpool rather than Wakefield that was the main supplier of corn and flour to Manchester.63 Cotton The conveyance of cotton from Liverpool to industrial Lancashire was, of course, central to the operation of the key sector of England’s Industrial Revolution. Liverpool’s primacy in the import of raw cotton was established in the late 1790s when the United States emerged as Europe’s key supplier following the development of the cotton gin in 1793.64 The major period of growth, however, was after 1800: Liverpool’s annual imports of cotton increased from around 100,000 bags at the turn the century to 450,000 bags (roughly 67,050 tons) in the mid-1820s. By the latter date, imports of cotton comprised roughly one-third of Liverpool’s total imports by weight.65 Although there are a number of examples of Manchester spinners and manufacturers employing road carriers to deliver cotton to their factories in the early nineteenth century, by the 1820s this practice had all but ended.66 At this time, almost all of the cotton carried to Manchester was brought on canals and rivers; the Old Quay Company carried around half of Liverpool’s imports (200,000 bags, roughly 30,000 tons), the Bridgewater Canal carried a similar quantity, while the Leeds and Liverpool Canal carried approximately 4,000–7,000 tons.67

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Liverpool cotton imports climbed dramatically in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, reaching 262,000 tons by 1848. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, promised to command a high proportion of the Liverpool–Manchester trade. Railways, however, were very slow to assert their primacy over the waterways in this branch of trade. Throughout the 1830s, for example, McConnel & Co., one of Manchester’s leading factory firms in the first half of the century, brought its cotton to Manchester by the New Quay Company, carrying on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation.68 As late as 1841, indeed, only one-quarter of the cotton brought to Manchester was carried by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the remaining threequarters split roughly evenly between the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation. Even by 1848, the two waterways were responsible for 63 per cent of the aggregate tonnage of the Liverpool–Manchester trade and in 1849, the Bridgewater and the Mersey and Irwell carried 129,872 tons of cotton from Liverpool to Manchester, although much was ultimately consumed in its satellite towns rather than in the town itself.69 This amounted to roughly 50 per cent of Liverpool’s imports. Manchester’s other canals played a role in redistributing cotton beyond Manchester. The Rochdale Canal, for example, in 1834, carried 3,714 tons of cotton (2.4 per cent of total British consumption) to Rochdale alone,70 while in the 1840s and 1850s the Rochdale Canal Company built cotton sheds at Rochdale, Littleborough and Heywood, as well as making arrangements to deliver cotton directly to canalside mills. 71 The bulk of the cotton brought to Manchester but destined for manufacture beyond Manchester, however, was not carried to hinterland factories by canals but by spinners’ carts operating on roads. It was not until the early 1850s, more than two decades after their emergence, that railways finally supplanted canals and rivers as the key conveyance of Liverpool cotton. In 1853, railways carried 62 per cent of Liverpool’s imports, canals and rivers carried 38 per cent and less than 1 per cent was carried on roads.72 Manufactured goods Manchester manufactured goods were, of course, mainly cotton textiles, the key commodity of industrialising Britain. The value of the British cotton industry’s final output increased from around £5m in the mid-1780s to £45m in the mid-1840s, with Manchester providing both the industry’s foremost concentration of factories and the industry’s prime market.73 The distribution of the two major types of cotton output is discussed in this section, beginning with cotton yarn and then moving on to finished cotton goods. The completion of the Rochdale Canal in 1804 provided, via connections with the Calder and Hebble and the Aire and Calder, the first direct water

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route from Manchester to Hull, a matter of great moment to Manchester merchants exporting yarn and piece goods to mainland Europe, who had supported the canal’s construction because of the expense of land transport between Manchester and the endpoint of the Yorkshire river navigations at Sowerby Bridge and Huddersfield.74 British cotton-yarn exports increased from £2.4m in 1804–06 to £5.7m in 1834–36, more than three-quarters of which went to north-western Europe, for which Hull remained the key port of despatch.75 The Rochdale Canal’s trade in eastbound manufactured goods (mainly cotton yarn and textiles) increased steadily from the early nineteenth century, peaking in 1839, when it carried 33,306 tons (approximately 640 tons per week) of ‘goods’ to the canal’s terminal lock, Sowerby Bridge, providing the company with an income of £9,988, a per ton toll of 6s., compared to 1s. 5d. on the canal in general.76 Until the late 1830s, the Rochdale’s major competition came from the Huddersfield Canal and from land transport. The Huddersfield took a shorter route from Manchester to the Yorkshire river navigations, but its narrow breadth necessitated the transhipment of goods at Huddersfield. Carriers on the Rochdale, in contrast, advertised the hauling of goods to Hull in a single barge.77 In 1839, it was estimated that 43,100 tons of yarn and textiles were sent by water from Manchester to Hull. Given that we know that the Rochdale Canal carried 33,306 tons on this route in this year, it can be estimated that 10,000 tons took the Huddersfield Canal route to the Yorkshire river navigations.78 Despite canal carriers’ charges from Manchester to Hull being up to 40 per cent cheaper than their road counterparts (30s. per ton, compared to 50s.), road carriers evidently retained part of the Manchester–Hull trade.79 Pigot’s 1838 Manchester trade directory, however, lists only three land carriers providing daily services to Hull and Goole compared to at least five canal carriers.80 Jackson, moreover, has shown that, by the early nineteenth century, virtually all consignments passing to and from Hull used inland navigation for part of their journey.81 This was true of McConnel & Co.’s yarn exports to Switzerland, shipped at Hull, and carried there by Buckley & Co., a carrier on the Rochdale and the Huddersfield canals. From the early 1840s, however, the railway companies targeted the trade in cotton yarn from Manchester to Hull, the Manchester and Leeds Railway establishing its own cotton-yarn service.82 The Rochdale Canal Company, in conjunction with the Yorkshire navigations and the canal carriers, responded by cutting tolls to a nominal level; in May 1841, canal carriers temporarily charged 10s. per ton for the carriage of such manufactures from Manchester to Hull. Such measures, however, were in vain. In 1849, indeed, despite the equalising of canal and railway carriers’ charges at the rate of 20s. per ton from Manchester to Hull, fewer than five tons of cotton goods were transhipped to the Calder and Hebble at Sowerby Bridge.83 Thus, while

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canals had held off competition from road carriers before the 1830s in the carriage of cotton yarn to Hull, railways decisively captured this trade in the 1840s. While the bulk of the Manchester to Hull trade was in cotton yarn, the Manchester to Liverpool trade was largely in finished cotton piece goods. British exports of cotton goods, independent of yarn, increased from £3.5m in 1794–96 to £18.6m in 1844–46, Liverpool firmly establishing itself as the key port of export despatch in this branch.84 In volume terms, as we have seen, manufactured goods from Manchester to Liverpool always lagged far behind incoming cargoes of cotton, timber and corn. As one carrier put it in the mid-1820s: ‘We have so much [sic] fewer Down Goods [Manchester to Liverpool] than Up Goods [Liverpool to Manchester] that there is a great competition between the Carriers.’ Freights, indeed, were only 10s. per ton on cotton textiles, compared to 15s. on raw cotton, and in the former trade carriers carted goods from Manchester factories and warehouses to canal warehouses free of charge.85 Because of the inherent time pressures exerted on manufacturers and merchants in foreign trade, northern textile manufacturers continued to send goods to Liverpool by road in the early part of the nineteenth century – a quicker service – even though the freight charges were four times higher than the canal charge.86 The expeditious nature of road transport, and its coverage of so many routes, also allowed road transport to continue to compete with canals in serving national markets throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, McConnel & Co., for examples, used both canal and road transport to distribute its yarn to Nottingham and the south-west. However, as the company explained to a correspondent in Chard (Somerset), goods ‘sent by land carriage instead of water carriage’ would be charged at higher prices.87 While road carriers were not entirely displaced in the carriage of goods to national markets generally, in the key Manchester–Liverpool trade, canals increased their trade in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, the 15,000 tons of textiles carried from Manchester to Liverpool in 1825 far exceeded the volume of trade carried by roads. As late as 1841, the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation carried more than three-quarters of the total trade from Manchester to Liverpool. The waterways’ principal advantages over the railway were two-fold. First, the canals carried manufactures to Liverpool at least 1s. per ton cheaper than railways (approximately 10 per cent of transport costs) and, second, the canal flats, unlike trains, could load packages of textiles directly on to international vessels, a practice that expedited the passage of goods and minimised breakages in warehouses.88 By 1847, the Mersey and Irwell alone carried approximately 35,000 tons of manufactured goods from Manchester to Liverpool. A year earlier, the Bridgewater Canal carried 44,800 tons from Manchester to Liverpool. The

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railways did not establish a definitive lead until 1851, when they carried more than 60 per cent of the ‘down’ goods from Manchester to Liverpool.89 In this year, the London and North Western Railway carried 73,296 tons of ‘bales and cases’ from Manchester to Liverpool.90 Timber Timber was a key commodity in the Liverpool–Manchester trade. In 1825, Liverpool imported around 160,000 tons of timber per year, three-quarters of which came from North America.91 At this time, timber comprised half of the traffic by weight on the Old Quay Company’s 60 vessels, an annual haulage that amounted to approximately 50,000 tons per year. A similar amount was probably carried on the Bridgewater Canal, on which the leading carriers were the Bridgewater Trustees and Bellhouse & Co., the latter employing a steam tug to haul floats of timber that could be up to 400 tons. Manchester builders and timber merchants received Liverpool timber on their wharves at a rate 8s. 4d. per ton.92 The canal trade in timber increased rapidly in the 1830s and 1840s. By 1852, Liverpool imported roughly 365,000 tons of timber, around 70 per cent from British America. Liverpool retained around 21 per cent of this timber for its own consumption and distributed the remaining 287,000 tons ‘within a radius of 100 miles of Liverpool’. In that year, water carriage retained its pre-eminence over railways. Thus, canals hauled 174,000 tons of timber (60 per cent of the non-retained timber), railways 101,000 tons (35 per cent) and coastwise vessels 12,000 tons (4 per cent).93 In 1857, the manager of the Harrington Timber Company, a carrier on the Bridgewater Canal, confirmed that canals carried the bulk of Liverpool’s timber imports to their inland markets, estimating that 60 per cent of Liverpool’s timber imports were carried by water. He placed the railway’s share at 20 per cent, claiming that ‘timber is not the sort of traffic desirable for a railway’.94 The completion of the Rochdale Canal in 1804 opened up the possibility of increased shipments of Baltic timber to Manchester. However, despite the initial fears of rival carriers such as the Mersey and Irwell,95 timber never emerged as a major trade on the Rochdale Canal and it did not exceed a 7 per cent share of the canal’s tonnage or income from 1810 to 1845. By 1855, only 1,000 tons of timber arrived at Manchester from Hull on the canal and the Rochdale Canal Company earned most of its income from timber on transhipments from the Bridgewater Canal.96 At this time, it was claimed that the port ‘supplies all the towns eastward with timber, as far as Bradford, Huddersfield and Leeds … not 5 per cent. of foreign timber used west of Todmorden [on the Yorkshire–Lancashire border] being supplied from Hull, or any port on the east coast of England.’97 While Baltic timber remained

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important in the east of England, Manchester timber was almost all supplied from Liverpool. Stone, limestone and lime Before the eighteenth century, the British building industry relied on stone from quarries situated near to construction sites. The first stone buildings in Manchester, for example, were supplied from sandstone beds at Collyhurst, just outside the township. From the 1790s, canals provided water transport links to the gritstone and limestone quarries of the High Peak (Peak Forest Canal, via the Ashton Canal), the flagstone quarries of the Pennines (Rochdale Canal; Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal) and the slate mines of North Wales (Bridgewater Canal; Mersey and Irwell, via Runcorn). These stone materials were key constituents of nineteenth-century construction and road building in Manchester.98 Pennine flags were taken from quarries around Bury, Rochdale and Bacup in Lancashire, and Yorkshire flags from the Calder valley. Before the coming of the railways, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury and the Rochdale hauled the bulk of the Pennine stone. The Rochdale Canal was probably the leading supplier. In 1832, the canal carried 44,134 tons of stone flags to Manchester from Pennine quarries; this had increased to 79,086 tons in 1836, before falling to 53,826 tons in 1849. The demand for stone made it one of the Rochdale Canal Company’s most important income streams, accounting for 17 per cent of its toll income in 1825 and 28 per cent in 1845. By 1855, the trade in stone, lime and limestone provided almost one-quarter of the canal’s toll income and stone-trade interests occupied approximately one-half of the company’s wharfage space in Manchester. 99 Data from the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal are less extensive but in 1835 the canal carried approximately 88 tons per working day or roughly 27,500 tons per year: 99 per cent of the canal’s stone trade was unloaded at Salford.100 The Peak Forest Canal brought limestone from the quarries of the High Peak, as well as carrying small quantities of gritstone (using for paving). From Runcorn, the Bridgewater and Mersey and Irwell brought flints from Sussex, slates from Wales and flags from Truro.101 Tentative estimates for the Mersey and Irwell suggest an annual haulage of these commodities of around 30,000 tons in 1847 (see Table 2.7). Summary and conclusions Research on Britain’s transport history has offered few detailed analyses of canal traffic, impeding attempts to assess the contribution of waterways to Britain’s industrialisation. This chapter has shown that a detailed exploration

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of canal archives and of parliamentary and business records provides the evidence needed to establish the broad contours of canal traffic in terms of extent and commodity composition. Two measures are important: the volume of traffic, measured in tons, and the income from tolls measured in pounds sterling. In order to furnish a comparison between canals in a particular region, it is often necessary to deflate available data on trading receipts to produce estimates of nominal tolls paid by navigation owners who also undertook the role of carriers on their own canals. The procedure adopted here to calculate nominal tolls was to multiply the weight of goods carried by the average of the per ton tolls paid by independent carriers. By analysing aggregate volumes of goods carried and toll payments, it has been possible to describe the relative size of the trades carried on Manchester’s leading waterways. As expected, the Bridgewater Canal exceeded all other waterways in terms of the tonnages carried and the income generated. A second tier was occupied by the Mersey and Irwell Navigation and the Rochdale Canal, which had roughly similar toll incomes in the 1830s and 1840s, although the latter carried a much higher tonnage, reflecting, to a significant extent, its role in transhipping Bridgewater and Wigan coal within central Manchester. The Ashton and Peak Forest canals had similar levels of trade by weight and earnings at levels that rank them below the former three companies; the Manchester, Bolton and Bury and the Huddersfield had the smallest trades. Hitherto, only the canals’ coal trade has attracted close investigation. Turnbull’s classic study has shown that canals played the key role in the reduction of the price of coal in the northern and midland manufacturing regions. Historical emphasis on coal reflects two main factors. First, coal was central to the operation of steam-powered factories, steam providing 93 per cent of the Lancashire cotton industry’s power by 1850.102 Second, the weight of coal relative to manufactured or consumer goods meant that it was routinely the foremost item in canal companies’ tonnage accounts. Manchester canals unsurprisingly were active in the haulage of coal and other heavy goods to supply Manchester’s rapidly growing industrial-urban economy. The Manchester, Bolton and Bury was largely given over to coal conveyance, although the Ashton and the Bridgewater brought the most coal to the Manchester market. The cheap relative cost of transporting coal by canal meant that only collieries situated very close to the urban core of Manchester could supply coal by roads at prices equivalent to canal-borne coal, most of which came from pits within about eight miles of Manchester. Stone and other minerals also feature prominently in the commodity composition of Manchester’s canal trade. Flags, limestone, lime and slate were largely used in construction, including road building, arriving at Manchester from canals serving the quarries of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Pennines,

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Derbyshire, North Wales and indeed southern England, contributing significantly to the massive urban growth of Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century. Canals still carried the bulk of these commodities in 1850. The focus on intra-regional movements of coal threatens to overshadow other aspects of the canals’ commodity trades, especially those inter-regional commodity flows that provided the basis for Britain’s regional economic specialisation. From the perspective of Manchester, the water-transport routes to and from the port of Liverpool that hauled the inter-regional shipments of raw cotton, timber and corn, as well as outgoing cargoes of Lancashire cotton yarn and textiles, were the most economically significant. These trades formed the main part of the income generated by the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation. American raw cotton brought to Manchester by water from Liverpool provided the bulk of the inputs of the region’s staple manufacture, while Irish, Baltic and American corn fed its burgeoning factory workforce. Very large quantities of imported timber from North America were brought to Manchester by canals, a trade that increased from 100,000 tons in 1825 to 170,000 tons in 1850. Returning barges carried finished textiles to Liverpool, relatively low in weight, but by the close of the period worth approximately £14m in value. These trades were all central building blocks of Manchester’s rapid industrial growth and for all these trades waterways were the prime conveyance in the first half of the nineteenth century. Manchester’s canal trade, however, was far more varied than bilateral commodity flows between Liverpool and Manchester. Even the Bridgewater Canal earned a substantial amount of its income, until the 1840s at least, from the ‘southern’ trades to the industrial midlands and London. Manchester’s trade with the east was also significant. Here, corn and cotton yarn were the most remunerative trades. Canals improved Lancashire’s access to eastern agricultural areas and their corn markets, supplementing supplies of Irish corn brought from Liverpool. Cotton yarn and textiles were also carried eastwards, mainly destined for export to Europe from Hull. Grain and stone, rather than coal and cotton, were the products that defined the Rochdale and Huddersfield canals, and this reminds us that the burgeoning and diverse economy of Cottonopolis was closely linked to Liverpool and the west, but also had major markets and sources of supply in Hull and the east. Notes 1 Turnbull, ‘Canals, coals, and regional growth’, p. 543. 2 Duckham, ‘Canals’, pp. 130–1; Ville, ‘Transport’, pp. 299–300.

Trade, commodities and markets 3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

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See, for example, Turnbull, Traffic and Transport, p. 90. For a discussion of the data, see the notes to Table 2.1. Herson, ‘Estimating traffic’, pp. 113–46. See chapter 4 for a full discussion of the carrying trade at Manchester. While the charges levied by carriers varied by commodity, tolls were generally around onefifth of total carriers’ charges. For example, in 1825 Manchester carriers charged 15s. on cotton from Liverpool to Manchester. The tolls paid by carriers were 3s. 8d. on the Bridgewater Canal and 3s. 4d. on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation. To calculate nominal tolls on the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, the following procedure was followed: the volume of trade carried by the Bridgewater vessels and independent carriers was calculated for each. The sum of total trading receipts (all canal income minus passenger receipts, income from warehousing and sale price of goods carried) was deflated for the Bridgewater vessels by the rate per ton paid by independent carriers. In 1802, for example, the duke’s vessels earned 10s. 2d. per ton, while independent carriers paid average tolls of 3s. 5d. per ton. In addition, for the Bridgewater Canal, nominal tolls for coal carried on the canal must be added. This has been estimated at 7d. per ton, based on comparisons with similar trades on other navigations. From 1844, the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation accounts include nominal toll payments (for coal and other goods) so that estimates of tolls are not necessary from this year forward. Malet, Bridgewater, pp. 80, 137. LCRO, Bridgewater Trust, General Accounts, 1844–50. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Traffic Book, 1849. Mather, After the canal duke, p. 4; Hadfield, Canals of the west midlands, Vol. I, pp. 205–6. In addition, there was sizeable trade in ‘country goods’, including the trade from Manchester to places to the west of Liverpool, which amounted to 15,000–25,000 tons per year from 1791 to 1810. House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of John Gladstone, p. 133. University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, Box 17/834a, 9 March 1850. Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 13–14. Based on Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 102, 107. University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/833a, ‘Goods moved on the Bridgewater Canal in the Year 1846’. In 1838, the Bridgewater Canal carried 20,000 tons destined for London. By 1850, this had fallen to 8,354 tons. The comparable figures for Liverpool are 7,000 tons in 1839 and 2,370 tons in 1850. See Mather, After the canal duke, p. 246. S. Salt, Railway and commercial information (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1850), p. 178. LCRO, Bridgewater Collieries Ltd, NCBw 6/3, 1846. Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I. In 1848, independent carriers hauled 75 per cent of the navigation’s tonnage; see LCRO, Bridgewater Trustees’ Accounts, 1848.

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22 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, p. 282. 23 MALSU, Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company, Minute Book, 1834–38, 1 September 1836. 24 The twelve-month equivalent figures cited in Table 2.7 would equate to slightly more than 200,000 tons. 25 This section draws on P. Maw, T. Wyke and A. Kidd, ‘Water transport in the industrial age: commodities and carriers on the Rochdale Canal, 1804–1855’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 30 (2009), pp. 200–28. 26 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Papers, Box 5, Items 8 and 45. 27 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Vol. 14; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, pp. 436–8. 28 Arnold and McCartney’s recent study of six canal companies also show that net receipts peaked in 1836–40 before ‘falling away thereafter’ and that railway competition had ‘an almost immediate effect … on canal tolls rather than on the volume of business’; see Arnold and McCartney, ‘Veritable gold mines’, pp. 214– 36. 29 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/20, Minute Book, 1853–56, 12 September 1855; B2/4/1/24, Ledger, 1832–71. 30 For a full breakdown of the Rochdale Canal Company’s toll charges per ton-mile, see GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 18 October 1823; B2/Misc. Papers, Box 5, Item 99. 31 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Traffic Books, 1–5. 32 Manchester Mercury, 30 April 1793. 33 Tonnage data by commodity may be roughly estimated from the toll income, extrapolating using assumptions based on income per ton of similar commodities on other canals: coal 7d. per ton; manufactures 1s. 2d. per ton; stone 5d. per ton; limestone 5d. per ton; manure 2d. per ton; sundries 10d. per ton. In 1836– 38, this would gives figures of coal 231,667 tons; merchandise 133,417 tons; stone 46,866 tons; lime and limestone 55,500 tons; manure 27,800 tons; sundries 19,700 tons. This suggests a total of 514,950 tons, a similar figure to the known aggregate tonnage of 514,241 tons in 1836. 34 In 1837, the Bridgewater Trustees reported that the trade in Wolverhampton ironwares to the Manchester market had shifted from the Bridgewater Canal route via Preston Brook to the Macclesfield, Peak Forest and Ashton route via Kigsgrove. See Mather, After the canal duke, p. 124. 35 In the 1830s, the shares of limestone and lime, as expressed in toll receipts, were 53 per cent and 47 per cent, respectively. 36 Following the procedure outlined in note 33, commodity tonnages on the Peak Forest Canal for 1836–88 may be tentatively estimated as follows: limestone 215,380 tons; merchandise 79,783 tons; coal 103,767 tons; stone 42,750 tons; sundries 4,400 tons. This aggregates to an estimated tonnage of 446,080 compared to the reported figure of 442,254 tons for 1836. The same commodity multipliers were used as in note 33, with the exception of lime and limestone, for which the figure of 1s. was used to account for a longer passage on the canal.

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37 Huddersfield Canal Company, Annual Report, 1813 cited in Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, p. 331. 38 NA, RAIL, 4581/5, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1831–33, 15 June 1832. 39 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 19–20, 26–7; M.W. Flinn, The history of the British coal industry, Vol. II: 1700–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 182. The Bridgewater Trust’s accounts show the sale price of Bridgewater coal carried on the canal varied from 6s. to 6s. 4d. from 1765 to 1791, increasing to 7s.–12s. from 1792 to 1810. 40 Turnbull, ‘Canals, coals, and regional growth’, pp. 537–60. 41 S. Salt, Statistics and calculations essentially necessary to persons connected with railways or canals, containing a variety of information not to be found elsewhere (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1846), p. 67; R. Cowling-Taylor, Statistics of coal: the geographical and geological distribution of mineral combustibles or fossil fuel (Philadelphia: J.W. Moore, 1848), pp. 294–8; R. Church, The history of the British coal industry, Vol. III: 1830–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 3. 42 See Fig. 2.1 and Report of inspectors of coal mines to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State (P.P. 1854, Vol. XIX), pp. 701–7; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 96, 254, 295, 301; J. Langton, ‘Coal output in south-west Lancashire’, Economic History Review, Vol. 25 (1972), pp. 28–54; S. Pollard, ‘A new estimate of British coal production, 1750–1850’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 33 (1980), pp. 212–35; Flinn, British coal industry, pp. 1–23, 180–9. 43 Several matters relating to coal (P.P. 1871, Vol. XVIII), p. 1161. 44 Timmins, Made in Lancashire, pp. 98–101. 45 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester (1851), sheets, 27, 29, 30 and 33; W. Whellan & Co., A new general and commercial directory of Manchester and Salford, Ashtonunder-Lyne, Stalybridge, and Dukinfield; Oldham, Rochdale, Middleton, Stockport, Altrincham, Cheadle, Hyde, Eccles, Radcliffe, Prestwich, Glossop, Mottram, Saddleworth, Todmorden, etc. (Manchester: Booth & Milthorp, 1852). 46 Baines, cited in M. Osborn, ‘“The weirdest of all undertakings”: the land and the early Industrial Revolution in Oldham, England’, Environmental History, Vol. 8 (2003), p. 17; Cowling-Taylor, Statistics of coal, p. 295. 47 Approximately 100,000 tons per year of coal were carried on the Peak Forest Canal in the mid-1830s, although much of this was probably carried to serve the lime kilns at Marple and Bugsworth, as well as Hyde cotton factories; see Bowyer, Peak Forest Canal. 48 NA, RAIL 458/12, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1846–47, April 1847. 49 In 1846, the Rochdale Canal Company estimated that the average distance of coal carriage on the canal was 1.8 miles; see GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Papers, Box 5, Item 99. 50 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Traffic Books, 1–5. 51 NA, RAIL, 826/1, Minutes of the Rochdale Canal Lessees, 28 October 1856. 52 R. Scola, Feeding the Victorian city: the food supply of Manchester, 1770–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 74–83, 98–105. 53 Salt, Statistics and calculations, pp. 102–6; Hadfield, Canals of Yorkshire, Vol. I, p. 161. 54 R.E. Carlson, The Liverpool & Manchester Railway project 1821–1831 (Newton

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Abbot: David & Charles, 1969), pp. 269–74 (including quote). 55 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, pp. 6–25, William Guyton, pp. 253–70, and Thomas Ogden Lingard, pp. 280–90. 56 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, p. 280. 57 Hadfield, Canals of Yorkshire, Vol. I, pp. 122, 161, 181, 189–95. 58 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 18 October 1821; B2/1/1/10, Minute Book, 1827–30, 12 November 1828. 59 Wakefield corn was also brought to Manchester on the Ashton Canal via the Huddersfield Canal, although the commodity data cited in table 2.10 suggest that this was a minor trade. Lincolnshire corn was also brought to Manchester on the Bridgewater Canal, via the Trent and Trent and Mersey canals; see Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 138–9. 60 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Traffic Books. This provided the Rochdale Canal Company with an income of £7,440, 19 per cent of the company’s toll income in that year. 61 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/15, Minute Book, 1841–42, 13 April 1842. 62 Salt, Statistics and calculations, p. 102. 63 NA, RAIL, 861/1, 13 May and 11 November 1856. For similar complaints about Wakefield’s decline in favour of Liverpool from the Aire and Calder and Calder and Hebble, see Hadfield, Canals of Yorkshire, Vol. II, pp. 373–4, 388. 64 Edwards, British cotton trade, pp. 84–91, 107–11. 65 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of John Gladstone, pp. 133–5, and James Cropper, pp. 144–5. A bag of American cotton contained roughly 336 lbs at this period. See the American Farmer (1825), p. 209. 66 M.J. Freeman, ‘Transport methods in the British cotton industry during the industrial revolution’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd Series, Vol. 1 (1980), pp. 59–74 argues that road transport remained central to distribution patterns for the cotton industry before the railways. However, Freeman’s own data on the trade of McConnel & Kennedy suggest that water transport had established itself as the company’s major mode of transport by the close of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1815, for example, just 12 per cent of the firm’s cotton arrived from Liverpool by land carriage. For the 1820s, see House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801– 1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Kenworthy, p. 277. He stated that consignments from Manchester to Liverpool ‘occasionally’ went by road; cotton from Liverpool to Manchester ‘never’ did. 67 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of William Guyton, pp. 268–9, Thomas Ogden Lingard, pp. 281–2, and Joseph Kenworthy, pp. 290–1. 68 JRL, MCK 2/2/20, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 1832–33, 24 April 1833. The firm asked its Liverpool agents to ‘forward your purchases [of cotton] per New Quay as usual’. 69 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/834b, 9 March 1850, Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade. At this date, Manchester itself consumed only 19.8 per cent of the cotton carried on the two

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70

71

72 73 74 75

76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85

86 87

67

navigations. In 1853, Poole also estimated Manchester’s consumption of Liverpool’s cotton imports at 20 per cent; see B. Poole, The commerce of Liverpool (Liverpool: T. Baines, 1854), p. 2. The Trustees’ trade was especially strong in ‘forward’ cotton that passed beyond Manchester to satellite manufacturing towns. In this trade, the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation retained almost three-quarters of the business in c.1850. See Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 156–7, 176–225. In 1844, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway carried 40,685 tons of cotton. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/8/3, Bonus Book Flour, Wool and Cotton. British raw cotton imports for 1833 from E. Baines, History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher and P. Jackson, 1835), p. 111. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/15, Minute Book, 1841–42, 3 July 1842; B2/1/1/16, Minute Book, 1843–44, 9 August 1843, 12 June 1844 and 10 July 1844; B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 11 June 1845; B2/1/1/20, Minute Book, 1853–56, 12 October 1853. Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, p. 5. Deane and Cole, British economic growth, pp. 185–6. Redford, Manchester merchants, pp. 169–75 R. Davis, The industrial revolution and British overseas trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), pp. 95–101. In 1834–36, north and north-western Europe also took £2.6m worth of cotton piece goods. Some rough figures on value are suggestive. Using the rough multipliers for the values of one ton of cotton yarn and cotton textiles reported by Braithwaite Poole for c.1850 (see chapter 7) and the divisions between yarn and piece goods exported to north and north-west Europe for 1834–36 reported by Davis, Industrial revolution, p. 99 we can adduce very tentative values of £3.8m of yarn and £2.4m of piece goods carried by waterways from Manchester to Hull. J. Pigot and Son, Pigot & Son’s general directory of Manchester, Salford &c (Manchester: J. Pigot & Son, 1829), Appendix, p. 81. Railway Times, Vol. 2 (1839), p. 462. J. Marshall, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, Vol. I (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1969), pp. 18–19. J. Pigot and Son, Pigot & Son’s general, classified street directory of Manchester and Salford (Manchester: J. Pigot & Son, 1838), Appendix, pp. 115–20. Jackson, Hull, pp. 1–25. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/14, Minute Book, 1839–41, letter transcribed from Thompson, M’Kay & Co. 24 April 1841. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/14, Minute Book, 1839–41, 1 May 1841; B2/1/16, 12 July 1843; B2/Traffic Book 5. By 1845, the Aire and Calder had also lost nearly all of its trade in textiles; see Hadfield, Canals of Yorkshire, Vol. I, p, 166. Davis, Industrial revolution, pp. 94–100. House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, p. 15, Joseph Kenworthy, p. 276, and Thomas Ogden Lingard, p. 283. Ibid., evidence of Joseph Kenworthy, p. 279. JRL, MCK, Letter Books, 10 August 1832 (emphasis in original).

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88 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 157. 89 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 220–1. 90 Salt, Railway and commercial information, p. 3; T. Baines, History of the commerce and town of Liverpool (London: Longmans, 1852), p. 829. 91 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of William Guyton, p. 257. 92 Ibid., evidence of T. Dickenson, p. 240. 93 Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, pp. 9–10 (including quotes). 94 T. Webster, Minutes of evidence and proceedings of the Liverpool and Birkenhead dock bills in the sessions of 1855 and 1856 (London: P.S. King, 1857), pp. 197–200. 95 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, p. 274. 96 In 1849, the Rochdale Canal transhipped 69,134 tons of timber from the Bridgewater in Manchester; see B2 Traffic Books. 97 Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, p. 12. 98 C. Powell, The British building industry since 1800: an economic history, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Spon Press, 1996); T. Edensor, ‘Building stone in Manchester: networks of materiality, circulating matter and the ongoing constitution of the city’, in M. Guggenheim and O. Söderström (eds), Re-shaping Cities: How global mobility transformed architecture and urban form (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 217. 99 NA, RAIL, 861/1, Minutes of the Rochdale Canal Lessees, 18 January 1857. The trade in lime and limestone, the bulk of which was transhipped from the Peak Forest Canal via the Ashton basin at Manchester, was much smaller. In 1845, it comprised only 1 per cent of the canal’s income. 100 RAIL, MBBCC, 458/6, Minute Book, 1833–35, 29 April 1835, 21 October 1835. 101 Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, pp. 198–9. 102 Return of the number of cotton, woollen, worsted, flax and silk factories subject to the Factories Acts in the United Kingdom (P.P. 1850, Vol. XLII), pp. 1–22.

3

Competition and complementarity: canals, roads and railways in Manchester

This chapter analyses the interplay between canals and other modes of transport in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Manchester. A broad literature has compared and contrasted the relative strengths and weaknesses of road, canal, coastal and rail transport during the first Industrial Revolution.1 It is now well known that roads provided a far greater geographical coverage than any other inland transport mode before 1850, when Britain possessed 22,000 miles of turnpiked road (itself only approximately one-fifth of total road mileage), compared to 6,000 miles of railway and 4,000 miles of canals and navigable rivers.2 Of these three forms of transport, only roads were not confined to point-to-point distribution between major towns and villages. During the nineteenth century, roads continued to play the key role in carrying goods to and from settlements without canal or rail access and in distributing goods within towns.3 Canals and railways were much more geographically restricted than roads. It took until c.1810 to develop a national system of waterways, while a nationally integrated rail system did not emerge in Britain until c.1850.4 The building of canals was a regional affair; individual canals were projected by local landed, commercial and industrial interests to serve regional demands for the conveyance of raw materials, foodstuffs and manufactured goods. Canal building was especially prevalent in the key industrialising regions of the midlands and northern England, as well as in south Wales and in lowland Scotland. In contrast, there were relatively few canals in southern, eastern and north-eastern England.5 Canals, of course, carried goods much more cheaply than did roads, reducing point-to-point freight costs by up to 75 per cent as compared with roads.6 These striking transport economies were found both in the short-haul trades in heavy minerals and in the intra-regional trades in foodstuffs and manufactured goods. Coastal shipping was cheaper still but in the eighteenth century the interruption of coastal shipping by bad weather and by unfavourable

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tides meant that coastal traffic was largely restricted to the carrying of bulk commodities, such as coal; from the early nineteenth century, however, the increasing use of steamships in the coastal trade allowed for more regular services and a much broader range in the commodities carried.7 The introduction of railways from c.1825 strengthened competition on routes leading to and from major towns, providing much more rapid and reliable services than canals and reducing the costs of carriage. The precise chronology by which railways achieved an ascendancy over canals is still debated but it may have come about by the 1860s and certainly, by the 1880s, railways had established a decisive lead over canals in handling Britain’s freight traffic. By 1898, indeed, canals carried only 10 per cent of the total volume of goods hauled by railways.8 Railways held a pre-eminent position in the inland transport of Britain’s industrial freight until they were challenged by a revival of road transport in the twentieth century.9 Recent research has stressed the complementarity of, as well as the competition between, road, water and railway transport in industrial Britain. Duckham uses the metaphor of transport as a ‘garment’ in which differing modes threaded together to produce a whole.10 The expansion of canals from 1760 to 1830 was accompanied by a major increase in traffic on roads, while the building of new railways in the 1830s and 1840s improved transport provision on England’s key long-distance trade routes. This research emphasises not just that canals and railways extended the supply of transport but also that the complex demands for transport to distribute goods to and from factories, warehouses and private dwellings could only be satisfied by the inter-linking of canals, roads and railways. As Freeman has shown, the demand for transport was influenced by a range of variables, including the elements of speed and reliability of despatch, as well as the basic question of cost.11 This chapter uses Manchester as a case study to analyse the links between canals and other modes of transport from c.1750 to c.1850. What relative roles did roads, canals and railways play in supplying the demand for transport in Manchester? And how did competition between these three modes of transport shape the changing structure of the transport system that emerged in the period of the city’s industrialisation? The first section focuses on interactions between canals and road transport until the 1830s, before the second section analyses the impact of the railways on canal transport in the two decades that followed the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830), the world’s first inter-city railway.12

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The expansion of Manchester’s road system In 1700, roads served Manchester’s transport needs. Roads for wagons and carts were recognised, along with footpaths and bridleways, as one of three categories of public highway in England. The roads were managed by parishes, which elected highway surveyors to extract contributions from parishioners (in either money or labour) to oversee their maintenance.13 In the early eighteenth century, a petition from Manchester merchants claimed that the ‘greater part’ of the Manchester to London trade was ‘conveyed by Land carriage’ in wagons carrying loads of up to 0.5 tons. At this time, four road carriers each provided one weekly service to and from London and Manchester.14 The major improvements to Manchester’s road system were effected by turnpikes. Turnpike trusts were formed by private Acts of Parliament, which gave powers to a body of commissioners to erect gates or bars on specific stretches of road and to extract tolls from users to raise funds for improving and maintaining that stretch of road. The first English turnpike trust was established in 1663, but a steady flow of turnpike Acts did not occur until after c.1700. At a national level, the most extensive creation of new turnpikes occurred from 1750 to 1770, when 52 per cent of the total turnpike mileage was approved; thereafter, the rate of turnpike authorisation flattened off, the last English turnpike trust being established in 1836.15 The expansion of the turnpike system in Manchester partly conforms to this pattern (Table 3.1), with two major clusters of Acts in the years 1724–34 and 1750–52, followed by a renewed surge of activity in the early nineteenth century. Trusts in the Manchester region generally managed short stretches of road, fewer than 25 miles in length, which primarily served local markets, although most turnpikes also formed parts of inter-regional road systems linking Manchester with major ports and industrial-commercial towns. The first turnpike serving Manchester was that to Buxton (1724), which both served local needs and formed part of an improved overland route from Manchester to London. Two trans-Pennine turnpikes were authorised in the next decade: first, a road from Manchester through Ashton to Saltersbrook (1731), where it connected to routes by road and water to Doncaster (on the ‘Great North Road’) and to the major port of Hull; second, a road from Manchester via Oldham to Austerlands (1734), where it joined with roads serving the wool textile districts of the West Riding of Yorkshire (see Table 3.1). The second wave of Acts in the early 1750s created turnpike trusts to manage roads between Manchester and Wilmslow, Stretford, Rochdale, Bolton, Bury and Warrington. The last-mentioned trust linked turnpike routes from Manchester to Liverpool via Prescot, thus effecting a major improvement in transport provision between Lancashire’s two largest

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Table 3.1 Manchester turnpikes, 1724–1826 Map ref. 1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

Year Name of trust 1724 1731 1734 1750

Manchester and Buxton Manchester, Ashton, Mottram and Saltersbrook Manchester, Oldham and Austerlands Crosford Bridge, Stretford, Hulme and Manchester 1752 Salford to Wigan, Warrington and Bolton

1752 Manchester and Wilmslow 1752 Manchester, Rochdale and Radcliffe Bridge, and Bury

1806 1806 1818 1825

Manchester, Middleton and Rochdale Hulme and Eccles Manchester, Denton, Hyde and Mottram Manchester and Ashton-under-Lyne (Ashton New Road) 1826 Manchester to Pilkington (Bury New Road)

Estimated length (miles) 25 22 19 6 4 (Pendleton district only) 14 16 (Manchester to Rochdale district only) 16 4 9 6 6

Source: W. Harrison, ‘The turnpike roads of Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 9 (1891), pp. 237–46; G.H. Tupling, ‘The turnpike trusts of Lancashire’, Memoirs of the Manchester Philosophical and Literary Society, Vol. 94 (1952–54), pp. 39–62; W. Albert, The turnpike road system in England, 1663–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Note: An 1817 Act to create a turnpike trust from Manchester to Newton Chapel never functioned. See Tupling ‘Turnpike trusts’, p. 43. Numbers in column 1 refer to labels on Fig. 3.1.

towns.16 However, after this flurry of new turnpikes in the early 1750s, no new trusts were created in central Manchester in the ‘mania’ of 1750–70, when so many were established in other parts of the country. The impetus for new turnpikes was not renewed until the early nineteenth century, when new trusts were established on roads from Manchester to Eccles in the west; to Hyde, Mottram and Audenshaw in the east; and to Pilkington, near Bury, in the north. The turnpikes created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remain the main framework of arterial roads radiating from the urban core of Manchester to the present day (Fig. 3.1). The increased expenditure on roads undertaken by trusts helped to speed up traffic and to reduce freight costs on roads. The trusts made a number of improvements to roads, implementing the methods of draining and surfacing recommended by McAdam and other highway surveyors, as well as building new stretches of road to ease gradients. It has recently been estimated that turnpike trusts were responsible for around half of the 40 per

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Figure 3.1 Turnpike roads in Manchester, 1724–1826 Source: J. Pigot and Son, Pigot & Son’s general & classified directory of Manchester, Salford, &c. for 1832 (Manchester: J. Pigot & Son, 1832) Note: The labels refer to the roads listed in Table 3.1.

cent fall in freight costs by road from 1750 to 1820.17 Road improvement went hand in hand with the innovations introduced by road-carrying companies, which, by the early nineteenth century, had transferred part of their longdistance trades on to ‘fly’ wagons, which used relays of horses to carry goods by day and night. Drier, flatter and harder road surfaces and gentler gradients reduced the number of horses required to pull road vehicles, while generations of selective breeding had produced stronger horses that could be sustained with smaller amounts of food. These latter developments were especially significant in that horse upkeep comprised by far the largest

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component in the costs incurred by road carriers.18 The overall impact of these improvements was to bring down journey times by road dramatically. As Turnbull has shown, the Manchester–London road journey for freight was reduced from nine to five days in the second half of the eighteenth century. The sprung van, introduced in the 1820s, had an even more dramatic effect on the speed of road transport and brought down the Manchester–London journey time to 36 hours; at this time, the quickest canal conveyance from Manchester to London took five days and nights.19 How was the extended system of road transport in the late eighteenth century used by Manchester businesses and how far did it compete with the movement of goods by canals? Trade directories are the major sources used by transport historians to analyse the organisation and reach of road transport during the Industrial Revolution. Such directories can provide simple counts of carriers serving particular routes, as well as, more contentiously, the number of weekly services offered to and from particular towns and derived indexes of aggregate ton-miles for these routes. These sources can also be used to make comparisons between road and canal transport provision.20 The first major trade directory with detailed information on road transport for Manchester was produced in 1763; it lists 58 carriers, all serving adjoining parts of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire, with none serving more distant markets.21 By 1820, a significant increase in the provision of road transport had taken place; at this time, Pigot’s trade directory listed 77 road carriers, 45 of which ran services to and from destinations within a twenty-mile radius of Manchester, each carrier usually serving a single town or village. The remaining 32 carriers served extra-regional routes, the majority working routes to and from Yorkshire. Those road carriers connecting Manchester to more distant markets comprised three trading from Manchester to London, four to Liverpool, four to Sheffield and one to Birmingham.22 What kinds of competing and complementary transport provision did roads and canals offer to Manchester’s industrial and commercial communities? The major points for comparison between transport modes include freight volumes and costs, and the reliability and speed of despatch. In cost terms, the advantage of canals over roads in carrying goods between towns is not difficult to establish; the available evidence is presented in Tables 3.2 and 3.3. The data show that canals were significantly cheaper than roads on all routes where evidence is available, although the relative cheapness of canals compared to roads of course varied by route and time period. In the 1770s, canal transport from Manchester to Liverpool was fully 85 per cent cheaper than road transport; canals, at this time, carried goods from Manchester to Liverpool for 6s. per ton compared with 40s. per ton by road. By 1825, canal freights had increased to 10–15s. per ton, while road transport freights

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remained steady at around 40s. per ton. For the important trade between Manchester and London, canal transport was around 45–75 per cent cheaper than road freights in the 1820s, depending on the type of road wagon. The marked economy of canal transport over roads was also evident in the trades to the east and west midlands; the smallest discrepancies in canal and road costs are found in the Manchester–Hull trade, where the costs of transport provision by water were increased by the heavy lockage required by the upland route through the Pennines. Even so, a comparison of freight costs for c.1800 and c.1830 show that canal transport on the Pennine route was roughly 40 per cent cheaper than that by road. The relative costs of canal and road transport are also revealed when the analysis is framed in terms of commodity trade rather than by particular trading routes. In the early 1820s, for example, Baines considered that the transport of corn from agricultural regions to Lancashire cotton towns was at least 75 per cent cheaper by canals than by roads.23 Likewise, McConnel & Co., one of Manchester’s leading cotton-spinning firms, prioritised canals over roads for distributing cotton yarn due to the latter’s higher freight charges, the firm describing land carriage as a ‘costly mode of conveyance’.24 However, as Freeman in particular has stressed, canal freight rates, such as those cited in Tables 3.2 and 3.3, only comprise point-to-point costs between towns and do not include the additional costs of warehousing and intra-urban road distribution.25 Nevertheless, even when these costs are added, water transport remained much cheaper than road. For example, in the Manchester and Liverpool trade in the mid-1820s, cotton sent from Liverpool to Manchester factories cost approximately 40s. per ton by road; in contrast, the waterborne freight cost from the Liverpool docks to canal warehouses in Manchester was just 15s. per ton. Even with the addition of 1–2s. for carting through Manchester (warehousing was generally provided free of charge for 2–8 weeks), canals remained by far the least costly conveyance for the raw cotton trade. Moreover, canal carriers collected the cotton yarn and piece goods leaving Manchester warehouses and factories for the port of Liverpool without charge, eliminating further costs of water transport to Manchester merchants and manufacturers.26 The comparison between the economics of transporting goods by roads and canals, however, must go beyond the basic costs to include an analysis of the reliability and speed of despatch and the scope of destinations served. In these respects, historians have suggested that road transport had the edge on canals. In the all-important route to and from Manchester and Liverpool, indeed, road transport was decidedly quicker. In 1825, goods travelling from Manchester to Liverpool by road could complete the journey in five or six hours. In contrast, it generally took at least seventeen hours to carry goods between Manchester and Liverpool by water, a journey that comprised eleven

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Table 3.2 Carriers’ per ton freight charges for merchandise carried between Manchester and English towns in the late eighteenth century Route

Manchester–Liverpool Manchester–Birmingham Manchester–Shardlow Manchester–London Manchester–Hull Manchester–Nottingham Manchester–Leicester

Cost by road (date)

40s. (c.1770) 80s. (c.1790) 65s. (c.1790) 170s. (1796) 65s. (c.1800) 80s. (1777) 120s. (1777)

Cost by canal (date)

6s. (c.1770) 30s. (c.1790) 15s. (c.1790) 95s. (1811) 40s. (c.1800)a 40s. (1777) 30s. (1777)

Cost of canal carriage as a percentage of road cost 15% 38% 23% 56% 62% 50% 25%

Source: Manchester–London by road taken from R. Fulton, A treatise on the improvement of canal navigation (London: I. & J. Taylor, 1796), p. 6; Manchester–Hull taken from GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/4, Minute Book, 1797–1801, 2 February 1801; Manchester–Liverpool taken from Raffald’s Manchester directory (1772); all other data taken from W.T. Jackman, The development of transport in modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), pp. 724–8. Notes: a = land carriage to Sowerby Bridge; water transport from Sowerby Bridge to Hull. The latter leg from Sowerby Bridge to Hull comprised 28s. (43%) of the freight cost; see Manchester Mercury, 14 January 1800.

Table 3.3 Carriers’ per ton freight charges for merchandise carried between Manchester and key English towns, 1825–36 Route

Cost by road (date)

Manchester–Liverpool 40s. (1826) Manchester–Hull 50s. (1830) Manchester–Birmingham not available Manchester–London 400s. (van)a (1833)

Cost by canal Cost of canal carriage (date) as a percentage of road cost 10s.–15s. (1825) 30s. (1830) 30s.–40s. (1836)

36% 60% –

80s.–100s. (1834)

23%

Source: Manchester–London by canal and road and Manchester–Birmingham by canal from Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of J. Grierson, p. 757; Manchester– Liverpool by canal from House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, pp. 280–90, and Joseph Kenworthy, pp. 271–80; Manchester–Liverpool by road from E.A. Pratt, A history of inland transport and communication in England (London: Routledge, 1912), p. 233; Manchester–Hull by canal and road from J. Marshall, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1969), Vol. I, pp. 18–19. Notes: a = standard road wagons carried freight at around half the per ton rate of vans. See G.L. Turnbull, Traffic and transport: an economic history of Pickfords (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979), pp. 67–8. For Manchester–London, this would suggest a rate of 200s. per ton, which is broadly in line with the rate of 170s. per ton cited for 1796 in Table 3.2.

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hours on the canal, around two hours descending or ascending the locks at Runcorn, and four hours on coastal vessels to Liverpool on the Mersey estuary.27 Likewise, canal transport from Manchester to Hull in 1830 took three days by road and five by canals and river navigations.28 In the trade to London, journey times by canal had been reduced to five days by the early nineteenth century; on roads, the quickest road transport could perform the service in 36 hours by the 1820s.29 Roads likewise provided much more extensive coverage than canals; in the 1830s, England’s turnpike road mileage was four times greater than its mileage of navigable water. From c.1830, however, there were few major British towns that could not be reached by canals and navigable rivers, or a combination of canals, rivers and coastal shipping. Historians have also argued that roads offered more reliable services than canals. There is abundant evidence of the susceptibility of canals to stoppages through frost in winter and drought in summer. The Huddersfield Canal, for example, lost 37 days to frost in the winter of 1822–23, while in the summer of 1826, the canal was likewise closed for 62 days due to lack of water.30 The Rochdale Canal was similarly stopped for the entirety of January 1850 due to frost but managed to get through ‘the long drought’ of summer 1854 ‘without much inconvenience’, while other canals were ‘wholly closed’.31 Transport users were of course aware of the disruptions to canal trade caused by weather. In the early 1830s, McConnel & Co. of Manchester sent a shipment of doubled thread to Barnstable in Devon by road because of their ‘apprehension of the canals being stopped by frost’.32 Roads, however, were not unaffected by poor weather. Thus, in 1808, the same Manchester firm complained of a late-arriving bale of cotton yarn carried by road from Manchester to Liverpool. When it confronted the carrier, he informed the firm that ‘winter & the badness of the roads’ had occasioned their delay.33 The final point of comparison between roads and canals is in terms of freight volumes. However, comparing the volumes of trade carried to and from Manchester by roads and canals is no easy task, much harder, as we shall see, than comparing canal and rail trade volumes from the 1830s.34 The uncertainties of the underlying data mean that the extent and nature of the competition between canals and roads is still debated by historians. Bagwell, for example, argues that the cost advantages of canals over roads meant they assumed a clear lead in the provision of transport for industrialising Britain. Freeman, in contrast, has argued that the greater speed and reliability of roads meant that they were often the best solution to manufacturers’ particular transport needs.35 In the absence of general quantitative data, we must fall back on the detailed comparative evidence available for specific trading routes, starting with the key trade between Manchester and Liverpool. The evidence suggests that, despite their significant cost advantage, canals

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had not entirely displaced roads in the exchange of goods between the two key Lancashire towns in the early nineteenth century. The Manchester Guide, published in 1804, noted that despite the proliferation of goods carried by water between Manchester and Liverpool since the 1770s, ‘the land carriage has been so far from decreasing that there are twenty times the goods carried by land now’. In the only detailed study, Freeman concluded, on the basis of payments to carriers made by three leading cotton firms, that canals did not dominate transport provision for this crucial industry before 1815 and that road transport remained competitive, often providing the best solution to the transport demands of factory firms.36 This pattern is clearest in his case studies of two firms operating at the fringes of the cotton region in northwest Lancashire and Derbyshire, especially in the years before 1815. Freeman’s data on the trade of McConnel & Kennedy (known after about 1820 as McConnel & Co.), the only Manchester firm included in his study, suggests, likewise, that road transport initially remained an important mode of conveyance for this specialist spinning firm’s raw cotton supplies, as well as for the distribution of cotton yarn to the firm’s key market in Glasgow, a town not served by inland navigation from Manchester. However, by the close of Napoleonic Wars, waterways had begun to establish a clear lead over road transport. By 1815, for example, just 12 per cent of the firm’s cotton arrived from Liverpool by land.37 By the 1830s, the role of water transport in McConnel & Co.’s Liverpool trade had been further strengthened, despite the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The New Quay Company, carrying on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, brought the bulk of the firm’s cotton to Manchester, while from 1825 yarn destined for Glasgow and Ireland was carried to steamships operating from Liverpool by the Manchester Grocers’ Company, a carrier on the Bridgewater Canal.38 Trade directory evidence for 1820 also suggests that canal transport dominated by this time; Liverpool was served by eight canal carriers, most of whom provided daily services, while only three road carriers served Liverpool, two providing daily services and one offering three services per week. The evidence assembled in the parliamentary debates on the authorisation of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in the mid1820s provides the clearest evidence of the relative position of road and canal transport. This indicates that road transport only remained viable in the outgoing trade from Manchester to Liverpool; even so, because of its high cost relative to canals, land carriage was largely confined to times of pressing need or when canal transport was overstocked. Road transport, likewise, according to this evidence, was not used to carry cotton from Liverpool to Manchester except in the most exceptional of circumstances. The importance of canals is underlined by the fact that the Liverpool to Manchester leg of this bilateral trade, where road transport was not used by 1825, accounted for

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more than three-quarters of the weight of goods carried between the two towns.39 Even in the much smaller outgoing trade from Manchester to Liverpool, canals carried the bulk of trade. The trans-Pennine trade between industrialising Lancashire and Yorkshire was important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Manufactures were exchanged between Manchester and the woollen towns of the West Riding (especially Leeds), while Hull remained the key port of despatch for Manchester’s major yarn export trade to north-west Europe after 1800. Equally important was the return carriage of corn from Wakefield, Leeds and the eastern agricultural districts. These flows of foodstuffs provided an important addition to Irish grain brought to Manchester from Liverpool.40 Despite canal carriers’ charges from Manchester to Hull being up to 40 per cent cheaper than their overland counterparts (see Table 3.3), road carriers evidently retained a part of the Manchester–Hull trade.41 Pigot’s 1838 Manchester trade directory, however, lists only three land carriers providing daily services to Hull and Goole compared to at least five canal carriers.42 Jackson, moreover, has shown that in the first half of the nineteenth century virtually all consignments passing to and from Hull used inland navigation for part of their journey.43 Data collected by the Manchester and Leeds Railway in the mid-1830s suggest that canals carried 189,020 tons of general merchandise (excluding coal and stone) between Manchester and Leeds, while road carriers carried just 44,274 tons.44 This seems to contradict an earlier and unsubstantiated statement made by the railway company that ‘The inadequacy of the Canals for the Conveyance of General Merchandise, is so strongly felt, that by far the greatest proportion is, with some difficulty, conveyed over a Mountainous District, by Waggons and Carts.’45 The business papers of McConnel & Co. in the 1830s show that their yarn exports to north-west Europe, shipped from Hull, were taken by Buckley & Co., a carrier on the Rochdale and Huddersfield canals. Only in McConnel & Co.’s increasing trade to Nottingham did canal carriers have to share a significant part of the trade with their counterparts on the roads.46 Road transport was the main method of conveyance for Manchester’s trade with London until the end of the eighteenth century. As early as 1580, London exported Lancashire woollens and fustians, the textiles arriving in the capital via roads from Manchester.47 As the Lancashire textile industry developed over the course of the seventeenth century, services offered by Manchester–London road carriers became more regular. In 1715, four carriers each provided weekly services to London. Sixty years later, there were six carriers in the London–Manchester trade; their ten weekly services in 32 wagons were capable of carrying almost 4,500 tons per year. A decisive step forward took place in the late 1770s when competition between road carriers brought down the standard journey time between Manchester and London

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from nine to five days.48 By this time, however, a water route from Manchester to London was possible via the Bridgewater, Trent and Mersey, Coventry and Oxford canals and the Thames Navigation. However, the circuitousness of the southerly sections of this water route led the emergent canal carriers to tranship goods from canal barges to road wagons to cover the section to the south of Braunston, Northamptonshire; it was not until the full opening of the Grand Junction Canal in 1805 that a viable, direct and continuous water connection linked Manchester to London. Until this time, canal carriers were not able to mount a serious challenge to road traffic in the Manchester– London trade. In 1800, indeed, only two canal carriers traded between Manchester and London. After 1805, however, carriers transferred the bulk of their traffic from road to canal, despite the introduction of the sprung van in 1814, which brought down journey times by road between Manchester and London to around a third of the canal journey times. By 1820, then, seven canal carriers offered 21 more services per week to and from London than the three remaining land carriers. While London’s road carriage generally increased in the 1820s and the 1830s, as Gerhold has shown, ‘services to the industrialising north and midlands formed a declining part of London [road] carrying’.49 When the Manchester and Birmingham Railway discussed its potential traffics in 1839, indeed, it expected to take a freight trade worth £76,727 in tolls per year from canals and a trade worth just £15,222 in tolls from roads; this was despite freight charges on roads being at least 50 per cent higher than canal charges.50 While canals had taken a clear lead in the trade between Manchester and the ports of Liverpool, Hull and London by 1830, road transport remained crucial to Manchester’s local trades. The importance of Manchester as a market for raw cotton, processed yarn and woven piece goods led to the creation of a network of waterways throughout the cotton-manufacturing district stretching over parts of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Many of these water routes, however, were circuitous. The trade between Manchester and Blackburn is a case in point. The canal route extended for 43 miles (via Leigh), although only 25 miles separated the two towns. Canals might not, therefore, provide the best solution for textile spinners and manufacturers to receive supplies of raw cotton and to distribute finished goods. The canals were wholly inappropriate, moreover, as a means by which putting-out manufacturers could supply their handloom weavers with yarn for weaving in their own homes, workers who were of course dispersed in a multiplicity of villages and hamlets in the four main cotton counties.51 As early as the 1780s, the largest firms in the Blackburn area employed many thousands of men, women and children. The Peels, for example, employed nearly 7,000 men, women and children in their own homes.52 Likewise, the Horrockses of Preston, in 1816, employed more than

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5,000 weavers across Lancashire, in the ‘different towns of the county, at Preston, Longridge, Bolton, Leyland, Ormskirk, Holcombe, Wigan, Chorley, Hutton and other places’.53 These handloom weavers were not displaced by powerlooms until the railway age54 and as long as non-mechanised forms of weaving predominated, the extensive dispersion of yarn to weavers required roads rather than canals. The evidence of the continued importance of road traffic within the cotton region is clearest for the trade between Manchester, Bolton and Bury for which good data are available. This takes the form of an estimate of volumes of road transport made by the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company in May 1832. This traffic census shows a daily volume of road traffic between Manchester and Bolton of 150 tons of spinners’ and bleachers’ goods and 73 tons of general merchandise, while that between Manchester and Bury amounted to 81 tons of spinners’ and bleachers’ goods and 164 tons of general merchandise. If these trade flows are proportionally inflated to a hypothesised 313-day working year, it would suggest annual road haulages of around 70,000 tons between Manchester and Bolton and 77,000 tons of Manchester and Bury trade. In contrast, few manufactured goods were carried on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, which linked the same three towns. In 1832, the canal company took tolls of just £417 for ‘merchandise’, a trade that is unlikely to have exceeded 10,000 tons.55 This pattern of trade was probably similar to that with other towns in Manchester’s industrial hinterland. Freeman’s evidence on the trades of the Strutts of Derbyshire and the Horrockses of north-west Lancashire strongly suggests that land carriage was the two firms’ prime mode of conveyance before 1815.56 The distribution of raw cotton and manufactures between Manchester and the satellite cotton towns, indeed, seems to have made extensive use of road transport until the 1840s. While cotton was mainly carried from Liverpool to Manchester by canals and rivers, roads took the greater part of the freight between the cotton towns and the market centre of Manchester. This is suggested by a letter from the Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade in 1850: Almost all the cotton for the ‘forward’ towns [Lancashire mill towns] has thus been carted [by road] – Manchester being the great market for manufactured goods in which all the fabrics of the district are exposed for sale, and there packed for exportation, the manufacturers and spinners in the neighbouring towns, find it consists more with the convenient transactions of their business to send their Goods as occasion requires in small or large quantities and without too frequent transhipments in their own carts and wagons to Manchester and having these delivered there, to bring back a return load of cotton from the canal wharf.

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This practice of using canals to bring cotton to Manchester and roads to distribute it to satellite towns only ended, according to this account, when the railway network was sufficiently established to enable spinners and manufacturers to collect goods from local railway stations.57 Coal within the Manchester industrial region, of course, was largely carried by canals, which provided 570,000 tons of coal to Manchester in the early 1830s. Even here, however, around one-third of Manchester’s coal supply came by road at this time. The road-borne coal arrived from two main sources: from two collieries within two miles of Manchester (at Bradford and Pendleton), which supplied Manchester with around 220,000 tons of coal per year in the mid-1830s; and from the mining region around Oldham, which supplied Manchester with 80,000 tons per year. Only a relatively small quantity of coal was brought by railways at this time.58 Road transport was also essential to the carriage of goods within Manchester.59 Canals and railways, of course, provided point-to-point transport systems. The only major exception to this pattern was in the ‘wharf ’ trade in coal, stone and timber, in which canal boats drew up alongside canalside wharves (including those adjoining factories) to discharge their cargoes directly to businesses that clustered along the canals in central Manchester. Roads still played a key role in distributing coal and stone from canalside wharves. The committee of the Ashton Canal, for example, considered its trade depended on their providing ‘a … road for carts and Carriages … from the Company’s wharves near Piccadilly for Ancoats Lane’.60 Likewise, in the early 1830s, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal’s newly opened Stanley Street wharves were considered ‘of no use’ because of the bad state of the road that connected the wharves with central Manchester.61 Roads were also vital to the intra-urban distribution of manufactured goods, raw cotton and dyestuffs. The inter-city canal trade in these commodities was typically handled by public carriers, which operated their businesses from warehouses in canal company basins. These canal carrying companies relied on road carts to carry goods to and from factories and the canal warehouses. McConnel & Co. of Manchester thus made extensive use of canal transport in its long-distance trades but used road carts to carry its goods within Manchester, to and from its Ancoats factory and the canal warehouses of Castlefield and Piccadilly.62 Similarly, William Horsfall, a card manufacturer based in Albion Mills, situated close to the Rochdale Canal near Oxford Street, collected his industrial inputs from canal warehouses in Piccadilly and Castlefield rather than receiving the goods directly at the factory.63 W.C. Taylor thus described ‘immense waggons incessantly traversing the streets of Manchester drawn by horses’. These carts were ‘laden with bales of cotton in the raw or manufactured state’.64 To summarise, roads and canals both comprised key elements in

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Manchester’s transport provision before 1830. Canals became Manchester’s main conveyance for the trade with the major ports of Liverpool, London and Hull, as well as intra-regional trade in coal from the Lancashire and Cheshire coalfield. Their main advantage over roads lay in their costs, but also the extensive facilities for transhipment available in Manchester’s five water transport basins. These canal basins provided a key link between canal and road transport, with warehouses storing goods and providing points from which canal cargoes were unloaded on to road carts and wagons. Speedier and more reliable conveyance by road offered alternative services on the major trade routes to the ports but they lagged far behind canals in terms of the volume of their freight traffics. For Manchester’s intra-regional trades, except for that in coal and stone, however, the position is reversed with roads carrying a larger part of the main traffic in cotton, yarn and piece goods between Manchester and the satellite cotton towns. Road transport, moreover, was essential to the distribution of all classes of goods within Manchester itself. The expansion of the rail network The triumphant opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 heralded the beginning of Manchester’s railway age. The two subsequent decades witnessed a major expansion of the rail network in northern England forged by a diversity of railway companies, before an amalgamation movement in the mid-1840s consolidated Manchester’s railways into four major groupings: the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (LYR), the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MSLR) and the Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway (MSJAR). The key decade for Manchester’s railway authorisation was the 1830s, rather than the later ‘railway mania’ of the 1840s, reflecting Manchester’s early industrial development and the demands of a rapidly growing manufacturing and commercial population. By the early 1840s, Manchester had developed direct rail links with Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham, as well as connecting lines to London and Hull (Fig. 3.2). The provision of local train services also increased significantly in the 1840s. By 1845, trains departing from Manchester called at stations in Ashton, Bolton, Chorley, Dukinfield, Eccles, Hyde, Glossop, Leigh, Oldham, Preston, Rochdale, St Helens, Stockport, Warrington and Wigan; by 1850, the list of local train stations also included Blackburn, Burnley, Bury, Colne, Clitheroe, Darwen, Haslingden and Stretford.65 Five railway stations in Manchester and Salford provided the urban hubs of the rail network: London Road station (later renamed Piccadilly), jointly occupied by the Manchester and Birmingham and the Manchester, Sheffield

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Figure 3.2 The major railways of Lancashire and their connections, 1845 Source: G. Bradshaw, Bradshaw’s map of the railways in Great Britain: shewing lines in progress to the present time (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1848)

and Ashton-under-Lyne; Oldham Road and Victoria stations of the Manchester and Leeds; Liverpool Road station of the Liverpool and Manchester; and New Bailey Street station of the Manchester and Bolton.66 By 1850, the Manchester railways were linked by two central junctions: the South Junction linked London Road station with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway near Ordsall Lane in Salford, and a junction between the Manchester and Leeds and the Manchester and Bolton was formed via a short rail link across the Irwell between New Bailey Street station and Victoria. No new company laid tracks in central Manchester after 1849, although the town benefited from connections to an ever-expanding British railway network, whose track mileage increased from 6,100 miles in 1850 to 18,700 by 1900.67 The advantages of railways over canals and roads are well known. The first and foremost of these was the unprecedented speed of railways. Most horsepulled canal boats and road wagons carried freight at speeds of just 2 mph, while ‘fly’ boats and sprung vans could travel at 4 mph and 10 mph, respectively. Railways, in contrast, could easily reach speeds of 25–30 mph.68 Railways thus slashed long-distance journey times. For example, the standard passage by water between Manchester and Liverpool was 17–18 hours in 1830; by railway, the journey was reduced to under two hours.69 Similar time economies are evident in all services from Manchester: in the 1830s and 1840s railways carried goods to London in 9–10 hours, to Birmingham and Hull in 4–5 hours and to Leeds in 2¾ hours.70 Railways were also a reliable transport mode, providing year-round services that were not available by

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Table 3.4 Railway authorisation and completion in Manchester, 1826–51 Company

Act

Date of Grouping Stations completion (1850)

Liverpool and Manchester Railway

1826

1830

LNWR

Manchester and Bolton Railway

1831

1838

YLR

Manchester and Leeds Railway

1836

1841

YLR

Manchester, Sheffield and Ashtonunder-Lyne Railway

1837

1845

MSLR

Manchester and Birmingham Railway 1837

1842

LNWR

Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway

1845

1849

MSJAR

Manchester and Huddersfield Railway 1845

1849

LNWR

Liverpool Road; Cross Lane Old Bailey Street Oldham Road; Victoria London Road; Ardwick London Road; Ardwick Oxford Road; Knott Mill N/A

Source: J. Haydn, Dictionary of dates, and universal reference relating to all ages and nations (London: Edward Moxon, 1851), pp. 498–9. Note: LNWR = London and North Western Railway; YLR = Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway; MSLR = Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway; MSJAR = Manchester, South Junction and Altrincham Railway.

canals or even roads. Railways were likewise less susceptible to pilferage, always a great source of anxiety to canal carriers in particular.71 Gilbert Winter, a director of the board of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, argued that pilferage did not occur on the railways to any great extent.72 In the 1830s and early 1840s, however, it is important to remember that railwaycarried goods were susceptible to loss by fire, when cinders were thrown up by the chimneys of the locomotives’ steam engines. In May 1834, for example, a railway wagon travelling from Manchester to Liverpool, containing cotton and silk yarn and woollen textiles, caught fire from a hot cinder.73 These goods were valued at £655 and the costs were refunded by the railway company.74 Likewise, in September 1836, a wagonload of cotton worth £200 was lost to a hot cinder from the locomotive engine.75 Railway-carried goods were also damaged by the weather. In summer 1834, several of the Liverpool and Manchester’s wagons were exposed in a storm and their contents were damaged by the water.76 The security of goods on railways, especially in the early years, thus should not be overstated.

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Table 3.5 Carriers’ per ton freight charges for merchandise carried between Manchester and key English towns in the 1840s Route

Cost by canal (date)

Cost by rail (date)

Manchester–Liverpool Manchester–Hull Manchester–Birmingham Manchester–London

9s. (1849) 20s. (1846) 17s.–20s. (1842) 32s.–40s. (1846)

9s. (1849) 20s. (c.1846) 16s.–22s. (1842) 40s. (1846)

Source: Manchester–Birmingham taken from Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of J. Grierson, p. 757; Manchester–London taken from H. Tuck, The Railway shareholder’s manual; or the practical guide to all the railways in the world (London: Effingham Wilson, 1847), p. iv; Manchester–Hull taken from evidence reported in GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/16, Minute Book, 1843–44, 12 July 1843 and Second Report from the Select Committee on Railways and Canals Amalgamation (P.P. 1846, Vol. VIII), evidence of George Jackson, p. 308; Manchester– Liverpool from University of Salford Archives, Bridgewater Estate Archive, DBA/17/834b, 9 March 1850, Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade.

Historians have generally argued that the great advantage of railways over canals was that they carried goods much more cheaply.77 In the case of Manchester transport before 1850, however, the railways’ cost advantages are not clear-cut. Table 3.5 provides examples of the costs of canal and railway freights charged to transport users in the 1840s. It shows that charges per ton of freight on railways and canals were almost identical. However, a comparison between Tables 3.5 and 3.3 shows that these costs were significantly below those prevailing on canals before the railway age. So, the competition from railways forced down standard freights across the board, reducing those from Liverpool to Manchester, for example, from 15s. per ton in 1825 to 9s. per ton in 1849.78 The lowering of costs to transport users tended to occur in two stages. First, the onset of competition between canals and railways for freight led to a reduction of charges. Second, following an initial period of intense competition, canal and railway companies agreed rates by water and rail, often as part of railway companies’ leasing of canals or even their outright ownership of them (see below). The reduction of freight costs, for the 1830s and 1840s at least, should be seen as the product of competition between transport modes rather than the inherent cost advantages of railway transport.79 It will be recalled that road carriers reduced their charges in competition with canals after 1750, while still carrying goods at rather higher rates than canals; in the 1830s and 1840s, in Manchester at least, canals were able to match the lower freights introduced by railways. Given the similar costs of canal and rail transport in the 1840s, how successfully were railways able to take traffic from canals? The early to mid1840s are often portrayed by historians as the crucial years for the railways’ eclipse of canals as Britain’s leading freight-transport providers. This view was espoused by Jackman in his classic study of British transport history,

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Table 3.6 Average annual freight trade on Manchester railways and major connections, 1842–44 Railway

Manchester and Leeds Railway Liverpool and Manchester Railway Manchester and Birmingham Railway Manchester and Bolton Railway Manchester, Sheffield and Ashton-under-Lyne Railway Grand Junction Railway London and Birmingham Railway Total

Tons carried

Freight receipts (£)

Income per ton

333,527 267,064 61,792 114,623

114,431 86,175 26,176 12,328

6s. 10d. 6s. 5d. 8s. 5d. 2s. 2d.

81,667 206,498 152,513

5,115 57,396 161,472

1s. 2d. 5s. 7d. £1 1s. 2d.

1,217,684

508,093

7s. 5d.

Source: Report of the officers of the railway department (P.P. 1844, Vol. XI), pp. 101–45; Report of the officers of the railway department (P.P. 1846, Vol. XXXIX), pp. 283–379. Note: Excludes the carriage of livestock, parcels and mails, and passengers.

published in the early twentieth century, and was endorsed by Clapham in the 1930s, Dyos and Aldcroft in the 1960s, and most recently by Casson in 2009.80 Mitchell and Bagwell, in contrast, have argued that it was not until the 1850s that the volume of goods carried by railways exceeded that on canals.81 F.C. Mather’s analysis of the rivalry between the Bridgewater Trustees and rail interests in the north-west and the west midlands remains the most detailed study of early canal–railway competition. This analysis suggests that, especially in respect of the trade between Manchester and Liverpool, the assumption that the canals immediately capitulated to the railways is mistaken. Before 1850, indeed, canals and rivers continued to haul the bulk of freight between Manchester and Liverpool. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that railways asserted dominance over canals in this trade.82 Railway data, in the form of parliamentary returns, suggest national freight-traffic volumes of 5–6m tons in 1842. Railway freight climbed dramatically in the next fifty years, reaching 38m tons in 1850, before doubling in volume in both the 1850s and the 1860s to reach 167m tons in 1870 and 299m tons by 1890.83 Canal freights, in contrast, crept forward slowly from approximately 30–35m tons in the 1830s to around 40m tons by 1890.84 For the early part of the railway age considered here, however, the railways had not equivocally asserted their primacy over canals on all routes. This can partly be explained by the fact that many of the earlier train services had focused on carrying passengers rather than freight, while, by 1855, 73 per

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cent of railway income was derived from freighting merchandise.85 Table 3.6 brings together the data on the goods traffic of the seven major railways handling goods to and from Manchester for 1842–44, the period before the amalgamation of the railway system in the mid-1840s makes it difficult to isolate that portion of railway traffic directly concerned with Manchester. The data suggest that railways carried much lower annual freight volumes than canals in the early to mid-1840s. The Bridgewater Canal alone carried a higher annual tonnage than the combined total of the seven railway companies listed in Table 3.6. These data suggest that, for Manchester, we must reject Jackman’s conclusion that by 1845, ‘the railways had grown to be the predominant party in the contest, completely overshadowing most canals’.86 However, the volumes of goods carried, by themselves, tell us relatively little about the economic vitality of a transport provider. Tonnage levels, for example, could be boosted by carrying large quantities of coal or stone over very short distances. Ton-miles is a better measure of the extent of transport usage, but the multiplicity of destinations served by canals, the differing sizes of the boats used and the frequent transhipment of goods from one canal to another mean that reliable estimates are not possible.87 Freight incomes offer surer points of comparison for analysing the relative significance of the goods traffic of canals and railways; this measure indeed provides telling evidence of the railways’ stern competition with canals in the early 1840s. The ability of the railways to attract high-yielding commodities, such as manufactures and foodstuffs, as well as the fact that railways operated over much longer distances than canals allowed railway companies to achieve much higher incomes per ton carried. The true state of the competition between canals and railways on Manchester’s key transport routes is shown in the following analysis of both the volumes of goods carried by rail and by water and the trading incomes they produced. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (LMR) opened in late 1830, immediately introducing freight rates of 10s. per ton between Liverpool and Manchester, two-thirds of the prevailing canal rate. 88 The waterways promptly lowered their charges and, by 1832, the railway was compelled to reduce its own charges for certain goods to meet those charged by canals.89 The first three full years of trade on the railway show that it carried an average of 88,865 tons per year between Liverpool and Manchester. In these years, the Bridgewater Canal carried 94,708 tons between the same two towns. If the probable volumes for the Mersey and Irwell Navigation (c.140,000 tons in 1836; see chapter 2) are added, we find that the two waterways carried approximately two-thirds of the Manchester and Liverpool trade. While trade increased in volume markedly over the next two decades, its distribution between the canal, the river navigation and the railway was

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largely unchanged. It was not until the 1850s, more than two decades after the railway opened, that the railway was able to exceed the volumes carried by water on Manchester’s premier transport route.90 Moreover, from the mid1830s, the traffic from Manchester to Liverpool was not undertaken in conditions of free competition. The two waterways and the railway entered into a series of agreements relating to freight rates, warehousing charges and the even division of traffic between the three major providers.91 Collaboration was punctuated by periods of antagonistic competition when agreements were torn up and freight rates slashed before new agreements were eventually reached. Thus, competition, in the sense of bidding for traffic by reducing rates, was the exception rather than the normal state of affairs before 1850.92 Coherent action was possible because a large share of the traffic – at least until the early 1840s – was in the hands of just three carriers (the Bridgewater Trustees, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company and the Old Quay Company). In 1839–41, the three companies carried roughly 50–60 per cent of the traffic on this route.93 Until the late 1840s, the waterways retained the ascendancy in the bilateral trade between Manchester and Liverpool and this was reflected in their ability to negotiate favourable traffic-sharing agreements with the LMR. So, in 1845, the Bridgewater Trustees, by this time also owners of the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, entered into a new agreement with the LMR to divide the traffic between Manchester and Liverpool in accordance with the proportions for the previous six years. This allotted the waterways two-thirds of the traffic and the railways one-third, the same proportion already evident in the early 1830s. Despite this large preferential share, the waterways exceeded their share by an annual average of almost 25,000 tons over the next four years.94 As late as 1850, the Trustees were able to inform the Board of Trade that, for the trade in cotton from Liverpool, the cargo ‘most prized by the carriers … much the larger portion passes along the “Duke’s” Navigations [the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation]’. By this time, 129,872 tons of this commodity alone was carried by waterways from Liverpool to Manchester.95 Where income data from freight traffic are available, a similar pattern emerges (Table 3.7). Thus, in the mid-1830s, the two waterways earned approximately £200,000 from traffic receipts (tolls plus carriers’ charges), while the railway generated slightly more than £90,000. By 1845, the two waterways’ receipts had increased to £220,000, while railway income lagged at around £120,000. Thus, in both of the available measures of freight traffic, volume carried and income earned, the waterways remained the key transport provider in the Liverpool and Manchester trade before 1850. The advantages of canals over railways were three-fold in respect of the Liverpool–Manchester trade in the early 1840s. First, the waterways carried

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manufactures to Liverpool at a rate that was 1s. per ton cheaper than railways (approximately 15 per cent of transport costs). Second, estuary vessels used by waterway providers could distribute packages of manufactured goods directly on to coastal and international vessels at Liverpool, a practice that expedited the passage of goods and minimised breakages and storage costs in warehouses.96 Finally, the canals controlled much greater amounts of warehousing in Manchester than did the railways, which was a key advantage in the cotton trade where it was common for factory spinners to hold large stocks of the raw material in transport warehouses and to bring small lots to the factory by road cart when needed.97 The surviving letter books of W. & J. Galloway, an important Manchester engineering firm, illustrate the advantages that canals had over railways in the early 1840s. The firm distributed machinery, engines, boilers, pipes and rivets throughout Britain and to Europe, the USA and India. The bulk of its output was shipped, in the first instance, on the Bridgewater Canal to Liverpool, either passing to an international port or to southern England by steamships. The firm’s use of waterways rather than rail transport reflected two factors. First, water carriage was cheaper: they informed a customer in London that shipping the goods via ‘Liverpool by Sea would be cheaper than Railway’.98 Second, on the key route to Liverpool, canals had an advantage over railways in that cargoes could be transhipped directly from the Bridgewater flats into a sea-going vessel, without accruing additional storage and cartage costs.99 In the Manchester to Liverpool trade, the heat of the battle with the railways did not come until 1849, when the opening of the Liverpool and Bury Railway (part of the LYR) led to the collapse of the 1845 traffic agreement. Denied access to the existing Manchester–Liverpool transport arrangement, the new railway charged very low rates on goods carried Table 3.7 Trading receipts of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1831–45 (£) Period 1831–33 1834–35 1836–38 1839–41 1842–44 1845

Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company 64,252 83,592 92,454 99,777 98,486 119,249

Bridgewater Canal 175,997 142,251 139,058 139,091 140,469 161,542

Mersey and Irwell Navigation – 55,155 – – 46,444 57,615

Source: T.J. Donaghy, Liverpool and Manchester Railway operations, 1831–1845 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972), pp. 173–4; for canal data, see chapter 2. Note: For a definition of trading receipts, see chapter 2; note the receipts are larger for the LMR than those cited in Table 3.6 due to the inclusion of income from livestock, mails and parcels.

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between Liverpool and Manchester (via Bolton), adding insult to injury by employing former canal carriers as their agents. The LMR (by this time part of the London and North Western Railway) had no choice but to match these low charges. The Bridgewater Trustees were so alarmed at the prospect of losing carriers to the railways that they offered to make the leading canal carriers formal agents of the Trust; six carriers accepted this arrangement in 1849. Theoretically, they hired out their boats to the Trust, while in practice continuing to work them. In return, they were paid a percentage of the freights.100 The strengthened relationship with the carriers, as well a new low scale of charges, shored up the canal trade between Liverpool and Manchester, the canals even taking prominent factory accounts from the railways in 1850.101 The contest intensified in 1851, and henceforth the railways gained the upper hand in the trade between Liverpool and Manchester. Figures from June 1851, collected by the Bridgewater Trust, show that for ‘up goods’ (from Liverpool to Manchester) the trade was divided roughly equally, but for the ‘down goods’ the railway carried more than 60 per cent of the total trade.102 The railways’ advantages over canals, which had begun to emerge by the early 1850s, were three-fold. First, railway companies began to carry cotton from Liverpool directly to newly opened railway stations in the key cotton towns outside Manchester at the same rates as they supplied cotton to Manchester; by the canals, it will be recalled, most cotton was collected by manufacturers from Manchester canal basins by road carts. Second, and relatedly, the railways used their ownership or leases of through canals (including the Rochdale, Ashton, Huddersfield and Bolton and Bury canals) to impede the smaller proportion of cotton carried beyond Manchester by canals rather than roads by raising freight rates and levying additional costs (see below). Third, in an era of falling cotton prices after 1850, mill owners preferred not to carry large stocks of a depreciating material and ordered smaller lots of cotton from Liverpool, producing on a hand-to-mouth basis. The speed and reliability of railways meant they were much better suited to meet the demands for small lots in this rapidly changing market than were canals.103 The evidence of the Manchester–Liverpool trade thus suggests that canals were able to effectively meet competition for at least two decades following the opening of a rival railway. How typical was this across Manchester’s major transport routes? By 1839, a circuitous system of tracks extended from London to Manchester via the west midlands, a route that comprised the Liverpool and Manchester, the Grand Junction and the London and Birmingham railways.104 The opening of the Manchester and Birmingham Railway in 1842 strengthened competition between canals and railways, and between railways themselves, in Manchester’s trade with the west midlands and London. There were two major water routes from Manchester to the west

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midlands at this time: (1) via the Bridgewater and Trent and Mersey canals and (2) via the Ashton, Peak Forest, Macclesfield and Trent and Mersey canals.105 The bulk of the trade on this route was carried between Manchester and the manufacturing parts of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, while a smaller proportion of the trade went on to London, the south-east and the south-west. As early as July 1839, Worthington & Co., a carrier on the Bridgewater Canal since the late eighteenth century, had been driven out of the trade, claiming that ‘all the best paying goods’ between Manchester and Birmingham ‘are going by the railway’.106 The traffic passing on the Bridgewater Canal between Birmingham and Liverpool also halved in the first six months of 1840.107 Railway competition was not, however, entirely to blame for the Bridgewater’s declining midland trade. The opening in 1835 of an alternative canal route from Manchester and Liverpool to the Black Country via the Ellesmere Canal and the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal intensified competition by water as well as by rail. By 1841, the Trustees complained of ‘a great revolution’ in the trade from the northwest to the midlands and London, in which ‘the low charges of the Railway and the low tonnages [freights] of the Ellesmere and Chester Canal have absorbed the greater part of the London and Birmingham trade with Liverpool and Manchester’.108 However, significant falls in the volume of the canal trade between the north-west and the west midlands are not apparent. Thus, in 1836, the canal trade between Manchester and the west midlands, as estimated by the proposers of the Manchester and Birmingham Railway, amounted to 384,558 tons per year; ten years later the Bridgewater Canal alone carried 330,856 tons to the west midlands.109 In income terms, the loss of trade was greater than is suggested by the volume figures, as the per ton income generated from the Bridgewater’s carriers (on all routes) fell by slightly more than one-third in this decade.110 During 1842–44, the Manchester and Birmingham and the Grand Junction Railway, the two railway companies serving Lancashire and the west midlands, carried a combined trade of 268,290 tons, some 60,000 tons less than the Bridgewater’s trade to the region. The two railways, however, generated per ton freight incomes of 6s. 2d. around three times higher than the 2s. per ton on the Bridgewater.111 The bilateral trade between Manchester and London was hit much harder by railway competition than the intermediate trade with the west midlands. In 1839, the Bridgewater Canal carried 19,595 tons of goods destined for places south of Birmingham; eight years later, this had slumped to just 1,277 tons, when most of the canal’s London carriers had defected to the railway. Pickford & Co., for example, had almost ceased operations on canals by 1846. The Trustees, so alarmed were they by these numbers, took the unprece-

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dented step of establishing their own carrying services on the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1848 (see chapter 4). This move had immediate benefits: their trade to places south of Birmingham increased to more than 7,000 tons in 1848 and to over 9,000 tons in 1852. Likewise, the Bridgewater’s trade from Liverpool to places south of Birmingham had fallen from 7,000 tons in 1839 to 1,300 tons in 1847, before increasing to more than 2,500 tons in 1851.112 The steps taken by the Trustees thus shored up a rapidly declining trade but the railways had established a clear lead in the Manchester trade to the south of Birmingham by 1850. The trans-Pennine trade between industrialising Yorkshire and Lancashire remained an important transport route in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1820s, Manchester water carriers followed two routes from Manchester to west Yorkshire and Hull: (1) via the Rochdale, Calder and Hebble, and Aire and Calder canals and (2) via the Ashton, Huddersfield, Calder and Hebble, and Aire and Calder. The Rochdale Canal evidently handled the greater part of the water trade. While the Ashton and Huddersfield canals took a shorter route from Manchester to the Yorkshire river navigations, their narrow breadth necessitated the transhipment of goods at Huddersfield. Carriers on the Rochdale, in contrast, advertised hauling goods to Hull in a single barge, as well as connecting steamship services to Scotland, London and continental Europe. This canal trade prospered until 1839, when the Rochdale Canal transhipped 33,306 tons of manufactured goods to the Calder and Hebble at Sowerby Bridge, providing the Rochdale Canal Company with an income of £9,987, 78 per cent of the canal’s tolls from manufactured goods in that year.113 The return trade in corn, meanwhile, provided the company with its highest earning traffic, accounting for 30 per cent of its 1839 tolls (c.£20,000). The Manchester and Leeds Railway opened in full in 1841 and immediately seized, in conjunction with adjoining railways, a large portion of the most remunerative long-distance trades between Lancashire and Yorkshire. The railway followed the line of the Rochdale Canal between Manchester and Sowerby Bridge, before adopting a course adjacent to that of the Calder and Hebble to Wakefield, where it connected with the Midland Railway, which provided access to Leeds station. The railway also connected with the Leeds and Selby and the Selby and Hull railways to provide access to the east coast ports of Hull and Goole. In 1842–44, the Manchester and Leeds Railway carried an annual average freight of 333,527 tons, the largest haulage of all the seven railways listed in Table 3.6. While this freight was far below the tonnage levels of the waterways on the same route (the Rochdale and the Calder and Hebble each carried 700,000–800,000 tons per year at this time), it is the contrasting history of their revenues from tolls that reveals the devastating impact of the railways on the canal trade between Manchester and Yorkshire.

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Between 1839 and 1841, the toll income of the Rochdale Canal fell by more than half, occasioned by the loss of the trades in Manchester cotton yarn and textiles destined for Hull and much of the corn trade from Lincolnshire, Hull, Wakefield and Leeds to Manchester. By 1849, indeed, despite the equalising of canal and railway carriers’ charges at the rate of 20s. per ton from Manchester to Hull, fewer than five tons of cotton goods were transhipped from the Rochdale Canal to the Calder and Hebble at Sowerby Bridge; a trade that had reached a peak of more than 33,000 tons in 1839 had been wiped out in a decade. In the same year, the Rochdale Canal’s income from the corn trade was just 20 per cent of its late 1830s level. The Manchester and Leeds Railway, in 1842–44, earned 6s. 7d. per ton from its goods traffic, while the Rochdale Canal generated just 7d. per ton, reflecting the latter’s enforced concentration on the less remunerative trades in coal and stone, which allowed it maintain overall tonnage rates of 700,000–800,000 for the subsequent forty years. The railways thus had a much more abrupt and shattering effect on the canal trade to the east than they did on the western trade to Liverpool. The diverging experiences of the canal trades to the two main outports serving Manchester can be explained by two prime factors. First, the waterways to Hull were managed by a number of separate companies, making decisive action in the face of railway competition much more difficult than for the water route to Liverpool, which was managed, from 1844, by a single concern. Second, the slow pace of canal traffic compared with that by rail was a far greater disadvantage in the eastern than in the western trade given the much greater distance between Manchester and Hull than between Manchester and Liverpool and the upland terrain that had to be traversed, which required 92 locks on the 32-mile Rochdale Canal section alone. In the Liverpool trade, by contrast, there were no locks on the route until Runcorn and the journey could be completed on canals within a single day. The Manchester canals’ intra-regional trade was largely confined, as outlined above, to coal and other heavy raw materials. Before 1850, there is little evidence that canals were seriously threatened by railways in the business of carrying coal to Manchester, the railway companies evidently preferring to focus their energies on the better-paying trades in passengers, foodstuffs and manufactured goods. In the early 1840s, the York and North Midland Railway, for example, wrote to the Rochdale Canal Company suggesting a division of trade between the railways and canals operating between Lancashire and Yorkshire, in which the railway carried all of the light goods trade, leaving the heavy trade entirely to canals.114 Likewise, in 1842, a deputation from ‘South Lancashire coal proprietors’ to parliament complained that ‘the coal traffic on railways has hitherto been much discouraged by the [rail] companies on the ground that it is less remunerative than any other class of traffic; and the coal proprietors generally have had to

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contend against very high and arbitrary tolls and charges on most of the lines [of railway] in the district’.115 By the 1850s there are signs that the railways, while they by no means usurped the canals’ role in the coal trade, were nevertheless taking this part of the freight traffic more seriously. Thus, in 1854, the London and North Western Railway carried 133,357 tons of coal into Manchester, while the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway unloaded 42,361 tons at its coal yards in Ardwick. Unfortunately, no data are available for Manchester’s other coal-carrying railway, the Lancashire and Yorkshire. Nevertheless, the Lancashire and Yorkshire’s coal freight would have to have been remarkably high to suggest that the railways had a larger share than the canals in the carriage of Manchester’s total coal supplies of 1.2m tons.116 In the trade in raw cotton and cotton textiles between Manchester and the cotton towns, canals had taken very little traffic from the roads in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Where such canal services did exist between Manchester and the satellite textile towns, they offered little resistance to competition from the railways. When the Manchester and Bolton Railway was completed in 1838, for example, Blackburn cotton manufacturers began carting their goods by road to Bolton, and sending them by rail from there, rather than using the canal route via the Leeds and Liverpool and Bridgewater canals, thus cutting journey times by half. Hargreaves, the canal carrier between Manchester and Blackburn, had scaled back his daily services to just three per week by 1840 and had removed his boats altogether by 1841.117 Railways also rapidly established much better transport links between Manchester and industrial towns outside the region that hitherto had been poorly served by the circuitous canal routes. The most important of these were the Sheffield and Scottish trades. In the trade to the former, the only water connection from Manchester was the very indirect route by the Rochdale Canal and the Calder and Hebble Navigation, as well as the Dearne and Dove, Barnsley and Sheffield canals. An alternative, and rather more direct, route used the Ashton and Peak Forest canals in conjunction with land carriage. In 1837, the Peak Forest Canal Company reported that it hauled 5,000 tons per year in both directions on this route, while roads carried a further 20,000 tons.118 The railways also facilitated much improved transport from Manchester to Scotland. In the early eighteenth century, Manchester mule spinners used land carriage to supply yarn to the important muslinweaving areas of Glasgow and Paisley. By 1815, McConnel & Co., the largest Manchester supplier to the Scottish yarn market, had switched to the use of canals and coastal vessels via Liverpool. By 1847, direct rail services from Manchester to Sheffield and Glasgow greatly added to Manchester’s transport provision, and attracted the attention of the leading canal carrier, Pickford & Co., which was abandoning the canals at this time.119

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The competition between road and rail, like that between canals and rail, differed by geography and by commodity. Railway promoters felt that they could eliminate long-distance road traffic (and passenger services) on all routes where rival services existed. Thus, the Manchester and Leeds Railway Company reported in 1836 that it planned to usurp entirely the road carriage between Manchester and Leeds, as well as taking one-third of the canal trade.120 There is little evidence, indeed, that roads were able to compete with railways over long distances before the twentieth century. In 1830, for example, Pickford & Co. promptly transferred its Liverpool van trade on to the railway when it opened.121 In contrast, the growth in railway freight generated new demands for shortdistance traffic in the vicinity of railway stations. F.M.L. Thompson has estimated that, nationally, wheeled commercial vehicles increased in number from 116,000 in 1811 to 161,000 in 1851 and 388,000 in 1901.122 In 1850, the Manchester trade directory listed 96 road carriers, an increase from 77 in 1820. However, all of these carriers served locations within 25 miles of Manchester; in 1820 carriers had served prominent overland road routes to London and the south-east, to Hull and West Yorkshire, to Bristol and the south-west, to the north and west midlands, and to Liverpool. By 1850, such routes no longer formed part of the Manchester road carriers’ transport network. Local services, in contrast, had increased in number, even on routes served by railways. Thus, in 1850, 57 of the 96 Manchester road carriers served locations that also benefited from rail access. The main growth of road carriage, however, lay in the distribution of goods between railway stations and locations within or close to major towns. The importance of roads in this respect is shown by the fact that most railway companies employed firms previously engaged as road carriers (or road and canal carriers) to perform the function of carrying goods to and from stations. Railway ownership of canals One way in which railways asserted their supremacy over canals was by their assumption of ownership or operational control of waterways. In many cases, railways took ownership of canals during the ‘railway mania’ of the mid1840s and, by 1855, most Manchester canals were either owned or leased by railways (see Table 3.8). Some of the most important steps were taken by the Manchester, Sheffield and Ashton-under-Lyne Railway, which was fully opened in 1845, and just a year later had purchased three canals that provided rival services on parts of its route (the Ashton, the Peak Forest and the Macclesfield). In 1844, the other part in this Manchester narrow canal network, the Huddersfield, was acquired by the Huddersfield and Manchester Railway, which later became part of the London and North Western Railway. In 1846, the Rochdale Canal was also subject to an attempted buy-out by the

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Manchester and Leeds Railway, although the sale was blocked by parliament after complaints by canal carriers and other canal companies. By 1855, however, the Rochdale had been leased by a consortium of railway companies, an arrangement that lasted until 1888. The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal showed more initiative, the canal company itself developing the railway that ran alongside the canal from Manchester to Bolton. The company also obtained powers to extend the line to Bury, although these rights were eventually exploited by the allied Liverpool and Bury Railway Company rather than by the canal company itself. Table 3.8 Ownership and operation of waterways in Manchester and region, 1855 Waterway

Owners in 1855

Operators in 1855

Bridgewater

Bridgewater Trustees

Bridgewater Trustees

Date of any change in ownership/leasing

1803 (death of duke of Bridgewater) Mersey and Irwell Bridgewater Trustees Bridgewater Trustees 1844 (purchase of navigation by Bridgewater Trustees) Rochdale Rochdale Canal Four railway companies 1855 (lease to Company railways) Ashton Manchester, Sheffield Manchester, Sheffield 1846 (sale of canal to and Lincolnshire Railway and Lincolnshire Railway railway; authorised in 1848) Peak Forest Manchester, Sheffield Manchester, Sheffield 1846 (sale of canal to and Lincolnshire Railway and Lincolnshire Railway railway) Manchester, Bolton Lancashire and Yorkshire Lancashire and Yorkshire 1831 (canal company and Bury Railway Railway receives permission to build railway) 1846 (Manchester, Bolton and Bury Railway and Canal Company almagamates with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway) Huddersfield London and North London and North 1845 (sale of canal to Western Railway Western Railway railway) Trent and Mersey North Staffordshire North Staffordshire 1846 (sale of canal to Railway Railway railway) Source: C. Hadfield and G. Biddle, The canals of north west England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), Vol. II, pp. 462–73; F.C. Mather, After the canal duke: a study of the industrial estates administered by the trustees of the third duke of Bridgewater in the age of railway building 1825–1872 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 178–80.

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Table 3.9 Ownership status of canals in the Manchester district, c.1860 Canal

Independent Railway-leased Railway-owned Mileage Canal Mileage Canal Mileage

Bridgewater 40 Mersey and 29 Irwell

Rochdale

32

Ashton Peak Forest

18 15

Macclesfield 26.5 Huddersfield 20 Manchester, Bolton 16 and Bury Total 69 independent Percentage of 35 total mileage

Total railwayleased Percentage of total mileage

32 16

Total railway95.5 owned Percentage of total mileage 49

Source: Royal Commission on Railways: Report of the Commissioners (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of Thomas Wilson, p. 558; C. Hadfield and G. Biddle, The canals of north west England, 2 vols (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), Vol. II, pp. 462–73.

By 1855, then, only the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, of Manchester’s leading waterways, operated outside the orbit of the railways. Even here, the Bridgewater Trustees, the owners of the two waterways, were looking from the mid-1840s to sell or lease the waterways to a railway company, although in fact a sale was not completed until 1872.123 Nationally, by 1866, one-third of canal mileage was owned by railways.124 In the Manchester region, railway ownership was more prevalent, with railways owning fully half of canal mileage, a proportion raised to the remarkable extent of two-thirds if railway-leased canal mileage is included (Table 3.9). Why did such a high proportion of the Manchester canal network come under railway ownership or operational control? And how important was this to the railways’ eventual supremacy over canals in handling Manchester’s freight trades? Historians discussing the failure of canals to respond positively to the challenge of railway rivalry have stressed two related factors: first, that canal companies were parochial in their management strategies, failing to amalgamate canals to create a more coherent national system and continuing to prioritise the interests of individual companies rather than those of waterways as a whole; and, second, that canals suffered from a range of different widths and lock sizes impeding national goods traffic.125 Clearly these factors must carry a great deal of weight and there is an abundance of evidence that canals responded sluggishly to the threat of railway competition. However, given that most of the canal sales to railways took place in the mid-1840s when the railway had yet to establish a trading supremacy over many canals, it would appear that the decline in trade on canals and their

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defective management were not decisive. A good example is the Manchester, Sheffield and Ashton-under-Lyne Railway’s purchase of the Peak Forest, Ashton and Macclesfield canals in 1846. At the time of purchase, the railway had not established the kind of trading advantage over the three canals that would make a sale inevitable. Indeed, in 1842–44, the railway carried an annual average freight of just 81,667 tons; in contrast, the Ashton and Peak Forest canals, which served equivalent trading routes to that portion of the railway that was open in the early 1840s, carried around 900,000 tons. Much more important was the greater financial resources of railways, based partly on their extensive passenger trades, which were not matched by canals. The greater financial clout of the railways allowed them to withstand the intermittent freight wars with canals in the 1840s but more importantly to purchase or lease canals at rates that would give canal investors much higher returns than would be achievable through independent operations.126 The Huddersfield and Manchester Railway Company thus offered Huddersfield Canal shareholders £30 for shares worth only £8–9 in 1845. Likewise, the lease of the Rochdale Canal by a consortium of four railway companies entailed a yearly rent of £37,652 (including a guaranteed £4 dividend for shareholders, a level not reached since 1840) despite the fact that toll incomes stood at just £25,000 (Table 3.10). The losses on the Rochdale Canal lease were obviously acceptable to the rail interest as the initial 21-year lease was extended in 1876. The London and North Western Railway, the only railway company to show canal results in its published accounts, likewise showed that it ran the Huddersfield Canal at a loss.127 Thus, for canal investors, the sale or lease of canals to railway companies was a rational strategy; railways were able to bear the losses from canals due their greater financial resources and because of the benefits afforded to their trading interests through the elimination of rival operations on canals. As Thomas Wilson, the principal agent of the Aire and Calder Navigation, stated, ‘if they [railway companies] were to lose 10,000l. [£] on the canal and gain 50,000l. on the railway, it is quite worth their while to do so’.128 The impact of railway ownership of canals also provoked heated debate among contemporary canal and rail interests. Railway companies were keen to emphasise that, although they often took canals unwillingly (as a way of getting parliamentary approval for railway amalgamations in the 1840s), they continued to invest in their upkeep and run them competitively.129 The independent canal interest, led by the Bridgewater Trustees and canal carriers, told a different story, arguing that canals under railway ownership or lease were hindered in the freight business by uncompetitive toll increases imposed by railway companies and that they were deliberately run down in order to prevent genuine rivalry with railways. The canal interest further argued that railway companies used their ownership of particular canals to discourage

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independent users from serving long-distance routes in competition with railways. This latter accusation was explicitly laid out by the Bridgewater Trustees in a statement to the Board of Trade in 1850: In many cases railways have obtained possession of canals connecting essential links in great systems of navigation – by these means it will be in the power of the railway companies … to shut up the canals as highways or destroy or bond to their own purposes all the canal traffic which now remains independent of and in competition with them – and ultimately to obtain an entire monopoly of the whole internal commerce of the country.130

Examples of railway malpractice are not hard to find. Braithwaite Poole of the London and North Western Railway, in private negotiations with the Bridgewater Trustees in 1849, reportedly threatened to close the Standedge tunnel on the railway-owned Huddersfield Canal and to restrict its operating hours to thwart the Bridgewater Trustees’ carrying operations.131 These threats, it seems, were more than just a negotiating position, with canal carriers later claiming that maintenance on the Huddersfield Canal was scheduled to coincide with the busiest periods of canal trade.132 Evidence that railway-owned or leased canals increased tolls is likewise abundant. George Jackson, a leading canal carrier on the Rochdale Canal, informed parliament that the Manchester and Leeds Railway, temporarily in control of the Rochdale Canal before the sale was blocked in 1846, immediately raised tolls for passing along the length of the canal from 1s. to 4s. per ton.133 On the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, tolls were raised after amalgamation with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway so that toll payments on the canal were increased to the full carriers’ rate on the railway. This increase was prohibitive because it left no room for a canal carrier to cover its full operational costs or to add a profit.134 On the Huddersfield Canal, owned by the London and North Western Railway, the railway company maintained the tolls of 1d. per ton-mile (1s. 11½d. for the whole length) but added a range of charges that were allowed by the canal’s original Act of Parliament but had not been customarily levied. These included payments for using the Pennine tunnel, ‘light dues’ (charges for boats passing on canals on return journeys without cargoes) and wharfage dues. These additional charges could more than double the cost of using the canal for a barge carrying a cargo of 20 tons one way and returning ‘light’.135 On the Ashton Canal, owned by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, canal tolls between Manchester and Stockport doubled from the late 1840s to the early 1850s. 136 What impact did these sharp practices have on canal trade? For the Rochdale Canal, the impact of railway ownership appears to have been relatively minor. Table 3.10 compares the volume of the Rochdale Canal’s trade and the toll payments made by carriers from 1831 to 1880, illustrating both

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the effect of railway competition in the early 1840s and the impact of the railway’s leasing of the canal in 1855. The immediate impact of railway competition was devastating, with canal income halving after the Manchester and Leeds Railway opened in 1841. However, the impact of the railway lease in 1855 is much less perceptible. Tonnage and income fell slightly in the late 1850s and 1860s and then crept upward in the 1870s. The canal’s trade thus was not severely limited by the railway lease although the canal gained little from the secular increases in industrial freight in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The more limited data on the Ashton and Peak Forest canals suggest a clearer pattern of decline under railway ownership, although the decline was not an immediately devastating one. Thus, the two canals’ combined annual tonnage in 1845, before the railway purchases, was 948,166. This fell to an annual average of 906,659 tons in 1847–49, while combined income in the same years fell from £29,003 to £25,574. More serious falls are observable by 1858 when the two canals carried 812,416 tons, netting an income of just £17,860.137 The stifling impact of railway ownership is also suggested by the greater business success of those late nineteenth-century waterways that remained outside railway control. The independent waterways to Liverpool, as we have seen, retained the bulk of trade until the early 1850s; as late as 1870, the Bridgewater and the Mersey and Irwell still carried a combined trade of more than 2.5m tons.138 Likewise, the independent Aire and Calder Navigation, running from Leeds to Selby and Goole, invested £600,000 in improvements after 1860, increasing its trade volumes from 1.1m tons in 1858 to 2.4m tons in 1898.139 The interactions between canals and railways thus form a complex web in the 1830s and 1840s. The extent of the competitiveness of canals depended on the length of the freight routes and the terrain over which goods were Table 3.10 Rochdale Canal, freight tonnages and toll income, 1831–80 Period

Tonnage

Toll income (£)

1831–35 1836–40 1841–45 1845–50 1851–55 after railway lease 1856–60 1861–65 1866–70 1871–75 1876–80

623,586 828,422 793,274 830,413 833,825

46,191 59,897 29,989 26,706 25,586

1s. 5d. 1s. 5d. 10d. 7d. 7d.

787,218 741,784 752,355 825,527 809,079

24,792 23,022 24,421 26,881 27,169

7d. 7d. 7d. 7d. 7d.

Source: GMRCO, RCCP, B2/ Misc. Vol. 14.

Income per ton

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carried. The trade between Manchester and Liverpool on a relatively short, lowland route provides the clearest evidence of canal vitality, while the upland route to Hull and the lengthy haul to London reveal the canal system’s greatest weaknesses. On most canal routes, canal companies had to reconcile themselves to lower freight incomes as railway competition reduced tolls in general and forced canals to shift to the less remunerative trades in raw materials. This was not a case, however, of railways reducing canals to penury. Independent canal companies continued to pay dividends to shareholders throughout the early years of railway competition. In the 1840s, moreover, the railway freight trades were relatively small. One of the key advantages they held over canals was financial rather than trading. Even where their trading levels were modest, their high capitalisations (strengthened through amalgamations into giant companies)140 and passenger incomes enabled them to purchase or lease canals on terms favourable to canal investors. While the railway-controlled canals were managed in order to optimise railway rather than canal income, Manchester canals did not lose an inordinate amount of trade in the second half of the nineteenth century. They did not, however, share in the rapid freight volumes that were such a marked feature of transport in the mid and late Victorian period. Summary and conclusions This chapter has emphasised that canals formed just one component of Manchester’s transport system from 1750 to 1850. Roads and railways, as well as coastal shipping, were also important elements. The key strengths of roads over canals before 1830 lay in their greater geographical coverage and the more speedy and reliable services offered by road carriers. For these reasons, roads remained central to the distribution of raw cotton, yarn and piece goods within the Lancashire cotton-textile district in the first half of the nineteenth century. Canals, in turn, provided the most effective modes of conveyance for the inter-regional trades in foodstuffs, raw materials and cotton yarn and piece goods along Manchester’s busiest trade routes before the arrival of railways: they connected Manchester to England’s major ports in London, Liverpool and Hull and they hauled massive quantities of coal and stone brought from local mines and quarries to Manchester’s domestic and industrial consumers. Most canal carriers provided these services at least 50 per cent more cheaply than did road carriers. Rail transport arrived in Manchester in 1830 and in time would capture the bulk of the region’s trade and own or control two-thirds of canal mileage. Railways combined speed and reliability with low freights and, while canals could match (albeit reluctantly) the railways’ charges, they were far inferior in respect of speed of despatch. By the 1840s, however, the dominance of rail

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over canals had yet to be established in freight traffic on all routes. The rail network was patchy and even two decades of railway competition on the Liverpool and Manchester route had not allowed the railway company to wrest the upper hand from waterways. By the 1850s, it was evident that the canal age had passed as amalgamated railway companies took control of most of Manchester’s canal companies and the railways carried the spiralling volumes of freight transported in Victorian Britain. The chapter has compiled a range of contemporary data on the freight costs by road, canal and rail for Manchester’s key transport routes. These data suggest that by c.1825, canals carried goods between major towns at around 30–50 per cent of the cost of road transport, although the upland route from Manchester to Hull meant that canals were only two-fifths cheaper. This had significant benefits for Manchester industries and consumers. Railways, in turn, introduced lower freight rates, ranging from one-third to one-half of previous canal freights. Current studies have identified the complementarity, as well as the competition, between different modes of transport in the Industrial Revolution. Above all, this chapter has shown that roads were key to establishing the complementary aspects of the system, a point requiring stronger emphasis in the transport history literature. For all canal and rail traffic, with the possible exceptions of coal, stone and timber, it was necessary to use roads for part of the journey, even if only for very short distances to and/or from canal basins and railway stations. This finding ties in with Bogart’s analysis of the development of roads and canals. His econometric study has shown that the development of canals was partly driven by road provision in that the option value of waiting to invest in canals diminished when nearby road improvements had been initiated.141 Canal basins and stations thus became the central site commodity interchange for Manchester’s transport networks, transhipping bulk freight carried along trunk routes for local distribution. In contrast, there was little obvious complementarity between canals and railways, except in the early years of business when the railway network was still very patchy, and when goods travelled on canals for part of their journey and rail for the remainder. The two modes competed for traffic on Manchester’s key transport routes; occasionally, canal and railway companies co-operated to develop facilities to establish through trades but these arrangements were either unfulfilled or very short-lived, and usually formed part of wider rivalries between railway companies.142 A second, and important, type of integrated transport service was that established between canals and coastal shipping. The waterways to Liverpool carried goods only as far as the Mersey estuary, using coastal flats to carry goods into the Liverpool docks. The links between canals and coastal shipping were strengthened by the shift to steamers in the coastal trade, encouraging the

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greater use of coastal shipping in the freight trades from Liverpool to Glasgow and London, and to London and Edinburgh from Goole and Hull. The chronology by which railways supplanted canals in the carrying of freight traffic varied by route. In the trade between Manchester and Liverpool – undoubtedly the key interchange trade so far as the cotton industry is concerned – the waterways carried the bulk of the trade measured by volume and generated higher earnings than railway rivals until 1850. This was a relatively short and flat route, served by only a single waterway company. Elsewhere, the canals were much less resilient in the face of looming railway competition. For many canals, indeed, active competition did not materialise. Manchester’s narrow canal network to the east, comprising the Ashton, Peak Forest and Huddersfield companies, sold out to railway companies a matter of months after the railway was completed, while the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company developed its own railway, and only kept the canal open after the intervention of parliament. Manchester’s canal trade with the west midlands evidently succeeded in maintaining traffic volumes, until the mid-1840s at least, but on the longer route to London the canal trade was much more quickly curtailed. The Rochdale Canal highlighted some of the difficulties of competing with the railways. The Manchester and Leeds Railway from 1841 immediately targeted and captured the Rochdale’s most remunerative inter-regional trades in corn and manufactured goods. The Rochdale continued to handle large volumes of stone from Pennine quarries, as well as coal and timber transhipped from the Bridgewater Canal. However, as a result of railway competition, the Rochdale’s annual income, by the late 1840s, had fallen to only one-third of the late 1830s peak, its per ton income declining by more than half. This evidence suggests clear parallels between the impact of railways on canal freight on the Rochdale from 1841 and the experience of railways competing with motorised road vehicles in the early twentieth century. Recent research on the inter-war British economy has shown that road transport carried an increasing share of incremental industrial output, especially that of the rapidly emerging ‘new’ industries producing high-value but lightweight goods, leaving the less profitable output of the stagnating ‘older’ industries to the railways.143

Notes 1 E.A. Pratt, A history of inland transport and communication in England (London: Routledge, 1912); Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 410–27, 605–14, 649– 61; Dyos and Aldcroft, British transport; Hawke, Railways and economic growth; Bagwell, Transport revolution; Thompson, ‘Nineteenth-century horse sense’; T.R. Gourvish, Railways and the British economy, 1830–1914 (London: Macmillan,

Canals, roads and railways

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17 18

19

105

1980); Aldcroft and Freeman (eds), Transport in the industrial revolution; Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, pp. 537–60; Aldcroft and Freeman (eds), Transport in Victorian Britain; Barker, ‘Transport’, pp. 86–100; R. Szostak, The role of transportation in the industrial revolution: a comparison of England and France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991); Crompton, ‘Canals’, pp. 93–110; Barker and Gerhold, Rise and rise; Bagwell and Lyth, Transport in Britain. Ville, ‘Transport’, pp. 296–306. Barker and Savage, Economic history of transport, pp. 46–7; Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 58–60; Barker and Gerhold, Rise and rise, pp. 5–7. Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, pp. 540–2; Bagwell and Lyth, Transport in Britain, p. 55. C. Hadfield, British canals: an illustrated history, 4th edition (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1986), pp. 32–3; Bagwell, Transport revolution, pp. 22–3. Dyos and Aldcroft, British transport, p. 113. Bagwell, Transport revolution, pp. 61–8. Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 157; J. Armstrong and P.S. Bagwell, ‘Coastal shipping’, in D. Aldcroft and M. Freeman (eds), Transport in the industrial revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 142–73. Scott, ‘Growth of road haulage’, pp. 138–55; Scott, ‘British railways’, pp. 101–20. Duckham, ‘Canals’, p. 135. Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–17. For studies of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, see Carlson, Liverpool and Manchester Railway; T.J. Donaghy, Liverpool & Manchester Railway Operations, 1831–1845 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972); F. Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1830–1980 (London: R. Hale, 1980). G.H. Tupling, ‘The turnpike trusts of Lancashire’, Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Vol. 94 (1953), pp. 39–41; Pawson, Transport and economy, pp. 65–78. Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 61–2. Pawson, Transport and economy, pp. 114–15; Albert, Turnpike road system. For the populations of Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see E.A. Wrigley, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change: England and the continent in the early modern period’, in P. Borsay (ed.), The eighteenth-century town (London: Longman, 1990), p. 42, and Crouzet, Victorian economy, p. 97. Bogart, ‘Turnpike trusts’, p. 443. Barker and Gerhold, Rise and rise, pp. 23–5; G.T. Timmins, ‘Techniques of easing road gradients during the Industrial Revolution: a case study of textile Lancashire’, Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. 25, (2003), pp. 97–117; G.T. Timmins, ‘Paving the way: advances in road-building techniques in Lancashire, 1770–1870’, Journal of Transport History, Vol. 26 (2005), pp. 19–40. Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 66–8; Select committee of the House of Lords appointed to enquire into the expediency of restraining the practice of carrying goods and merchandize on canals, navigable rivers, and railways on Sundays (P.P. 1841, Vol. XXI), evidence of Joseph Baxendale, p. 225.

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20 For the debate on the reliability of trade directories for analysing road transport, see Barker and Gerhold, Rise and rise, pp. 10–11. 21 Thomas Mortimer, The universal director, or, the nobleman and gentleman’s true guide to the masters and professors of the liberal and polite arts and sciences (London: J. Coote, 1763). Turnbull has shown that local carriers generally comprised from one-half to three-quarters of the carrying firms of provincial towns in the eighteenth century. See G.L. Turnbull, ‘Provincial road carrying in the England in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Transport History, 2nd Series, Vol. 4 (1977), pp. 17–39. 22 J. Pigot, R. Dean and W. Dean, Pigot and Deans’ directory of Manchester and Salford for 1819 and 1820 (Manchester: R. & W. Dean and J. Pigot, 1819). 23 Quoted in Pratt, History of inland transport, p. 179. 24 JRL, MCK 2/2/22, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 27 February 1834, to George Gill, Nottingham. 25 Freeman, ‘Introduction’, p. 16; See also Duckham, ‘Canals’, p. 132. 26 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, p. 283. 27 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, pp. 15–16. 28 Marshall, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, Vol. I, pp. 19–22. 29 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 66–7. 30 Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 14–15. 31 GMCRO, RCCP, B/2/1/1/19, Minute Book, 1850–53, 2 May 1850; B2/1/1/20, Minute Book, 1853–56, 3 May 1855. 32 JRL, MCK 2/2/22, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 1833–36, 24 December 1834, John Miller & Co., Barnstable. 33 JRL, MCK 2/2/3, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 1805–10, 20 November 1808, to John Long, Liverpool. 34 For an excellent account of the transport volumes of Chester, a much smaller town with far less complex transport arrangements than Manchester, see Herson, ‘Estimating traffic’, pp. 113–46. 35 Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 60; Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 16–17. 36 Freeman, ‘Transport methods’, pp. 59–74. 37 Ibid., p. 69. 38 JRL, MCK 2/2/20, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 1832–23, 24 April 1833, McConnel & Co. to its Liverpool agent: ‘forward your purchases [of cotton] per New Quay as usual’. For canal shipments to Hull, see, for example, 28 March 1833, to Buckley & Co. 39 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Kenworthy, pp. 271– 80. His firm of carriers occasionally hauled goods from Manchester to Liverpool, when the boats were full, but ‘never the other way’ (p. 277). 40 Maw, Wyke and Kidd, ‘Water transport’, pp. 200–28. 41 Marshall, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, Vol. I, pp. 18–19. 42 Pigot & Son’s general, classified street directory of Manchester and Salford (1838), Appendix, pp. 115–20.

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43 Jackson, Hull, pp. 1–25. 44 LCRO, DDX 87/39, Report from the committee on the Manchester and Leeds Railway Bill, 14 June 1836. 45 LCRO, DDX 87/24, Manchester and Leeds Railway Report, 26 June 1831 (original emphasis). 46 For canal shipments to Hull, see JRL, MCK 2/2/20, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 1832–33, for example, 28 March 1833, to Buckley & Co.; Freeman, ‘Transport methods’, pp. 69–71. 47 Daniels, Early English cotton industry, pp. 9, 34–5; Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, pp. 236–40; Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 61. 48 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 63–4. 49 Gerhold, ‘London carrying trade’, quote p. 409. 50 Railway Times, Vol. 2 (1839), p. 704. 51 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 137–8; Freeman, ‘Transport methods’, pp. 63, 72. 52 Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, pp. 307–8. 53 Report of the minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the State of Children Employed in the Manufactories of the United Kingdom (P.P. 1816, Vol. III), evidence of William Taylor, p. 507. 54 Timmins, Last shift, pp. 36–45. 55 Assuming an average toll payment of 1s. per ton for this category of goods (which would be similar to other canals), we would arrive at a figure of 8,340 tons. 56 Freeman, ‘Transport methods’, pp. 60–8. 57 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/834b, 9 March 1850, Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade. 58 Several matters relating to coal (P.P. 1871, Vol. XVIII), pp. 1161. 59 Thompson, ‘Nineteenth-century horse sense’, pp. 62–3, 65–7. 60 NA, RAIL 804/1, Ashton Canal Company Minute Book, 1798–1815, 12 May 1802. 61 NA, RAIL 458/7, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1835–37, 6 October 1835. 62 JRL, MCK 2/2/20, McConnel & Co., Letter Book, 1832–33, 24 April 1833. For invoices from canal carriers, including charges for carting goods within Manchester, see MCK 3/5/1, Receipts and invoices, 1825. 63 MALSU, MISC 690, Folder 1, William Horsfall correspondence, 24 October 1836, to George Horsfall, Halifax. 64 C. Redding (ed.), The pictorial history of the county of Lancaster (London: Routledge, 1844), p. 11. 65 Carlson, Liverpool and Manchester Railway; Tomlinson, ‘Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal’, pp. 231–99; Donaghy, Liverpool & Manchester Railway; G.T. Gourvish, Mark Huish and the London & North Western Railway: a study of management (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972); Marshall, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, Vol. I; Ferneyhough, Liverpool and Manchester Railway; G.O. Holt, A regional history of the railways of Great Britain, Vol. 10: The north west (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1987). 66 There were smaller stations at Oxford Road, Knott Mill and Ardwick in the borough of Manchester and Cross Lane in the borough of Salford.

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67 Ville, ‘Transport’, p. 305. 68 Bagwell and Lyth, Transport in Britain, p. 53. 69 Report of the officers of the railway department (P.P. 1844, Vol. XI), pp. 111; Duckham, ‘Canals’, p. 127. 70 Railway Times, Vol. 2 (1839), p. 546; Railway News, Vol. 7 (1867), p. 415; The Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales, Vol. 2 (1848), p. 575. 71 Select committee of the House of Lords appointed to enquire into the expediency of restraining the practice of carrying goods and merchandize on canals, navigable rivers, and railways on Sundays (P.P. 1841, Vol. XXI), evidence of J. Davis, pp. 546–7, and of Francis Twemlow, pp. 513–16. Joseph Baxendale, a partner in Pickford & Co., a railway and canal carrier, claimed that pilferage also occurred on railways, perhaps to a greater extent (p. 590). 72 NA, RAIL 1057/3713, Preamble to Bill: Numerical List of Assents & Summary of Evidence (1832), p. 2. 73 NA, RAIL 371/3, Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, Minute Book, 1833–36, 2 June 1834. The fire was extinguished with water from the Bridgewater Canal. 74 NA, RAIL 371/3, Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, Minute Book, 1833–36, 7 July 1834. 75 NA, RAIL 371/4, Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, Minute Book, 1836–38, 26 September 1836. 76 NA, RAIL 371/10, Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company, Minute Book, 1833–39, 13 July 1834. 77 See literature cited and analysed in T.R. Gourvish, ‘Railways 1830–70: the formative years’, in D.H. Aldcroft and M.J. Freeman (eds), Transport in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 76–7. 78 Jackman presents evidence across a number of routes to show that railways brought down canal freights by approximately one-third in this period, although some reductions were much lower or higher. See Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 731–5. 79 This point was made by Thomas Wilson, principal agent of the Aire and Calder Navigation; see Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), p. 556. He argued that lower canal rates did not attest to the fact that railways carried goods more cheaply but ‘that competition has been advantageous’. 80 Jackman, Development of transport, p. 638; Clapham, Economic history, Vol. 1, pp. 396–8; Dyos and Aldcroft, British transport, p. 221, describe the ‘swift advance of the railway over the canal’; M. Casson, The world’s first railway system: enterprise, competition, and regulation on the railway network in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 211. 81 B.R. Mitchell, ‘The coming of the railway and United Kingdom economic growth’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 24 (1964), pp. 317–18; Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 113. 82 Mather, After the canal duke. 83 Ville, ‘Transport’, p. 307. 84 Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 157. 85 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 126.

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86 Jackman, Development of transport, p. 638 (emphasis added). 87 Relatively reliable ton-mile estimates for railways are available from 1842 because the data were collected contemporaneously by railway companies and presented in a convenient form to parliament. Historians have used trade directories to provide estimates of ton-miles of freight carried on roads for London from 1681 to 1840, but these are highly inferential given the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the information given in trade directories, the multiplicity of destinations served on individual journeys (and the double-counting issues this presents) and the different sizes of road vehicles. The two sets of estimates by Chartres and Turnbull, and by Gerhold, thus differ markedly. The former suggest a sixteen-fold growth in ton-miles from 1681 to 1838, the latter just a three-fold expansion. See Chartres and Turnbull, ‘Road transport’, pp. 64–99, and Gerhold, ‘London carrying trade’, pp. 392–410. 88 Clapham, Economic history, Vol. I, pp. 396–7. 89 Donaghy, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, p. 79. 90 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 60. 91 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 104; Donaghy, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, p. 81. 92 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 104–6, 153–4. 93 Jackman, Development of transport, p. 741. 94 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 189–90. 95 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/834b, 9 March 1850, Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade. 96 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 157. 97 Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, pp. 6–7. For warehousing in Manchester, see chapter 5. The waterways to Liverpool controlled as many as 19 large warehouses in Manchester in the 1840s. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway had just three. 98 MALSU, MS Q 658 972 GA1, W. & J. Galloway, Letter Book, 1840–41, 6 March 1840, to John Hindle, London. 99 Ibid., 14 April 1840, to Leech, Harrison & Co., Liverpool. 100 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 200–1. 101 Gourvish, Mark Huish, p. 140. 102 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 220–1. 109 Ibid. 104 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 107. 105 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 133. 106 Ibid., pp. 136–7 (including quote). 107 Ibid., p. 136. The shift to spinners holding smaller stocks of cotton is described by Poole in 1854; see Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, p. 7. 108 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 144–5 (including quote). Canal competition in the midlands trades was intensified when the Ellesmere and Chester Canal Company established a new dock at Ellesmere Port to improve their position in the Mersey estuary carrying trade, and by the company’s (in conjunction with the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal Company) establishing its own carrying branches to pursue vigorously the Manchester trade to the west midlands via Ellesmere Port rather than via Runcorn and Preston Brook;

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Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 149–50. 109 Railway Times, Vol. 2, p. 704; University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/833a, ‘Goods moved on the Bridgewater Canal in the Year 1846’. 110 See chapter 2, Table 2.1. 111 Trading data for the alternative route from Manchester to the west midlands via the Ashton, Peak Forest and Macclesfield canals are less extensive. However, the general pattern of trade can be tracked by toll income for merchandise on the Peak Forest, which increased from £1,916 in 1832, one year after the Macclesfield Canal opened, to £5,231 in 1839, when the rail route was established from Manchester to London. Subsequently, toll income fell to £2,696 in 1843, before increasing to slightly more than £4,000 in the trading boom of 1845–46. Payments made by Pickfords, the leading canal carrier in the Manchester– London trade, to the company present a similar pattern of decline from the late 1830s, declining by half in the first three months of 1839. See chapter 2, Table 2.9, and Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 101. 112 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 246. 113 In the same year, it was estimated that 43,100 tons of textiles were sent by water from Manchester to Hull. The remaining 10,000 tons not carried by the Rochdale were, presumably, despatched on the Huddersfield Canal. See Railway Times, Vol. 2 (1839), p. 462. 114 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/16, Minute Book, 1843–44, 8 February 1843. 115 Second Report from the Select Committee on Railways and Canals Amalgamation (P.P. 1846, Vol. XIII), pp. 130–2. 116 R. Hunt, Mineral statistics of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for 1853 and 1854 (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), pp. 66–7. 117 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 138–9. 118 NA, RAIL 856/4, Peak Forest Canal Company Minutes, 23 December 1837. The road haulage is calculated at 20,000 tons as a residual of the total trade between Manchester and Sheffield estimated by the Manchester, Ashton and Sheffield Railway Company at 24,220 tons. See Salt, Statistics and calculations, p. 88. 119 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 72–3, 114–15. 120 LCRO, DDX 87/39, Report from the committee on the Manchester and Leeds Railway Bill, 14 June 1836. 121 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 72. 122 Thompson, ‘Nineteenth-century horse sense’, pp. 72–80. 123 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, p. 362. 124 Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of Thomas Wilson, p. 558. 125 Dyos and Aldcroft, British transport, pp. 220–1; Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 158. 126 Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of Thomas Wilson, pp. 557–8. 127 Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of Thomas Wilson, p. 557.

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128 Ibid., p. 557. 129 Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 163. 130 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/834b, 9 March 1850, Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade. 131 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 206. 132 Royal Commission on Railways (P.P. 1867, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of Thomas Wilson, p. 564. 133 Second Report from the Select Committee on Railways and Canals Amalgamation (P.P. 1846, Vol. VIII), evidence of George Jackson, pp. 188–9. 134 Third Report from the Select Committee on Railways and Canal Bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, p. 206 135 Third Report from the Select Committee on Railways and Canal Bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, pp. 206–7. 136 Third Report from the Select Committee on Railways and Canal Bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, p. 207. 137 Report of the commissioners of the railways (P.P. 1850, Vol. XXXI), pp. 352–3; Return relating to inland navigation and canal companies in England and Wales (P.P. 1870, Vol. LVI), pp. 680–1, 692–3. 138 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, p. 362. 139 Bagwell, Transport revolution, p. 157. 140 In 1850, the top 15 railways companies controlled 61 per cent of UK paid-up capital; see Gourvish, ‘Railways 1830–70’, p. 83. 141 D. Bogart, ‘Inter-modal network externalities and transport development: evidence from roads, canals, and ports during the English industrial revolution’, Networks and Spatial Economics, Vol. 9 (2009), pp. 309–38. 142 See examples cited by Mather, After the canal duke, p. 134. 143 Scott, ‘Growth of road haulage’.

4

Bringing goods to market: carriers in the canal age

This chapter analyses the organisation of the carrying trade on Manchester canals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is a subject to which historians have not paid adequate attention. Turnbull’s classic study of Pickford & Co., the leading carrier in the Manchester–London trade, is the only major study of a canal carrier in the industrial age.1 Our understanding of the organisation of carriage on Britain’s waterways, in both methodology and detail, falls far short of that of its roads. 2 Historians have, however, provided useful outline studies of the structure of carriage on Britain’s canals.3 This research has shown that three main types of businesses traded on Britain’s waterways: first, canal companies which operated public services on their own navigations and adjoining waterways; second, independent public carriers which provided regular timetabled services, mainly transporting industrial inputs, corn, manufactures and other high-value goods; and third, private carriers, ‘own-use’ operators, which only carried goods belonging to their own firms and were particularly active in the coal, stone and corn trades.4 This chapter extends these general accounts to provide a detailed historical reconstruction of the organisation of the carrying business on Manchester canals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on the analysis presented in chapter 2, it emphasises the contrasting demands of the carrying and handling of inter-regional trades in foodstuffs, industrial inputs and manufactures and the intra-regional trades in heavy raw materials, commodities that were hauled by wholly different classes of businesses. The chapter also analyses the circumstances that led certain waterway owners to acquire their own fleets of barges, and their associated investments in horses and crew, in order to carry goods on their navigations, while others simply provided a public waterway for the use of independents. This investigation of carriage organisation provides the opportunity to refine our understanding of the trading relationships between canals and other modes of transport,

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picking up on some of the themes explored in chapter 3. The first section analyses the carrying services of canal companies. Section two discusses the businesses of public carriers. The third section analyses the fate of canal carriers in the early railway era, before section four scrutinises the trades of private carriers, who hauled their own goods on canals and did not offer public services. Canal companies Until the Canal Carriers’ Acts of 1845 and 1847 lifted all legal restrictions on carriage to enable canal companies to compete more effectively with railways, most canal companies had not been permitted to carry goods on their own waterways in order to prevent them from establishing monopoly services. In practice, this was not a serious impediment and many canal companies established carrying services on their own and other canals, either in open defiance of the law or under the guise of independent firms. Nevertheless, in Manchester, only the Bridgewater proprietors and Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company, both of whom were exempt from the pre-1840s carriage restrictions, significantly developed this part of their business. For Manchester’s other canal companies, carrying departments were fleeting experiments that were closed down when independent companies introduced equivalent services.5 Bridgewater Canal The proprietors of the Bridgewater Canal – the duke of Bridgewater himself until his death in 1803 and the Bridgewater Trustees from 1803 to 1872 – were active carriers on their canal, and, from the 1840s, on canals owned by other canal companies. Indeed, for the first decade after the opening of the Bridgewater Canal in 1765, the duke was the canal’s only regular carrier, before a number of independent operators introduced new services to and from Manchester and the west midlands in the 1770s and 1780s.6 As late as 1810, however, the duke’s own vessels continued to handle almost all of the interchange trade between Manchester and Liverpool, as well as the trade in Worsley coal. In the late 1780s, the duke’s vessels offered three services per week to and from Manchester and Liverpool, as well as two services to and from Manchester and Altrincham, and a weekly return service from Manchester to Warrington, Chester and Cutter’s Bridge.7 At the beginning of this decade, the Bridgewater fleet included 26 vessels operating between Manchester and Liverpool and six market boats bringing agricultural goods to Manchester from the Cheshire agricultural belt.8 From 1791 to 1810, we can provide a full reconstruction of the propor-

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Table 4.1 Annual average tonnages carried by Bridgewater vessels and public carriers on the Bridgewater Canal, 1791–1810 Period

Bridgewater coal vessels

Bridgewater vessels Public carriers (non-coal)

Total

1791–95 1796–1800 1801–05 1806–10 Average over twenty years

68,357 (25%) 88,705 (30%) 100,261 (29%) 87,335 (24%) 86,165 (27%)

151,235 (56%) 144,079 (49%) 151,133 (44%) 165,859 (45%) 153,077 (48%)

271,523 292,451 341,527 369,341 318,711

51,931 (19%) 59,667 (20%) 90,133 (26%) 116,147 (31%) 79,469 (25%)

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1790–1810.

Table 4.2 Annual average tonnages carried by Bridgewater vessels and public carriers in the Liverpool–Manchester trade on the Bridgewater Canal, 1815–24 Period

Bridgewater Trustees

Public carriers

Total

1815–19 1820–24 Average over ten years

28,379 (38%) 32,547 (34%) 30,462 (35%)

46,323 (62%) 64,572 (66%) 55,448 (65%)

74,702 97,119 85,910

Source: S. Salt, Railway and commercial information (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1850), p. 69.

tions of trade handled by the duke and by independent carriers (Table 4.1). The data show that the Bridgewater vessels carried three-quarters of the canal’s trade by weight in this period. Three main services were provided: the carriage of coal from the Bridgewater collieries at Worsley to Manchester and other places; the carriage of general merchandise from Liverpool to Manchester (and the much smaller return trade); and the trade between Liverpool and Preston Brook destined for the west midlands and southern England. By the 1790s, the Bridgewater fleet comprised 44 lighters, each capable of carrying 40 tons, and 43 flats of 15 tons burthen: 87 vessels in all, with a tonnage capacity of approximately 2,500 tons.9 On the duke’s death in 1803, the Bridgewater fleet had increased in size to 60 flats (900 tons) and 46 lighters (1,840 tons).10 However, Table 4.1 also indicates that independent carriers handled an increasing share of the canal’s trade. Their share of trade rose from 19 per cent of the canal’s tonnage in 1791–95 to 31 per cent in 1806–10. In these years, regular public carriers were largely restricted to the interchange trade between Manchester (and vicinity) and the south of England, via the junction of the Bridgewater and the Trent and Mersey at Preston Brook, a route that combined the trades to the Staffordshire potteries, to the Black Country and to London (see below).

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From 1810 to 1838, we cannot provide aggregate data on the division of carriage for the canal’s main traffics. Nevertheless, it is evident that the period witnessed significant changes in the organisation of the carrying trade on the Bridgewater Canal, not least of which was that independent carriers claimed much larger shares of the canal’s business. For the mid-1820s, the best data reflect the Liverpool–Manchester trade. The first regular independent public carrier on this route did not appear until 1811.11 Thereafter, a very rapid reorganisation of carrying services between Liverpool and Manchester occurred. Hence, as Table 4.2 shows, for the years 1815–19 the Bridgewater Trustees hauled only 38 per cent of the bilateral trade between Liverpool and Manchester, a proportion that had fallen to 34 per cent for 1820–24. By 1825, the Trustees operated 70–80 vessels in the Manchester–Liverpool trade alone.12 In the two other major Bridgewater trades – the interchange trade with the Trent and Mersey and the coal trade – fewer complete data are available. In the former, it is evident that, like the Manchester–Liverpool trade, the share carried by independent carriers was increasing. Thus, as trade directories show, the number of carriers trading from Manchester to the west midlands and the south increased from three in 1794 to eight in 1808–09, with a further four firms serving Cheshire and North Wales via the Trent and Mersey and the Ellesmere and Chester canals, before more than doubling to 18 in 1825, with four additional firms serving Cheshire and North Wales. As late as 1840, the number of public carriers on the Bridgewater Canal serving the midlands and south remained at 18, as well as two firms trading between Manchester, Chester and North Wales.13 In contrast, the Bridgewater Trustees remained the leading coal carrier on the canal in the early 1830s, hauling 85 per cent of the coal brought along the canal to Manchester at this time.14 More complete data on the Bridgewater carriers are available from the mid-1830s. These data show that the Bridgewater Trustees’ carrying services continued to decline in relative importance as the nineteenth century progressed. In the six years from 1838 to 1843, for example, we find that the non-coal trade on the canal was handled in the following proportions: Bridgewater Trustees 25 per cent (216,749 tons per year) and independent carriers 75 per cent (642,757 tons per year).15 Despite the Bridgewater Trustees’ relative decline as carriers of the canal’s trade, in absolute terms their carrying department had increased in size since the first decade of the nineteenth century. In 1837, the Trustees owned 86 flats and 76 lighters.16 Similar divisions of trade between the Bridgewater carrying department and independent carriers were maintained throughout the 1840s. As Table 4.3 shows, for the period 1844–47 the Bridgewater Trustees carried 26 per cent of the canal’s trade by weight, trades that provided just 18 per cent of the canal’s toll income. Data adduced by Jackman, furthermore, suggest that the Trustees’ carrying services provided just 10 per cent of trade between Manchester and

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Table 4.3 Annual tonnages carried and tolls paid by Bridgewater vessels and public carriers on the Bridgewater Canal, 1844–47 Year

1844 1845 1846 1847 Average over four years

Bridgewater Trustees Tonnage Tolls (£)

Tonnage

344,199 (27%) 358,387 (26%) 371,762 (26%) 369,270 (26%) 360,905 (26%)

936,013 (73%) 1,037,809 (74%) 1,087,715 (75%) 1,042,879 (74%) 1,026,104 (74%)

15,952 (15%) 17,566 (17%) 18,277 (19%) 17,434 (20%) 17,307 (18%)

Public carriers Tolls (£) 92,245 (85%) 83,154 (83%) 79,720 (81%) 70,664 (80%) 81,446 (83%)

Total Tonnage Tolls (£) 1,280,212 1,396,196 1,459,477 1,412,149 1,387,009

106,197 100,720 97,997 88,098 98,253

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Estate Ledger, 1844–50.

Liverpool for 1839–52.17 Even in the coal trade, the Trustees’ share had sharply declined by the 1840s. This latter development was occasioned by the rapid increase in the trade from Wigan via the junction with the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Leigh. In 1846, independent firms hauled as much 542,785 tons of coal on the canal (80 per cent), the Trustees hauling 109,076 tons (20 per cent) from the Bridgewater pits in and around Worsley.18 The Bridgewater Canal proprietors had a legal requirement to allow independent carriers to use the canal on payment of the authorised tolls. Pratt and Jackman, however, in their classic studies of British transport history written in the early twentieth century, contend that the Trustees operated a deliberate policy to restrict independent carriers from using the canal by monopolising warehouse space in Manchester.19 In this account, they closely followed Joseph Sandars’ polemical pamphlet which strongly criticised transport provision in the north-west as part of his promotion of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.20 The assertion that the Trustees and the Old Quay Company used their control of warehousing at the waterways’ basins and docks in Manchester, Runcorn and Liverpool in order to promote their own carrying services at the expense of independent carrying services, however, reflects a complete misunderstanding of the organisation of warehousing in the canal trade. In fact, all Manchester canal companies retained hold of large plots of land in intermediate and terminal stations, regardless of whether or not they actively engaged as carriers on their canal. In each case, the canal basins were extensively developed to facilitate the trade of independent carriers; the canal companies established large-scale, multi-storey warehouses – the largest of their kind in Manchester in the mid-1820s – as well as extensive wharves for coal, stone and timber, large parts of which were leased out to independent firms at ‘nominal’ rents in order to encourage trade on the canals.

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From the 1830s, as Mather has shown, the Trustees took deliberate steps to encourage independent carrying services on the Bridgewater Canal.21 By the early 1850s, George Loch, a deputy superintendent of the Bridgewater Trust, could look back on the years since his appointment in 1837 as a period where it had become ‘very much indeed’ the policy of the Trustees to encourage the ‘conduct of the carrying business by private carriers’. 22 This policy was grounded in contemporary Manchester’s political economy. Loch expounded his views in private correspondence in 1840: I have ever held, publicly and privately, that no company can carry as economically as an individual. I have always doubted whether railway companies do carry goods without drawing on their passenger profit. I have always dreaded their doing so and annihilating the private carriers, first on their own lines, next on canals and forcing canal companies to become carriers, and thus placing the whole carrying trade of the country into the hands of joint stock companies who will, of course, combine against the public.23

There was also an economic motive underpinning the Trustees’ policies to promote the trade of independent carriers: the smaller profits, or indeed losses, generated by the Bridgewater carrying department by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. From 1844 to 1848, for example, the carrying department made losses in three out of the five years; the trade carried by independent carriers in the same years yielded the Trustees profits of £40,000–£70,000.24 Until the 1830s, the Bridgewater Trustees’ carrying services were largely restricted to their own canal. In addition to the haulage of Bridgewater coal, the Trustees operated services between Manchester and Liverpool (and intermediate places) and between Liverpool to Preston Brook, the transhipment point for barges entering or leaving the Trent and Mersey Canal. In addition, the Trustees undertook the greater part the estuarial carriage between Runcorn and Liverpool, employing steam tugs to tow vessels between the Runcorn basin and the Duke’s Dock in Liverpool from 1833.25 The competition from other canals and railways that intensified in the 1830s and 1840s, referred to in the quotation from Loch above, led the Bridgwater Trustees to eschew established practices. On the one hand, and as outlined above, the Trustees encouraged independent carriers on their own canal. On the other hand, the Trustees pursued the, at first sight contradictory, policy of developing new carrying services on rival canals. In fact, the expansion of the carrying department was pursued in order to minimise the losses of canal traffic on the long-distance trades in which the Bridgewater was just one link in a waterway chain, especially the trades to the midlands and south. As regards this latter development, the three principal steps undertaken by the Trustees may be summarised as follows. First, and perhaps

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most importantly, the Trustees purchased the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in 1844. This move was designed to allow the Trustees to exercise more control over the freight costs of waterborne trade between Manchester and Liverpool in a period of intense competition with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. This purchase brought into the Trustees’ hands a new carrying operation that had carried 55,000–95,000 tons annually in the previous four years.26 Second, the Trustees enacted a number of agreements designed to protect their long-distance trades to southern England, which came under threat, as Mather has shown, from four waterways (the Macclesfield Canal, the Ellesmere and Chester Canal, the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal and the Weaver Navigation) and three railways (the Grand Junction, the Manchester and Birmingham and the North Staffordshire). In response, in 1848, the Trustees purchased the Anderton Carrying Company, an action that restored Preston Brook, rather than Anderton, as the prime transhipment for Staffordshire goods destined for Liverpool or Manchester.27 In 1849, the Trustees strengthened their position in the through trades to Staffordshire by leasing the carrying branch of the Trent and Mersey Canal from the North Staffordshire Railway, which controlled this canal from 1846. These measures enabled the Bridgewater Trustees to become firmly established as carriers on midlands canals.28 By the 1850s, Loch could claim that the Trustees carried ‘a large portion of the pottery trade between The Potteries and Liverpool’. 29 At this time, the Trustees employed 56 boats trading to and from Wolverhampton and 29 boats to the Potteries and Macclesfield.30 Finally, the Trustees shored up their control of the trade in the Mersey estuary: in 1843, the Trustees leased the Ellesmere and Chester Canal Company’s carrying trade across the Mersey, including their fleet, warehouses and docks at Ellesmere Port and Liverpool; several years later, the Trustees agreed to carry the Chester and Birkenhead Railway Company’s goods across the Mersey from Birkenhead to the port of Liverpool.31 Mersey and Irwell Navigation Following the completion of the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in the 1730s, the navigation proprietors apparently undertook the bulk of the waterway’s trade. The growth of trade, however, was slow and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation owners realised that no profits had been made from 1724 to 1749. By the early 1750s, trade was increasing and the company built new vessels to ply the route from Manchester to Warrington. At around this time, a new carrier began to carry on the navigation – the Salford Quay Company, a Liverpool-based carrying and warehousing concern, which developed its own commercial facilities on the Salford side of the Irwell slightly to the north of

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the Mersey and Irwell Company wharves in Manchester. The Salford Quay Company was later purchased by the duke of Bridgewater in order to further his canal interests; the firm ceased to carry between Manchester and Liverpool in 1774 to prevent competition with services on the duke’s canal.32 In the early 1770s, the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company employed 21 vessels on the navigation, all carrying between Manchester and Liverpool via Warrington; these vessels were, it seems, the only regular carriers on the waterway at that time. In 1779, three years after the opening of the Bridgewater Canal, the navigation, warehouses, wharves and vessels were sold to a new group of proprietors for £10,000. The new company, known as the Old Quay Company, continued to act as prime carriers on the navigation, although it immediately announced that it would be happy to contract with independent carriers.33 The Old Quay Company operated 18 vessels in 1781, the fleet increasing slightly in size to 20 vessels in 1788; at the latter date, the company provided three weekly services to and from Manchester and Liverpool.34 The fleet was expanded during the trading boom of the early 1790s. Ten new vessels were ordered in 1791, instituting a 30 per cent increase in fleet size.35 In the early nineteenth century, the Old Quay Company’s carrying provision continued to expand along with increasing trade, the company allowing its principal agent a free hand to buy or hire additional craft to cope with rising demand.36 The major expansion of the Liverpool– Manchester trade in the early 1820s encouraged the company to add eleven new boats to the fleet in 1823 alone.37 We can make some rather more precise comments about the size of Old Quay Company’s trading operations in the mid-1820s. At this time, the company operated 64 vessels with a combined capacity of more than 2,000 tons.38 By far the greatest part of the company’s trade was the bilateral trade between Liverpool and Manchester – in which it was able to equal the trade on the Bridgewater Canal – but the company operated vessels on the Ellesmere and Chester Canal from 1797 and on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal from 1811. In addition, the company forwarded goods by road from Manchester to east Lancashire, as well as to the Yorkshire market centres of Leeds, Wakefield and Sheffield.39 In c.1825, the Old Quay Company probably accounted for 90 per cent of all goods carried on the navigation. However, in 1823 a new joint-stock carrying company, the New Quay Company, commenced services on the navigation, establishing its own warehouses and wharves to the south of the Old Quay Company’s basin on the Irwell waterfront in Manchester. By as early as 1825, the New Quay Company had assembled a fleet of 18 flats.40 In 1834, the Old Quay Company ceased its services on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, selling its craft to Picton & Co. of Liverpool. The Old Quay Company’s intention was not to withdraw from the carrying business

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altogether but to focus on the Liverpool and Manchester trade. Hence, in March 1834, the firm ordered four new iron flats, a new design that was adopted in 1831 to replace the previous wooden flats,41 as well as a new iron float for the timber trade. An additional four new iron flats were ordered in September 1835.42 In the early 1830s, the Old Quay Company introduced a steam tug to tow its vessels to and from Runcorn and Liverpool. By 1837, four steam tugs were in operation in the Mersey estuary, bringing the company’s expenditure on new iron flats and steam tugs to £11,000 during 1834–37. 43 However, the financial difficulties facing the Old Quay Company by the early 1840s, as well as the developing competition from railways, forced the company to downsize its carrying services and take steps to entice independent carriers on to the navigation.44 So, in 1840, the Old Quay Company built a new shed at its Liverpool dock at a cost of £2,797 to encourage carriers to divert part of their trade from the Bridgewater Canal. Shortly afterwards, the company rented out one of its largest Manchester warehouses to Barnby, Faulkner & Co., a Manchester carrier that had previously concentrated on the trade from Manchester to Hull. These moves appear to have been successful, as by 1841 the company began to dispose of its 60 or so river craft, following an internal investigation that had suggested that if all of the trade of 1839–41 had been handled by independents paying the standard toll of 2s. 6d., greater profit levels would have been reached than those actually achieved by committing resources to their own carrying department.45 By June 1842, the company noted that independent carriers had significantly increased their share of the business.46 Table 4.4 shows the rapid decline of carrying services in the Manchester–Liverpool trade on the navigation in this period, the carrying department’s annual haulage falling from almost 120,000 tons in 1838 to 37,000 tons in 1844, the last year of Old Quay Company ownership. The decline of the carrying department continued under the management of the Bridgewater Trustees, its trade falling to 28,000 tons in 1848. Independent carriers came to the fore, the volume of their trade steadily increasing from 27,000 tons in 1838 to break the 100,000-ton ceiling in 1843 and stay above it for the remainder of the decade. Rochdale Canal None of Manchester’s other canal companies introduced comparable services to those operated by the Bridgewater proprietors and the Old Quay Company in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, Manchester’s other canal companies operated only sporadic carrying services, none of which ever formed a large part of the trade on their canals. When services were offered by canal companies, they were quickly withdrawn when independent firms were able to offer equivalent services.47

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Table 4.4 Annual tonnages carried by the navigation company and public carriers in the Manchester–Liverpool trade on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1838–48 Year

Navigation company

Public carriers

Total

1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848

117,000 96,000 96,000 74,000 54,000 55,000 37,000 42,000 50,000 42,000 28,000

27,000 29,000 51,000 69,000 85,000 101,000 104,000 140,000 139,000 106,000 101,000

144,000 125,000 147,000 143,000 139,000 156,000 141,000 182,000 189,000 148,000 129,000

Source: A. Hayman, Mersey and Irwell Navigation to Manchester Ship Canal (Manchester: Federation of Bridgewater Cruising Club, 1981), p. 48.

The Rochdale Canal Company did not become a major carrier in this period. The company was prepared to pioneer services to encourage traffic but withdrew from carrying as soon as public carriers provided equivalent services. Two services were offered in the early years of its business. First, from 1800 to 1804, the company offered a new service between Manchester and Hull, arguing that vessels ‘navigated at the expense of and under the direction of the company … [offered] … the only certain method of securing the regularity and dispatch, which the trading interest at Manchester requires’.48 Second, from 1800 to 1811, the company instigated a thriceweekly service from Manchester to Rochdale. Even in these years, the company’s carrying business never formed a major part of its trade. In 1810, for example, its boats paid £415 in tolls, just 2 per cent of total receipts in that year.49 By 1811, a public carrier, Job Cogswell of Littleborough, had agreed to take over the operation of the Rochdale–Manchester service.50 Following the 1845 Act, and again in the early 1850s, the company did consider undertaking its own carrying services but decided against it on both occasions.51 In 1855, on establishing its lease of the Rochdale Canal, however, a consortium of four railway companies did establish a carrying service between Manchester and Hull. As the end of the railway lease approached in 1887, the Rochdale Canal Company began to acquire a fleet of barges to replace the railway companies’ service, raising £48,000 to finance the venture. By 1892, the carrying department’s fleet comprised 53 wooden boats, 15 steam cargo craft, 12 steel boats and three made of iron.52

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Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal During the construction of its waterway, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company owned and operated six barges with a total capacity of 110 tons. The company used these vessels to carry ‘stone, bricks, earth, timber and materials for making the canal’.53 By 1799, two years after the canal had been completed from Salford to Bolton and Bury, the company had sold two of its five remaining boats to Bolton carrier Thomas Smith, resolving that if his venture ‘should not be found to answer’ the company would buy the boats back after six months.54 Several years later, the company sold a further two boats to the Little Bolton Colliery Company.55 Subsequently, carriage on the canal was handled mainly by private carriers hauling coal and stone from collieries and quarries along the line of the canal, as well as a small number of public carriers. The company encouraged these latter operators by providing free access to its warehouses (for a specified number of days) and by providing extensive wharves at Bolton, Bury and Salford at low rents.56 Ashton, Peak Forest and Huddersfield canals Carriage on the narrow-canal network that comprised the Ashton, Peak Forest and Huddersfield canal companies was mainly hauled by independent carriers. From the mid-1830s, however, the Ashton Canal Company instigated new services to the main towns on the line of the canal (Stockport, Ashton, Oldham and Dukinfield), as well as through trades to Stalybridge on the Huddersfield Canal and Hyde and Marple on the Peak Forest Canal. These services were taken over by the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway following their purchase of the Ashton, Peak Forest and Macclesfield canals in 1846.57 By 1857, the railway company was hauling 10 per cent of the total tonnage carried on the Ashton, 9 per cent on the Peak Forest, but just 3 per cent on the Macclesfield.58 The railway company’s services were rooted in rail/canal interchanges at Piccadilly, Guide Bridge and Ashton. The carrying department closed in the early 1890s when it was found that the company only ‘got traffic in one direction’.59 The London and North Western Railway, meanwhile, initiated services on the Huddersfield Canal in the 1850s.60 The Huddersfield Canal Company had not been a carrier and independent carriers complained that railway management was prejudicial to the water interest, especially because of the owners’ addition of charges for ‘light’ barges, tunnel dues and wharfage.61

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Public carriers There were two main types of independent carriers plying their trade on Manchester canals. Public carriers provided regular scheduled public services for individuals and firms, while private carriers were ‘own-use’ operators, hauling only goods belonging to the firm itself. While most public carriers worked long-distance trade routes, much of the traffic was intermediate, necessitating regular interchange points en route. Thus, the public carriers on the Rochdale Canal occupied warehouses at all of the canal’s basins in Manchester, Rochdale, Gauxholme, Heywood and Sowerby Bridge.62 In doing so, they replicated the canal business of Pickford & Co., which traded throughout England, but primarily carried goods over short distances.63 Many canal carriers had initially been active in the long-distance trade by road; some indeed continued to carry overland until the 1840s.64 The carriers paid a standard toll to canal companies for use of their canals, levying additional charges to the consumer to reflect the carriers’ costs (boats, wages, horses, feed etc.) and to make their profits. In 1825, for example, the Bridgewater Trustees charged 3s. 8d. per ton for the use of their canal between Liverpool and Manchester; the carriers (including the Trustees) running boats on this route charged 15s. per ton on cotton and 10s. per ton on manufactured goods. Few balance sheets are available for canal carriers in this period. One for the Merchants’ Company, trading between Halifax, Manchester and Liverpool in 1832, shows that the firm received a freight income of £21,280, as well as £249 for carting goods. The firm’s outgoings included £7,579 on canal tolls (to the Rochdale Canal Company and the Bridgewater Canal) and £1,905 on railway charges (to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway); £4,266 on boatmen’s, porters’ and carters’ wages (and £1,361 on other salaries); and £2,257 on ‘horse keep’. Total disbursements amounted to £20,522, leaving a profit of £1,007.65 Many public carriers made use of ‘fly’ boats that carried from ten to twelve tons and employed relays of horses to travel at 3½ mph (between locks) day and night. In the Manchester–Liverpool and Manchester–Hull trade larger vessels were also in operation, carrying up to 50 tons.66 The number of public carriers operating on Manchester canals can be roughly tracked using trade directories (see Table 4.5). In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the canal carrying trade grew slowly. As late as 1797, only three public carriers are recorded in the Manchester trade directories, increasing to 11 in 1808–09. By 1815, trade directories reveal that a much larger group of carriers had come into existence: 24 carriers are listed in that year. The number of carriers peaked at 47 in 1836 before falling to 33 in 1845 and 21 in 1855. The Castlefield basin of the Bridgewater Canal provided the commercial base for most of these firms, the bulk of which

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Table 4.5 Number of public carriers on Manchester’s canals, 1815–55 Year

1815 1825 1836 1845 1855

Bridgewater Canal

Western waterways Mersey and Manchester, Bolton Irwell Navigation and Bury Canal

Rochdale Canal

Eastern waterways Ashton and Peak Huddersfield Forest Canals Canal

Total number of carriers

18 25 28 18 15

1 2 2 2 2

3 6 6 7 6

1 0 6 5 8

24 26 47 33 21

1 1 1 2 1

Source: Manchester trade directories, 1815–55. Note: The total number of carriers is not the sum of columns 1–6 because some carriers operated on more than one canal.

1 3 4 6 1

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traded to Liverpool, the midlands and London. There was also a significant number of firms operating out of the Piccadilly basins of the Rochdale and Ashton canal companies, mostly carrying goods to and from Yorkshire and Hull. Midlands The first non-Bridgewater boats to carry regularly on the duke’s canal did not appear until 1774 when Henshall & Co., a firm operated by a number of the directors of the Trent and Mersey Canal Company, introduced scheduled services between Manchester and the west midlands, initially using land carriage for part of the journey until the link between the Bridgewater and Trent and Mersey was established at Preston Brook. Henshall & Co. advertised rates of 52s. 6d. per ton between Manchester and Birmingham, only two-thirds of the land rate of 80s. per ton. By 1777, the canal rate had fallen to 30s. per ton.67 In 1782, John Gilbert, the duke of Bridgewater’s agent, joined with Worthington, a road carrier, to provide additional services on the Manchester–west midlands route, spurring the Trent and Mersey Canal Company to complain of partiality of treatment at the Castlefield basin, lamenting that Worthington & Gilbert’s boats ‘can be discharged in two hours, while ours must lie a day or more under their cargo for want of proper assistance’.68 Nevertheless, by the mid-1790s, Hugh Henshall & Co. claimed the largest share of traffic on the Trent and Mersey, as well as that passing to and from the Trent. At this time, Henshall & Co.’s canal fleet of 65–75 barges had become comparable in size to that of the duke of Bridgewater.69 Worthington & Gilbert, their only serious rival in the west midlands and Manchester trade, operated a fleet of only 23 boats of 15 tons burthen, 19 trading between Manchester and Stourport, and four between Manchester and Birmingham. The only other midlands carrier on the Bridgewater Canal in the mid-1790s was Gilbert & Burgess, which operated a single vessel of 13 tons between Manchester and Stone in Staffordshire.70 These firms engaged in extensive carrying trades between Manchester, the midlands and the south. Much of the traffic catered for the Staffordshire potteries and the west midlands metalware towns, as well as Bristol and the south-west by way of the Severn and the east midlands via the Trent. Leaving the London trade for the moment, four particularly important routes may be discerned. The first was the trade to and from the Staffordshire potteries, a route that combined the Bridgewater and the Trent and Mersey canals. Second was the trade to and from Birmingham and the south-west: this route used the Bridgewater and the Trent and Mersey canals, before following a number of number of short canals serving towns in Birmingham and the Black Country and subsequently one of two canal connections (the Birmingham and Worcester or the Staffordshire and Worcester) to the Severn

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Navigation, which itself possessed a variety of connections to the canals and waterways of the south-west and South Wales. Third was the trade to and from the east midlands, which used the Bridgewater and the Trent and Mersey canals, where goods were transhipped to and from the Derby or Cromford canals and then the Trent, from where the boats continued (via a number of further connections) to Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, Lincolnshire and East Anglia. Fourth was the trade to Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales via the Trent and Mersey, the Ellesmere and Chester, the Montgomeryshire and the Shropshire canals. Tables 4.6 and 4.7 provide a snapshot of Manchester’s and Liverpool’s midlands trade using the Bridgewater Canal in 1845. For Manchester, the largest trade, in terms of tonnage carried, was to Cheshire, Shropshire and Wales, followed by Birmingham and the south-west, the east midlands and the Potteries. In the Liverpool trade, by contrast, the trades to Birmingham and the Potteries stand out, the industries of both regions, metalwares and earthenware respectively, using Liverpool as the prime point of despatch for exports. The number of firms plying the Manchester and midlands routes increased markedly in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1825, trade directories list 22 canal carriers engaged in one or more of these midlands trades (including six carrying through the midlands to London). As late as 1840, 20 carriers still plied these routes, but this fell sharply to nine in 1845.71 London Pickford & Co., a road carrier between Manchester and London since the 1750s, developed the largest business of a public canal carrier in the first half of the nineteenth century. Turnbull, the firm’s historian, records that the firm first employed barges from Manchester in 1786. In that year, it despatched four vessels per week from Manchester to Rugeley on the Trent and Mersey Canal, where wagons were employed to carry goods by road to London. As the canal network developed, Pickfords gradually extended the proportion of the London business that was carried by canals: to Coventry in 1794 and Blisworth in 1797. The eventual completion of the Grand Junction Canal in 1805 enabled Pickford & Co. to complete the journey from Manchester to London solely by canal. In addition to the London trade, Pickfords traded on the midlands routes outlined above.72 The size of Pickford & Co.’s fleet grew sharply in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, increasing from ten barges in 1795 to approximately 80 in 1820. The company built 50 new boats in the trading boom from 1822 to 1824, at a cost of roughly £13,500, although many of the old boats were replaced at this time so that the total size of the fleet averaged 85–90 in the 1820s before increasing in number to 116 in the late 1830s. Despite the rapid growth of Pickfords’ canal trade, land carriage remained in full

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Table 4.6 Bridgewater Canal trade to the midlands and south from Manchester, 1845 Location

Tonnage to Manchester

Shropshire, Cheshire and Wales Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stourport Preston Brook East Midlands The Potteries London

27,581

Total

Tonnage from Manchester

Total

Percentage of total

3,475

31,055

31

21,274

2,988

24,262

24

10,273 11,034 6,369 2,325

7,314 1,701 1,076 4,026

17,587 12,735 7,445 6,351

18 13 7 6

78,856

20,580

99,436

99

Source: S. Salt, Facts and figures, principally relating to railways and commerce (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1848), p. 105.

Table 4.7 Bridgewater Canal trade to the midlands and south from Liverpool, 1845 Location Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stourport The Potteries East Midlands Preston Brook Shropshire, Cheshire and Wales London Total

Tonnage to Liverpool

Tonnage from Liverpool

Total

Percentage of total

27,713 5,618 7,651 6,766

9,992 13,135 8,713 5,487

37,707 18,753 16,364 12,253

40 20 17 13

2,736 902

4,589 1,308

2,736 2,210

8 2

51,386

43,224

94,610

100

Source: S. Salt, Facts and figures, principally relating to railways and commerce (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1848), p. 105.

operation between Manchester and London for valuable packages requiring a faster service. As late as 1836, Pickford & Co. ran fly wagons from Manchester to London three times per week.73 The firm had few competitors in the Manchester–London trade before 1800. By 1815, five firms had been established in the carrying trade between London and Manchester: Pickfords, Bache & Co., Higginson & Co., Darch, Dickenson & Co. and Marsden,

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Hartley & Co. While the last two firms had dropped out of the trade by 1825, two new firms had appeared: Snell, Robins and Snell and Whitehouse & Co. As late as 1840, five canal carriers plied the Manchester–London route. Pickford & Co., Robins and Whitehouse survived from 1825, and were joined by new entrants Kenworthy & Co. and Crowley, Hincklin, Batty & Co. In the early 1840s, however, much of the London–Manchester trade transferred to railways. Only two carriers are listed in 1845, at least one of which, Pickford & Co., was mainly carrying by rail by this time. In 1845, only 6,351 tons passed between Manchester and London on the Bridgewater Canal, a reduction from 20,000 tons in 1839 and 1840.74 Liverpool Regular carriers did not appear on the Bridgewater Canal’s key Manchester to Liverpool route until 1811. The catalyst for this development was the Mersey and Irwell’s and the Bridgewater’s joint raising of public freight rates to Liverpool in September 1810. By this move, charges on cotton increased from 10s. 6d. to 20s. and on manufactures from 7s. 2d. in 1797 to 20s.75 The Manchester Grocers’ Company, established in 1811, led the way, establishing a new service from Castlefield to Liverpool. It was joined by Marsden, Hartley & Co. in 1813 and Job Cogswell in 1815.76 By the mid-1820s, a massive reorganisation of the carrying trade to Liverpool had taken place with independent carriers carrying more than twothirds of the Bridgewater Canal’s Manchester–Liverpool tonnage from 1820 to 1824 (Table 4.2). Independent carriers had even appeared on the Mersey and Irwell by the early 1820s, in the form of the New Quay Company, established in 1822. By 1825, there were at least six independent carriers on the route, with a combined fleet of more than 80 vessels (Table 4.8). The Liverpool canal traders increased in number in the next quarter of a century despite competition from the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The 1840 trade directory records eight independent traders on the Bridgewater Canal and one independent on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation. In 1845, ten carriers are recorded on the Bridgewater and the Mersey and Irwell. A contemporary survey of the trade in 1849 (see Table 4.9) listed 13 private water carriers between Manchester and Liverpool. Evidently, these estimates must be treated with some caution as the total tonnage by water navigation exceeds canal company data by more than 100,000 tons. Certainly, by this time, it is evident that the public carriers, rather than navigation owners, hauled the bulk of the water trade to and from Liverpool and Manchester Most Liverpool carriers hauled raw cotton, corn and other foodstuffs, dyewares and manufactured goods. At least two firms, the Manchester Grocers’ Company and the Manchester and Liverpool Union Company, concentrated a good deal of their activities on corn, while the New Quay

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Table 4.8 Major carriers in the Manchester–Liverpool trade on the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, 1765–1825 Carriers

Commenced

Number of vessels in 1825

Bridgewater Trustees Old Quay Company Total navigation companies

1776 1779

75 64 139

Merchants’ Company New Quay Company Manchester Grocers’ Company Manchester and Liverpool Union Company Bellhouse Kenworthy Marsden, Hartley & Co. Job Cogswell Pickford & Co. Total public carriers

1824 1822 1811

20 17 15

1823 1823 1821 1813 1815 1821

16 12 4 0 0 0 84

Total vessels 1825

223

Source: S. Salt, Railway and commercial information (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1850), p. 69; House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826). Notes: Kenworthy and Pickfords operated between Manchester and Liverpool on the Bridgewater Canal and Leeds and Liverpool Canal via the junction at Leigh established in 1821. Marsden, Hartley & Co., Job Cogswell and Pickfords had all ceased carrying on this route by 1825. Several of the Yorkshire and Hull carriers operated on this line in the mid-1820s, although their activities are not recorded here.

Company was evidently a large carrier of dyewares and dry salters’ goods.77 Few public carriers hauled timber. The Grocers’ Company claimed that the freight rates in 1825 of 8s. 4d. were such that they ‘could not live by the trade’. The timber brought from Liverpool to Manchester was handled by three firms: the Old Quay Company, the Bridgewater Trustees and Bellhouse & Co., the latter employing steam tugs to tow timber floats in the Mersey estuary. In 1850, a description of Bellhouse’s estuarial trade describes a steam tug towing 13 floats; the length of the train reached 500–600 feet. The timber was delivered directly to canalside wharves in Manchester.78 By 1840 a further firm, the Harrington Timber Carrying Company, had entered the trade. By 1857 the firm’s manager claimed that it carried ‘more timber than any other firm in Liverpool’ trading on both the Mersey and Irwell and on the Bridgewater Canal.79

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Table 4.9 Major carriers in the Liverpool–Manchester trade, 1849 Carrier

Trade (tons)

Bridgewater Trustees (BC) Kenworthy & Co. (BC) Thompson, M’Kay & Co. (BC) Merchants’ Company (BC) William Jackson & Sons (BC) Carver & Co. (BC) Manchester Grocers’ Company (BC) James & John Veevers (BC) Bellhouse & Son (timber) (BC) Harrington Carrying Company (timber) (BC) Total (BC)

40,000 60,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 35,000 25,000 20,000 30,000 30,000 390,000

Old Quay Company (Bridgewater Trustees) (MIN) New Quay Company (MIN) Barnby, Faulkner & Co. (MIN) Joseph Nall (MIN) Brockbank & Co. (MIN) Total (MIN)

60,000 40,000 35,000 35,000 20,000 190,000

Total by water navigation

580,000

Source: S. Salt, Railway and commercial information (Manchester: Bradshaw and Blacklock, 1850), p. 185. Note: (BC) = Bridgewater Canal; (MIN) = Mersey and Irwell Navigation.

Bolton and Bury The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal was primarily orientated towards the conveyance of coal. As a result, few public carriers operated on the canal, which failed to attract large parts of the carriage of lightweight valuable goods from the turnpike roads. The trade directories analysed in Table 4.5 include only one year (1845) when more than a single carrier operated on the canal. Other evidence suggests that public carriers may have been more numerous than trade directories imply. Certainly, the Old Quay Company introduced services to Bolton and Bury in 1811. In addition, several carriers mainly trading on other canals are sporadically mentioned in the canal company minutes, although it is not known how enduring some of these services were: in 1825–26 the Union Company, the bulk of whose trade was on the Bridgewater Canal, added new services on the Bolton and Bury Canal and was provided with accommodation in Salford and Bury: John Hargreaves, who carried to Blackburn on the Bridgewater and Leeds and Liverpool canals, appears to have introduced services to Bolton and Bury in

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1831.80 One year later, John Bridge commenced the conveyance of ‘Merchandize between Manchester and Bolton’.81 This service lasted until at least 1835.82 In 1834, the Liverpool firm of C. & J. Picton took over the Old Quay Company’s services on the canal, together with its vessels, running scheduled services between Liverpool, Bolton and Bury. In order to facilitate this trade, the company allowed the firm to use the canal ‘at any time during the night’.83 Shortly after, Bernard Stiles began carrying from Salford to Bolton and Bury.84 The latter firm was still pursuing this trade a decade later, seven years after the company had completed its railway to Bolton.85 Rochdale Canal The unusually complete Rochdale Canal Company archive allows us to track payments made by carriers at benchmark dates. The data are derived from the company’s carriers’ ledgers, which record the tolls paid by those firms that were allowed credit (Tables 4.10 and 4.12). However, a substantial proportion of the company’s toll revenue came from cash payments: in both 1815 and 1845, indeed, this was approximately half, the bulk probably paid by private carriers (see below).86 Canal carriers on the Rochdale fell into two groups: the Hull carriers and the Liverpool carriers. The Hull carriers served the markets of Yorkshire and the east coast, a route that combined the Rochdale (or Huddersfield) canals, the Calder and Hebble and the Aire and Calder. On eastbound voyages, Hull carriers shipped cotton yarn and textiles, returning with corn, flour and cotton and woollen textiles. The eastward traffic generated the most income: Hull carriers paid tolls of £25,776 on the eastward leg in 1839–41 but only £13,801 on the return journey.87 At Hull or Goole, the carriers arranged to tranship goods on to coastal vessels and, by the 1840s, on to steamships to Europe.88Liverpool carriers, on the other hand, served the west coast via the Rochdale and Bridgewater canals. In practice, the distinction between the Hull and Liverpool carriers was far from absolute. By the 1840s, many of the Hull carriers also carried to and from Liverpool on the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation.89 In 1806, the first complete year covered by the carriers’ ledgers, Job Cogswell, trading between Manchester and Wakefield (and later Liverpool), was the most active public carrier, with payments of £1,646, 12 per cent of the Rochdale Canal Company’s toll income. As late as 1815, Cogswell retained his ascendancy, his tolls having increased to £4,940, but by the mid-1820s a new firm, the Rochdale and Halifax Merchants’ Company, operating 18 vessels between Sowerby Bridge and Liverpool,90 was the leading public carrier on the canal. In 1825, it paid £5,583 in canal tolls, 14 per cent of the canal company’s’s toll receipts. Thompson & Co., carrying between Manchester and Hull, paid £4,276 in canal tolls, while three other public carriers – the

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Manchester and Liverpool Union Company, trading between Liverpool and Sowerby Bridge, James Veevers, carrying between Todmorden and Liverpool, and George Thornton, carrying between Sowerby Bridge and Liverpool – paid between £1,000–£2,000. By 1835, Thompson & Co. was the canal’s leading public carrier, paying £5,528 in tolls, 10 per cent of total toll income. Barnby, Faulkner & Co., also carrying between Manchester and Hull, paid £5,287, while William Jackson & Sons, which had begun trading from Hull to Manchester in the early 1830s, paid tolls of £3,675. Marsden & Co. and Buckley, Kershaw & Co., two Hull carriers also operating on the Huddersfield, paid tolls of £2,419 and £1,586, respectively. The Rochdale Canal Company’s Liverpool carriers retained an important share of the canal’s business, the Merchants’ Company paying tolls of £4,051, J. & J. Veevers £2,380, and George Thornton £1,456. Significant changes in carriage had taken place by 1845, especially among the Hull carriers, which had shifted the bulk of their trade on to the Manchester and Leeds Railway.91 Of the Hull carriers, only Jackson & Son increased its business on the canal in the 1840s, paying tolls of £4,233 in 1845, 15 per cent of toll income in that year. At this time, Jackson & Son’s canal stock was worth approximately £12,000, consisting of 36 barges, two narrow boats and 120 horses.92 The Liverpool carriers had also experienced a reduction in their trade by 1845. Veevers & Co. and the Merchants’ Company now paid tolls of less than £1,500.93 These firms concentrated on the Manchester–Liverpool leg of their trade, where waterways remained competitive.94 New firms trading on the canal compensated for some of the losses. The most important were the Bridgewater Trustees and Kenworthy & Co., the latter carrying cotton to Rochdale. By 1855, the combined tolls of the two firms amounted to £1,870, 8 per cent of all toll income. At the latter date, further decline among public carriers is evident, with only Jackson & Sons (£2,036), the Merchants’ Company (£1,504) and J. & J. Veevers (£1,474) making significant toll payments. Ashton, Huddersfield and Peak Forest canals In the water trade to Yorkshire and Hull, the Ashton and Huddersfield canals competed with the Rochdale. It is, however, clear that the latter held the ascendancy as vessels on this broad canal made the trip to Hull in a single barge, while the Ashton and Huddersfield’s narrow locks necessitated transhipment at Huddersfield. The expansion of the trade by narrow canal was also impeded by the Huddersfield Canal Company’s failure to complete its canal until 1811, seven years after the full opening of the Rochdale. Despite the canal’s incomplete state, Dean’s 1808–09 directory records two carriers (Wade & Co. and Rooth & Co.) operating between Manchester and Hull on the Ashton and Huddersfield route.

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Table 4.10 Tolls paid by major public carriers on the Rochdale Canal, 1806–55 (£) Carrier (six years)

1806

1815

1825

1835

1845

1855

Total

Thompson & Co. Merchants’ Company William Jackson & Sons James & John Veevers Job Cogswell Barnby, Faulkner & Co. George Thornton Marsden & Co. Manchester and Liverpool Union Company Buckley, Kershaw & Co. Bridgewater Trustees Leeds Union Company John Kenworthy & Co.

– – – – 1,646 – – –

2,093 – – – 4,940 – – –

4,276 5,583 – 1,396 – 414 1,244 –

5,528 4,051 3,675 2,380 – 5,287 1,456 2,419

530 1,305 4,233 1,433 – 404 – 89

269 1,504 2,036 1,474 – – – –

12,696 12,443 9,944 6,683 6,586 6,105 2,700 2,508

– – – – –

– – – 1,218 –

1,797 – – – –

237 1,586 – – –

– – 366 – 241

– – 903 – 967

2,034 1,586 1,269 1,218 1,208

Total

1,646

8,251

14,710

26,619

8,601

7,153

66,980

Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/4/1/1/6, 11, 13, 17, 20, 25, 27, 29, 30. Note: Firms paying less than an aggregate of £1,000 are excluded.

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Rooth & Co., a former road carrier, was established on the canal by 1805. The development of the business received strong support from the Ashton and Huddersfield canal companies, which advanced money and allowed the firm to carry stone free of charge for a Manchester warehouse.95 Nevertheless, Rooth seems to have left the canal trade before 1815. By the mid-1820s, three carrying firms – Marsdens, Buckley & Co. and Welsh – operated regular services on the Huddersfield in competition with their counterparts on the Rochdale. Welsh had evidently dropped out of the trade by the mid-1830s, although Carver & Co. – like Welsh also engaged in road carriage – had entered the trade. These three firms still operated their services in 1840, although following the opening of the Leeds and Manchester Railway in 1841, Carver & Co. and Buckley & Co. shifted some of their trade to the railway. Carver & Co., in particular, seems to have responded positively to the opportunities of railway carriage in the 1840s, leading two lists of toll payments to Manchester and Leeds in 1842 and the Liverpool and Manchester in 1845.96 Public carriers also operated through trades on the Ashton and Peak Forest canals by 1829: Needham & Co., carrying to Sheffield via the Peak Forest (together with land carriage), and Johnson & Sons between Ashton, Marple and Whalley. The completion of the Macclesfield Canal in 1831 forged a crucial link between the Ashton and Peak Forest and the narrowcanal network of the west midlands, the three canals providing a shorter route to the south than that provided by the Bridgewater Canal. Two longstanding carriers on the Bridgewater, Wheatcroft & Sons in the east midlands trade and Shiptons in the trade to Birmingham and the south-west, had switched to the Ashton–Peak Forest–Macclesfield route by 1840, while the Anderton Carrying Company, a leading carrier in the Staffordshire trade, developed new trade to Manchester via the Macclesfield in competition with the established firms on the Bridgewater. Other longstanding and extensive canal carriers also switched part of their business to the Huddersfield at this time, notably Pickford & Co. and Kenworthy & Co., sending their fly boats to Huddersfield, Halifax and Leeds.97 Canal carriers in the railway age In the 1820s, the major national carriers – Pickfords, Bache and Robins – welcomed the coming of the railways, eagerly advertising new services by rail. However, for the first two decades of rail transport, the railway companies did not pursue a consistent policy towards either commodity trade or methods of organising carriage. Railways were a new form of enterprise and their operators established guiding principles only by trial and error. For the established canal and road carriers, meanwhile, the early period of the railway

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age was a time of opportunity and uncertainty: should they shift part or all of their business to the railways? Ultimately, most canal carriers did shift part of their business to railways; by c.1850, independent carriers had been shut out of most railway trades, either to disappear from business, to refocus on canal carriage or to survive in the reduced role of railway agents. The Liverpool and Manchester, the region’s first railway, pursued a number of carriage arrangements in its early years of operation: it administered its own carrying departments and carriages (using personnel poached from carrying firms); it leased (or otherwise made available) carriages to independent firms (including Pickford & Co.); and it even allowed at least one firm, John Hargreaves & Son, to run its own goods trains on the railway.98 By the early 1840s, the bulk of the trade on the railway was handled by the Liverpool and Manchester’s own goods department. Nevertheless, a list of tolls at the Liverpool end of the railway for 1845 records payments from 14 independent carriers, at least ten of which were established firms in the canal trade, led by Carver & Co., Hargreaves & Son and Pickfords.99 Manchester’s key rail connections with the west midlands and southern England comprised the Grand Junction Railway opened in 1837 from the Liverpool and Manchester to Birmingham, and the London and Birmingham Railway opened in 1839. The two companies developed two contrasting arrangements towards carriers. The former operated its own merchandise service and was reluctant to make additional provisions for carriers. The leading canal carriers in the Manchester–London trade (Pickfords, Bache and Kenworthy) were only allowed to pack their own carriages under stringent terms in 1838. The London and Birmingham, meanwhile, did not carry for the public, merely making trains and carriages available to carriers to use. As a result, the London and Birmingham welcomed established carriers, and cultivated particularly good relations with Pickford & Co., which for several generations had been established as the leading national carrier by road and canal.100 By 1838, then, Pickfords ran daily rail services between Manchester, London and Liverpool, as well as other services in the midlands and north. At this time, gaps in the railway network meant that canal and road transport were required to supplement railway carriage but, by 1845, the bulk of Pickford & Co.’s business had shifted to rail.101 The firm was dependent on the London and Birmingham Railway: relations with the Grand Junction Railway quickly soured and Pickfords engaged in a number of protracted legal battles with that railway in the 1840s as both carriers and railway companies strove to establish the parameters of the relationship. This issue was debated at length by parliamentary select committees in 1839 and 1844.102 However, Pickfords were able to avoid the Grand Junction and switch Manchester-bound goods to carrier-friendly lines, including the North

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Midland, the Midland Counties and the Manchester and Leeds. In 1846, it was estimated that Pickfords sent 85,000 tons per year on the London and Birmingham Railway. Their trade on canals steadily reduced from 1840 and then sharply fell from 1845 and had ceased entirely by the early 1850s. 103 The Manchester and Leeds Railway had made overtures to the canal carriers during its construction and by the time of its completion in 1841 had already persuaded a number of them to transfer part of their Yorkshire and Hull trade to rail. In 1840, the railway company reported that Barnby, Faulkner & Co., a carrier on the Rochdale, had been won over. Faulkner further declared that ‘if one carrier came they all would’. By 1841, the railway company had reached agreements with Thompson & Co., Barnby, Faulkner & Co., Marsden & Co. and Buckley, Kershaw & Co., all of which immediately dramatically reduced their trade on the Rochdale and Huddersfield canals or ceased to operate on them at all.104 Figures adduced by Salt for one month in 1843 show ten carriers paying tolls to the Leeds and Manchester, led by Carver and Pickfords.105 These two carriers, it seems, most actively embraced the opportunities afforded by railway carriage. It is significant that both firms operated significant road traffic in the late 1830s and thus had established customers trading in lightweight, high-value goods where prompt despatch was prioritised. The great railway amalgamations of the 1840s heralded a major change in policy. In 1847, the London and North Western Railway grouping shut out carriers on their lines. The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway soon followed.106 However, carriers were not entirely dispensed with. The railway companies, taking advantage of the carrying companies’ customers, warehouses and carts, employed them as railway agents, responsible for soliciting traffic (at fixed railway rates), receiving goods at stations, packing them in carriages, undertaking the necessary paperwork and arranging delivery by road at terminal stations. They were expressly forbidden from carrying goods in competition with railway services by any other ‘route or conveyance’ and were paid fixed amounts based on a percentage of gross receipts.107 In 1847, Pickford & Co., along with Chaplin & Horne, were appointed as agents for the London and North Western Railway, a role they performed for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Long-established carriers thus found their function downgraded. Many carriers combined the business of railway agent with independent operations on canals or as agents of the Bridgewater Trustees. Thus, Thompson, M’Kay & Co., the leading carrier on the Rochdale Canal in the 1830s, was an agent for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway’s carrying department, occupying warehouses at the Manchester goods station while continuing to operate daily services to Liverpool from its Piccadilly and Castlefield canal warehouses. Seven other

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carriers undertook the role of railway agent in the early 1860s: Carver & Co., Chaplin, Horne & Carver, Pickford & Co., Joseph Nall, Jackson & Sons, Kenworthy & Co. and Faulkner & Co. Only the last three firms, as well as Thompson, M’Kay & Co., combined water carriage with business as a railway agent.108 Private carriers Private carriers have received very little attention in current studies of British transport history. The meagre state of our knowledge of this type of carrier reflects both the paucity of historical accounts of the economic organisation of the canal trade and the many difficulties that confront historians attempting to shed light the activities of ‘own-use’ operators from surviving canal records. As private carriers hauled only their own goods and did not provide services for the public, they are seldom recorded in the carriers’ sections of trade directories. Herson has recently noted that ‘the traffic of … own account carriage continues to lurk in the shadows’.109 While many aspects of private carriers’ trades necessarily remain opaque, this section seeks to elucidate the central features of the commercial organisation of private carriage in Manchester, derived from scattered references in canal company records and from a number urban history sources, including town plans and trade directories. The bulk of private carriers confined their activities to the canals’ bulky mineral trades, especially in coal, stone and salt. In addition, own-use operators carried a large share of the trade in corn brought to Manchester from eastern agricultural areas. Colliery, quarry or corn-mill proprietors who shipped goods from canalside works thus made up the bulk of private carriers; others were firms of merchants and dealers in coal, stone and corn based in the larger market centres. Given the importance of coal to Manchester’s canal trade, it is appropriate to begin our analysis of private carriage with this commodity. By the late 1830s, collieries and merchants brought approximately 700,000 tons of coal to Manchester. Canals carried the bulk of Manchester’s coal, the leading supply regions in the 1830s being the Bridgewater quarries around Worsley, as well as collieries along the line of the Bolton and Bury and Ashton canals. Smaller quantities of coal were brought to Manchester on the Rochdale Canal. In the 1840s, meanwhile, collieries around Wigan quickly rose to prominence, becoming the leading source of Manchester coal by 1850. For the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, we can provide a good account of the colliery firms that provided 70 per cent of the canal’s trade in the 1830s. The data presented in Table 4.11 show that seven firms hauled the canal’s coal trade to its Salford basin: Fogg of Darcy Lever; Andrew Knowles

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Table 4.11 Tonnages hauled by private carriers in the Salford coal trade on the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, 1834–37 Carrier A. Knowles Brownbill, Bromilow & Co. Fogg J. Fletcher Pendleton Colliery Company Ellis Fletcher E. & W. Bolling Total

1834

1835

1836

1837

Total (four years)

27,215

28,647

36,182

47,248

139,292

9,620 16,453 11,820

25,662 17,771 11,033

20,908 19,516 13,351

21,551 18,520 15,591

77,741 72,260 51,795

24,740 9,866 3,199

17,040 11,616 2,404

9,326 11,563 5,512

0 13,032 3,080

51,106 46,077 14,195

102,913

114,173

116,358

119,022

452,466

Source: NA, RAIL, 458/7, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1835–37, 7 April 1837.

of Little Lever and Little Bolton; E. & W. Bolling of Bolton; John Fletcher of Ladyshore; Brownbill, Bromilow & Co. of Clough Side and Ringley; E. Fletcher of Clifton and Kearsley; and the Pendleton Colliery Company. As Table 4.11 shows, Andrew Knowles was the largest supplier at this time, his collieries supplying Manchester with 25,000–50,000 tons per annum. In 1850, four of the seven firms still occupied wharves at Salford.110 Coal carried to Manchester on the Bridgewater Canal came from two locations: the Worsley collieries administered by the Bridgewater Trustees and the pits around Wigan, whose coal was transhipped from the Leeds and Liverpool Canal at Leigh. The supplies from Worsley were all carried in the Trustees’ coal fleet, amounting to 100,000–150,000 tons in the 1830s and 1840s. Wigan coal, by contrast, was carried by colliery proprietors’ own boats, which carried almost 300,000 tons of coal to Manchester on the Leeds and Liverpool and Bridgewater canals by the late 1840s. The private carriers hauling Wigan coal can be tracked in two ways: first, from the toll payments made by colliers to the Rochdale Canal Company to carry their coal from the Bridgewater Canal to wharves in the factory districts of St Peter’s, Piccadilly and Ancoats (Table 4.12) and, second, from analysing the occupants of coal wharves shown on two town plans of Manchester published in 1851. These sources suggest that at least 13 firms brought coal to Manchester from the Wigan area in the 1840s, including Jackson & Co. of Astley, Bedford, and Tyldesley collieries; Ackers, Whitley & Co. of Leigh; the Orrell City Colliery Company; John Scowcroft & Co. of Hindley Green; Nathan Eckersley of Tyldesley; the Ince Hall Coal Company; the Earl of Balcarres, of Haigh Hall and Upholland; Francis George Dutton & Co. of Blackrod; Meyrick Banks of Winstanley and Orrell; Ralph Thicknesse of Aspull; Robert Worsley of

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Hindley Green; John Johnson of Aspull; and John Gibson & Co. of Little Hulton. It is not possible to weight the importance of individual firms.111 The Ashton and Rochdale canals channelled the remainder of Manchester’s canal coal. The Ashton carried roughly 200,000 tons to Manchester in the 1830s. Information on suppliers is limited. The Werneth and Fairbottom collieries were the major mines, both located between the towns of Ashton and Oldham, on the Hollinwood branch of the Ashton Canal, and both were operated by members of the Lees and Booth families. The two firms occupied a large coal wharf in the Ashton canal basin. Jonah Harrop & Co., of the nearby Bardsley colliery, possessed a coal wharf on the Ashton Canal in Ancoats, as did William Jones & Co., which operated at least three collieries in the Oldham area, and the Dunkirk Coal Company of Dukinfield. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Rochdale Canal had ceased to be a major supplier of coal to Manchester. In the mid-1830s, however, it had brought 50,000–90,000 tons per annum from the east, the leading suppliers being Landless & Dickinson and Knowles & Co. of Littleborough, as well as Livesey & Co. of Alkrington, and George Walmsley and James Sutcliffe of Rochdale (Table 4.12). Earlier still, in 1816, Lees, Jones & Co. of Werneth colliery had switched their coal trade from the Ashton to the Rochdale following a toll agreement with the Rochdale Canal Company that lasted until 1819. At this time, the Werneth colliery was shipping 10,700 tons of coal to Manchester per year, nearly 15 per cent of the coal carried on the Rochdale Canal at that time.112 The canal trade in stone mainly comprised Pennine flagstone brought to Manchester on the Rochdale and the Bolton and Bury canals. In addition, Derbyshire gritstone and limestone came to Manchester on the Peak Forest and Ashton canals, while the Bridgewater and the Mersey and Irwell carried Welsh slates from the west. Unfortunately, before the 1830s, few private carriers on the Rochdale Canal paid tolls on credit so that the trades in heavy minerals cannot be tracked in the companies’ carriers’ ledgers. Nevertheless, in the 1820s, the Rochdale Canal Company encouraged a number of heavygoods trades by introducing a system of bonuses, whereby drawbacks on canal tolls were introduced for specific commodities. One such bonus was directed at stone, the most remunerative of the company’s heavy-goods trades. The bonus ledger identifies no fewer than 150 firms carrying flags from the Rochdale to the Bridgewater between 1821 and 1829. More than one-third of these carriers were evidently small concerns in which the boat’s owner acted as the captain. The bulk of the remaining firms were quarrymen or stone merchants based in Manchester and Rochdale.113 From the mid1830s, the canal company’s carriers’ ledgers include a greater number of private carriers, especially in the stone and coal trades (Table 4.12). Thomas Airey, a Manchester flagstone dealer, paid the highest amount in tolls, £2,894

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Table 4.12 Tolls paid by private carriers on the Rochdale Canal, 1815–55 (£) Carrier

Main trade

Thomas Airey James Hoyle Robert Dawson John Bibbington George Walmsley Thomas Livesey & Co. Samuel Jackson & Co. Landless & Dickinson John Knowles & Co. Samuel Ellis James Sutcliffe Harrington Carrying Company timber Ackers, Whitley & Co. Barrow, Lees & Co. William Heap Benjamin Crowther Charles Heyworth & Co. James King & Co. Orrell City Colliery Company Total

1815

1825

1835

1845

1855

Total (five years)

stone flour stone stone coal

– – – – –

– – – – –

– 1,934 545 – 740

2,894 741 383 – –

– – – 808 –

2,894 2,675 928 808 740

coal

–

–

578

–

83

661

coal and salt

–

–

–

–

580

580

coal

–

–

574

–

–

574

coal salt coal

– – –

– – –

– – 515

170 – –

364 519 –

534 519 515

–

–

–

255

210

465

coal

–

–

–

275

140

415

coal stone malt

411 352 –

– – –

– – 329

– – –

– – –

411 352 329

stone coal

– –

– –

– –

296 245

– –

296 245

coal

–

–

–

126

79

205

763

0

5,215

5,385

2,783

14,146

Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2/4/1/1/6, 11, 13, 17, 20, 25, 27, 29 and 30. Note: Firms paying their tolls in cash or credit tolls of less than an aggregate of £200 are excluded

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in 1845, 10 per cent of the Rochdale’s toll income in that year. Bibbington & Co., stone and sand merchants in Manchester and Rochdale and lime burners at the Bugsworth basin of the Peak Forest Canal, paid £808 in 1855, while Robert Dawson, a quarryman near Todmorden, paid tolls totalling £928 in 1835 and 1845. On the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, Brockbank & Co. was the leading flagstone carrier, occupying the Phoenix stone yards at the canal company’s Salford basin. On the Peak Forest Canal, Samuel Oldknow, who owned limestone kilns at Marple, was an important operator in the early nineteenth century, when he ran at least 15 boats on the canal.114 The Rochdale Canal’s important corn and flour trades are poorly reflected in the carriers’ ledgers, other than the large quantities carried by the Hull public carriers. Only two private carriers are represented: James Hoyle & Sons, corn millers of Rochdale, which paid tolls of £1,934 in 1835, 4 per cent of the Rochdale Canal Company’s income, and Benjamin Crowther, a Mirfield maltster, who paid tolls of £329 in the same year. There were evidently many additional private carriers in this trade, including corn factors, millers and maltsters in Lincolnshire and Wakefield. Indeed, half of the total warehousing in the company’s Piccadilly basin was reserved for grain shipped to Manchester by private carriers. Sandars & Co., corn merchants and maltsters of Gainsborough, Wakefield and Manchester, was a leading firm. In the late 1820s, the Sandars occupied two offices in the Piccadilly basin, while in 1847 the Manchester branch of the Sandars’ operations referred to ‘the great amount of tonnage’ that they had put on the canal ‘for so many years’.115 Summary and conclusions This chapter has thrown new light on the commercial organisation of the carrying trade, one of the least studied aspects of British transport history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on the findings presented in chapter 2, it has shown that carrying services on canals underwent a number of major changes after c.1770, and has highlighted the diverging pattern of carriage in short- and long-distance trades, the trades in lightweight and heavy goods, and in the interactions between water, road and railway conveyances. Three principal types of firms traded on Manchester canals: canal companies, possessing their own fleets of boats, either to transport their own goods (particularly coal and stone) or to carry those belonging to others; public carriers, who operated scheduled services for the public between stated destinations; and private carriers using their own vessels to move heavy goods and foodstuffs from canalside industrial premises. Looking at the period as a whole, corporate carrying departments carried the fewest

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goods. In Manchester, only the Bridgewater proprietors and the Old Quay Company developed enduring carrying concerns. Their carrying operations were largely restricted to their own navigations but both carrying departments expanded their services on to other lines either to guarantee a share of trade for their waterway when faced with competition from other transport routes or to provide better services for the public. Manchester’s other canal companies were far less active in respect of the carrying trade. Their services were in general short-lived trials to promote new services, which they were happy to surrender when independent carriers entered the trade. In fact, all canal companies provided a number of facilities to encourage public and private carriers, providing extensive warehouses and wharves at nominal rents in canal basins along their route, as well as offering loans and extending toll credits to independent carriers. The rapid increase in canal trade after 1815 in Manchester was promoted by independent carrying firms and by the 1830s even the Bridgewater Trustees and the Old Quay Company had reached the conclusion that carrying departments were less remunerative than the levying of tolls. In Manchester, public carriers’ services on canals were slow to develop in the late eighteenth century. At the time of the canal mania of the early 1790s, public carriers were restricted to a handful of independent firms in the interchange trade between the Bridgewater Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal. Independent carrying on this branch of trade increased after 1800, together with several new services on the Bolton and Bury (which was completed in 1797), the Ashton (1800) and the Rochdale (1804). The development of carriers on the key Manchester–Liverpool trade from 1811 and in the period of sustained economic growth after the Napoleonic Wars proved to be the turning point. Some carriers, such as Pickford & Co., shifted some of their resources from road transport. This transition from roads to canals was particularly prominent in the long-distance trades to London via the west midlands and in the trans-Pennine trades to Yorkshire and Hull. While road transport remained competitive in serving Manchester satellite towns, water conveyance had the edge on long-distance routes, except to the far north of England and Scotland. By c.1835, there were almost fifty carriers providing services to and from Manchester, the main destinations being Liverpool, the midlands, London and Hull. From 1825, most public carriers offered fly-boat services on these routes that established a greater regularity of despatch and a shortening of journey time. The advent of the railways from 1830 provided a new opportunity for carriers, notwithstanding their investments in canal stock. Many railways initially welcomed carriers on to their railways on payment of the standard toll, which included charges for locomotive power and the hire of carriages. Pickford & Co. and Carver & Co., both already leading carriers by land and

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canal, were particularly active in this respect but most carriers transferred a portion of their business to the railways in the 1830s and 1840s. By 1850, however, great changes had taken place in the carrying business at Manchester, as railway companies undertook their own carrying services, and previously independent carrying firms found their roles reduced to that of railway agents, prohibited from carrying by road or canal on railway routes, with their roles largely restricted to loading and unloading at railway stations and in the distribution of goods by road in the locality of the stations. Private carriage remains the least well understood mode of canal conveyance. Own-use operators were particularly active in the canals’ mineral trades and retained a significant portion of the corn trade until the 1840s. Manchester’s coal trade was, for example, almost entirely in the hands of private carriers with the exception of the conveyances from the Bridgewater pits at Worsley. Our knowledge of patterns of extraction and distribution, together with an analysis of the occupants of coal wharves in central Manchester, reveals that colliers in and around Wigan, Ashton and Bolton became leading carriers in this branch. These firms possessed extensive fleets of canal barges in order to haul 50,000–100,000 tons of coal to Manchester each year. Notes 1 Turnbull, Traffic and transport. 2 For an overview of the literature on road transport during the Industrial Revolution, see Barker and Gerhold, Rise and rise. See also Bogart, ‘Turnpike trusts’, pp. 479–508. 3 Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 434–42; C. Hadfield, The canal age (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1968), pp. 69–87; H. Hanson, The canal boatmen, 1760–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), pp. 16– 29. 4 For the latter two types of carrying firm, the general term ‘independent carriers’ will be used. 5 Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 434–6; Dyos and Aldcroft, British transport, pp. 204–5; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 90–1, 102–25. Carriage on American canals was also primarily undertaken by independent firms, rather than the navigation owners; see A.D. Chandler, The visible hand: the managerial revolution in American business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 32. 6 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 90. 7 E. Holme, Lewis’s directory for the towns of Manchester and Salford for the year 1788 (Manchester: Lewis’s, 1788). 8 E. Raffald, The Manchester and Salford directory (Manchester: J. Harrop, 1781). 9 LCRO, QDV/16/3, Return of Vessels employed on the Bridgewater Canal, 4 August 1795.

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10 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 92. 11 Turnbull claims that Pickford & Co. began to include a small number of services to Liverpool in 1800, although this has not been corroborated in any other sources. See Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 82. 12 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, pp. 6–25. 13 J. Scholes, Scholes’s Manchester and Salford directory (Manchester: Sowler and Russell, 1794); R. Dean and W. Dean, Deans’ Manchester and Salford directory for 1808 and 1809 (Manchester: R. & W. Dean, 1809); J. Pigot and W. Dean, Pigot and Dean’s Directory for Manchester and Salford, &c. for 1824–5 (Manchester: J. Pigot and W. Dean, 1824). 14 Several matters relating to coal (P.P. 1871, Vol. XVIII), p. 1161. 15 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/381. 16 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 1. 17 Jackman, Development of transport, p. 741. 18 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/382. 19 Pratt, Inland navigation, pp. 231–2; Jackman, Development of transport, p. 518. For a similar argument, see Carlson, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, pp. 29–30. 20 J. Sandars, A letter on the subject of the projected rail road between Liverpool and Manchester (Liverpool: Wales & Co, 1824). 21 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 103–6. 22 Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal Bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, p. 202. 23 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 104–5. 24 Ibid., p. 104. 25 A. Hayman, Mersey and Irwell Navigation to Manchester Ship Canal (Manchester: Federation of Bridgewater Cruising Club, 1981), p. 25. 26 Table 4.6; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 124–5. 27 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 169. 28 Ibid., pp. 201–3. 29 Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal bills (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, p. 208. 30 Hayman, Mersey and Irwell Navigation, p. 21. 31 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 192. 32 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 19–20, 29–30. 33 Ibid., pp. 36–7. 34 Raffald, Manchester and Salford directory (1781); Holme, Lewis’s Manchester and Salford directory (1788). 35 Hayman, Mersey and Irwell Navigation, p. 10. 36 Ibid., p. 13 37 Ibid, p. 22. 38 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 102. 39 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 89; Pigot and Dean, Manchester directory (1824). In 1824–25, the Old Quay Company paid tolls of £1,095 to the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company. This suggests an approximate tonnage of 21,900 tons. This

Carriers in the canal age

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66

145

estimate assumes the MBBCC earned 1s. per ton on merchandise carried on the canal; see chapter 2. Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 102. Hayman, Mersey and Irwell Navigation, pp. 25–6 Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., pp. 25, 34. Ibid., pp. 36–7. Ibid., p. 37; for the size of the fleet in 1841, see House of Lords, the Sessional papers printed by order of the House of Lords in the session 4 & 5 Victoria and 5 Victoria, Vol. 21 (1841), evidence of Edward Atherton Lingard, p. 72. Hayman, Mersey and Irwell Navigation, p. 38. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/4, Minute Book, 1797–1801, 20 December 1800; B2/1/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–05, 7 May 1801; RCCP, B2/1/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 13 June 1805; B2/1/1/6, Minute Book, 1806–12, 9 October 1807, 8 April 1808, 4 May 1809 and 19 May 1809. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/4, Minute Book, 1797–1801, 29 December 1800 (including quote); RCCP, B2/1/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 13 June 1805. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/4/1/6, Ledger, 1806–09, fo. 994. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/16, Minute Book, 1806–12, 1 May 1811, 17 May 1811 and 21 June 1811. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 10 September 1845 and 10 December 1845; Hadfield, Canals of Yorkshire, Vol. II, pp. 388–9. Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, pp. 432–6. LCRO, QDV16/14. NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1790–1831, 9 March 1799. NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1790–1831, 3 September 1802. NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1790–1831, 20 September 1804. J. Pigot and Son, Pigot & Son’s general and classified directory of Manchester and Salford, with their suburbs (Manchester: J. Pigot & Son, 1836); I. Slater, Slater’s classified general and classified directory and street register of Manchester and Salford and their vicinities (Manchester: I. Slater, 1845). Bradshaw’s shareholders’ guide, railway manual and directory for 1857 (Manchester: Bradshaw & Blacklock, 1857), p. 174. Hadfield, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, pp. 442 (including quote). I. Slater, Slater’s general and classified directory and street register of Manchester and Salford, with their vicinities (Manchester: I. Slater, 1855). Third report from the Select Committee on railway and canal bills (1852–53, Vol. XXXVIII), evidence of George Loch, p. 206. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Papers, Box 7, Item 35; B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 12 November 1845. Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 86–7. Seven out of 30 canal carriers hauled goods by road and canal in 1820. See Pigot, Dean and Dean, Directory of Manchester and Salford (1819). See also Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 34–46. GMCRO, RCCP, Misc. Papers, Box 7, Item 3. Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 437–40; LCRO, Return of Vessels

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employed on the Bridgewater Canal, 4 August 1795. 67 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 78-9. 68 Cited in Hadfield, Canals of the west midlands, p. 38. 69 Hadfield, Canals of the west midlands, p. 78; Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 78–9. 70 LCRO, Return of Vessels employed on the Bridgewater Canal, 4 August 1795. 71 J. Pigot and I. Slater, Pigot & Slater’s general, classified and street directory of Manchester and Salford, including the adjacent townships (Manchester: Pigot & Slater, 1840); Slater, General and classified directory of Manchester (1845). 72 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 80–1. 73 Ibid., pp. 57–69, 77–81. 74 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 246. 75 The former charges listed are those current in 1797. Many rates were reduced shortly afterwards; see Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 13–14. 76 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, pp. 5–26; Mather, After the canal duke, p. 15. 77 S. Salt, Facts and figures, principally relating to railways and commerce (Manchester: Bradshaw and Bradlock, 1848), pp. 38–9. 78 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of T. Dickenson, pp. 12–13, 114. 79 Webster, Minutes of evidence, pp. 197–200; Pigot and Slater, General, classified street directory of Manchester (1840). 80 NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1790–1831, 28 April 1825, 12 October 1826, 11 August 1831. 81 NA, RAIL, 458/5, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1831–33, 20 October 1832. 82 NA, RAIL, 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1833–35, 6 February 1835. 83 NA, RAIL 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1833–35, 3 September 1834. 84 Pigot and Son, General and classified directory of Manchester (1836). 85 Slater, General and classified directory of Manchester (1845) 86 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/4/1/1/13, 14, 25–27, Ledgers 1815 and 1845. 87 GMCRO, RCCP, Misc. Papers, Box 5, Item 104. 88 J. Pigot and I. Slater, Pigot & Slater’s general and classified directory of Manchester and Salford, including the adjacent townships (Manchester: Pigot & Slater, 1841), Appendix, p. 94. 89 See the Liverpool carriers listed in Tables 4.7 and 4.8. 90 Salt, Statistics and calculations, p. 69. 91 Ibid., p. 78. 92 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 10 December 1845. 93 In 1841, the Merchants’ Company unloaded 16,266 tons at the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin; Veevers unloaded 3,769 tons. See GMCRO, RCCP, Misc. Papers, Box 7, item 19. 94 Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 189–225. For carriers on the Manchester– Liverpool route in the 1840s, see Salt, Railway and commercial information, p. 185.

Carriers in the canal age

147

95 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Ashton Canal Company, Minute Book, 1798–1815, 8 February 1805. 96 Salt, Statistics and calculations, p. 69; Salt, Facts and figures, p. 90. 97 Pigot and Son, General directory of Manchester and Salford (1829); Pigot and Son, General and classified directory of Manchester (1836); Pigot and Slater, General, classified street directory of Manchester (1840); Slater, General and classified directory of Manchester (1845). 98 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 169–70; Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 107–9. 99 Salt, Facts and figures, p. 90. 100 Joseph Baxendale, one of the partners in the firm, thought the firm was ‘decidedly’ the most extensive carrier in England in 1841; see Select committee of the House of Lords appointed to enquire into the expediency of restraining the practice of carrying goods and merchandize on canals, navigable rivers, and railways on Sundays (P.P. 1841, Vol. XXI), evidence of Joseph Baxendale, p. 223. 101 Baxendale estimated that their stock of canal boats had, by 1841, fallen by a quarter since the beginning of the railway era. See ibid., p. 230. 102 Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 624–33. 103 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 100–2, 114–20. 104 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, pp. 287–9 (quote p. 289). 105 Salt, Facts and figures, p. 90. 106 Salt, Facts and figures, p. 64; Jackman, Development of transport, pp. 640–2. 107 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 123–33; NA, RAIL, 791/103, agreement between the London and North Western Railway, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, the North Eastern Railway, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, and Carver & Co., Thompson, M’Kay & Co., and C.T. Faulkner & Co., 1 May 1860. 108 I. Slater, Slater’s general and classified directory and street register of Manchester and Salford, with their vicinities (Manchester: I. Slater, 1863), p. 160; Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 199–200. 109 Herson, ‘Estimating traffic’, p. 114. 110 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester (1851), sheet 27. 111 Table 4.11; Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester (1851), sheets 27, 29, 30 and 33. 112 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/5/5/1, Bonus Book, coal, 1813–19. For Barrow, Lees & Co., see Osborn, ‘Weirdest of all undertakings’, pp. 13–14. 113 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/5/11/1, Bonus Book, flags. 114 Bowyer, Peak Forest Canal, p. 20. 115 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/4/1/17, Ledger, 1818–60; B2/Misc. Papers, Box 5, Item 42.

5

On the waterfront: basins, warehouses and wharves in canal-age Manchester

Manchester canals should not only be seen as components of a transport network: they also played a significant role in the urban development of Manchester. This chapter will outline the massive extensions to Manchester’s urban waterfront in the first half of the nineteenth century, analysing the development of Manchester’s five canal and river basins, and their associated investments in warehouses and wharves. J.D. Porteous has provided the major interpretative framework for analysing the development of ‘canal ports’ in the Industrial Revolution. His account focuses on the emergence of Runcorn, Ellesmere Port, Goole and Stourport as transhipment hubs linking eighteenth-century canals with estuaries leading to major seaports. Porteous identifies a number of features that distinguished the location and development of these four canal ports. Essentially, they were small settlements located at the lower reaches of navigable rivers, without major road access, which urbanised rapidly following the arrival of an industrial canal, with the core of the burgeoning town clustered around the docks, wharves and warehouses built by canal companies.1 At first sight, Manchester does not fit Porteous’s category of ‘canal port’. By 1750, it was already a populous market town and river port. Manchester was not, moreover, an intermediate shipping point but an important final destination for waterborne traffic and a major producer of the manufactured goods and other commodities carried on its canals. Nevertheless, Manchester, given its importance to the Industrial Revolution, offers an excellent vantage point from which to refine our understanding of urban transport infrastructure from the late eighteenth century and, as Porteous recognises, canal-age Manchester developed a number of canal basins, which individually exhibit many of the transportation facilities identified in his case studies.2 With the exception of Faulkner’s recent narrative accounts of London canals, historical studies of canals pay only modest attention to the emergence and functions of urban canal infrastructure in Britain’s rapidly

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growing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century towns.3 Despite longstanding interest in the history of transport in the north-west, we still lack a clear understanding of the function and development of the transport hubs at the termini of Manchester’s canals. Research on Manchester has been stimulated by the University of Manchester Archaeological Unit (UMAU), in particular its work on the 58 surviving canal warehouses in the north-west, which identifies the canal warehouse as a distinctive element in the region’s transport archaeology.4 This type of building borrowed from earlier port and urban warehouses but also developed individual design features, the most innovative being internal shipping holes that enabled barges to unload directly into the building. Four types of warehouse have been identified in the north-west. Much the most important was the Type 1 warehouse, which featured the major innovation of the internal canal arm. This facility enabled boats to enter the building through shipping holes and to unload directly on to internal warehouse floors. Warehouse Types 2 and 3 did not have internal canal arms, goods being loaded externally by the use of cranes, either a separate jib crane (Type 2) or, where the warehouse was built flush to the canal, a cathead crane fixed to the building (Type 3). Type 4 warehouses were open-sided sheds, a late innovation in canal architecture.5 In turn, canal warehouses influenced the design of the first generation of railway warehouses.6 This chapter complements recent archaeological research with a historical study of canal transport facilities in Manchester, focusing on the building, function and occupation of waterside warehouses and wharves in the first half of the nineteenth century. It offers a detailed analysis of the five basins developed by Manchester’s leading water navigation companies, as well as facilities developed on private canal branches, a hitherto little-explored aspect of the urban development of Cottonopolis. The sources that underpin this analysis are historical and can be divided into two key categories. First, the chapter makes use of the records of Manchester’s five major canal and river navigation companies, which detail investments in warehouses, wharves and canal basins. Second, it draws on urban history sources for Manchester, especially town plans, trade directories and township rate books, to provide additional detail on the chronology and function of waterside infrastructure and to offer contextual analysis of the waterways and urban development. In this latter endeavour, the rateable values (RV) assigned to Manchester properties by contemporary poor relief assessors are particularly useful. These values relate to the poor relief contributions to be paid by each property within a specific township and are based on the assessors’ estimate of the rental value of properties (minus contents and the costs of maintaining the property in a tenantable state for that year). Studies by Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, and Maw, Wyke and Kidd, have shown that rateable values are a

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reliable proxy for property asset values across a range of different types of property in Manchester in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 The use of RV provides the opportunity to compare investments in different canal basins and in other major additions to Manchester urban architecture, especially textile warehouses and factories. The development of urban canal transhipment infrastructure reflected the differing demands of the canals’ two broad categories of traffic, each having distinct storage and redistributive requirements. Valuable or fragile goods required in-house storage in canalside warehouses. These canal warehouses were transhipment points, at which outgoing cargoes were received from carts, stored and then loaded on to barges, while incoming cargoes were unloaded, stored and then transferred to carts. The canals’ heavy goods trade, by contrast, was mainly accommodated on canalside wharves. Although much less visible features of the industrial city than imposing multi-storey warehouses, wharves were no less important elements in Manchester’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urbanisation and industrialisation, providing the sites from which incoming cargoes of coal, stone and timber were stockpiled, apportioned and sold. Canal and river company basins Water Street: the Mersey and Irwell Navigation The Mersey and Irwell Navigation provided Manchester with its first water transport infrastructure. The completion of the navigation in the 1730s led to an immediate expansion of storage and transhipment facilities on the banks of the Manchester side of the Irwell. The first development of this infrastructure can be tracked using early plans of Manchester.8 A 1734 plan of Manchester shows a small ‘wharf for boats, etc.’ and a warehouse named ‘Rock House’ adjacent to Blackfriars on the Manchester side of the Irwell. The warehouse was a Type 3 development, terraced into the sheer sandstone cliffs that formed Manchester’s river frontage closest to the built-up part of the town. The side of the warehouse facing the river rose adjacent to the water’s edge so that goods could be unloaded from river boats using an external crane from the warehouse’s third storey and transhipped to road carts at street level at the rear of the warehouse. The pre-1734 wharf was built on a second site to the south of Rock House, at the first point from the centre of town where a natural break in the vertical sandstone banks allowed sufficient space to moor river craft in order to unload bulky goods on to flat land. By 1740, the Mersey and Irwell Navigation had been completed to Warrington. At this time, the river company developed a new open wharf and warehouse at the end of Quay Street, beyond the built-up area of the town, approximately half a mile to the south of the original facilities, where the

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riverside banks were low and the adjoining land was relatively flat. The wharf took the form of a 75-yard-long stretch of open, level land, enclosed by masonry on the three landward sides, with a gateway at the rear of the site leading to Quay Street, which linked the wharf with the centre of Manchester. A number of buildings stood on the wharf; the largest, set back from the river front, was a three-storey house/warehouse occupied by the principal agent of the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company. This site – later known as the Old Quay – became the hub of the navigation’s trade at the Manchester end, although by the middle of the nineteenth century, the provision of warehouses and wharves had greatly increased and had spread out to the north and south of the 1740 site (see Fig. 5.1).9

Figure 5.1 The Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company’s basin in Manchester, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) SW = stone wharf TW = timber wharf 1 Old Quay Warehouse 1 2 Old Quay Warehouse 2 3 Old Botany Warehouse 4 Lower Irwell Street Warehouse

5 Old Quay Warehouse 3 6 New Botany Warehouse 7 Victoria Warehouse 8 Potato market 9 Logwood wharf

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In 1755, a Liverpool-based carrying and warehousing concern developed its own commercial facilities on the Salford side of the Irwell. The Salford Quay adopted a similar layout to the Old Quay infrastructure, comprising a large wharf, which was enclosed on three sides, with a warehouse and dwelling house for the quay’s manager. The Salford Quay Company was purchased by the duke of Bridgewater in the 1760s in order to further his canal interests. Although the Salford Quay is shown on Green’s plan of Manchester and Salford for 1787–93, the firm had ceased to carry between Manchester and Liverpool by 1774 to prevent competition with services on the duke’s canal.10 As outlined in chapter 2, the expansion of trade on the navigation was slow until the late eighteenth century. As such, the development of waterside wharves and buildings by the early part of the nineteenth century differed only slightly from the 1740 infrastructure. The Manchester rate book for that year shows that the Old Quay Company paid taxes on two sites in central Manchester: on a ‘house, warehouse, stable, yard, wharf, timber yard and saw pits’ at 52 Water Street and a ‘warehouse and yard’ at 59 Water Street. 11 Green’s plan of 1794 shows a cluster of buildings (two of which were warehouses) and a wharf opening out on to Quay Street on the 1740 Old Quay site (52 Water Street) and also a third warehouse slightly further upstream labelled ‘new warehouse’ (59 Water Street), on the site later known as Old Botany Quay.12 The original Old Quay was assigned a rateable value of £151, while Old Botany Quay was rated at £75. Trade on the navigation grew rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century. One outcome of this renewed growth was a major increase in storage and transhipment facilities on the Irwell waterfront in Manchester. By 1850, then, the Mersey and Irwell Navigation operated seven warehouses and at least six wharves, which dominated a section of the Irwell waterfront from Charles Street (New Botany Wharf) in the south to Irwell Street (Old Botany Wharf) in the north. Development was particularly rapid in the brisk years of the Manchester and Liverpool trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Extensions began in 1804, when a fourth Mersey and Irwell Company warehouse was developed to the south of the Old Quay on a narrow lane called Lower Irwell Street between Water Street and the river. This was evidently a smaller site than the Old Quay or Old Botany; it was converted from an existing use as a dyehouse and rated at £50 in 1807.13 Development in the subsequent fifteen years took the form of the expansion of existing warehouse sites. Map evidence shows that the Old Botany warehouse (built by 1793) had been extended from a single narrow building running at right angles to the river in 1793 to a three-sided rectangular shape (with the Irwell frontage forming the ‘fourth side’) by 1819. This development had probably been completed by 1813; the rateable value of the site increased from £150 in

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1812 to £500 in 1813.14 Likewise, in 1820, a new L-shaped warehouse (Old Quay Warehouse 3) was added to the southernmost end of the 1740 Old Quay site.15 These developments spearheaded a five-fold increase in the rateable values of the Old Quay and Old Botany sites between 1804 and 1823.16 The Liverpool and Manchester trade boomed in the first five years of the 1820s, attracting the attention of railway developers, but on the Mersey and Irwell demands for warehouse accommodation, notwithstanding the extensions of 1804–20, again became pressing. So, in 1825, a wholly new warehouse site was developed at New Botany Quay, to the south of the Old Quay, just below Water Street’s intersection with Charles Street. This new site is shown on Bancks’s 1831 plan of Manchester and entailed the clearance of existing buildings to make room for a large open wharf and the building of a new L-shaped warehouse.17 In 1825, Thomas Ogden Lingard, the principal agent of the Old Quay Company, provided an overview of the company’s transhipment facilities at Manchester. At this time, the company’s six warehouses provided 24,000 square yards of warehouse room; in addition, the company controlled 14,000 square yards of wharves in central Manchester. This amounted to approximately eight acres of storage space, investments that had cost the company ‘upwards of £80,000’.18 In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Old Quay Company hauled the bulk of the navigation’s traffic. After 1815, the rising volume of the Liverpool–Manchester trade encouraged independent carriers to introduce new services on this route. On the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, the main new carrier was the New Quay Company, a joint-stock company established in 1822 with a capital of £30,000.19 Unlike most waterway carriers at this time, the New Quay Company developed its own storage and transhipment infrastructure, building a warehouse and wharves to the south of the Old Quay Company basin on the Manchester side of the River Irwell. These wharves were fully open by 1825. The basin is shown on Bancks’s 1831 plan. Located on Water Street to the south of Liverpool Road, it comprised a large open wharf and a collection of buildings. In the same year, the New Quay Company was assessed for poor relief of £600 on ‘a warehouse and wharves’.20 The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway did not put an end to the trade on the navigation; in fact, as chapter 3 has shown, waterways continued to handle the bulk of trade between Manchester and Liverpool. However, the Irwell waterfront benefited from few extensions between Bancks’s survey of 1831 and that of the Ordnance Survey in 1848. The major exception was the development of a new warehouse completed in 1844, named the Victoria Warehouse. This was built to the north of the 1740 Old Quay site. This building is still standing and has been subject to a detailed archaeological survey by UMAU. It was a five-storey brick-built L-shaped building with an internal area of 6,565 square yards.21

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Table 5.1 Warehouse development on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in Manchester, c.1740–1840 Warehouse

Old Quay Warehouse 1 Old Quay Warehouse 2 Old Quay Warehouse 3

Old Botany Warehouse

Location

Old Quay (Water Street/Quay Street) Old Quay (Water Street/Back Quay Street) Old Quay (Water Street/Back Quay Street South) Old Botany Wharf (Water Street/Cobden Street) Lower Irwell Street

Lower Irwell Street Warehouse New Botany Warehouse New Botany Wharf (Water Street/Charles Street) Victoria Warehouse Water Street/Back Quay Street

Construction date of original building

Rateable value, 1855 (£)

c.1740

1,187

c.1740 1820

c.1793 1804 1825 1844

850 (including wharf) 120 1,208 (including wharf) 400

The Old Quay Company’s purchase of the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal in 1842 provided a new opportunity for the development of storage and transhipment infrastructure for Manchester’s river trade. The Manchester and Salford Junction canal basin, which stood on a plot between Charles Street, Atherton Street, Quay Street and Water Street, had earlier been offered for sale to the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company. The key feature of the basin was a northward branch from the canal to Quay Street along which a covered potato market was established to serve the Irish vessels now capable of bringing goods to Manchester on the navigation from the port of Runcorn. This basin also contained at least five wharves for timber and slate.22 By the late 1840s, the Old Quay Company had established six additional wharves on the Irwell waterfront, including a timber yard, a logwood yard and six general wharves.23 Castlefield: the Bridgewater Canal The Bridgewater was Manchester’s first artificial canal and its most heavily trafficked waterway in the period studied here. It had also developed, by the mid-nineteenth century, Manchester’s most extensive waterside accommodation for the canal trade, in its extensive canal basin straddling the Manchester and Hulme township borders in the south-west of the borough’s built-up area (see Fig. 5.2).

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Figure 5.2 The Bridgewater Canal’s Castlefield/Hulme basin, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) CW = coal wharf TW = timber wharf SW = stone wharf 1 Duke’s Warehouse 2 Grocers’ Company Warehouse 3 Staffordshire Warehouse 4 Kenworthy’s Warehouse

5 Merchants’ Warehouse 6 Middle Warehouse 7 New Warehouse 8 Worthington’s Warehouse 9 Severn Warehouse 10 Potato wharves

By 1763, the Bridgewater Canal had opened its celebrated aqueduct over the River Irwell at Barton and had reached Cornbrook, in the township of Stretford, within a mile of Manchester. Here, according to a contemporary account, the duke of Bridgewater had ‘made a wharf ’ for selling Worsley coal, the key commodity of the canal’s trade in its earliest years. The completion of the canal into Manchester itself in 1765 led to the immediate development of transhipment accommodation in what was to become the Bridgewater’s major canal basin at Castlefield. The duke had originally planned to locate the canal’s terminus at Dolefield, at the point specified in the duke’s Act of Parliament, slightly to the east of the Old Quay, but eventually settled on Castlefield due to the difficulties in extending the canal through the steep land between Castlefield and the centre of Manchester. From 1763 to 1765, the duke invested almost £12,000 on buying land plots in Castlefield and Hulme. The bulk was spent on purchasing the Hulme Hall estate from

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George Lloyd Esq., which comprised approximately 43,000 square yards of land.24 The development of transport infrastructure and basin facilities at Castlefield/Hulme reflected trade patterns on the Bridgewater Canal. The first phase of the canal was built to carry coal from Worsley to Manchester and facilities for transhipping this commodity became the focus in early land development. The duke’s agents were faced with the problems of the low situation of Castlefield and the 8-metre slope between Castlefield and the lower reaches of Alport Lane (later part of Deansgate), which was the nearest road connecting the basin to the built-up part of the late eighteenth-century town. A large coal wharf was established on the east side of Castlefield, near to Knott Mill, which benefited both from the most level ground on the plot and its location closest to the lowest part of the road to central Manchester. Coal was initially carted up a steep routeway cut into the northern terrace of the Medlock, before a navigable tunnel was built in c.1770, complete with water-powered swivel crane, to haul boxes of coal directly from canal boats to the road at street level, within the sandstone bluff. The coal wharf was enlarged at a cost of £122 in 1792 and remained the hub of the canal’s coal trade into the nineteenth century.25 It was rated at £160 in 1845. By this time, the basin also contained four timber wharves, a manure wharf and a large slate wharf.26 The completion of the second phase of the canal to Runcorn in 1776 fundamentally altered trade on the canal and triggered contingent changes in land use at Castlefield. The Liverpool trade was dominated by inflows of three raw commodities (timber, cotton and corn), and outflows of processed cotton yarn and textiles. Timber, like coal, could be accommodated on open wharves, while corn and cotton required internal storage in warehouses. The great age of Manchester’s canal warehouses was about to begin. By 1794, three warehouses had already been established at Castlefield; five decades later the basin contained seven warehouses, while the Trustees owned a further four Manchester canal warehouses, which had originally been built by independent canal carriers.27 The Bridgewater Acts allowed landowners occupying canalside land to build warehouses and wharves to store and redistribute canal-borne commodities. However, the duke’s occupation of canalside lands for the final half-mile of the canal into Manchester prevented the establishment of private wharves at the Bridgewater’s easterly end.28 In early 1791, one of the many canal promoters at work in Manchester complained of the duke’s ‘monopoly of the freight on his canal of nearly thirty year standing’.29 The duke of Bridgewater thus not only kick-started the canal age in Manchester but also spearheaded the first phase of canal warehouse development in the town. In doing so, as outlined above, the duke’s agents pioneered a new type of warehouse design, its key original

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Table 5.2 Warehouses in the Bridgewater Canal basin, c.1770–1840 Warehouse

Location

Construction date of original building

Rateable value, 1845 (£)

Duke’s Warehouse Grocers’ Company Warehouse Staffordshire Warehouse Kenworthy’s Warehouse Merchants’ Warehouse Middle Warehouse New Warehouse

Knott Mill/Hulme 1771 (rebuilt 1790) Castlefield 1776 (extension 1809)

860 400

Castlefield

900

Castlefield

1786–88 (extension 1804) 1820

699

Castlefield

1827

600

Hulme Hulme

1831 1836

720 1,080

feature being canal arms that passed directly into the warehouse. An American visitor to Castlefield in 1801 marvelled that ‘the water passes under some of the warehouses which facilitated the loading and unloading of the boats’.30 This Type 1 layout was subsequently adopted by canal warehouses in Manchester and elsewhere. The first warehouse built at Castlefield was known as the Duke’s Warehouse, reflecting its initial use by the duke’s boats, which began services to Warrington – before the canal was fully complete to Runcorn – in the early 1770s.31 The Duke’s Warehouse was built in 1771.32 It pioneered the Type 1 design, with two internal canal arms that facilitated unloading. The original warehouse was a four-storey building positioned at the terminal point of the canal with a floor area of 2,421 square yards, straddling the Manchester– Hulme township boundary, alongside the road at Knott Mill, which facilitated the transhipment of canal cargoes to road carts. The warehouse was extended in the late 1770s and early 1780s to incorporate an old fulling mill on the Hulme bank of the Medlock, extending the floor space to 6,253 square yards. The warehouse burnt down on 1 October 1789 but was rebuilt by 1794 on roughly the same footprint.33 The first independent carriers did not appear on the Bridgewater Canal until 1774, and were concentrated initially on the trades between Manchester, the west midlands and London, via the Bridgewater’s junction with the Trent and Mersey Canal at Preston Brook. The rise of independent public carriers led to the development of new warehouses in Manchester. Thus, in 1776, two years after independent carriers arrived on the canal, the duke’s accounts noted that his agents were in the process of ‘erecting a new warehouse at Castle Street’.34 This warehouse is now usually known as the Grocers’ Warehouse – due to its later occupation by the Grocers’ Company – but it was

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built more than thirty years before the firm was established in the canal trade. The first known occupants were Henshall & Co. and Worthington, Gilbert & Co., the two major public carriers on the Bridgewater Canal at this time.35 Both firms carried to and from the west midlands, hence the warehouse’s original name of the ‘Staffordshire Warehouse’. 36 This nomenclature is somewhat confusing to historians in that the third Castlefield warehouse (built in 1786–88 and described below) is now, and was by the 1840s, referred to as the Staffordshire Warehouse. However, for the purposes of consistency with other studies of Castlefield, the name Grocers’ Warehouse will be used here for the 1776 warehouse and Staffordshire Warehouse for the 1786–88 development. The Grocers’ Warehouse was studied by Tomlinson prior to its demolition in 1960. He found that the original part of the building was 21 yards long and 10.5 yards wide internally, with its five storeys rising 45 feet above the canal. It was built over the navigable tunnel for coal boats, developed in the 1760s, which formed the basis, albeit in a modified form, of its water-powered Type 1 hoisting system. This internal canal arm had been joined by another by 1807. A major extension took place in 1809, when the Trustees laid out £2,060 on materials and construction costs in extending the warehouse to take the eastern gable of the building to the road at Knott Mill.37 This warehouse extension was rated at £90 for the first time in 1810, increasing the total RV of the Grocers’ Warehouse to £352.38 The final warehouse form had a floor area of approximately 4,650 square yards.39 In 1786, work commenced on a third Castlefield warehouse, now generally known as the Staffordshire Warehouse.40 It is portrayed with hatched lines on a map that accompanied Lewis’s directory of 1788 – a style of presentation that reflected work planned or in progress – which suggests it was still under construction at that time. By 1796, the warehouse was rated at £112, higher than the Grocers’ Warehouse (then £93) and lower than the Manchester side of the Duke’s Warehouse (£142).41 The warehouse was served by a northerly branch of the canal from the main trunk, which divided in two to form internal arms that passed all the way through and beyond the warehouse. In 1804, the Trustees laid out £2,413 on ‘a new addition to the west of the warehouse at bottom of Castlefield’, as well as ‘light new offices near the said warehouses’.42 The dimensions of neither the original warehouse nor its extension are known, although the enlarged warehouse was rated at £459 in 1807. Further developments of the Bridgewater basin took place in 1820–36, when four new warehouses were built. Kenworthy’s Warehouse (Type 1) was built in 1820, on a short canal spur to the north of the lock that linked the Rochdale and Bridgewater canals. Its rateable value, on opening, was £400, increasing to £450 by 1831.43 The Merchants’ Warehouse was built in 1827–

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28. Work began in 1825 – this date features on an inscription on one of the shipping arches – to produce a three-storey building that was the only one of the Castlefield warehouses to be built side-on to the canal. It featured two internal shipping holes on the western elevation.44 Despite these major extensions in warehousing in the basin in the 1820s, and the onset of railway competition from 1830, the demands of trade continued to pressurise warehouse space in the basin. Thus, in 1831, a fifth Bridgewater warehouse – the Middle Warehouse – was built at the Manchester terminus. This was, in fact, the first warehouse to be built entirely on the Hulme side of the canal, with access provided by a newly built broad canal arm, which passed into two internal shipping holes. Shortly after its completion it was rated at £500.45 These last-mentioned warehouses were costly investments; in the years 1826–33 total improvements in warehouses alone cost the Bridgewater Trustees £44,000.46 The major extensions in warehouse provision on the Bridgewater Canal from 1820 to 1831 proved insufficient to accommodate the secular increases in the volume of trade in the 1830s. This is evident from the following statement made by Captain James Bradshaw, deputy superintendent of the Bridgewater Trust in 1833: Our trade is much increasing, and we are experiencing great detention and loss from the want of necessary accommodation in warehouses etc … it is absolutely necessary if the concern is to be carried on to profit that means should be found to make the requisite conveniences and afford facilities to our trade. 47

This trade growth led to the building of a seventh Bridgewater warehouse in Manchester, a development financed by a payment of £5,000 by the duke of Sutherland.48 Built on the Hulme side of the canal, it was the largest of the Bridgewater warehouses, with an internal floor area of more than 8,900 square yards.49 In 1837, it had a rateable value of £1,120, the highest of the basin’s warehouses.50 An additional basin development in the 1840s reflected inter-navigational competition with the Old Quay Company for the trade of foodstuffs to Manchester. The Mersey and Irwell’s plans for a potato market in the Manchester and Salford Junction canal basin led the Trustees to develop their own potato wharf on two new northward branches from the canal at the western end of the basin in Hulme. Four covered sheds were constructed to cover the length of each side of the two branches, the sheds partly overhanging the canal branches to facilitate sales made directly from boats. The potato wharves were partly open in 1840 and completed in 1841. In the latter year, their RV was calculated by poor relief assessors at £200. 51

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Salford: the Manchester, Bolton and Bury canal basin The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company was unique in that the heart of its storage and transhipment operations was in Salford rather than Manchester. The company built the major part of its basin alongside Oldfield Road in Salford, the terminus of the canal from its opening in 1797 until the completion of the canal extension to the Salford bank of the Irwell in 1809. Following the Irwell extension, and the building of the company’s railway to Bolton, additional wharves were developed around Stanley Street and Ordsall Lane in Salford. The use of Oldfield Road as the hub of the canal’s commercial activities was evidently not the company’s original intention. Following parliamentary authorisation in 1791, the company viewed lands adjoining the Old Quay Company basin on the Manchester side of the Irwell as potential sites for warehouses and wharves.52 Likewise, Green’s 1794 plan of Manchester and Salford shows a ‘bason’ site on the projected line of the canal on the Salford bank of the Irwell, opposite to the Old Quay Company’s future New Botany Quay.53 By the summer of 1794, the canal was largely complete from Oldfield Road in Salford to Bolton and Bury but financial difficulties precluded the purchasing of the remaining land required for the Irwell connection; in June of that year the company estimated that it needed £1,596 to acquire the remaining land required to complete the parliamentary line of the canal, all of which was in the township of Salford.54 Without the funds to extend the canal to either of the basin sites posited in the 1790s, the company began to acquire smaller quantities of land around Oldfield Road, which had good access to Chapel Street and, from there, to two road bridges (Old Bridge and Blackfriars) over the river to central Manchester. So, in late 1795, the company purchased two plots, from the earl of Derby and James Cooke respectively, adjoining the canal and Oldfield Road.55 In early 1796, the canal company estimated that it required £2,000 for warehouses at ‘Manchester, Bolton and Bury’.56 However, with its financial problems evidently at the forefront of its thinking, the company placed its hopes on private firms to establish the infrastructure for the canal’s trade. Thus, shortly after the canal’s opening in 1797, the company circulated handbills and issued newspaper advertisements outlining clauses in its Act of Parliament that authorised ‘proprietors of Lands to erect and provide such warehouses and other conveniences’. This policy was introduced by the company because ‘wharves warehouses and other conveniences … [were] much wanted’.57 It is not known how extensive the take-up of this initiative was. Certainly, later evidence suggested that a Mr Starkie had established a wharf near Oldfield Road.58 In any case, by the close of the eighteenth century, the

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company was taking its own steps to improve storage and transhipment facilities at Oldfield Road. Thus, in June 1799, a new canal branch was built to the north of the main canal to sit alongside Oldfield Road so as to establish new wharf land.59 At this time, the company purchased approximately 20,000 square yards of land from Mr Starkie and the Overseers of the Salford Poor in order to build a second northward canal branch to the west of the original branch alongside Oldfield Road. In addition, the company purchased Babley Fields (a plot of 8,336 square yards) from James Ackers to extend the basin along the canal to the west.60 These land purchases comprised the bulk of the original basin to the west of Oldfield Road (see Fig. 5.3). A warehouse was built on the Oldfield Road canal branch and in 1802 the committee ordered that the warehouse site be enclosed with an 8-foot-high wall, with a gate to allow access to road carts.61 The warehouse was insured for £1,000 in 1810.62 The canal branch and warehouse are shown on Pigot’s map of 1819 and Bancks’s of 1831. Roughly half of the footprint of the warehouse was built over the branch canal to allow internal unloading from boats (Type 1), with the remaining part of the warehouse standing flush to Oldfield Road. Although the warehouse was still in operation in 1840, it had been

Figure 5.3 The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal’s Salford basin, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) CW = coal wharf SW = stone wharf MW = manure wharf

1 Site of infilled canal branch and warehouse (demolished c.1845)

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demolished by the time of the OS survey in 1848.63 By this time, it was clear that the canal had not been able to attract a significant proportion of the trade in general merchandise between Manchester, Bolton and Bury from the rival turnpike roads. From 1831, the canal company began to build a railway line, alongside the canal to Bolton, with a terminal warehouse at Ordsall Lane in order to capture this trade; the company’s Salford canal basin was largely given over to providing wharfage space for the canal’s remaining and still extensive coal and stone trades. From 1805, the canal company began at last to complete the final phase of the canal to join Oldfield Road with the River Irwell. Land was purchased in various plots from 1806 to 1809 and the junction completed in the latter year.64 Further accommodation for the canal trade accompanied this extension. In Salford, the company developed three new wharves on the north and south sides of the canal extension between Oldfield Lane and Ordsall Lane.65 In a much larger development, the company built a new complex of coal wharves between Stanley Street and Ordsall Lane on Ringspiggott field, a 90,000-square-yard plot purchased from the Bridgewater Trustees in 1833, the bulk of which was required for the railway to Bolton.66 The building of the coal wharves for the canal trade cost £2,300 and they were completed by 1834.67 A large manure wharf was also developed to the south of the canal at a cost of £739.68 The company’s wharves for the railway trade were established to the north of the Stanley Street coal wharves, along Ordsall Lane.69 The completion of the canal to the River Irwell also opened up possibilities for extending transhipment facilities to the township of Manchester. This opportunity was evidently taken seriously. As early as 1805, the committee entered into negotiations to purchase the 5,000-acre plot to the east of Water Street that later formed the Manchester and Salford Junction canal basin (see Fig. 5.1). This required the agreement of the Old Quay Company ‘that a canal shall be made from the … river to the plot of land in question’.70 Whether this agreement was reached is not clear but the matter was not pursued again until the early 1820s, when the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company agreed to take the lands ‘for the purpose of building a warehouse upon’.71 Plans of warehouses, as well as the required lock and canal branch, were considered by the committee in April and June of 1825, when the company sought the ‘immediate occupation of the land’.72 However, the canal company records make no further mention of the project until the close of 1826, when an intermediary of the landowners attended a committee meeting and was informed that ‘the canal company abandon all intention of trying on leasing the said land’.73 The reasons why the Manchester warehouse project was discontinued are not entirely clear; one can only speculate that the end of the trade boom in 1825 discouraged the company from making costly invest-

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ments. Subsequently, the single warehouse and extensive wharves for the coal trade in Salford remained the only storage and transhipment infrastructure on the canal. Piccadilly: the Rochdale and Ashton canal basins On the east of Manchester, the Rochdale and Ashton canals developed adjoining canal basins at Piccadilly. By 1850, the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin contained eight warehouses and a series of wharf plots, initially 25 in number but reduced to 17 by the late 1830s. The Ashton’s Piccadilly basin was also occupied by the Huddersfield and Peak Forest canal companies, and contained, by 1850, six warehouses and 12 wharves. The two basins were formed on a previously undeveloped plot named Stanley Barn Fields situated on the eastern fringes of the Manchester township and owned by Lord Ducie. It is shown on William Green’s 1794 map of Manchester as bounded by Shooter’s Brow (later renamed London Road), Brewer Street, Lees Street, a stream named Shooters Brook and a coal wharf belonging to the duke of Bridgewater. The plot comprised approximately 56,000 square yards and was divided into two parts to accommodate the separate canal basins of the Rochdale Canal Company (23,000 square yards) and the Ashton Canal Company (34,000 square yards). The Rochdale Canal Company’s part of the plot was the smaller of the two and, as the canal’s construction progressed, it became evident that the land purchased from Ducie had left the company ‘rather cramped’ for wharfage space at Piccadilly.74 Hence, in 1803, the company purchased an extra 10,000 square yards of adjacent land to the north-east, on a chief rent of one shilling per square yard per year (£500), from Daniel Leech, an absentee landowner living in London; Leech later returned to Manchester to develop his remaining land into a private canal basin known as the Brownsfield wharves (see below).75 Further land was acquired by the company in 1805, when two plots totalling around 10,000 square yards situated to the north of the land purchased from Lord Ducie were bought from Edward Tooke, a member of the Rochdale Canal Company’s committee, on a chief rent of £832 per year.76 These purchases extended the perimeter of the basin to Back China Lane, Upper Stanley Street and Leech Street, creating a total basin area of approximately nine acres. Surviving manuscript plans show a number of proposed basin layouts for the Rochdale Canal’s Piccadilly basin. The earliest design from 1796 featured a large oval reservoir in the middle of the land purchased from Lord Ducie, with two contiguous semi-circular warehouses. In 1804, a revised plan shows a reservoir and a single warehouse situated in the north-east area of the basin, on the land purchased from Leech.77 Neither of these plans were followed.

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The first warehouse was built in 1806–07 on the land purchased from Tooke in the western part of the basin, a decision that was probably influenced by the opening of Dale Street, which improved access to the centre of the town.78 The Rochdale Canal Company’s first warehouse was completed in 1807. This warehouse still stands today and has been the subject of a detailed analysis by UMAU.79 It is a six-storey building, including basement and loft. Originally, the upper storeys were completely open with a hoist trapdoor at the centre of each floor through which goods were lifted from below. The warehouse was of the conventional Type 1 design with a canal branch passing inside to enable barges to unload under cover using the hoisting system, which was driven by a large underground waterwheel installed in 1807 and replaced in 1824.80 UMAU measured the 1807 warehouse at 2,571 square yards, roughly of average size for surviving canal warehouses in the northwest.81 The ashlar stone, laid according to the watershot construction method, provided the warehouse’s most distinctive external feature. It thus had much in common with the stone-built industrial and domestic buildings of the Pennines, from where the materials and the construction methods originated. The warehouse was insured for £3,000 in early 1808.82 The bulk of the planning for the Piccadilly basin was complete by 1810, when Manchester surveyor William Johnson produced a plan that closely resembled the basin’s eventual layout. Johnson’s plan identifies eight proposed canal branches within the basin and 23 specified wharf plots of varying sizes, ranging from 466 to 1,590 square yards, as well as two additional areas specified as general wharves. Dale Street divided the basin into two sections. The smaller eastern section, bounded by London Road, Lees Street and Ducie Street, comprised slightly fewer than 10,000 square yards, while the principal western part of the basin was framed by Back China Lane, Upper Stanley Street, Leech Street and Ducie Street and comprised approximately 35,000 square yards. The 1810 plan identifies four buildings within the basin. The first was the 1807 warehouse. The second and third buildings were built alongside the northern bank of the canal; one was of an L-shaped design and was positioned next to the Dale Street lock, the other was at the centre of the basin and had a dog-leg shape to accommodate a kink in the canal. The Rochdale Canal Company described the buildings as ‘sheds’; a contemporary sketch of the dog-leg shed shows a three-storey building, slightly set back from the canal, with a series of openings to allow external loading and unloading, but no internal shipping holes (Type 2).83 Both three-storey sheds were completed in 1810. The fourth building was the company offices fronting Dale Street, completed in 1807.84 Although the 1810 plan bore a distinct similarity to the layout of the basin by 1850 (Fig. 5.4), it was many years before this was realised. Development in

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Figure 5.4 The Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), with additions from RCCP, B2/Plans, Box 8, item 2 SW = stone wharf 1 Stone Warehouse 2 Old Brick Warehouse, 1818 (converted from sheds, 1810) 3 New Brick Warehouse, 1822 (converted from sheds, 1810) 4 Merchants’ Warehouse 5 Veevers’ Warehouse

6 Marsden’s Warehouse 7 1836 Warehouse 8 Jackson’s Shed 9 Iron Shed 10, 11 lime and coal wharf 12 land sold to William Occleshaw 13 Union Warehouse

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the basin was concentrated in short periods during upswings in trade.85 In the summer of 1817, the Rochdale Canal Company responded to the rise in trade by raising a loan of £6,000 to provide a new warehouse.86 William Heap, a Manchester builder, submitted a plan to convert the 1810 dog-leg shed by extending its width by nine yards and increasing its height to five storeys. The estimated cost was £4,330. In early 1818, the Halifax engineer Thomas Bradley slightly modified the specifications.87 The resulting brick warehouse adhered to the Type 1 form, featuring two shipping arches served by short internal canal arms adjacent to the canal. It was to be the largest of the basin’s warehouses, providing a total floor area of 6,568 square yards, comparable in size to some of the largest warehouses at Castlefield. The company also invested in improving the wharves at this time, gravelling 2,000 square yards of land on the north side of the basin and installing cranes ‘for the loading and unloading of flags, stone, and timber’.88 These developments did not hold back the tide for long. By 1822, Manchester’s economy was again moving forward and the company reported that ‘additional warehousing at Manchester is wanted’.89 The decision was taken to rebuild the remaining L-shaped 1810 shed by the Dale Street lock.90 This new five-storey warehouse was completed in 1822. It had a conventional Type 1 layout, with floor space of 5,100 square yards. This was the first of the Rochdale Canal Company’s warehouses to make use of iron rather than timber columns, a change in construction technique that was already evident in Manchester’s cotton factories.91 In 1823, this ‘new brick warehouse’ was insured for £6,000.92 Several other improvements were made around this time: new hoisting tackle was installed in the 1807 and 1822 warehouses, the Manchester millwright Thomas C. Hewes being employed to construct a Table 5.3 Warehouses in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1807–41 Warehouse

Construction date of original building

Stone Warehouse Old Brick Warehouse

1807 1810 (rebuilt and extended 1818) 1810 (rebuilt and extended 1822) 1825 1825 (rebuilt 1830) 1833 1836 1841

New Brick Warehouse Veevers’ Warehouse Merchants’ Warehouse Marsden’s Warehouse Jackson’s Warehouse Jackson’s Shed

Source: GMCRO, RCCP, B2 Minute Books; Rochdale Canal Company Plans.

Area in 1851 (sq. yds) 2,717 6,568 5,100 726 2,267 749 5,511 652

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waterwheel and other equipment for the purpose.93 Meanwhile, the company built its Lees Street branch to the west of Dale Street, known as ‘Occleshaw’s branch’, after the wharf ’s tenant.94 At around this time, the company also constructed two branches in the western part of the basin: one connected the canal to Ducie Street, the other was alongside Piccadilly lock, serving a small shed (Type 1) belonging to Sattersfield & Cresswell lime burners and merchants, who leased the wharf.95 As a testament to the canal’s prosperity and as a means of regulating traffic and reducing pilfering, the company ordered ‘that a gateway built of stone rusticated be erected at the Entrance into Manchester wharf, between the office and the new [1822] warehouse there’.96 This archway remains in place today. Sustained commercial growth to 1825 demanded yet further extensions. Contracts were agreed for building two further warehouses in 1825, as well as the cutting of branches proposed in the 1810 plan. The first branch was cut to Upper Stanley Street in the eastern part of the basin to open up new wharf space. The second branch was cut to Back China Lane to accommodate the building of a new Type 1 warehouse, five storeys in height.97 Completed in 1825, it took its name, the Merchants’ Warehouse, from its principal tenant, the Rochdale and Halifax Merchants’ Company. In the same year, a second warehouse was built in the western section of the basin between Dale Street and Lees Street. Originally built for the use of the Manchester and Liverpool Union Company, after 1827 it was occupied by J. & J. Veevers, carriers in the Sowerby Bridge–Liverpool trade.98 The Veevers’ Warehouse, as it became known, adhered to the conventional Type 1 layout, although at just 726 square yards it was much smaller than typical north-west canal warehouses, reflecting the fact that it was, from the outset, designed to accommodate a single firm. The Rochdale Canal Company borrowed £15,000 to carry out these works.99 After the economic crisis of 1826, the canal’s trade stagnated for the remainder of the decade. In October 1829, fire destroyed the Merchants’ Warehouse, ruining property and contents worth approximately £50,000.100 The Merchants’ Warehouse was rebuilt in 1830 and leased to its two previous occupants, although the new building had three storeys rather than five, with a total floor area of 2,267 square yards.101 It was not until the 1830s that trade again began to increase. This was a time of rapid commercial growth and the most prosperous years of the canal’s history, annual dividends peaking at £6 per £85 share in 1839.102 The upturn in trade led the Rochdale Canal Company to undertake several new projects within the basin. First, Marsden & Co., a public carrier in the Hull trade, which had previously operated mainly on the Huddersfield Canal, requested new warehousing. The company’s engineer proposed building on the north side of Ducie Street, then used as coal wharves by Landless &

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Dickinson of Littleborough. On this land, the company constructed a small two-storey warehouse (Type 1), with a floor area of 749 square yards, served by a single internal arm.103 In 1833, the warehouse was insured for £1,000. In 1835, a single-storey shed was built for J. & L. Marsden adjacent to this warehouse.104 Shortly after, a much more substantial warehouse was built in the northeastern part of the basin, prompted by an extension of the corn trade. Plans to build a new warehouse, straddling the canal branch to Upper Stanley Street, were finally agreed in May 1836. Construction was rapid and the brick warehouse was completed by autumn 1836 and was insured for £5,000.105 It was a six-storey, Type 1 design with two internal shipping arms on the northern elevation. The upper five floors had a variety of floor plans, surrounding trap doors that allowed the raising and lowering of goods via a manual hoisting system. The 1836 warehouse – it featured a prominent date stone – possessed an austere façade very much in keeping with the mills and factories of nearby Ancoats.106 It became known as Jackson’s Warehouse after its main occupants, although, initially, the Rochdale Canal Company occupied most of the building. The commercial success of Jackson & Sons, carriers between Liverpool and Hull, was underlined further when in 1841, the Rochdale Canal Company built the firm a smaller two-storey warehouse (Type 3) between Leech Street and the Upper Stanley Street branch.107 This latter warehouse, known as Jackson’s Shed, was insured for £400 in late 1841.108 After the opening of the Manchester and Leeds Railway there were few major developments in the basin. In 1839, a further arm was cut to Lees Street, thus realising the seventh out of the eight arms originally projected in the 1810 plan.109 The arm along the northern side of Piccadilly was the only proposed branch not completed because, in the mid-1820s, the Rochdale Canal Company sold this land to William Occleshaw, who built a corn mill and a lead pipe manufactory on it.110 In addition to building Jackson’s Shed in 1841, the company also built a small single-storey shed for Messrs Buckley, iron merchants, in 1844. This was the last substantial building to be erected within the basin. Under the terms of the 1855 lease with the four railway companies, the Rochdale Canal Company was prohibited from adding further buildings to the site.111 The Ashton basin, meanwhile, was developed on the opposite side of Ducie Street from the Rochdale Canal. Although the Ashton Canal Company took a larger share of Stanley Barn Fields than the Rochdale, it made additional and very extensive land purchases to the east of Great Ancoats Street to the north of the proposed route of the canal from the Feoffees of the Manchester Grammar School in Ancoats, paying an annual chief rent of £965.112 The financial difficulties facing the company in the late 1790s and

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early 1800s led it to sell off large parts of its abundant Piccadilly and Ancoats land to other canal companies, canal carriers and industrialists. The first infrastructure on the canal, however, was constructed by the Ashton Canal Company. In July 1798, plans were made to build a warehouse on the Piccadilly land purchased from Lord Ducie.113 The warehouse, which cost approximately £1,000, was built at the terminal point of the canal, with a single internal canal arm on the southern elevation.114 It was rated in 1800 at just £33, which suggests that it was not completely finished.115 In the mid1790s, the company took steps to open up its extensive lands in Ancoats. The company established two long canal branches on the grammar school land and staked out land plots for wharves for sale to independent operators. The company began the process of selling the wharves on the Ancoats branch from late 1798, mostly to colliery proprietors in the Oldham and Ashton areas, as well as to industrialists seeking factory sites.116 From 1802, the canal company began to develop wharfage accommodation on the plot of land purchased from Lord Ducie. To this end, the company built a new canal arm in the basin. The arm took an elongated Ushape, branching from the south side of the main trunk of the canal to the east of the warehouse.117 This work, completed by 1804, opened up the west side of the basin for trade.118 Part of this land had already been sold in 1802 to James Mallalieu, a company committee member, and it was he, rather than the canal company, who built a warehouse at the end of the new branch. The north elevation adjoined Ducie Street, with the end point of the U-shaped canal arm passing into the building on the southern elevation.119 Although originally a private development, after Mallalieu died in 1812, the company agreed to buy back the wharf and its buildings from his trustees.120 Despite the Piccadilly basin being the Ashton Canal’s closest land to the centre of Manchester, the company continued its policy of selling land to external parties. In 1802, a 6,000-square-yard plot in the south-east corner of the basin was sold to Samuel Oldknow. Although Oldknow is best known for his role in developing England’s muslin trade in the 1780s, he also made substantial investments in limestone quarries in Derbyshire and was closely involved with the Peak Forest Canal Company in the early nineteenth century.121 Oldknow built a warehouse on the land in Piccadilly that was completed between 1804 and 1808.122 It was linked to the Ashton Canal by a short branch to the south of the main canal, conforming to the typical Type 1 layout. The warehouse was rated for poor relief at £150 in 1815, although by 1834 the building had been sold to James Lillie and had been converted into an iron foundry.123 Further land sales were made by the company to the Peak Forest and Huddersfield canals in the early nineteenth century. In 1801, the company entered into negotiations with the Peak Forest Canal Company to sell land in

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Manchester for storage and transhipment. The Ashton, aware of the demand for limestone in Manchester, as well as the availability of return cargoes from Manchester, strongly advised the Peak Forest Canal Company of the need for ‘procuring a sufficient number of boats to complete the orders for limestone’ and of ‘the necessity of building warehouses to accommodate the trade from Manchester up the Peak Forest Canal’.124 A sale of 21,980 square yards of land in Ancoats from the Ashton to the Peak Forest was agreed in 1802 on a chief rent of £458.125 The Peak Forest Canal Company, however, appears to have used the land solely for establishing wharves for the sale of limestone; no doubt the space available in the warehouse established by the leading shareholder Samuel Oldknow was deemed to be sufficient for its needs. By the mid-1820s, the Peak Forest Canal Company was organising the Manchester part of its business from one of the Ashton Canal Company’s warehouses in the Piccadilly basin.126 In fact, definite evidence of a Peak Forest Canal Company warehouse is not found until the publication of the Ordnance Survey map of Manchester and Salford in 1851. The OS plan suggests that the Peak Forest Canal Company occupied a warehouse adjoining the original Ashton Canal Company warehouse of 1798. This was a narrow extension on the southern elevation of the original building with a separate internal canal arm. Earlier map evidence suggests that the Peak Forest warehouse was built between 1831 and 1838.127 In 1807, meanwhile, the Ashton Canal Company sold a further 18,000 square yards of land in Piccadilly and Ancoats to the Huddersfield Canal Company at an annual chief rent of £370.128 The Huddersfield company did use part of the land to build a warehouse in the Piccadilly basin. The warehouse was completed by 1808 and is included on a plan of Manchester and Salford produced in that year.129 The warehouse was built above a short arm that linked the Rochdale and Ashton canals, which was widened to allow boats to unload without impeding the canal, with an easterly wing towards Junction Street. It was rated in 1815 at £70, before being significantly rebuilt and extended in 1825. In 1834, the older part of the warehouse was rated at £77 and the newer part, complete with six storeys, was rated at £305.130 An additional private canal warehouse was built just outside the Ashton canal basin on Mather Street. This development originated from a proposal made by John Rooth & Co., carriers on the Ashton and Huddersfield canals in 1807. To develop its canal trade, the carrier requested that the canal company issue a loan of £1,500 to allow the firm to build a warehouse and wharves on a plot of land it owned in Manchester, as well as to remove the towpath between the north bank of the canal and the carrier’s land between the canal and Mather Street. The company agreed to advance a loan of only £500 and refused to forego the towpath, offering instead to build a bridge over the towpath to allow Rooth & Co. to unload their boats below the path. In

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Figure 5.5 The Ashton Canal’s Piccadilly basin, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) CW = coal wharf SW = stone wharf TW = timber wharf 1 Ashton Canal Warehouse 1 2 Huddersfield Canal Company Warehouse 3 Site of Oldknow’s Warehouse 4 Mallalieu’s Warehouse 5 Ashton Canal Warehouse 2

6 7 8 9

North Staffordshire Warehouse Peak Forest Canal Company’s Warehouse Rooth’s Warehouse Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company ‘Stores’ 10 Lime, coal and iron wharf 11 Coal and lime wharf

addition, the company allowed a 10 per cent reduction of canal tolls on the stone flags and slate brought down the canal to be used in the building of the warehouse.131 Rooth & Co.’s warehouse was completed by 1808. Recent archaeological work on the warehouse site has revealed a probable internal canal arm, built below the towpath bridge, dating from the early nineteenth century.132 Two additional Piccadilly canal warehouses were built by the Ashton Canal Company. The first building (Ashton Canal Warehouse 2) appears on Manchester maps from 1819 and consisted of a long, narrow, rectangular building at right angles to the north side main trunk of the canal and extending to Ducie Street. By 1831, the building had been extended, along the Ducie Street side, to form a T-shape. The OS plan of 1851 shows that the building was served by an internal canal arm, although it is not clear if this was included in the original building design.133 The final warehouse was built on the western side of the Piccadilly basin, near to Mallalieu’s Warehouse, between 1831 and 1838. By 1850, the two buildings had been joined together,

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Table 5.4 Warehouses in the Ashton Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1798–1838 Warehouse

Location

Construction date Rateable of original building value, 1845 (£)

Ashton Canal Warehouse 1 Ashton Canal Warehouse 2 Oldknow’s Warehouse Rooth’s Warehouse Huddersfield Canal Company Warehouse Mallalieu’s Warehouse Peak Forest Canal Company Warehouse North Staffordshire Warehouse

Ducie Street Ducie Street Store Street Mather Street Junction Street

1798 1808–19 1804–08 1804–08 1804–08

260 170 Not rateda Not ratedb 470

Ducie Street Ducie Street

1808–19 1831–38

200 92

Ducie Street

1831–38

180

Notes: a = rated at £150 in 1825; b = rated at £188 in 1834.

the newer part occupied by the Trent and Mersey Canal department of the North Staffordshire Railway Company (Fig. 5.5).134 In the 1840s, meanwhile, the Ashton Canal Company had extended its Manchester storage and transhipment facilities by establishing a new wharf site between the Piccadilly basin and Great Ancoats Street. This entailed the building of two new canal branches between the canal and Meadow Street, opening up five wharf plots, which were mainly leased to stone merchants.135 The bulk of the canal warehouses on Manchester’s canals were thus built by canal companies rather than by canal users. Aside from the examples described in relation to the Ashton Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin and the New Quay basin at Water Street, independent canal carriers built five additional canal warehouses in Manchester before 1850. The first non-corporate canal warehouse was established by Pickford & Co. in the early nineteenth century. The firm was, of course, already a major road carrier in Manchester prior to the canal age and began to switch resources from road to canal from the late eighteenth century. By 1794, Pickfords occupied part of the Grocers’ Warehouse in Castlefield. However, at this time, the company evidently continued to run the bulk of its Manchester operations from its offices, warehouses and stables on Oxford Street. The completion of the Rochdale Canal through the south of the township of Manchester, between Castlefield and Piccadilly, in 1799–1800, provided the opportunity to link Pickfords’ Oxford Street premises to the canal system via a long canal arm along Dickinson Street. The canal branch was complete by 1800 and in 1815 the warehouse was rated at £350.136 This road/canal warehouse was evidently owned and used by Pickfords until they withdrew from the canal trade in the late

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1840s.137 On the OS plan of Oxford Street, surveyed in 1849, the site is not specified as a warehouse.138 Two further canal warehouses were built at the bottom of Deansgate, just outside the Castlefield estate, on a plot between Deansgate, Trafford Street and the north bank of the Rochdale Canal. A surviving manuscript plan in the records of the Rochdale Canal Company, dating from 1804–07, describes the plot as belonging to Worthington, Gilbert & Co., one of the first independent carriers on the Bridgewater Canal.139 Both warehouses were complete by 1808.140 The first was an L-shaped building, the short side flush with Crown Street, which bisected the plot, and featured a short internal canal arm, spurred from the north bank of the Rochdale Canal. The second – known as the Severn Warehouse – was a rectangular building that adjoined Deansgate on the western elevation, served by an extension of the branch canal. The labelling on Bancks’s 1831 plan indicates that Worthington, Gilbert & Co. occupied the L-shaped warehouse and James Cogswell occupied the Severn Warehouse.141 The 1834 rate books indicate that the two warehouses (with a combined rating of £500) were owned by the Bridgewater Trustees, although it is not known when the change of ownership from Worthington, Gilbert & Co. to the Trustees occurred.142 The remaining two private canal warehouses adjoined the Rochdale Canal between the Castlefield and Piccadilly basin. One was built between 1804 and 1808 and was separated from the Rochdale Canal Company basin at Piccadilly by London Road. Named the Union Warehouse, it was built directly over the main trunk of the Rochdale Canal, incorporating a further internal arm, alongside the canal, to allow unloading to take place without interfering with canal traffic. In 1838, the Bridgewater Trustees purchased the Union Warehouse for £10,000 from the Manchester and Liverpool Union Company and invested an additional £1,471 in improving it and making it suitable for their needs.143 The Bridgewater Trustees also owned a warehouse on a branch to the south of the Rochdale Canal on Chorlton Street. The building is first shown on a Manchester plan in 1831, when it is described as a ‘foundry’, while the OS plan, surveyed in 1849, describes the building as ‘The Grocer’s Company Store’.144 Trade directory evidence suggests it was used by the Bridgewater Trustees, the Grocers’ Company, and John Kenworthy & Co. in 1855.145 As the building was not designed for the canal trade, it did not feature the internal canal arm characteristic of Manchester’s canal warehouses. The Union and Chorlton Street warehouses were still owned by the Bridgewater Trustees when they sold the Bridgewater Canal in 1872.146

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The business of the canal warehouse Warehouses stored and transhipped the canals’ high-value, inter-regional commodity trades. Two main types of firms occupied canal warehouses. First, public carriers who operated regular scheduled services on canals leased warehouse space in one of the large-scale warehouses in canal company basins (or much more rarely built their own warehouses). Second, warehouse space was occupied by the canal companies themselves, either to facilitate the trade of their own carrying departments or to provide accommodation for private carriers hauling foodstuffs, manufactures, salt and sundries. In canal company basins, priority was given to the public carriers. They paid fixed rents, payable in quarterly or bi-annual instalments, and did not pay additional storage charges except on goods passing only short distances on the canals.147 The rents levied by canal companies did not form a large part of canal company incomes. Table 5.5 reports the income generated by the Bridgewater Canal on warehouse rent. Although warehouse rent in Manchester more than trebled between 1786–88 and 1810, by the latter date it still amounted to just £1,408. Total receipts attributable to the canal in this year exceeded £150,000.148 Likewise, the Old Quay Company generated an annual average income of £501 for warehouse rent at Manchester in the eight years that followed 1817; this fell short of the taxes levied on the same properties by roughly £100 per year.149 On the Rochdale Canal, warehouse and wharf rent was £687 in 1842, just 2 per cent of the company’s income in that year.150 Canal carriers agreed that the charges were slight. Thus, in 1825, Joseph Kenworthy, a leading canal carrier on the Bridgewater Canal, stated that the firm had ‘a portion of Warehouse room allotted to us, for which they [the Bridgewater Trustees] charge a nominal rent’. Kenworthy stated that if Manchester warehouse charges had been equalised with those of the warehouses at the Liverpool docks, rental cost would amount to 3s. 4d. per ton.151 As well as warehouses, canal companies rented out a range of ancillary facilities to carriers in their basins. Perhaps the most important of these was stabling, horses, of course, being the prime source of motive power on canals. Offices, cranes and wharves were also leased by canal companies to canal carriers in Manchester basins. Canal companies also retained warehousing for the storage of goods brought to Manchester by private carriers, as well as individuals and firms using the canal on an ad hoc basis. For these general traders, canal companies levied warehouse charges according to the weight of the commodity and length of time it was stored, following the expiration of a period of free storage. In 1810, the Bridgewater Trustees and the Rochdale Canal Company allowed two weeks’ free storage in their public warehouses, charging 1d. per

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ton per day thereafter.152 On the Rochdale, free warehousing provision was extended to 21 days in 1815, to 42 days in 1819 and to two months in 1820, while the subsequent charges for storage were reduced to ½d. per ton per day.153 Free warehouse provision, meanwhile, was 21 days on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in 1825.154 The canal carriers, in turn, allowed their own customers a period of free storage in the warehouses they occupied. Thus, the Grocers’ Company, in 1825, allowed those using their boats to store goods in their warehouses for 21 days without charges. These terms were evidently similar to those of other carriers plying the routes between Manchester and Liverpool.155 It is possible to track the firms occupying each canal company warehouse for particular canals at selected points. The clearest data relate to the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin. Most straightforwardly, the company constructed three of its warehouses expressly for the use of particular carrying firms. Thus, two firms, the Merchants’ Company and Barnby, Faulkner & Co., occupied the 1825 Merchants’ Warehouse from the outset. Likewise, the smaller 1825 warehouse was built at the request of the Manchester and Liverpool Union Company, although from 1827 it was occupied by J. & J. Veevers. In 1833, the Rochdale Canal Company built a warehouse for Marsden & Co. to facilitate its switching of trade from the Huddersfield to the Rochdale Canal.156 In the company’s five other warehouses, occupancy was not reserved for single firms. Rather, the warehouses were leased to a number of public carriers or were retained for general public Table 5.5 Warehouse receipts on the Bridgewater Canal, 1786–1810 (three-year averages, £) Period

Manchester

1786–88 1789–91 1792–94 1795–97 1798–1800 1801–03 1804–06 1807–09 1810 Average over twenty-five years

425 458 773 631 719 1,199 1,307 1,291 1,408 973

Liverpool

Worsley

Runcorn

Preston Brook

Other

Total

217 264 388 334 352 565 604 588 840 492

31 14 31 11 10 17 25 30 34 22

0 0 0 19 27 10 14 43 42 19

0 0 0 0 4 9 12 3 1 4

0 3 3 5 8 12 18 15 17 10

673 739 1,195 1,000 1,120 1,812 1,980 1,970 2,342 1,520

Source: LCRO, Bridgewater Ledgers, 1764–90 and 1791–1810. Notes: ‘Other’ includes warehouses at Burford Lane (near Lymm), Broadheath (near Altrincham) and Stockton Quay (near Warrington). Manchester and Worsley receipts for 1786–88 refer to 1787 and 1788 only. From 1791 Liverpool includes rent arrears due in that year; Runcorn receipts for 1795–97 refer to 1796 and 1797 only; Preston Brook receipts for 1798–1800 refer to 1799 and 1800 only.

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use. For example, in 1834, the 1807 warehouse was occupied by George Thornton & Co. and J. & L. Marsden (each leasing two rooms), Buckley, Kershaw & Co. and John Thompson & Co (each leasing one room), while the Rochdale Canal Company retained four rooms for general use.157 In the 1840s and 1850s complete information is available for the whole of the warehouse provision in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin. A company survey in 1842 records the RV of its warehouses and the occupants responsible for paying it. The eight company warehouses were rated at £2,210; 54 per cent of the area was occupied by the company itself, with the remaining 46 per cent reserved for public carriers (Table 5.6).158 The company occupied 88 per cent of the 1807 warehouse, 85 per cent of the 1818 and 1822 brick warehouses, 32 per cent of the 1836 warehouse, but none at all in the 1825, 1833 and 1841 warehouses. Aside from the Rochdale Canal Table 5.6 Occupancy and rateable value of the Rochdale Canal Company’s warehouses in Piccadilly basin, 1842 Occupant

Warehouse space occupied

Rochdale Canal Company

1807 Warehouse (four rooms) 1818 or 1822 Warehouse 1818 or 1822 Warehouse 1836 Warehouse (three rooms) 1836 Warehouse 1841 Warehouse 1818 or 1822 Warehouse (two rooms) Merchants’ Warehouse Merchants’ Warehouse 1836 Warehouse (ground floor) Veevers’ Warehouse 1807 Warehouse (one room) 1818 or 1822 Warehouse (two rooms) 1818 or 1822 Warehouse (two rooms) Marsden’s Warehouse 1836 Warehouse (top room)

William Jackson & Sons Merchants’ Company

Barnby, Faulkner & Co. J. & J. Veevers Thompson, M’Kay & Co.

J. & L. Marsden

William Carver & Co.

Total RV (occupied by RCC) (occupied by public carriers) Source: GMCRO, RCCP, Misc. Papers, Box 7, Item 35.

Rateable value (£) Per warehouse Per firm 175 1,193 834 42 142 181 34 34 175 183 25 84 25 87

215 209

208 84 112

30

97

67 92

92

2,210

2,210 (1,193) (1,017)

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Company, the largest share of warehouse space was occupied by William Jackson & Sons, Barnby, Faulkner & Co., and the Merchants’ Company. In 1857, shortly after the leasing of the canal, the Rochdale Canal Company furnished the railway companies with details of warehouse occupancy in its Piccadilly basin (Table 5.7). These data suggest a significant consolidation of warehouse space at Manchester. The company occupied all of the 1818 and 1822 brick warehouses, some 11,668 square yards of warehouse-floor space, 48 per cent of the total at Piccadilly. Jackson & Son leased the largest share of warehouse room among the carriers, amounting to 6,751 square yards and 28 per cent of the total. This included all of the 1836 warehouse and half of the Merchants’ Warehouse. Carver & Co. occupied the second largest share of warehouse space in the basin, leasing the entire 1807 warehouse. J. & J. Veevers retained their small 1825 warehouse in Lees Street and had taken over Marsden’s Warehouse in Ducie Street. The Merchants’ Company retained half of the Merchants’ Warehouse. Similar patterns can be discerned on other canals, although less complete data are available. Thus, in 1845, warehouse space in the Bridgewater Canal’s Castlefield/Hulme basin was divided equally between the Bridgewater Trustees, who were responsible as occupants for £2,660 (51 per cent) of warehouse rating of £5,259, with public carriers obliged to cover the Table 5.7 Warehouse occupancy in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1857 Occupant

Warehouse occupied

Rochdale Canal Company

1818 Warehouse 1822 Warehouse 1836 Warehouse Merchants’ Warehouse 1807 Warehouse Veevers’ Warehouse 1833 Warehouse Merchants’ Warehouse 1841 Warehouse 1841 Warehouse

William Jackson & Sons Carver & Co. J. & J. Veevers Merchants’ Company Sundry persons Unoccupied Total area occupied (occupied by RCC) (occupied by carriers) (occupied by ‘sundry persons’) (unoccupied)

Source: NA, RAIL, 861/1, Minutes of the Rochdale Canal Lessees, 18 January 1857.

Area occupied (sq. yds) 11,668 5,511 1,240 2,716 739 726 1,028 326 326 24,280 (11,668) (11,960) (326) (326)

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remaining rating of £2,599 (49 per cent). The Ashton and Huddersfield canal companies occupied slightly lower proportions of their warehouse space as measured by RV responsibility. The Huddersfield’s share of warehouse space in its Piccadilly warehouse was 40 per cent in 1834, while the Ashton Canal Company paid 39 per cent of the RV of its five warehouses in 1845. The Old Quay Company occupied the largest share of its warehouse provision; in 1845, it occupied two-thirds of the Old Quay warehouse rating of £3,770; the remaining third was paid by two public carriers.159 Canal basins were, in essence, points of transhipment between canal and road transport. Warehouses performed this function for Manchester’s conveyances of high-value and fragile goods, above all raw cotton, corn and other foodstuffs, dyewares and textiles. On incoming goods, carriers’ boats entered the warehouses via the internal canal arms, where the goods were unloaded using manual and water-powered hoisting systems, lifted on to one of the warehouse floors, and then transferred to road carts using external hoists fitted to the rear (or road-side) of the warehouse. The warehouses also offered storage services. The Grocers’ Company reported in 1825 that roughly half of the goods it brought to Manchester were taken directly to their final destination on arrival, while the remaining half was deposited in warehouses to be retrieved by their owners as required.160 Raw cotton and corn stand out as the key commodities requiring warehouse storage in Manchester’s canal trade. For raw cotton, the storage of very large stocks in canal (and later railway) company warehouses became the normal mode of business in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cotton manufacturers collected only sufficient quantities of the raw material to suit immediate production requirements. In 1825, Thomas Ogden Lingard, of the Old Quay Company, stated that cotton manufacturers might request ‘a particular Kind of Cotton out of the Lot’, even if it meant extracting a small quantity from a bulk cargo. Porters employed by the canal company or canal carrier would cart goods to their destination and a charge would be made to the manufacturer.161 Even cotton purchased in Manchester might be stored for long periods in canal company warehouses. When the Merchants’ Warehouse in the Rochdale Canal’s Piccadilly basin was destroyed by fire in 1829, many thousands of pounds worth of cotton was ruined. This cotton had, according a newspaper report, been stored in the canal warehouse by ‘different country manufactures, who after purchasing it in the Manchester market, had deposited it in the Halifax [and Rochdale Merchants’] company’s warehouse until a convenient opportunity occurred in transporting it to their several factories’.162 The extensive provision of warehousing was one factor that allowed canals to maintain their lead over railways in carrying cotton to Manchester before 1850. Corn brought to Manchester from Liverpool and Yorkshire was likewise a key commodity stored in Manchester canal ware-

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houses, although information on this branch of canal trade is limited. We do know that the entire capacity of the 1818 and 1822 warehouses of the Rochdale Canal Company was reserved for the corn trade, 48 per cent of the area of the internal storage space in the basin. The two warehouses were described in 1829 as the ‘extensive granaries of the Rochdale Canal Co … in which an immense quantity of grain and flour is at present deposited’.163 When the railway became the leading conveyance of Yorkshire corn to Manchester from 1841, it found it necessary to establish extensive corn warehouses. By 1846, the Manchester and Leeds Railway had established 25,000 square yards of warehouse space for the corn trade.164 For outgoing trades of Manchester yarn and textiles, lengthy warehousing of goods was neither necessary nor desirable. Indeed, the expedition of carriage was often of prime significance. On the all-important route to Liverpool, moreover, competition among the carriers for less bulky ‘down’ goods from Manchester to Liverpool had reduced carriers’ charges to roughly one-third of charges for ‘up’ goods. This price (10s. per ton) included the costs of collecting goods from factories and warehouses in Manchester by cart, bringing them to the canal warehouse and loading them on to canal boats for despatch. The carting of goods within Manchester was considered to be worth 2s. per ton in 1825.165 The wharf and the industrial city While canal infrastructure has recently begun to attract the attention of historians and industrial archaeologists, the bulk of analysis has concerned the development of warehouses. Wharves comprised the second major type of storage and redistributive unit for Manchester’s water transport. Although much less noticeable features of the industrial city than the commanding multi-storey warehouses, wharves were nonetheless important elements in Manchester’s nineteenth-century urbanisation and industrialisation, providing the locations from which incoming cargoes of coal, stone and timber were stored, divided up and sold. This section analyses the wharf as an economic and urban space in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Manchester. It looks at the emergence and commercial functions of wharves, drawing a distinction between public wharves developed by canal and river navigation companies and private wharves established by non-canal company interests on independently held land alongside canals and private canal branches. Studies of British canals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have shown that heavy raw materials dominated tonnage accounts.166 Stone and especially coal – ‘raw materials out of the bowels of the earth’ – along with timber were foremost in this category.167 These raw materials became central

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elements in Manchester’s urban growth: coal provided 99 per cent of the power for Manchester’s factories, as well as supplying the domestic hearth, while stone and timber were important construction materials that sustained the massive growth of Manchester’s inner urban core. The canal trade in coal and stone was largely undertaken by colliery and quarry proprietors, occupying works adjacent to canals (or joined thereto by canal branches or tram roads), which assembled their own fleets of barges and leased wharves in the market centres to break bulk and to sell their raw goods to merchants, retailers and consumers. This pattern of carriage and storage for coal and stone contrasted with that for manufactures and ‘general merchandise’, which were handled by public carriers rather than by the owners of the goods, their businesses managed from canalside warehouses rather than wharves. Timber carrying adopted a business organisation that incorporated features of the trades in both general merchandise and coal/stone. Like the former, timber was handled by specialist carriers rather than by the owners of the goods; like the latter, the timber was distributed to specialist wharf sites or directly to canalside businesses. Manchester’s wharf trades, other than those in coal, stone and timber, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries included pig iron, sand, bricks and manure, all commodities with low value-to-weight ratios. Wharves were central to the operations of all of Manchester’s canal company basins, although the commodity composition of wharf trade varied significantly by canal. Stone dominated the Rochdale Canal Company wharves. In 1845, stone accounted for 28 per cent of the company’s total income from canal traffic; at this time, coal provided 13 per cent and timber only 5 per cent.168 For this reason, neither timber nor coal wharves comprised a large part of the Piccadilly basin’s land use. Table 5.8 provides a snapshot of wharf occupancy in the Piccadilly basin in 1857. Total wharf space in the basin amounted to 19,683 square yards on which the company levied an annual rent of £770.169 Eight stone wharves accounted for the largest part of the basin’s wharf land. Barber & Worthington, a firm of road contractors and excavators, was the most prominent, occupying slightly more than 4,500 square yards of wharf space, while stone merchants Hargreaves & Craven and Abraham Dent occupied 3,000 square yards and 372 square yards, respectively. The Rochdale Canal Company also allocated a wharf of 1,000 square yards for the general use of the stone trade. Seven ‘goods’ wharves, comprising nearly 4,800 square yards, surrounded the major carriers’ warehouses. The company also reserved 3,500 square yards of wharf space for ‘goods’ at the centre of the basin. Sattersfield & Co. occupied two coal, lime and limestone wharves in the smaller westerly section of the basin, the firm having occupied this site since 1810. The most extensive cluster of canal company coal wharves was that

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Table 5.8 Wharf use in the Rochdale Canal Company’s Piccadilly basin, 1857 Commodity Stone Goods Coal, limestone, lime Total

Number of wharves Leased Public

Size of wharves (sq. yds) Total Leased Public (sq. yds)

7 6 2

1 1 0

7,989 4,792 2,283

1,060 3,559 0

9,049 8,351 2,283

15

2

15,064

4,619

19,683

Source: NA, RAIL, 861/1, Minutes of the Rochdale Canal Lessees, 18 January 1857; GMCRO, RCCP, B2 Plans, Box 8, Item 2.

developed by the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal in Salford. Map evidence for c.1850 (see Table 5.10) suggests that the firm operated at least 12 coal wharves, although one of these was orientated towards the company’s railway trade. Like the Rochdale, the Mersey and Irwell Navigation had no specified wharves for coal; the navigation’s wharf trade was instead geared towards its carriage of timber imported at Liverpool and stone brought by coastal vessels to Runcorn. The Bridgewater’s canal basin had a large coal wharf but the bulk of wharfage space was reserved for timber, reflecting the canal’s continued importance in this branch of trade throughout the period. The Ashton basin had wharves for coal, stone and timber. Manchester also acquired a number of private wharves built by individuals and firms owning land adjacent to the canals. Manchester’s earliest storage and transhipment facilities for the canal trade were developed, as we have seen, by the duke of Bridgewater. His occupation of all the canalside lands close to Manchester raised local hostility towards his monopoly of wharfage facilities. A promoter of the Rochdale Canal in 1791 urged the ‘merchantile power of Manchester’ to press for a free junction between the Bridgewater Canal and ‘whatever canals may come from Rochdale, Oldham or Ashton’, proposing that the wharves belonging to the duke in Castlefield and Hulme be ‘declared public wharves’, with new facilities to charge ‘a fixed moderate price [for storage]’.170 The context of these comments was the duke of Bridgewater’s refusal to allow the Rochdale Canal, then in its planning stages, to form a connection with his canal at Castlefield. The duke preferred to establish an intermediate transhipment point where barges arriving in Manchester by canal from the east destined for points to the west of Manchester could unload their cargoes on to the Duke’s own vessels using cranes, thus securing the trade for his own vessels for the western part of the journey.171 By late 1792, however, the duke had permitted the junction of the Bridgewater and the Rochdale, after the latter company had opened negotiations to establish an alternative junction

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with the Mersey and Irwell Navigation.172 The substantial extension of Manchester’s canal system following the 1790s ‘mania’ did engender major changes in the availability and location of commercial wharfage in Manchester, ending the domination of storage facilities owned by corporate canal and river navigation interests. The Rochdale Canal’s connections with the Bridgewater and Ashton canals, as well as its route across the township of Manchester, opened up the possibility of extensive canal wharfage beyond the duke’s canal basin at Castlefield. It is to the development of this private wharfage provision that we now turn. The construction of the Rochdale Canal created a new waterway throughout the southern fringes of Manchester, and opened up new sites for canal wharves, including at the Piccadilly basins of the Rochdale and Ashton canal companies. More importantly, it also offered the option for owners of land alongside the canal to develop their own land for wharfage in locations close to the built-up centre of Manchester. A number of significant clusters of private wharves were built on the Rochdale Canal between Ancoats and Castlefield; in addition, the Ashton’s canal banks in Ancoats featured important complexes of private wharfage facilities.173 Two private branches have left substantial archives: Philips, Tate & Co.’s 120-yard branch from the north bank of the Rochdale Canal, built in 1817, and the Leech family’s Brownsfield wharves, located near Piccadilly, developed in the 1820s. Philips, Tate & Co., a partnership of Manchester and Liverpool manufacturers and merchants, possessed a land plot close to Oxford Street. The partnership offered the land to the Rochdale Canal Company in 1806, contending that the land was ‘an eligible situation for wharves or warehouses’.174 The partners later decided to develop the land themselves; a canal branch would, according to one of the partners, ‘abundantly increase’ the value of the land and still leave ‘room for both buildings and extensive wharves’.175 The branch had been built by January 1817, when the partners were convinced that the ‘wharf land … [was] ingeniously laid out’. By 1850, the land alongside the branch was mainly occupied by wharves: four coal wharves, four timber wharves and one general wharf.176 The largest private basin was developed by the Leech family at Brownsfield, immediately to the north-east of the Piccadilly basin. The land was surveyed and marked out with proposed streets and building plots before the passing of the Rochdale Canal Act of 1794; the proposed line of the canal passed through the middle of the estate. Following a series of legal disputes between Daniel Leech and the Rochdale Canal Company, in 1800 the two parties agreed on the exact route of, and the width of land required by, the canal. In 1803, moreover, Leech sold around an additional 10,000 square yards to the Rochdale Canal Company, bringing the total amount of land sold to the company to 16,972 square yards. This still left Leech with 30,000 square

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yards of the Brownsfield estate on which to develop his own wharfage plots. In 1802, the Manchester attorney, George Duckworth, detailed the estate’s commercial potential: It will be the best land in the town or neighbourhood of Manchester for the sites of warehouses and wharves. It is nearer the centre of the town and elevated higher than any other land within the same distance, so that large loads of coals and the other heavy articles may be brought from it to any part of the town with one horse. All the high land near it is already sold at high prices for wharves. Wharfage land on the banks of the Ashton Canal beyond Ancoats [at New Islington] have in back situation (half a mile further from the market place…) sells [for good prices], with the disadvantage of a valley to be passed in the way to Manchester.177

After the canal’s opening in 1804, the Leech family and their agents discussed cutting branches from the Rochdale Canal to facilitate the conversion of the Brownsfield estate into a major wharfage hub. In 1806, Manchester surveyor William Johnson considered ‘the making of the branches of canal … an object of the first importance … preparing it against the time when high prices will be offered for it’.178 Development, however, was delayed by sluggish land prices during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as a series of land and legal disputes. In 1819, Thomas Leech, who took over the management of the estate following Daniel Leech’s death, supervised the cutting of branches from Lees Street to Port Street and from Port Street to Brewer Street, and this was followed by further canal branches in 1825 and 1828–29.179 The branches opened up 17 new plots. Brownsfield cotton mill was built on one of these, while the remaining 16 were laid out as wharves (Table 5.9). Coal wharves dominated, comprising over 10,000 square yards and accruing £500–£600 yearly in rent. Stone wharves comprised the second largest share of the estate, commanding a further £600 per annum in rent and occupying nearly 9,000 square yards in 1857. Timber wharves comprised the bulk of the remainder. Contemporary maps provide the means of tracking the locations of wharves and other facilities for storing and transhipping goods in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford.180 The data for 1850 are presented in Table 5.10, which enumerates all wharves and yards used to store heavy goods in Manchester and Salford, together with the information on the location of wharves/yards located within 20 yards of a waterway.181 The table distinguishes between those wharves built and owned by canal companies and those developed on private land. In 1850, private wharves were more numerous than those on corporate land, confirming the duke’s fears of the early 1790s that private wharfage facilities would seriously challenge his own infrastructure. Canal company basins provided slightly more than one-third of the wharves in Manchester

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Table 5.9 Occupancy and usage of the Brownsfield wharves, Piccadilly, 1837–57 Usage No. of sites Cotton mill Coal wharves Stone wharves Timber wharves Iron warehouses Brick wharves Iron wharves Coal and flag wharves Stone and timber wharves Total

1837 Area (sq. yds)

Rent (£)

No. of sites

1847 Area (sq. yds)

Rent (£)

1857 No. of Area sites (sq. yds)

Rent (£)

1 5 5 0 1 1 1 2 1

2,114 10,459 7,893 0 866 1,085 3,200 4,314 1,800

1,000 505 665 0 60 75 160 200 84

1 6 4 3 2 1 0 0 0

2,114 13,725 6,864 6,215 1,728 1,085 0 0 0

906 623 635 405 240 75 0 0 0

1 5 5 3 2 1 0 0 0

2,114 10,043 9,594 7,167 1,728 1,085 0 0 0

600 505 620 405 290 100 0 0 0

17

31,731

2,749

17

31,731

2,884

17

31,731

2,520

Source: CL, Misc 1a., Thomas Leech’s White Book, 1815–57, pp. 297–300, 385–6, 387–92, 463–4, 467–8.

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Table 5.10 Usage and location of wharves and yards in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford, 1850 (detailing sites located within 20 yards of a waterway) Location Canal basin wharves/yards Ashton Canal Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Bridgewater Canal Rochdale Canal Mersey and Irwell Navigation Manchester and Salford Junction Canal Subtotal Private canal wharves/yards Rochdale Canal (private branch) Rochdale Canal (private land by canal) Ashton Canal (private branch) Ashton Canal (private land by canal) Manchester and Salford Junction Canal (private land by canal) Bridgewater Canal (private land by canal) Bridgewater Canal (private branch) Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal (private land by canal) Subtotal Private river wharves/yards Irwell Medlock Brooks Irk Subtotal Yards or wharves located within 20 yards of a waterway Yards or wharves located more than 20 yards from a waterway Total of all yards/wharves

Coal

Timber

Stone

Other

General/ unspecified

Total

2

1

4

1

10

18

12 2 0 0

1 6 0 1

2 1 3 0

2 1 3 1

0 4 7 6

17 14 13 8

0 16

3 12

2 12

1 9

0 27

6 76

35

15

9

2

6

67

11 11

3 0

5 0

0 1

3 5

22 17

0

2

0

0

0

2

1

2

1

0

1

5

1

1

1

0

1

4

0

1

0

0

0

1

0 59

2 26

0 16

0 3

0 16

2 120

1 1 1 0 3

8 9 1 1 19

0 0 0 0 0

0 0 1 0 1

1 0 0 0 1

10 10 3 1 24

78

57

28

13

44

220

88

148

23

2

1

262

166

205

51

15

45

482

Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851). Notes: The classification of wharves follows the map labels; ‘Other’ includes wharves/yards for iron (3), lime and coal (3), bricks (2), manure (2), potatoes (2), lime and sand (1), sand (1) and logwood (1). It is assumed that all wharves in canal company basins were owned by canal companies and all other wharves were not.

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and Salford, private wharves by canals and private branches provided 55 per cent of wharves, with rivers adding 11 per cent. The breakdown varied by commodity: private wharves comprised 79 per cent of coal wharves located within 20 yards of a waterway, 68 per cent of waterfront timber wharves and 57 per cent of stone wharves. Almost three-quarters of private wharves (and indeed 40 per cent of total waterfront wharves) were situated on private land alongside the Rochdale Canal or on one of its private branches. Slightly more than 13 per cent of private wharves were located on the Ashton Canal or its private branches, with 17 per cent of private wharves by rivers. Not all wharves and yards in Manchester were situated within 20 yards of a waterway. In fact, for the canals’ major coal and timber trades, non-waterfront sites were more numerically significant in terms of the plots identified on the OS plan. This lack of clustering is, at first sight, surprising given what know of the economies of shipping bulky commodities by water. Probing the matter more deeply, Table 5.11 shows that a secondary clustering of coal and timber yards is identifiable if a slightly wider definition of waterside location is adopted (within 175 yards of a waterway). Thus, more than two-thirds of coal wharves/yards and 55 per cent of timber wharves/yards were located within 175 yards of a waterway. Furthermore, comparing the occupants of waterside wharves/yards with those in other locations, from contemporary trade directories, suggests that the large canalside wharves were largely occupied by colliery proprietors, road contractors, timber and stone merchants, saw millers and land developers, while many of the smaller yards removed from the waterfront – often tiny spaces in rows of terraced houses – were occupied by retail coal dealers, builders and joiners serving local markets. The latter firms did not compete with those that occupied the large waterside wharves but looked to them for supplies. There was little evidence of the clustering of coal, stone or timber yards at the Manchester ends of the turnpike roads to Bury, Rochdale, Oldham, Ashton, Wilmslow and Chester, although there were a number of timber yards at the Salford end of the turnpike road to Pendleton. By 1850, there were a total of seven ‘coal wharves’ at the goods stations of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway, Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, and the London and North Western Railway. How was the wharf trade organised? The urban wharf itself was a simple space: a wide, flat plot of open land – usually of an area of 1,000–2,000 square yards – with a canal frontage of sufficient length to allow canal boats to moor alongside.182 The goods were unloaded from barges by travelling cranes that projected over the water183 and were then stockpiled or divided up into smaller parcels for redistribution and sale. Weighing machines were often used to apportion parcels of coal and stone into standardised lots.184 Wharves contained few buildings other than offices or small sheds.185 The lack of fixed

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Table 5.11 Location of wharves and yards in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford, 1850 (detailing sites located within 175 yards of a waterway) Location Canals Rivers All other locations Total

Coal

Timber

Stone

Other

General/ unspecified

Total

94 18 54

73 39 93

35 3 13

12 2 1

38 7 0

252 69 161

166

205

51

15

45

482

Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851). Note: ‘Rivers’ includes Mersey and Irwell Navigation basin.

capital invested in wharves meant that they were flexible spaces whose tenancies could switch freely between coal, stone and timber merchants. The functions of the Brownsfield wharves, near Piccadilly, for example, shifted between the major wharf trades: in 1847, coal took 49 per cent of wharf space at Brownsfield but ten years later occupied only 36 per cent; stone wharves meanwhile increased their share from 25 per cent to 34 per cent. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, annual rental payments for Manchester wharves amounted to approximately 1s. per square yard per annum. In 1834, the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company rented its Stanley Street coal wharves at 10¾–12d. per square yard per annum, while in 1855, coal, stone and timber wharves at Brownsfield were leased for 12–15d. per square yard.186 In summary, wharves provided a key point of transhipment for Manchester’s incoming cargoes of coal, stone and timber, all vital for urban and industrial growth. Wharves were simple and flexible spaces that provided the link between intra-regional water transport and intra-urban land transport. The first wharves were developed by Manchester’s major canal and river navigation companies, which developed large waterfront basins that became emblematic urban spaces in the first industrial city. After 1790, new canal basins were developed by the ‘canal mania’ companies but the greatest initiatives were taken by private developers who built private canal branches from the main branch canals or developed adjacent land into wharfage spaces for heavy goods. Manchester canal basins in comparative perspective The Manchester rate books provide the best comparative measure of the scale of investment in the respective basins of the companies. The data are presented in Table 5.12 at regular intervals between 1800 and 1855 and include rateable values for warehouses, wharves, offices, cranes, stables, steam

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engines, boat houses and so on. As expected, the Bridgewater’s canal basin had attracted the most investment. Its canal basin had the highest individual RV in all of the years compared in Table 5.12. The heavy outlay on infrastructure on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, however, briefly produced, if the New Quay Company is included, a higher rating than the Bridgewater in 1825, although the Bridgewater Trustees’ subsequent investments meant that the old navigation was outpaced again by the 1830s. The Rochdale Canal Company’s property at Piccadilly was rated the third most valuable across the period. The major extensions of the 1820s and 1830s outlined above saw the basin’s RV double between 1815 and 1825 and again between 1825 and 1845. By 1855, the Rochdale Canal Company’s RV had reached £3,306. The RV of the Ashton’s Piccadilly basin increased at a similar rate to the Rochdale Canal Company until 1825, but subsequently lagged behind, reaching £1,848 by 1855. How did investment in canal warehouses compare with that in other nineteenth-century industrial and commercial buildings in Manchester? Rateable values provide the best guide to investment in buildings, although not to their contents. Manchester had a diverse industrial sector, but it was dominated by cotton, other textiles and textile finishing. The largest individTable 5.12 Rateable value (£) of property in Manchester’s water navigation companies’ canal basins, 1800–55 Company Old Quay Company (Water Street) New Quay Company (Water Street) Mersey and Irwell Navigation total

1800

1815

1825

1834

1845

1855

227

1,386

2,364

3,110

4,266

4,906

0

0

600

650

965

990

227

1,386

2,964

3,760

5,231

5,896

527

2,148

2,870

4,251

7,683

9,590

Bridgewater Canal (Castlefield/Hulme) Rochdale Canal Company (Piccadilly) ACC, HCC and PFCC (Piccadilly) Manchester canals total

13

670

1,377

2,116

3,094

3,306

33 573

822 3,640

1,184 5,431

1,552 1,633 7,919 12,410

1,848 14,744

Total

800

5,026

8,395

11,679 17,641

20,640

Source: MALSU, M9, Manchester and Hulme rate books, 1800–55. Note: The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal’s Salford basin is not included due to the loss of the township of Salford’s rate books for this period. ACC = Ashton Canal Company; HCC = Huddersfield Canal Company; PFCC = Peak Forest Canal Company.

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189

ual investments were made in cotton factories, although the larger number of textile warehouses results in a higher overall RV for warehouses than factories. By 1815, it was already clear that canal warehouses required some of the largest building outlays in Manchester, being by far the biggest warehouses in the town. The largest warehouses on the Bridgewater Canal (the Staffordshire Warehouse) and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation (Old Quay Warehouses) were rated at £800, when the mean warehouse RV for the whole town was only £43 and few warehouse sites in the cotton trade exceeded £250.187 The largest cotton factories (McConnel & Co. and A. & G. Murray) were rated at more than the largest canal warehouses (from £924–£933) but these industrial giants were atypical in a town where the average rateable value of a factory firm was £104.188 By 1850, investment in factories had increased substantially but canal basins remained significant and imposing building clusters. Thus, the collection of seven warehouses in the Bridgewater basin at Castlefield/Hulme had a rating of £5,259 in 1845. This was only slightly lower than the group of nine cotton factories alongside the Rochdale Canal on Union Street in Ancoats (£7,966) and the significant collection of cotton mills on the south bank of the Medlock between Oxford Street and Chorlton Street (£5,558). Summary and conclusions Manchester’s commercial waterfront was dramatically extended in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when five new major public canals were built, as well as numerous small private wharfage spaces. While Manchester’s three major rivers flowed at the periphery of the built-up area, canals brought the waterfront much closer to the heart of the town. Five extensive canal basins were established by the major river and canal navigation companies in Manchester and Salford. The basins were dominated by large-scale, multi-storey warehouses designed for storing grain, manufactures and sundries that were brought to and from Manchester. The majority of the warehouses featured internal shipping holes that enabled barges to unload directly into the building, an innovation in warehouse design pioneered by Manchester’s canal companies. These were by far the most valuable commercial warehouses in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and handled the key commodities of Manchester’s expanding national and international trades. Canal company basins also laid out wharves to store and redistribute the canal’s cargoes of coal, stone and timber, complementing the more numerous wharves built on private land contiguous to the canal and those on new private canal branches in central Manchester. Less visually obvious but certainly not economically less significant were the wharves laid out between

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the warehouses, providing the connection between water and land transport for coal, stone and timber, as well as other high bulk–low dispersion commodities, such as sand, bricks, iron and manure. These commodities, though less conspicuous than the cotton manufactures that made Manchester famous, were vital for the region’s industrial and urban growth: coal powered Manchester’s factories; stone was essential to road building and paving, as well as to construction; and timber was extensively used in construction (roof structures, doors, lintels and window frames) and furnishing, as well as for railway sleepers.189 Porteous’s typology of port development concentrates on a specific form of urbanisation, in which small-scale settlements rapidly grew into major transhipment hubs of traffic between industrial canals and coastal ports. This chapter has shown that the extent of Manchester’s canal trade, and the modes of commercial infrastructure built to handle this trade, requires its inclusion in detailed studies of the impact of canals, urbanisation and economic growth. Like Porteous’s ‘canal ports’, Manchester’s canal basins were central transhipment hubs, receiving and storing and redistributing the foodstuffs, raw materials and finished goods that were central to the town’s unprecedented industrial and urban growth. Recent research has recognised the interdependency of, rather than competition between, different modes of transport during the Industrial Revolution.190 The canal basins’ warehouses and wharves played a central role in threading the system together, providing the key link between local road traffic and bulk water transport along the trunk canal routes. Moreover, in the case of the Rochdale Canal, its route through the centre of Manchester resulted in the construction of numerous private wharves and imposing buildings, each becoming a focus for industrial and commercial activity, each making its own mark on the fabric of the city and contributing to the dynamic and diverse economy of the self-proclaimed ‘metropolis of manufactures’. Notes 1 J.D. Porteous, Canal ports: the urban achievement of the canal age (London: Academic Press, 1977). 2 Ibid., pp. 31–2. 3 A.H. Faulkner, ‘The Regent’s Canal dock, Part 1 (1811–1879)’, Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society, Vol. 182 (2002), pp. 70–81; A.H. Faulkner, ‘The City Road basin’, Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society, Vol. 189 (2004), pp. 578–85. 4 UMAU reports relating specifically to the Manchester canal infrastructure include: Bridgewater Wharf, Castlefield. An archaeological watching brief (1997/42, December 1997); Castlefield, Manchester: an archaeological desk-based assessment (2001/16, March 2001); Ashton Canal Corridor, Manchester. An

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5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14

15

191

archaeological desk-based assessment (2001/23, May 2001); Piccadilly Basin, Phase 2. An archaeological watching brief (2002/30, April 2002); Castlefield, Manchester. An archaeological desk-based assessment, revised report (2004/26, July 2004); Jackson’s Wharf, Castlefield, Manchester. An archaeological desk-based assessment (2004/42, September 2004); Piccadilly Basin – marina, canal and public realm works, Manchester: an archaeological watching brief (2000/6, December 2000); Jackson’s Warehouse, Tariff Street, Manchester: an archaeological building survey of the 1836 Rochdale Canal warehouse (2002/52, August 2002); Carver’s Warehouse, Rochdale Canal Basin, Manchester: an archaeological building survey of the 1806 canal warehouse (2006/67, October 2006). M. Nevell, ‘The archaeology of the canal warehouses of North-West England and the social archaeology of industrialisation’, Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. 25 (2003), pp. 43–55. R. McNeil, ‘The 1830 railway warehouse: an old model for a new system’, in D. Brumhead and T. Wyke (eds), Aspects of the history of transport in the city and region since 1700 (Manchester: Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 2004), pp. 91–101. Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, Manchester, pp. 24–30; P. Maw, T. Wyke and A. Kidd, ‘Canals, rivers, and the industrial city: Manchester’s industrial waterfront, 1790–1850’, Economic History Review, Vol. 65 (2012), p. 1501. This paragraph and the next two are based on H. Clegg, ‘The third Duke of Bridgewater’s canal works in Manchester’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 65 (1955), pp. 91–104; V.I. Tomlinson, ‘Early warehouses on Manchester waterways’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 71 (1961), pp. 129–32; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 17–18; Nevell, ‘Archaeology of canal warehouses’, pp. 43–8. It is not known when the original wharf and Rock House warehouse ceased to be used. Certainly, by 1801, they were not owned by the Navigation Company. See MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1801. Tomlinson, ‘Early warehouses’, p. 132; Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, pp. 19–20, 29–30. MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1801. W. Green, A plan of Manchester and Salford, drawn from an actual survey by William Green. Begun in the year 1787 and compleated in 1794 (Manchester: William Green, 1794), sheets 8 and 14. The Water Street/Lower Irwell Street site is labelled as ‘Old Botany Wharf ’ on the Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 27. MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1804. Green, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794), sheet 8; Pigot and Dean, New plan of Manchester and Salford (1819); MALSU, Manchester township rate books, 1812 and 1813. A new plan of Manchester and Salford with every recent alteration, in J. Pigot and W. Dean, Pigot and Dean’s Directory for Manchester and Salford, &c. for 1824–5 (Manchester: J. Pigot and W. Dean, 1824); MALSU, Manchester township rate books, 1818 and 1820.

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16 MALSU, Manchester township rate books, 1804 and 1823. 17 Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 8. The site was first rated at £620 for a warehouse, wharf, yard, engine, smithy and wheelhouse in 1825; MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1825. 18 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, p. 285. 19 E. Baines, History, directory, and gazetteer of the County Palatine of Lancaster, Vol. II (Liverpool: Wales & Co., 1825), p. 136. 20 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 86; Mather, After the canal duke, pp. 51, 241–2; M. Nevell, ‘The archaeology of Manchester’s early waterfronts’, in D. Brumhead and T. Wyke (eds). Moving Manchester: aspects of the history of transport in the city and region since 1700 (Manchester: Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 2004), pp. 35, 44–7; Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 8; MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1831. 21 Nevell, ‘Archaeology of early waterfronts’, pp. 44–7. 22 See Fig. 5.1. 23 Table 5.12. 24 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/3/177; DBA/7/517/1; DBA/9/539. The duke spent a further £1,731 on land in Manchester and Hulme from 1783 to 1794. On the size of the Hulme Hall estate, see Clegg, ‘Duke of Bridgewater’s canal works’, p. 97. 25 LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1791–1810, fo. 44. 26 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 32. 27 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheets 32–4. 28 D.A. Roydes, ‘The duke of Bridgewater and his thirty-year monopoly of the trade of Manchester’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, Vol. 82 (1984), p. 172; Green, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794), sheets 13–14. 29 Roydes, ‘Thirty-year monopoly’, pp. 168–73. 30 Historical Society of Pennsylvania, James Olden, diary, 1800–01, 19 March 1801. 31 The first directory of Manchester, published in 1772, records nine Bridgewater vessels in this trade; see E. Raffald, The Manchester directory for the year 1772 (Manchester: J. Harrop, 1772). 32 Nevell, ‘Archaeology of canal warehouses’, pp. 46–7. 33 LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1764–90; Nevell, ‘Archaeology of early waterfronts’, p. 41. The pre-1789 warehouse is shown on the map produced for Lewis’s 1788 trade directory and the rebuilt one with a similar layout on Green’s 1794 plan. 34 LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1764–90, fo. 64. 35 Tomlinson, ‘Early warehouses’, pp. 145–6. For the two carriers see chapter 4. 36 It is referred to by this name in the Manchester rate books. The warehouse now referred to as the Staffordshire Warehouse, built in 1786–88, is described as the ‘New Warehouse’ with its location described as at the Vitriol Works, which are shown on Green’s 1794 plan adjacent to that warehouse. In 1809 the Trustees’ account books refer to it as ‘the warehouse commonly called the Staffordshire

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Warehouse at Castle Quay’; see LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1791–1810, fo. 154. 37 LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1791–1810, fo. 223; Dean and Dean, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1808); Pigot and Dean, New plan of Manchester and Salford (1819). 38 MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1810. 39 Nevell, ‘Archaeology of early waterfronts’, p. 41. 40 LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1764–90, fo. 119 41 In 1820, the Manchester side of the Duke’s Warehouse was rated at £375 and the Hulme side at £240. If the same proportions were present in 1796, the total RV for the Duke’s Warehouse would have been £364. 42 LCRO, Bridgewater Ledger, 1791–1810, fo. 154. The changes can be tracked in the differences shown on Bancks’s 1800 and Dean and Dean’s 1808 plans; A new plan of Manchester and Salford 1800, in G. Bancks, Manchester and Salford directory (Manchester: G. Bancks, 1800); Dean and Dean, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1808). 43 MALSU, Manchester township rate books, 1820 and 1831. 44 D. Scattergood, S. Ferguson and N. Neil, ‘The Merchants’ Warehouse, Castlefield, Manchester’, Greater Manchester Archaeological Journal, Vol. 1 (1985), pp. 95–8. 45 MALSU, Hulme township rate book, 1831; Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 9. 46 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 23. 47 Ibid., p. 60 48 University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/16/824. 49 Nevell, ‘Archaeology of early waterfronts’, p. 31. 50 MALSU, Hulme township rate book, 1837. 51 MALSU, Hulme township rate books, 1840–41. 52 NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1790–1830, 26 July 1791. 53 Green, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794), sheet 14. Green’s 1794 plan correctly identifies the Manchester basins of the Rochdale and Ashton canals. See sheets 10 and 16. 54 NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 25 June 1795. 55 The plots can be seen on Green’s Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794), sheet 7. 56 NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minutes of the Annual General Committee, 1790–1831, 4 February 1796. 57 NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minutes of the Annual General Committee, 1790–1831, 29 June 1797. 58 NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 10 February 1803. Starkie’s land is shown on Green’s Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794), sheet 7. 59 NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 25 June 1799. 60 NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 10 February 1803; 20 September 1804. The branch can be seen on Pigot and Dean’s New plan of Manchester and Salford (1819). 61 NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 3 September 1802. 62 NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 27 December 1810. 63 Pigot and Slater, Plan of Manchester and Salford with their vicinities (1840); Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 27. The site of the

194

64

65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

77 78 79

80

81 82

Transport and the industrial city warehouse was on a plot of land purchased by the Salford Police Commissioners in 1845 to develop a new market for vegetables and meat. See Scola, Feeding the Victorian city, pp. 172–3. NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, Minutes of the Annual General Committee, 1790– 1831, 27 June 1805, 26 June 1806; RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 14 August 1806, 29 June 1809, 27 July 1809. Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 5; Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 27. NA, RAIL, 458/5, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1831–33, 30 May 1833. NA, RAIL, 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1833–35, 6 November 1833, 19 February 1834, 19 March 1834, 17 September 1834; RAIL 458/7, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1835–37, 13 April 1837. NA, RAIL 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1833–35, 26 June 1834. Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 27. NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 20 August 1805 (including quote). NA, RAIL, 458/3, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1791–1825, 12 November 1823 and 24 June 1824 (including quote). NA, RAIL, 458/4, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1824–31, 28 April 1825 and 2 June 1825 (including quote). NA, RAIL 458/4, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1824–31, 14 December 1826. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/6/3/45, Letter Book, November 1798–January 1799, 13 December 1798, from Edward Tooke. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 18 December 1801, 14 January 1802 and 11 March 1803; B2/Plans, Box 13, Item 35. CL, Archive of the Brownsfield Estate, D10, Articles of Agreement with the Rochdale Canal Company, 14 May 1803. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/6/3/44, Letter Book, October 1798–November 1798, 3 November 1798; B2/Plans, Box 3, Item 2; Box 3, Item 11a; B/2/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 20 December 1805 and 10 January 1806. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Plans, Box 3, Item 11. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 10 January 1806. M. Nevell, B. Grimsditch and I. Hradil, Carver’s Warehouse, Rochdale Canal Basin, Manchester: an archaeological building survey of the 1806 canal warehouse (Manchester: UMAU, 2006/67), pp. 2–5, 7–9, 13, 33–4. See GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Plan, Box 10, Item 1 for plan of 1807 waterwheel and hoisting system. See also S. Stockley, ‘Hoisting in Dale Street: the 1806 Rochdale Canal Company warehouse and hoisting system’, in R. McNeil and A.D. George (eds), The heritage atlas 3: warehouse album (Manchester: Manchester Field Archaeology Centre, 1997), pp. 30–3. The Rochdale Canal Company measured the building at a slightly larger 2,217 square yards. See Table 5.3. The building displays a date stone marked ‘1806’; see Stockley, ‘Hoisting in Dale Street’, p. 30. In autumn 1806, William Johnson described the warehouse as ‘half built’; see CL, Archive of the Brownsfield Estate, Misc. 25, 10 October 1806, William Johnson to Daniel Leech; for its insurance, GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/6,

Basins, warehouses and wharves

195

Minute Book, 1806–12, 8 January 1808. 83 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/6, Minute Book, 1806–12, 16 March and 27 April 1810; B2/Plans, Box 13, Item 12. 84 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Plans, Box 13, Item 14; B2/1/6, Minute Book, 1806–12, 5 May and 5 July 1807. 85 For a survey of economic cycles in this period, see A.D. Gayer, W.W. Rostow and A.J. Schwartz, The growth and fluctuation of the British economy, 1790–1850: an historical, statistical and theoretical study of British economic development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). 86 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/7, Minute Book, 1812–18, 8 August 1817. 87 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/7, Minute Book, 1812–18, 2 January 1818; B2/Plans, Box 1, Item 36, Box 13, Item 12 and Box 17, Item 7a. 88 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 29 May 1818. 89 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 13 February 1822. 90 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 28 February 1822. 91 Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, p. 157. 92 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 25 September 1823. 93 Stockley, ‘Hoisting in Dale Street’, pp. 30–3; GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 25 September 1823 and 25 March 1824. 94 William Occleshaw was a ‘plumber and glazier and manufacturer of rolled lead patent pipes, water closets, lift and force pumps, wholesale crown glass warehouse, grinder and preparer of white lead paint’; see Pigot and Dean, Manchester directory (1824–25). 95 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 3 February 1822; B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 6 May 1824, 8 March 1826; Pigot, Dean and Dean, Directory of Manchester and Salford (1819). 96 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 21 November 1822. 97 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 15 February 1825. See also B2/Plans, Box 17, Item 4. 98 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 15 February 1825; B2/1/10, Minute Book, 1827–30, 29 November 1827. The RCC later built an office for J. & J. Veevers on this plot, B2/1/10, Minute Book, 1830–33, 11 September 1833. 99 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 29 April 1825. 100 Manchester Mercury, 13 October 1829; Manchester Courier, 17 October 1829. 101 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/11, Minute Book, 1830–33, 6 May 1830. 102 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. II, pp. 432–4. 103 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/11, Minute Book, 1830–33, 13 March 1833. 104 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/12, Minute Book, 1833–36, 25 April 1833, 9 September 1835 and 13 November 1833; B2/Plans, Box 8, Item 2. 105 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/13, Minute Book, 1836–39, 5 May and 12 October 1836. 106 M. Nevell, I. Hradil and S. Stockley, Jackson’s Warehouse, Tariff Street, Manchester: an archaeological building survey of the 1836 Rochdale Canal warehouse (Manchester: UMAU, 2002/52), pp. 4–10, 18–19, 23–4. 107 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/14, Minute Book, 1839–41, 12 August 1840, 13 November 1840 and 10 March 1842; B2, Misc. papers, Box 5, Item 46. 108 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/15, Minute Book, 1841–42, 11 November 1841.

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Transport and the industrial city

109 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/13, Minute Book, 1836–39, 7 September 1836, 13 December 1837 and 11 July 1838; B2/1/14, Minute Book, 1839–41, 10 April 1839. 110 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 25 June 1825, 1 September 1825, 15 December 1825 and 12 January 1826. 111 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/21, Minute Book, 1856–59, 30 December 1857. 112 S. Hibbert, W.R. Whatton, J. Palmer and J. Greswell, History of the foundations in Manchester of Christ’s College (Manchester: Thomas Agnew, 1848), pp. 44–5; B.A. Pythian and J.A. Graham (eds), The Manchester Grammar School, 1515–1965 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), p. 20. The four fields belonging to the grammar school are shown on Green’s 1794 plan, sheet 11. 113 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 27 July 1798, 8 August 1798, 11 October 1798. 114 NA, RAIL, 804/3, Plan of land of Ashton Canal Company purchased from Lord Ducie; Bancks, New plan of Manchester and Salford (1800). 115 MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1800. 116 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 25 October 1798, 30 October 1798, 15 November 1798, 10 March 1802, 28 May 1802, 27 May 1805, 22 July 1805, 4 November 1805. 117 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 30 July 1802. 118 See plan in J. Aston, The Manchester guide (1804), no page number. 119 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, Plan of land of Ashton Canal Company purchased from Lord Ducie; Ashton Canal Company Minutes, 30 July 1802, 14 October 1803; Pigot, Dean and Dean, New plan of Manchester and Salford (1819). 120 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 29 November 1814. 121 G. Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights: the Industrial Revolution at Stockport and Marple (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1924). 122 Oldknow also built a warehouse, which survives today, on the Peak Forest Canal at Marple between 1801–05. See Nevell, Hradril and Stockley, Jackson’s Warehouse, p. 7. 123 MALSU, Manchester township rate books, 1815 and 1834. 124 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 30 November 1801. 125 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 27 May 1805. 126 Baines, County palatine of Lancaster, Vol. II, p. 404. 127 Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 11; A plan of Manchester and Salford with their vicinities, in J. Pigot and Son, Pigot & Son’s general, classified street directory of Manchester and Salford (Manchester: J. Pigot & Son, 1838). 128 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 8 June 1807. 129 Dean and Dean, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1808). 130 MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1834.

Basins, warehouses and wharves

197

131 NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 8 February 1805. 132 UMAU, Paradise Wharf watching brief: a record of the warehouse hoist system and Type 1 canal warehouse (2002/71; December 2002). 133 Pigot, Dean and Dean, New plan of Manchester and Salford (1819); Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 11; Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 29. 134 Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 8; Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 29. 135 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 29; Adshead’s twenty-four illustrated plans of Manchester (1851), sheet 8; MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1855. 136 Bancks, New plan of Manchester and Salford (1800); Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, Manchester, p. 216. 137 Turnbull, Traffic and transport, pp. 38–9. 138 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 33. 139 GMCRO, RCCP, B2 Plans, Box 17. 140 Dean and Dean, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1808). 141 Dean and Dean, Manchester and Salford directory (1809); Pigot and Son, General directory of Manchester and Salford (1829); Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 8. 142 MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1834. 143 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 116. In 1841, more than £4,000 was laid out to improve the Bridgewater offices at Castlefield. 144 Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831), sheet 11; Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 34. 145 Slater, General and classified directory (1855). 146 Mather, After the canal duke, p. 339. 147 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/6, Minute Book, 1806–12, 17 April 1812; B2/1/7, Minute Book, 1812–18, 6 March 1818; B2/1/10, Minute Book, 1827–30, 28 April 1830; B2/1/16, Minute Book, 1843–44, 8 February 1843, 8 March 1843 and 12 June 1843. 148 LCRO, Bridgwater Ledger, fo. 232. 149 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, pp. 283–4 150 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/Misc. Papers, Box 5, Item 8. 151 House of Lords, the Sessional Papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Kenworthy, pp. 273– 4 (including quote). The Old Quay Company occupied part of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury’s Salford warehouse rent free; see NA, RAIL, 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1833–35, 6 November 1833. 152 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/7, Minute Book, 1806–12, 27 April 1810, 19 April 1811 and 15 November 1811. In 1812, the Ashton Canal Company charged 1d. per ton for warehouse room at Manchester. See NA, RAIL, 804/1, Minutes of the Ashton Canal Company, 1798–1815, 6 March 1812.

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Transport and the industrial city

153 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/8, Minute Book, 1812–18, 24 June 1815; B2/1/9, Minute Book, 1818–23, 11 June 1819 and 24 August 1820; B2/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 9 June 1847. 154 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, p. 283. 155 Ibid., evidence of Joseph Harrison, p. 14 and Joseph Kenworthy, p. 276. 156 Building warehouses for individual firms was evidently common practice for canal companies. In 1818, for example, the Warwick & Birmingham Canal Company built substantial warehouses for Pickford & Co. The canal company retained ownership of the property, which they leased to Pickfords, the rent being calculated as 7.5 per cent of construction costs, the same financial arrangement on which Rochdale Canal Company leased their warehouses. See Turnbull, Traffic and transport, p. 86; GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/13, Minute Book, 1836–39, 8 August 1838; B2/1/14, Minute Book, 1839–41, 8 April 1840. 157 MALSU, Manchester township rate book, 1834. 158 In 1847, at the Rochdale Canal Company basin at Rochdale, the area of warehousing occupied by the company and public respectively was 43 per cent and 57 per cent; see GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 13 January 1847. 159 MALSU, Manchester township rate books, 1834 and 1845. 160 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, p. 25. 161 Ibid. evidence of Thomas Ogden Lingard, p. 283; Poole, Commerce of Liverpool, p. 7. 162 Manchester Gazette, 17 October 1829. 163 Manchester Mercury, 13 October 1829. 164 Salt, Statistics and calculations, p. 105. 165 House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Kenworthy, p. 276. 166 See, for example, Crompton, ‘Canals’, pp. 97–9. 167 NA, RAIL, 458/1, MBBCC, minutes of the Annual General Assembly, 1790–1831, 13 October 1790. 168 GMCRO, RCCP, B2 Miscellaneous vol. 14. 169 NA, RAIL, 621/1, Minutes of the Rochdale Canal Lessees, 18 January 1857. 170 Roydes, ‘Thirty-year monopoly’, pp. 168–73. 171 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/1, Minute Book, 1791–93, 23 September 1791, 11 September 1792. 172 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/1, Minute Book, 1791–93, 4 October 1792. 173 Manchester trade directory maps for 1800, 1808–09, 1819 and 1824 show the gradual building of private branches on the Rochdale Canal in the early nineteenth century. The final private branch, however, was built in 1850, twenty years after the arrival of Manchester’s first railway; see Adshead’s twenty-four illustrated plans of Manchester (1851). 174 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/6/3/90, incoming correspondence, 3 December 1806. 175 MALSU, John Leigh Philips Papers, M/2/1/68, 27 January 1815, T.M. Tate to Francis Philips.

Basins, warehouses and wharves

199

176 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheet 33. 177 CL, Archive of the Brownsfield Estate, Misc. 25, 12 June 1802, George Duckworth to Daniel Leech. See also Misc. 25, 6 January 1803, George Duckworth to J.L. Bond. 178 CL, Archive of the Brownsfield Estate, Misc. 25, 15 February 1806, William Johnson to Daniel Leech, and 10 October 1806 (quote). 179 CL, Archive of the Brownsfield Estate, Plans 10a, Misc. 25, 23 February 1825, Thomas Leech to John Leech; Misc. 1a, Thomas Leech’s White Book, 1815–57, pp. 74–6, 320. 180 The data include plots specified as either wharves or yards. 181 The selection of 20 yards as a break point is somewhat arbitrary. Most wharves directly adjoined waterways or were separated from a waterway only by the width of a towpath. 182 The Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company leased its wharves at a fixed sum per boat length. See NA, RAIL, 458/4, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1824–31, 8 February 1827, 31 May 1827. 183 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 2 May 1845. 184 A. Velkar, ‘Caveat emptor: abolishing public measurements, standardising quantities, and enhancing market transparency in the London coal trade c.1830’, Enterprise and Society, Vol. 9 (2008), pp. 281–313; GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 26 September 1801; B2/1/1/12, Minute Book, 1833–36, 8 January 1834; B2/1/1/13, Minute Book, 1836–39, 25 January 1838; NA, RAIL, 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 13 August 1834. 185 Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheets 27, 32–4. 186 CL, Thomas Leech’s White Book, 1815–57, pp. 299–300; NA, RAIL, 458/6, MBBCC, Minute Book, 1833–35, 10 September 1834. 187 Lloyd Jones and Lewis, Manchester, pp. 108–24. 188 Ibid., p. 106. 189 Reports of the Inspectors of Factories (P.P. 1842, Vol. XXII), pp. 369–403; Powell, British building industry, pp. 41–5. 190 Duckham, ‘Canals’, p. 135.

6

The waterfront and the factory

This chapter analyses the impact of canals and rivers on the development of factory industry during the Industrial Revolution. Cotton was, of course, Manchester’s primary industrial sector. While the English cotton industry was distributed throughout north, east and south Lancashire, north Cheshire, north and west Yorkshire and west Derbyshire, Manchester was the industry’s undisputed centre. The town had the largest concentration of cotton mills before 1850, its factory workforce numbering 10,000 more than any rival district.1 Nor was Manchester purely a manufacturing town.2 It was also the industry’s market and export centre. By the early 1850s, Cottonopolis’s palazzo warehouses marketed the output of almost 1,000 manufacturers from the satellite cotton towns, the market turning over more than £1m per week.3 The raw cotton import figures remain the best indicator of the phenomenal expansion of the industry, retained imports rising from 6m lbs in 1775–76 to 621m lbs in 1849–50, when the UK housed 60 per cent of the world’s cotton factory spindlage.4 Many of Manchester’s other industries, especially in textile finishing, engineering and chemicals, grew in response to the remarkable expansion of cotton production, while Manchester’s older textile history was represented from 1750 to 1850 by a continued manufacture of smallwares, linens and silks. Studies of industrial development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have provided detailed evaluations of why manufacturing and marketing became concentrated in particular British regions.5 There are, however, few spatial analyses of factory location within major manufacturing towns. Several recent studies have suggested that the building of canals played a key role in determining the timing and location of urban factory development in northern England. Turnbull has argued that canal banks provided narrow corridors of ‘superior locational space’ that became magnets for industrial and commercial businesses, while both Williams and Farnie and Holden have shown that canals provided many of the new mill sites in nineteenth-century Lancashire and Yorkshire, a development that reflected mill owners’ requirements for industrial water and for facilities to transport raw

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materials and finished products.6 These studies have questioned the validity of the older view that, once water-powered factories were superseded by steam-powered mule factories, the availability of water was no longer a prime determinant of factory location.7 This chapter presents new data on the location of factories in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford to test the proposition that water transport infrastructure determined the intra-urban pattern of mill construction.8 The data are obtained from two large-scale plans, published in 1851: the Ordnance Survey’s plan, surveyed in 1844–50 at 60 inches to the mile, and that of Joseph Adshead in 1849–51, at 80 inches to the mile.9 The new dataset includes 386 industrial sites recorded on the two plans, 326 sites in the township of Manchester itself and 60 sites in the five adjoining townships that comprised the remainder of the borough of Manchester in 1850. Trade directories allowed us to provisionally identify the occupants and function of each industrial site marked on the two plans, so that it could be placed in one of ten manufacturing categories: cotton mills, other textiles, textile finishing, metals/engineering, chemicals and soap, sawmills/woodworking, tanneries, glass works, paper works, corn mills and stone and lime works.10 Factories that could not be placed in one of these categories were not included in the dataset. The location of each industrial site was pinpointed and the sites were grouped by their proximity to canals, rivers or ‘other’ locations. Distances were measured from the nearest part of the building to the nearest part of the waterway in a straight line. The break point selected for waterside locations was 175 yards, the longest known distance over which a factory used a canal or river to supply water to steam engines in Manchester during this period, a distance that would usually leave a factory site within two of Manchester’s irregular city blocks from a waterway.11 Works located within 175 yards of a waterway were further subdivided into five groups: adjacent to a waterway, 1–10 yards away, 11–20 yards away, 21–100 yards away and 101–175 yards away. The inclusion of rateable values (RV) completed the dataset. Rateable value was adduced by contemporary poor rate assessors in order to calculate the poor relief contributions due from each property within a specific township. From 1836, poor rate assessors worked within a national framework established by the Parochial Assessment Act and clarified in the Poor Law Exemption Act of 1840.12 The Acts stipulated that assessors were to calculate RVs from their assessment of the annual rental value of each site’s buildings (and land), from which a deduction was to be made for the cost of maintaining the building in a tenantable state for that year. These deductions included the costs of insurance, wear and tear, repairs and whitewashing, and were generally reckoned to be about 20–25 per cent of the gross rental value per year. The RV assessment excluded all building contents (including machinery), with the exception of steam engines, which were assumed to be

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Transport and the industrial city

fixed investments in a building. As such, RVs are a reliable proxy for the value of buildings and power and are comparable across the borough of Manchester, as well as with other factory districts.13 The township rate books for Manchester, Cheetham, Hulme, Chorlton-on-Medlock and Ardwick survive for 1850. Unfortunately, the Salford township rate books were destroyed during the Second World War and it has not been possible to include Salford in the dataset.14 The matching exercise between the two maps, trade directories and rate books was successful: only 14 of the 386 map sites (3.6 per cent) could not be assigned an appropriate RV.15 Tables 6.1 and 6.2 provide a provisional representation of the data, pointing to two significant findings: first, that textile factories and finishing works comprised the greater part of factory RV in Manchester and second that waterways provided the bulk of factory sites in the borough. Textile factories Cotton was Manchester’s foremost factory industry in 1850. When the industry began to mechanise in the 1770s, however, the town was not initially a prime mill location. Aspin has shown that Manchester, Salford and their immediately adjacent townships contained only eight of the 101 water-frame spinning factories in Lancashire built before 1794. 16 It was only after improvements to the steam engine and the spinning mule that cotton factories proliferated in Manchester and in other urban locations in northern England. Crompton’s mule census of 1811 reveals the rapidity of this urban factory formation; by this date, Manchester operated 31 per cent of the mule spindles identified in cotton factories in Lancashire and adjacent counties.17 The factory returns, available from the early 1830s, confirm Manchester’s pre-eminence of the cotton factory sector, a position it retained until the late 1850s.18 The new data provide a snapshot of the cotton factory sector in 1850, identifying 89 cotton factories. The majority of cotton mills had waterfront locations: 52 cotton mills (58 per cent) directly adjoined waterways; 72 (81 per cent) were situated within 20 yards of a waterway; and 86 (97 per cent) stood within 175 yards. The RV of cotton mills, presented in Table 6.2, confirm the overwhelming importance of a waterside location. The 72 factories located within 20 yards of a waterway contributed 85 per cent of RV for the sector. Canals provided the location for 42 of these cotton factories, while the remaining 30 were built by rivers. Ancoats was the foremost factory district, containing more than 40 per cent of cotton mill RV in the borough of Manchester (Table 6.3; Fig. 6.1). The Rochdale and Ashton canals, and their private branches, provided the major

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203

Table 6.1 Distribution of industrial sites relative to the waterfront in Manchester, 1850 Type of site up to 20 yards Cotton mills Other textile mills Textile finishing Metals/machinery Sawmills/wood manufacture Chemicals/soap Paper mills Glass works Corn mills Tanneries Stone and lime works Total

Distance from a waterway 21–100 101–175 more yards yards than 175 yards

Total

72 23 39 46 13 18 2 3 6 5 4

11 7 5 37 11 2 0 1 1 1 0

3 5 1 11 0 0 0 1 1 0 0

3 13 9 10 11 6 0 0 1 3 1

89 48 54 104 35 26 2 5 9 9 5

231

76

22

57

386

Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851).

sites for Ancoats’ development. Some of Manchester’s largest mills fronted the Rochdale Canal, including the fine-spinning factories of Adam & George Murray, McConnel & Co. and Hugh Shaw & Co.19 In total, there were 13 cotton mills on the Rochdale Canal in Ancoats, more than half of which stood on private branches. There were also 14 factories on the Ashton Canal in Ancoats, including five on private branches. Four Ancoats mills had riveror brookside locations. Significant concentrations of canalside mills were also found in the vicinity of Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The Oxford Street district contained 23 cotton mills, 12 of which were located on the Rochdale Canal or one of its private branches (Fig. 6.2). William & Walter Stirling’s spinning and weaving mill was the major firm. Its RV of £1,531 made it the sixth largest cotton factory in the dataset. There were, in addition, ten cotton mills on the north bank of the River Medlock near Oxford Street, although their average RV was less than half that of those on the Rochdale Canal. The 14 Piccadilly mills comprised almost 15 per cent of cotton mill RV, the bulk (8) located close to the Rochdale Canal or one of its branches (Fig. 6.3). Houldsworth & Co.’s fine-spinning mill and Robert Ogden & Co.’s cotton spinning and weaving works were the largest of the Piccadilly mills. There were also three mills on the River Medlock in the Piccadilly district, including that of the Hanover Mill Company, rated at £1,215 (Manchester’s twelfth largest cotton factory) and three mills on the Ashton Canal.

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Table 6.2 Rateable value of industrial sites relative to distance from the waterfront in Manchester, 1850 (£) Type of site up to 20 yards Cotton mills Other textile mills Textile finishing Metals/machinery Sawmills/wood manufacture Chemicals/soap Paper mills Glass works Corn mills Tanneries Stone works Total rateable value

44,126 (72) 5,006 (22) 9,016 (39) 10,632 (45) 3,078 (13) 2,146 (17) 545 (2) 793 (3) 738 (6) 457 (4) 384 (4) 76,921 (227)

Distance from a waterway 21–100 101–175 more than yards yards 175 yards 4,768 (11) 688 (7) 780 (5) 3,755 (36) 746 (10) 177 (2) 0

1,127 (3) 601 (5) 67 (1) 553 (11) 0

132 (1) 50 (1) 0

100 (1) 167 (1) 0

0

0

11,096 (73)

2,615 (22)

0 0

1,747 (3) 1,969 (13) 1,858 (9) 774 (7) 719 (9) 224 (5) 0 0 0 161 (3) 17 (1) 7,469 (50)

Total

51,768 (89) 8,264 (47) 11,721 (54) 15,714 (99) 4,543 (32) 2,547 (24) 545 (2) 1,025 (5) 955 (8) 618 (7) 401 (5) 98,101 (372)

Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) and MALSU, 1850 township rate books for Manchester, Hulme, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Ardwick and Cheetham. Note: Figures in parentheses refer to number of sites for which RV is available.

The township of Chorlton-on-Medlock contained the major concentrations of riverside cotton mills. The cotton mills of Chorlton adjoined the south bank of the River Medlock. Two mill clusters owned by Birley & Co. and the Oxford Street Twist Company were particularly notable; the former was rated at £3,541, by far the largest individual RV for the region, the firm having ranked as Lancashire’s principal cotton factory firm since the late 1830s.20 Hulme and Ardwick each contained three cotton mills, while there were two riverside cotton mills on the Manchester bank of the River Irwell and another on the River Irk at some remove from the main factory areas. Only three of Manchester 89 cotton mills were located more than 175

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Figure 6.1 Cotton factories and engineering works in Ancoats, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851)

yards from the waterfront. The only large-scale factory at some remove from a waterway was John Pooley’s Hulme Mill, rated at £1,153, the fourteenth largest in Manchester. Of the remaining two non-waterfront factories, one, Oak Street Mill, was among the first steam-powered mills built in the town; it was, however, demolished in the short window between the OS and Adshead surveys. The other non-waterfront cotton factory was built at Miles Platting on the easterly extremity of the borough. Manchester, of course, also manufactured other non-cotton textiles. Seventeen smallwares mills and nine silk factories provided more than threequarters of the RV of ‘other textiles’. Smallwares manufacturers had formed a key component of Manchester’s industrial sector since the late sixteenth century, while the town’s silk industry developed rapidly from the late eighteenth century to become England’s second largest silk factory centre by the late 1830s.21 Waterfront clustering is once again evident; firms located within

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Table 6.3 Locations of cotton factories in Manchester and Salford, 1850 Location

Number of sites

Rateable RV/site (£) Percentage of value (£) total cotton factory RV

Ancoats Oxford Street district Piccadilly Chorlton-on-Medlock Other (township of Manchester) Hulme Ardwick

31 23 14 9 6 3 3

20,995 9,379 7,321 9,196 1,843 1,849 1,185

677 408 523 1,022 307 616 395

40.6 18.1 14.1 17.8 3.6 3.6 2.3

Total

89

51,768

582

100.1

Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) and MALSU, 1850 township rate books for Manchester, Hulme, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Ardwick and Cheetham. Note: Ancoats, Piccadilly and Oxford Street district refer to the districts shown in Figs. 6.1–6.3.

Figure 6.2 Cotton factories and engineering works around Oxford Street, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851)

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Figure 6.3 Cotton factories and engineering works in Piccadilly, 1850 Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851)

175 yards of waterways provided 76 per cent of the sector’s RV. The largest ‘other textile’ factory was Wood & Westhead’s smallware mill on the south bank of the River Medlock in Chorlton-on-Medlock, rated at £708. In c.1840, the firm was said to weave each year more than 35,000 miles of cotton, linen, worsted and silk smallwares.22 Textile finishing Manchester’s prominence as a market for textiles encouraged the development of finishing trades. The new data show 54 finishing sites in Manchester and Salford in 1850, including 30 specialist dye works and five print works. Waterfront locations were pervasive. Firms situated within 20 yards of a waterway provided 77 per cent (£9,016) of the RV of the textile finishing sector. Here, river banks, rather than canals, were the key locations, account-

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ing for 78 per cent of the RV of £9,016. Thomas Hoyle & Sons’ extensive Mayfield print works was by far the largest finishing firm: its RV of £1,550 was greater than all but five of the town’s cotton mills. There were nine finishing sites located more than 175 yards from a waterway, including four calendaring works that undertook only the final stages of finishing. Other sectors Manchester possessed other industries that, like the textile-finishing sector, owed their expansion to the rising fortunes of the cotton industry. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Manchester became Britain’s primary centre of mechanical engineering. The principal stimulus came from the cotton industry’s demands for machinery, steam engines and boilers, although the sector later produced locomotives, bridges and machine tools, as well as a range of metalwares.23 Manchester contained 106 metal/engineering sites in 1850, the bulk being iron and brass foundries, as well as machine manufactories, but there were also lead, copper, tin and zinc works, and manufacturers of spindles, reeds, shuttles, screws, bolts, files and wire. As with cotton, the largest engineering works had waterfront locations: sites within 20 yards of a waterway contributed 68 per cent of the sector’s RV: those located further than 175 yards from the waterfront added just 5 per cent. An important cluster of smaller firms were located between 20–175 yards from a waterway, contributing 27 per cent to the sector’s RV. Table 6.4 Location of metal/engineering works in Manchester and Salford, 1850 Location

Piccadilly Ancoats Oxford Street district Other (township of Manchester) Ardwick Hulme Cheetham Chorlton-on-Medlock Total

Number of sites

Rateable value (£)

RV/site (£) Percentage of total metal works RV

36 (33) 29 (29) 14 (13)

5,993 2,902 3,589

182 100 276

38.1 18.5 22.8

14 (13) 5 (5) 4 (4) 1 (1) 1 (1)

1,128 347 1,217 358 180

87 69 304 358 180

7.2 2.1 7.7 2.3 1.1

104 (99)

15,714

159

100

Source: Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851) and MALSU, 1850 township rate books for Manchester, Hulme, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Ardwick and Cheetham. Note: Figures in parentheses refer to the number of sites that had a rateable value.

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Canals and their private branches in south and east Manchester, rather than rivers, accommodated the leading engineering works. Almost four-fifths of the sector’s RV was found in Ancoats, Piccadilly and the Oxford Street district (Table 6.4), canals providing 92 per cent of the RV of engineering firms located within 20 yards of the waterfront. In 1850, Sharp Bros. & Co. was the foremost engineering concern; their Atlas Works on Oxford Street was rated at £1,908, the fourth largest of any industrial firm in Manchester. Seventeen firms were rated at between £301–£1,000, including William Fairbairn & Co., with four ironworks in Ancoats and Piccadilly (together rated at £868); Parr, Curtis & Co.’s foundry on the Ashton Canal in Piccadilly (£656); Roberts’ Globe Works on a branch of the Rochdale Canal near Oxford Street (£584); and Peel, Williams & Peels’ Soho Foundry, on a branch of the Ashton Canal in Ancoats (£459). Two prominent firms built their works on river sites: W. & J. Galloway positioned their works at Knott Mill on the River Medlock in Hulme (£805), while John Barton & Co., brass founders and manufacturers of copper rollers, developed two works on the Irwell (£770). The RV of the leading 18 firms in 1850 amounted to £10,475, two-thirds of the total for the sector. There was a long tail of smaller metal/engineering sites; 37 were rated at £50 or lower. While 35 of these 37 sites were located within 175 yards of the waterfront, few were directly situated on a waterway. Thus, firms located within 20 yards of a waterway contributed only 26 per cent of the RV of these 37 sites. Canals accommodated glass and stone works, as well as sawmills. There were five glass manufactories in Manchester in 1850; Molyneux, Webb & Co. on a branch of the Ashton Canal (rated at £417) and Percival, Yates & Co. on the Rochdale Canal (£132) operated the largest of these works. Canalside firms provided more than 75 per cent of glass RV in 1850. Stone and lime works also clustered close to the waterfront, with 96 per cent of RV provided by works located within 20 yards of a waterway. In the wooden manufacturing sector, 68 per cent of RV was generated by firms within 20 yards of the waterfront. There were two subgroups: for sawmills, 84 per cent of the RV of £3,318 was located within 20 yards of a waterway, while, in contrast, for coach/cabinet makers just 24 per cent of RV (£300 out of £1,225) was found within 20 yards of the waterfront. River sites were favoured by chemical manufacturers, paper and corn mills, as well as tanneries. Improvements in dyeing and bleaching in the late eighteenth century depended on improvements in chemical knowledge and modes of manufacture, especially in the production of four major heavy chemicals for industrial uses – salt, sulphuric acid, soda water and chlorine – as well as mordants, mainly alum and copperas, and natural alkalis, such as potash and barilla. During industrialisation, chemical production developed rapidly in the vicinity of the Cheshire salt fields and in Manchester itself,

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attracted by the proximity to the source of its greatest demand – the Lancashire cotton industry.24 The dataset identifies 26 works in this category in Manchester in 1850, with 84 per cent of the RV of the chemical sector generated by firms located within 20 yards of waterways. The major sites were riverside locations, especially on the River Medlock and its tributaries. Manchester’s two paper mills both adjoined rivers. The largest, owned and occupied by John Dickinson & Co., fronted the River Medlock at Castlefield and was rated at £486. Likewise, 80 per cent of the RV of Manchester’s tanneries was found within 20 yards of a waterway, mostly on rivers. Corn mills too adhered to traditional riverside locations. Five of Manchester’s nine corn mills directly adjoined rivers, while one stood in the Rochdale Canal basin at Piccadilly. To summarise, all major sectors of industry in Manchester favoured a waterfront location. In total, 78 per cent of factory RV (£76,921) in Manchester was generated by industrial works situated within 20 yards of a waterway. Of this RV of £76,921, 57 per cent was located on or close to canals and 43 per cent by rivers. The Rochdale Canal was the most important individual waterway, providing the location for £27,611 (36 per cent) of Manchester’s waterfront RV: slightly more than half of the RV of the Rochdale Canal factory sites were located on private canal branches. The Ashton Canal contributed 18 per cent of waterfront RV; the remaining canals provided a further 3 per cent. Of the river sites, the Medlock was by far the most important: works within 20 yards of this river were rated at £23,612 (31 per cent of waterfront RV). The rivers Irk and Irwell each contributed 4 per cent of waterfront RV with tributary streams supplying an additional 3 per cent.25 Explaining the waterfront pattern of factory development Why was factory industry attracted to waterfront locations? Although economic historians have rarely confronted micro-questions of industrial location directly, recent research has significantly extended our knowledge of the determinants of factory location in industrial Lancashire. Williams and Farnie have asserted that, before 1860, cotton factory location in Manchester was ‘conditioned by the availability of a water supply for boilers and engines’, as well as the use of canals ‘for the transportation of coal, raw cotton, and finished textile products’. Canal banks thus provided ‘a high proportion’ of mill sites in the first half of the nineteenth century.26 Holden has also analysed the location of textile mills in northern England, highlighting the pre-eminence of waterside locations in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Canals attracted factories, he argues, because of ‘water-supply … rather than transport’, although he allows that for Manchester mills constructed before

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c.1830, ‘transport must have been a major consideration’.27 This section provides the first detailed overview of the determinants of factory location in nineteenth-century Manchester, framing the analysis in terms of the four posited advantages of waterside locations found in the contemporary and secondary literatures: (1) to supply water for industrial purposes; (2) to provide access to coal and other raw materials; (3) to transport manufactured articles; and (4) to carry away waste products. The study concludes that the provision of water for steam engines was the principal cause of the waterfront pattern of factory development in Manchester. The Rochdale Canal Act of 1794, like other canal acts of the period, anticipated that canals would become appropriate sites near which to build factories. The Act allowed mill owners on sites within 20 yards of the canal to take unlimited quantities of water for the supply of steam engines for ‘the sole purpose of condensing steam’, the mill owner to return the water to the canal after use.28 The pipes were laid at the expense of the factory proprietors but regulated by stop cocks controlled by the canal company.29 The low-pressure condensing engines produced in the early nineteenth century used water for two purposes: feeding boilers and condensing steam. The second purpose required far greater volumes of water. In the mid-nineteenth century, ‘ruleof-thumb’ estimates suggest that condensing required as much as 25 to 30 times more water than boiler feed.30 High-pressure steam engines, available from the early nineteenth century, were much more economical in their use of water, only requiring it for boiler feed and not for condensing. The water provision allowed by Manchester’s extensive waterfront, however, meant that they were not generally taken up in Manchester before 1850. Hence, W. & J. Galloway of Manchester stated in 1844 that ‘high pressure engines are more general & better known than formerly, but are rarely adopted, unless compelled on account of the location being at a distance from good supply of Cold Water’.31 Steam power was pervasive in Manchester, providing 99 per cent of the power capability of Manchester’s cotton factories by 1840. 32 There is abundant evidence that Manchester factories used canal water to operate steam engines. As early as 1800, the Manchester Mercury advertised land for sale on the bank of the Rochdale Canal near Oxford Street that claimed to be ‘desirably situated for erecting … a factory upon … the owner has a right to take water from the said canal for the purpose of working a steam engine’.33 One year later, the Rochdale Canal Company granted permission to Adam & George Murray of Ancoats to cut ‘a line of canal up to their works in order to supply their steam-engine with condensing water’.34 The cotton factory firms that moved into Ancoats in the late 1790s did so in the knowledge that the 1794 Rochdale Canal Act allowed factories to take water from the canal for their steam engines. Thus, McConnel & Co., Manchester’s second largest factory firm in 1850, built two factories in Ancoats in 1797 and

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1800 ‘in the fullest conviction’ that the Act authorised them to use the canal’s water. The firm designed its factories to take water ‘conformable to’ the Act and it considered its water supply to be ‘a permanent right’.35 McConnel & Co., like other firms in Manchester at this time, designed its mills to minimise the distance between the engine and boiler houses and the waterways.36 Love’s 1839 Manchester guidebook claimed that it was the need for condensing water for steam engines that had led most factories to be ‘erected on the banks of canals and rivers’.37 The right to take condensing water for steam engines was extended to factories built within 20 yards of private canal branches. In 1804, Philips, McNiven & Co. built a canal branch near Oxford Street to open up its land for factory sites. The developers sought and received clarification that ‘proprietors of such [private] cuts’ could ‘take water out … for the supply of steam engines’, pointing out a number of advantages to the Rochdale Canal, not least that ‘no factory with a steam engine can be erected … without increasing the tonnage [tolls] of the company’.38 The Rochdale Canal Company also sold water to firms located beyond the 20-yard limit fixed by parliament. As early as 1804, the company supplied water to a steam-powered works located more than 60 yards from the canal.39 In 1808, the company received a number of proposals from ‘persons desirous of erecting Factories or Mills but out of the distance limited by the act of parliament’, inducing them to increase the charge levied on supplying water to factories beyond the 20-yard limit.40 In 1819, Houldsworth & Co. laid a pipe of approximately 175 yards from its Newton Street factory to the Rochdale Canal to take ‘condensing water’ for its steam engine, the greatest known length of such an undertaking. For the privilege of taking and returning the water, Houldsworth & Co. paid the canal company £51 per year.41 The Rochdale Canal Company also sold water to cotton mills situated on rivers. From 1839, for example, James Guest paid an annual sum of £40 to supply water to an 80 h.p. steam engine powering his mill on the River Medlock in Little Ireland.42 Cotton factories used canal water for processes other than condensing. The Rochdale Canal Company frequently complained that Manchester factories abused water rights.43 Blatant infringements were settled by the canal company through the extraction of annual charges for particular privileges.44 Disagreements about water rights provoked major conflicts between the Rochdale Canal Company and the Manchester mill owners in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1847, the mill owners formed an association to obstruct the sale of the Rochdale Canal to the Manchester and Leeds Railway after the railway company refused to include a clause in its bill to protect the mill owners’ ‘right to the use of canal water for all the purposes to which they have hitherto applied it’.45 The Rochdale Canal Company responded to the mill owners’ manoeuvres by systematically levying charges for water supplies where water

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was used for purposes other than condensing. Factories within the 20-yard limit (including those on private branches) were to pay an annual charge of 5s. per h.p., while firms beyond the 20-yard limit found their annual charges increased to 15s. per h.p. The new scale of charges also reflected developments in steam-engine design; high-pressure stream engines that required water for boiler feed but not for condensing were to pay 20s. per h.p. per year.46 Tellingly, neither side disputed that water was used for purposes other than condensing. The mill owners argued that factories had always used water for boiler supply; this privilege, according to McConnel & Co., having been enjoyed since ‘time out of mind’.47 Joseph Lamb, of Bee Hive Mills in Ancoats, argued that the wording of the 1794 Act was based on a misunderstanding of the workings of steam engines: is it not as plain, as white is not black, that the millowner must have steam to condense, before they want water to condense it, and I would ask, that at the time the [Rochdale] canal was made, from what place could the water for raising steam have been got, if it was not intended to be taken from the canal – for neither the corporation water works, nor the Manchester and Salford waterworks was in existence?48

The Rochdale Canal Company countered that factory firms illegally used canal water not only to supply boilers but also for a range of additional functions, including cleaning machinery, heating mills and to supply water tanks to tackle factory fires.49 Canal water was also used by firms in other industries. In foundries, sawmills and glass works, as in textiles, firms used canal water primarily to operate steam engines.50 Firms that required very large volumes of water for processing, above all in the finishing and paper sectors, usually located their works on river sites. However, the increasing impurity of river water in Manchester compelled the largest finishing firms on the rivers Medlock and Irwell to build extensive reservoirs and filtration pools; the largest Lancastrian papermakers in the mid-Victorian period required as much water as did medium-sized towns.51 The Rochdale Canal Company sold water to several dyeing firms on its banks, as well as to those located on river sites at some remove from the canal. The New Garratt Print Works, situated on the River Medlock (rated at £567 in 1850), paid £50 a year for water drawn from a private branch on the Rochdale Canal, the annual charge being increased to £80 in 1849 when the canal company discovered the privilege was being ‘greatly abused’.52 What alternative supplies of water were available to Manchester industry? Hassan has analysed the town’s water supplies before 1850, highlighting the inadequacy of the public provision of water to industry. Before 1750,

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Manchester’s public water supply was supervised by the Court Leet, supplemented by a number of ad hoc private arrangements, such as water taken from wells and ponds. This system, although serving the town well in the early eighteenth century, struggled to cope with increases in population from the mid-eighteenth century, as well as the pollution of traditional sources of supply. In the 1770s, new manorial works were promoted but failed to shore up the ailing public supplies. The joint-stock Manchester and Salford Water Works Company, created by parliament in 1809, refurbished the manorial works and became the only source of piped water to Manchester until 1851. However, as late as the 1840s, the company supplied water to only 23 per cent of Manchester’s houses and just 21 per cent of businesses. Hassan thus concludes that the waterworks company’s ‘provision of water for the industrial sector was … extremely poor during the first half of the nineteenth century’.53 Other than waterways and piped water, industrialists drew supplies of water from ponds, wells and boreholes. The only large-scale factory in 1850 situated more than 175 yards from a waterway, for example, was that built by John Pooley in the late eighteenth century by a large pond in Hulme.54 Likewise, Arkwright’s mill in Miller Street, the first in Manchester to use steam power, obtained water from the Shudehill Pits, which also supplied at least two more late eighteenth-century cotton mills, as well as the Swan Street iron foundry of Peel, Williams & Peel.55 Small-scale businesses also used water drawn from private wells.56 A second benefit attributed to canalside location was that it cheapened access to raw materials, especially coal. Before 1850, the provision of coal gave canals an advantage over railways as sites of factory location despite similar point-to-point transport costs. Thus, Wheeler’s 1836 account of industrial Manchester explained that canalside mills could unload coal ‘without any second expense, at their very doors’, while railway coal was discharged ‘at the “station” whence it must be carted to their destination’. 57 Even after the expansion of the railway network, canals remained the primary conveyance for Manchester coal, hauling as much as two-thirds of its annual supply of approximately 1m tons in the late 1830s and 1840s.58 In 1850, only six of 89 cotton factories were located within 200 yards of railway stations and, in any case, all of these mills stood closer to a waterway than to a station.59 In fact, the bulk of non-canal coal was carried by road rather than by rail at this time.60 Buxton’s considered account of Manchester’s factory sector, published in 1855–56, explained that canals remained central to the distribution of raw materials; there were, he argued, ‘peculiar advantages to the manufacturer in the proximity of the canal’: His [the mill owner’s] chief and indispensable requisites are cotton and coals. Both are very bulky; both very inexpensive in proportion to their bulk; and neither, therefore, will bear a heavy rate of freight … the canal boats can be

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brought alongside, and even run into the factory yard; and their contents can be laid down upon the very spot where they are required for use. Where these conveniences are wanting, there must be the additional item of cartage introduced into the cost; and this, where constant consumption necessitates constant supply, must amount in the aggregate to a sum sufficiently considerable to make exemption from it worth trying for.61

Most canalside factory sites included wharves for coal. The Ancoats mills of Adam & George Murray, for example, incorporated an underground canal branch and adjoining basin, which allowed the firm to receive coal directly into its factories.62 Likewise, McConnel & Co. paid for boatloads of coal to be delivered directly into its gas yard.63 Canalside factories without coal yards could purchase coal from the extensive networks of wharves on private canal branches in Ancoats, Piccadilly and the Oxford Street district. By 1850, there were no fewer than 57 coal wharves situated within 20 yards of the Rochdale Canal.64 Firms in other sectors equally benefited from attached wharves for coal and other raw materials. In 1810, Soho Iron Works in Ancoats contained ‘a commodious wharf on the bank of the Ashton Canal, which communicates with other canals, by means whereof, coals and metal are advantageously brought without any expense of land carriage’.65 Likewise, sawmills built on canal banks accessed imported timber from Liverpool and Hull; J. & W. Bellhouse, which owned and occupied Manchester’s largest sawmills, sited on the Rochdale Canal and rated at £1,164, were also timber carriers between Liverpool and Manchester.66 Manchester factories also made extensive use of canals to transport raw cotton and finished cotton textiles.67 As late as the 1840s, more than a decade after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, canals remained the dominant mode of transport for incoming cargoes of raw cotton and outgoing shipments of cotton piece goods. One estimate made in 1841 suggested that the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation carried more than three-quarters of the volume of both the raw cotton and the piece goods that passed between Liverpool and Manchester. The waterways’ principal advantages over the railway at this time were two-fold. First, the canals carried manufactures to Liverpool at least 1s. per ton cheaper than railways (approximately 15 per cent of transport costs) and second, sailing flats could distribute packages of finished textiles directly on to international vessels, a practice that expedited the passage of goods and minimised breakages and storage costs in warehouses.68 Despite the continued importance of canal transport, it is not clear that locating a factory on the banks of a canal conferred any specific intra-urban advantages on a firm with respect to the transportation of raw cotton and finished goods. Whereas coal, stone and timber merchants established private canal fleets to haul their heavy cargoes and to distribute them directly to

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factories and canal wharves, the carriage of manufactured goods, raw cotton and dyestuffs was typically handled by public carriers, either the waterway owners or independent firms. These carriers operated their businesses from warehouses in canal company basins, establishing regular, scheduled services to fixed locations. The carriers’ warehouses received goods from their customers, stored them and arranged for their shipping to the final destination.69 The complexity of delivery arrangements precluded public carriers’ boats from collecting or distributing goods to factories: it was left to road carts to carry cotton, yarn and textiles to and from Manchester factories and canal warehouses. In the Manchester to Liverpool trade, the competition among carriers for cargoes for freight led the carriers to collect goods free of charge from industrial firms located at any point within the town.70 McConnel & Co. has left the largest collection of business papers of any canalside industrial firm. The archive shows that the firm made extensive use of canal transport in its long-distance trades but that road carts carried its goods within Manchester, to and from the Ancoats factory and the various canal warehouses of Castlefield and Piccadilly. In the 1830s, its cotton was brought to Manchester by the New Quay Company, carried on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, to warehouses located on the Irwell, more than one mile to the west of the factory. The cotton was then carted by road to Ancoats, for which McConnel & Co. paid a fee. The firm shipped its cotton yarn to Liverpool via the Manchester Grocers’ Company, a canal carrier on the Bridgewater Canal; the yarn was first carted to the carrier’s Piccadilly and Castlefield warehouses. Canal transport was also the main conveyance for McConnel & Co.’s yarn exports to Switzerland, the goods first being carted to the Piccadilly warehouse of Buckley & Co., a canal carrier from Manchester to Hull.71 Similarly, William Horsfall, a card manufacturer based in Albion Mills, situated close to the Rochdale Canal in the Oxford Street district, collected its industrial inputs from canal warehouses in Piccadilly and Castlefield, rather than receiving the goods directly at the factory.72 W.C. Taylor thus described ‘immense waggons incessantly traversing the streets of Manchester drawn by horses’. These carts were ‘laden with bales of cotton in the raw or manufactured state’.73 A final advantage credited to waterside locations was to facilitate the carrying away of waste products created in the manufacturing processes. Ure, in 1836, asserted that factories should be built ‘near a river or canal … with such a slope to the voider stream as may ensure the ready discharge of all impurities’, while in 1854, Taylor considered that drainage requirements made ‘a river or canal almost essential to a mill’.74 The many graphic descriptions of the poor quality of water around Manchester attest to the use of waterways for this purpose.75 Cotton mills, however, were not the major culprits; their main discharge was the warm condensing water that was

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returned to the canal in accordance with the canal acts. There were also, it is true, complaints of cotton mills along the Rochdale Canal sweeping ashes, privy waste and other rubbish into the canal.76 However, the textile-finishing, chemical and tanning sectors must bear (along with human sewage) the responsibility for polluting Manchester’s waterways, the majority of these enterprises being sited on rivers rather than canals.77 In the mid-Victorian period, tests on Manchester river water showed it was six times harder in Manchester than at its source.78 The pollution of Manchester’s rivers explains why factories and dye works on the River Medlock purchased cleaner water from the Rochdale Canal Company. Where tanneries and chemical works were sited on the canals, their waste products caused problems for neighbouring businesses. In the mid-1840s, for example, a canalside firm on the Rochdale Canal complained that its boilers were ‘very much corroded’ because a nearby business had poured ‘tan liquor into the canal’.79 The provision of water for manufacturing processes and the use of canals to carry coal thus stand out as the major factors underpinning cotton factory location in Manchester before 1850. Canals provided a convenient and, within 20 yards, free source of condensing water, as well as water for a range of other purposes, including the supply of boiler feed and heating. The canals’ ability to supply coal cheaply and with a minimum of transhipment costs afforded them an advantage over non-waterfront sites. One way of weighting the relative importance of these two factors is to assign estimates of the costs incurred by mill owners in bringing water and coal to sites at some remove from the waterfront. Unfortunately, however, the data required to assign costs for water provision and coal transhipment are not available. Two pieces of evidence, however, suggest that the provision of water might have been the foremost determinant of the waterfront pattern of development. First, 27 of the 82 (33 per cent) waterfront cotton factories stood on nonnavigable rivers and hence could not unload coal directly from canal or river craft. Second, non-waterfront factories could purchase coal carried to Manchester by road without accruing additional costs over those on coal brought by canal. While it is well known that land carriage for coal was much more expensive than water conveyance, the extensive development of Pendleton Colliery after 1830, which had the deepest sinkings of any pit in England, and its location within two miles of the centre of Manchester, minimised or even eliminated the canals’ cost advantage over roads in supplying the Manchester coal market. By 1836, Pendleton Colliery alone was supplying Manchester with 215,000 tons of coal by road per year, 24 per cent of the town’s supply.80

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Manchester: a typical case study? The new data allow us to make broader comments on the industrial structure of Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century. Our knowledge of the cotton sector from the 1830s chiefly rests on data adduced by the factory commissioners. The most detailed survey of Manchester was undertaken in 1840, when the inspectors listed 169 cotton factories in the parish of Manchester (Manchester, Salford and 28 adjoining townships) that could provide jobs for almost 40,000 people.81 The commissioners’ data, presented in Table 6.5, identify two major factory types, each accounting for more than 40 per cent of the cotton labour force: specialist spinning/doubling factories and combined cotton spinning and powerloom weaving factories. Weaving-only factories provided just 5.6 per cent of the factory labour force. The new RV data for 1850, reported in Table 6.6, are remarkably similar to the commissioners’ 1840 data with respect to the structure of the Manchester’s cotton factory sector. Specialist spinning/doubling mills and combined spinning and weaving factories remained by far the most representative mode of organisation, accounting for 38 per cent and 36.6 per cent of cotton factory RV, respectively. However, the new data for 1850 show that weaving-only mills accounted for almost 10 per cent of cotton factory RV. This is consistent with Taylor’s argument for the whole county of Lancashire that there was a ‘significant increase in the number of firms engaged solely in weaving’ in the 1840s.82 Manchester’s domination of the production and marketing of cotton textiles earned it the nickname ‘Cottonopolis’. The new data for 1850, summarised in Table 6.7, confirm the textile industries’ lead of the factory sector. Cotton factories alone accounted for slightly more than half of factory Table 6.5 Cotton factories in Manchester parish, 1840 Factory type

Spinning/doubling Spinning/doubling and powerloom weaving Powerloom weaving Smallware mills Not specified Total

Number of Steam hp Water hp mills (full capacity) (full capacity)

Labour force Percentage (full capacity) of total cotton labour force

84

3,708

0

17,853

45.1

43 24 17 1

3,844 414 196 36

10 0 0 0

17,593 2,201 1,700 244

44.4 5.6 4.3 0.6

169

8,198

10

39,591

99.9

Source: Reports of the Inspectors of Factories (P.P. 1842, Vol. XXII). Note: There were also 16 small mills spinning and weaving waste described as being in ‘Manchester, Ashton and Oldham’. These mills employed just 406 workers and were probably mainly located in the latter two towns.

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219

Table 6.6 Cotton/smallwares factories in Manchester and Salford, 1850 Factory type

Spinning/doubling Spinning/doubling and weaving Powerloom weaving Smallware mills Room and power mills Not available Total

Number of sites

Rateable value (£)

RV/site (£) Percentage of total cotton factory RV

29

21,162

735

38.0

25 21 14 14 3

20,370 5,405 3,221 4,859 611

817 246 245 359 218

36.6 9.7 5.8 8.7 1.1

106

55,628

539

99.9

Source: dataset, as above; Slater’s directory of Manchester and Salford (1850). Note: Room and power mills were multi-occupancy units where a variety of firms rented space and steam power from the owner. The RV of firms based in room and power mills was distributed as follows: spinning/doubling £1,293; spinning/doubling and weaving £1,168; powerloom weaving £774; smallware mills £470; and empty, other trades, or unknown £1,154.

RV, while other textile factories and textile finishing works together contributed a further one-fifth. Engineering/metalwares provided the major non-textile component of factory RV (15 per cent), with sawmills adding a further 5 per cent. The new data fit well with information on the sectoral distribution of industry derived from employment patterns revealed in the 1851 census: thus, textile factories and finishing works provided 75 per cent of factory employment, with engineering (15 per cent) and sawmills (5 per cent) adding the bulk of the remainder. How did factory location in Manchester compare with that of other manufacturing towns in the cotton district? The most detailed studies of pre1850 factory location outside Manchester are of the cotton towns to the east of Manchester that adjoined the River Tame, including Ashton, Dukinfield, Hyde, Mossley and Stalybridge. The spatial distribution of mills in this district reveals a number of similarities to the pattern uncovered in the study of Manchester. In the 1770s and 1780s, water-powered spinning factories were first established on the region’s numerous rivers and brooks, before the locus of factory construction switched to the banks of the Ashton and Peak Forest canals in the building booms of the 1820s and 1830s.83 As in Manchester, railway infrastructure ‘did not attract new mills … as the canals did’.84 Holden’s account of Blackburn and Stockport in the nineteenth century reveals similar consolidations of factories in canal and river locations, a finding matched by Timmins’ study of the location of factory clusters in Burnley.85

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Table 6.7 Factory industry in Manchester by sector, c.1850 Industrial sector

Percentage of 1850 rateable value, new estimates

Percentage of labour force employed (census, 1851)

Cotton Other textiles Textile finishing Metals/machinery Sawmills/wood manufacture Chemicals/soap Paper mills Glass works Corn mills Tanneries 0.6 Stone works

52.8 8.4 11.9 16.0 4.6 2.6 0.6 1.0 1.0 0.5 0.4

57.1 12.4 8.1 14.6 4.6 1 0.3 0.7 1.0

Total

100

100.1

0.7

Source: dataset, as above; Census of Great Britain, 1851 (P.P. 1852–53, Vol. LXXXVIII, part 2), pp. 124–9. Note: Census data also include the borough of Salford.

In contrast, the pattern of factory development of Oldham and Bolton diverged from that of Manchester. In these locations, the trend for mills to ‘scatter indiscriminately’ in town-centre locations was already apparent in the late 1840s86 and accelerated decisively during the major post-1850 factory expansion when Manchester was eclipsed as a centre of cotton spinning by Bolton in the 1850s and by Oldham in the 1860s. Indeed, Williams and Farnie highlight a significant change in the location of cotton factories throughout Lancashire after 1860, when most new mills were ‘built away from canals’. This shift reflected notable changes in factory design in the second half of the nineteenth century, the major feature of which was the mills’ use of artificial reservoirs, rather than canals or rivers, to supply water for boilers and for condensing.87 The increasing use of reservoirs stemmed partly from improvements in municipal water supplies. Thus, the Bolton Corporation, on taking control of the town’s waterworks in 1847, declared that its ‘first object’ was to secure an ample supply of pure water for its manufacturers. By the 1880s, over half the capacity of Bolton’s municipal waterworks was piped to meet the needs of industry and trade.88 Manchester, meanwhile, had passed the zenith of its importance as a centre of cotton manufacture in the mid-nineteenth century. Manchester’s relative decline as a factory centre became a topic of public debate from the 1850s. Buxton, in a study published in 1855–56, for example, noted that ‘old factories are sometimes enlarged, but new ones are not built there

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[Manchester] … They are built at some convenient spot in the district [in the outlying suburbs and towns].’ In 1844, Manchester cotton manufacturers Armitage & Ward requested the advice of Ancoats mill owner Samuel Faulkner regarding a favourable location for a new powerloom factory. Faulkner counselled the firm to build their factory ‘on a canal bank’ but to ‘go out of the borough [of Manchester]’.89 By 1850, there were few central factory sites available on canals in Manchester and competition from other sectors had inflated land prices in a town with many economic interests. Buxton thus noted that land in Manchester ‘is covered and property is becoming daily of greater value’.90 This development of new factory sites outside Manchester was accelerated by the mill owners’ perception of high taxes in Manchester, as well as their concerns over the ‘independent spirit’ of the town’s operatives.91 Although the Manchester Corporation took control of the borough’s waterworks in 1851 and greatly improved the service to industry, the finishing sector was the chief beneficiary.92 High land prices in the town discouraged the construction of the large reservoirs typical of post-1860 Lancashire mills that held as much as 2 million gallons of water. Technical developments, moreover, greatly increased the power capability of the industry. As late as 1841, the largest power capability of a Manchester cotton mill was just 397 h.p.; by the 1890s, cotton mills with engines capable of generating 1,500 h.p. were commonplace.93 Manchester’s relative decline as a centre of cotton spinning in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed new patterns of factory location to come to the fore. Summary and conclusions Research on the contribution of transport to Britain’s industrialisation has focused on evaluating whether transport improvement stimulated, or merely responded to, industrial growth, as well as on analysing the impact of reduced freight costs brought about by new transport modes.94 This chapter has taken the examination of transport’s impact on the industrial economy in a new direction, showing that canals and rivers played a key role in determining the intra-urban pattern of factory development. In Manchester, there was a major expansion of the waterfront during the Industrial Revolution spurred on by the construction of five canals and more than twenty private canal branches. The expansion of the waterfront was most marked in Ancoats, Piccadilly and around Oxford Street, districts that had remained largely undeveloped in the early 1790s, but that had become the city’s foremost factory areas by 1850. The new data presented here have shown that in all major sectors of centralised industry, factories strongly clustered in waterfront areas. The cotton sector provided more than half of the RV of Manchester’s

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factory industry. Here, 85 per cent of factory RV was sited within 20 yards of a waterway. The age of steam in textiles was characterised by changing patterns of water use rather than the relocation of industry away from waterways. The first generation of Manchester cotton factories (1770–95) proliferated on the river banks to exploit the motive power of flowing water. From the mid-1790s, steam-powered cotton factories came to the fore, requiring water for two different purposes: to feed boilers and to condense steam. Canals and their private branches, as well as rivers, were by far the major sources of water for Manchester steam engines before 1850. Municipal water remained a minor source of factory supply until the second half of the nineteenth century. Canalside works also had the advantage over non-waterfront sites in accessing coal, which could be unloaded directly on to factory wharves, minimising the costs of transhipping this heavy raw material. The dispersion of cotton mills across the entire waterfront, including on non-navigable rivers and small streams, however, suggests that transport considerations were of secondary importance in determining intra-urban industrial locations, as does the widespread use of road transport to distribute raw cotton and textiles to and from canal warehouses to factories. River locations were also important as sites for cotton mills, as well as being the prime location for finishing works, corn/paper mills and tanneries, which required very large quantities of water. Canals and rivers thus played a key role in Manchester’s emergence as a leading factory sector in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not only did the town’s five major waterways reduce freight costs of coal, raw cotton, foodstuffs and manufactures but they also determined the bulk of the industrial sites that allowed Manchester to become the world’s leading factory sector in 1850. Further studies of water transport infrastructure in other industrialising towns in the north and midlands would extend our knowledge of the determinants of urban factory location in the Industrial Revolution. Notes 1 Cotton, woollen, worsted, flax and silk factories (P.P. 1839, Vol. XLII), pp. 1–351. 2 Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, Manchester, pp. 23–43. 3 Rose, Firms, networks and business values, p. 73; Farnie, English cotton industry, p. 61. 4 Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, p. 521; Deane and Cole, British economic growth, p. 187; Farnie, English cotton industry, p.180. 5 Hudson, ‘Regional perspective’, pp. 13–18; J.E. Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution: a study of international trade and economic development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 72–5; Maw, ‘Yorkshire and Lancashire ascendant’, pp. 740–51; N.F.R. Crafts and A. Mulatu, ‘How did the location of

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6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14

15

16

223

industry respond to falling transport costs in Britain before World War I?’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 66 (2006), pp. 575–607. Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, p. 544; Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, pp. 48–119; W. Holden, ‘Water supplies to steam-powered textile mills’, Industrial Archaeological Review, Vol. 21 (1999), pp. 41–51. See also Miller et al. A. & G. Murray, pp. 154–5. See, for example, A. Briggs, Age of improvement: 1783–1867 (London: Longman, 1971), p. 21; Colum and Goodall stated that the ‘steam engine … largely freed the textile industry from the constraint imposed by the availability of water’; see G. Colum and I.H. Goodall, Yorkshire textile mills 1770–1930: the buildings of the Yorkshire textile industry (London: HMSO, 1992), pp. 135–6. This chapter draws on Maw, Wyke and Kidd, ‘Canals, rivers and the industrial city’. Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851); Adshead’s twenty-four illustrated plans of Manchester (1851). Adshead’s survey was restricted to the township of Manchester, while the Ordnance Survey’s also includes the other five townships included in the borough at this time. William Green and Bancks & Co. had, in 1794 and 1831 respectively, produced large-scale plans of Manchester. Neither plan, however, provides sufficient detail or labelling to enable a reliable reconstruction of the spatial distribution of factories and other centralised manufacturing sites for these dates. See Green, Plan of Manchester and Salford (1794); Bancks & Co., Plan of Manchester and Salford (1831). Where a number of factories were occupied by a single firm on a single site, this is counted as single factory in the dataset. Premises that were empty in 1850 but still rated on the basis on their previous use (e.g. an empty cotton factory) were added to the dataset. GMCRO, RCCP, B2 Plans, Box 10, 6. 6 & 7 Will, c. 96; 3 & 4 Vict. c. 89 Burdens affecting real property (P.P. 1846, Vol. VI), evidence of George Coode, pp. 258–62; evidence of Henry Ashworth, pp. 316–37, 356–60; evidence of Robert Hyde Greg, pp. 364–8; evidence of Henry Coppock, pp. 593–5. The standard use of this source is Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, Manchester. The Manchester borough rate books are held at MALSU. The two 1851 maps show 91 industrial sites in the borough of Salford for the ten categories analysed in this article. In all, there are 20 sites shown on the plans that could not be matched with the 1850 rate book. This occurred for three main reasons. First, the building had been demolished between the OS survey and 1850. In these (four) cases, an appropriate RV was added from either the 1848 rate books or Manchester factory RV data from 1841–45 cited in Burdens affecting real property (P.P. 1846, Vol. VI), pp. 22– 38. Second, the building was shown on the Adshead plan but not included in the 1850 rate book. In these (two) cases, the data was retrieved from the 1852 rate book. The remaining 14 cases were those in which the building use described by the rate book was so obscure or different from that suggested by the town plans as to make identification unachievable. Aspin, Water-spinners, pp. 452–68. The figures do not include hand-powered

224

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30

Transport and the industrial city jenny or mule workshops or the small number of steam-powered mills built in Manchester before c.1795. On the former, see Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, pp. 14–16; for the latter, see Nevell, Manchester, pp. 90–2. Bolton Archives and Local Studies Unit, Samuel Crompton Papers, ZCR/16. Cotton, Woollen, Worsted, Flax and Silk Factories (P.P. 1839, Vol. XLII), pp. 1–135; Cotton, Woollen, Worsted, Flax and Silk Factories (P.P. 1850, Vol. XLII), pp. 453–75; Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, p. 21. These mills are analysed by Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, pp. 33–93. Reports of the Inspectors of Factories (P.P. 1842, Vol. XXII), p. 381; B. Love, The handbook of Manchester (Manchester: Love and Barton, 1839), pp. 52–3. In 1833, Birley & Kirk employed the second largest number of workers of Manchester firms who completed the first factory inspector’s questionnaire; see V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘Labour, power and the size of firms in Lancashire cotton in the second quarter of the nineteenth century’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 30 (1977), p. 100. Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, p. 14; Rogers, ‘Lancashire cotton industry’, p. 148. Love, Handbook of Manchester, p. 56. Musson and Robinson, ‘Origins of engineering’, pp. 209–33. Musson, Growth, pp. 121–4; Timmins, Made in Lancashire, pp. 114–15. The Salford side of the River Irwell was much more extensively furnished with industrial sites than the Manchester side, especially in the textile-finishing sector. Of the 56 industrial sites within 20 yards of the Irwell in Manchester and Salford in 1850, 43 were in Salford. The 56 Irwell sites were only marginally outnumbered by the 61 sites on the north and south banks of the River Medlock but almost doubled the 29 sites on the Irk. Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, pp. 53–4. Holden, ‘Water supplies’, p. 45. 34 Geo III c 78, CXIII, emphasis added. For other examples of canal acts making provision for the use of steam engines, see GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 8 October 1845 (Peak Forest Canal). The rights to take water for steam engines matched those of cotton factories on river-front sites; see Manchester Mercury, 3 January 1792. See also J. Getzler, A history of water rights at common law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 30–7. For an excellent archaeological study, see Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, pp. 154–5. Holden, ‘Water supplies’, pp. 41–4. The volumes of water required for condensing were enormous. In 1853, it was reported that condensing required 4 gallons of water per horsepower per minute. Assuming an average steam-power capability of 50 h.p. per cotton mill (Table 6.6), and assuming a twelve-hour working day, this would amount to 144,000 gallons per day. Boiler feed would require an additional 5,760 gallons per day. See J. Milne, A practical view of the steam engine (Edinburgh: Balfour & Co., 1830), pp. 136–8 and J. Templeton, The milleright and engineer’s pocket companion, 9th edition (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1854), pp. 138–9. A number of Yorkshire mill owners giving evidence to the Royal Commission on Rivers in 1866 used more than 400,000 gallons of condensing water per day to serve engines of from 90–120 h.p. See First report of the commis-

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31

32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51

225

sioners appointed in 1868 to inquire into the best means of preventing the pollution of rivers (P.P. 1870, Vol. XL), pp. 680–6, 700–1. MALSU, MS Q 658 972 GA1, W. & J. Galloway, Letter Book, 1841–55, 12 October 1844, to Mr Mellor, Manchester. See also N. Von Tunzelmann, Steam power and British industrialization to 1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 222– 3 and A. Nuvolari and B. Verspagen, ‘Technical choice, innovation, and British steam engineering, 1800–1850’, Economic History Review, Vol. 62 (2009), pp. 686, 698–706. Reports of the Inspectors of Factories (P.P. 1842, Vol. XXII), pp. 369–403. Manchester Mercury, 25 February 1801. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/4, Minute Book, 1797–1801, 15 January 1801. JRL, MCK 2/2/3, Letter Book, 1805–10, 13 April 1807. Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, pp. 53–4, 67–9, 85–6; Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, pp. 51–2, 58, 94; Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheets 24–5, 29–30, 32–5. Love, Handbook to Manchester, p. 46. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/6/3/79, incoming correspondence, 1804, 14 March 1804, from George Philips, Manchester. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/5, Minute Book, 1801–06, 23 August 1804. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/6, Minute Book, 1806–12, 14 October 1808. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/8, Minute Book, 1818–23, 29 January 1819 and B2/1/1/14, Minute Book, 1839–41, 9 December 1840. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/13, Minute Book, 1836–39, 11 January 1839. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/9, Minute Book, 1823–26, 19 May 1825, 25 June 1825; B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 14 July 1847, 11 August 1847. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/12, Minute Book, 1833–36, 11 December 1833, 11 June 1834. Manchester Times, 24 April 1847 (emphasis added). GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/18, Minute Book, 1847–50, 11 August 1847, 9 February 1848, 8 March 1848. Terms of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal were calculated on a similar basis: they charged 20s.–40s. per h.p. per annum for condensing water where factories did not use canal coal but only 10s.–20s. per h.p. per annum where they did. In either case, the company required that the water was returned to the canal after use. NA, RAIL, 458/3, 28 October 1803, 2 November 1808; RAIL, 458/4, 25 November 1824, 8 March 1827, 19 April 1829, 19 June 1829, 10 September 1829; RAIL, 458/5, 10 May 1832, 24 April 1833; RAIL, 468/7, 21 March 1836, 9 June 1836. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/18, Minute Book, 1847–50, 13 September 1848. Manchester Guardian, 26 February 1853. Manchester Guardian, 23 February 1853; Law Times, Vol. XIII (1849), pp. 321–3. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/13, Minute Book, 1836–39, 10 January 1838; B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 13 November 1844, 11 December 1844; B2/1/1/18, Minute Book, 1847–50, 9 February 1848, 11 November 1841, 14 November 1849. Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheets 22 and 34; J. Hassan, A history of water in modern England and Wales (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 7; J. Hassan, ‘The growth of the British water industry

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52

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

Transport and the industrial city in the nineteenth century’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 37 (1985), p. 541. For the quantities of water used by finishing firms on the rivers Irwell and Medlock in the late 1860s, see Pollution of rivers (P.P. 1870, Vol. XL), pp. 308–15. GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/6, Minute Book, 1806–12, 29 July 1808, 14 October 1808, 17 April 1812; B2/1/1/15, Minute Book, 1841–42, 8 December 1841; and B2/1/1/18, Minute Book, 1847–50, 12 September 1849. J. Hassan, ‘The impact and development of the water supply in Manchester 1568–1882’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 133 (1984), p. 32. S. Clark, ‘Chorlton mills and their neighbours: Manchester cotton mills’, Industrial Archaeology Review, Vol. 2 (1978), p. 208. Hassan, ‘Growth of the British water industry’, p. 541; Nevell, Manchester, pp. 82–90. None of these cotton mills was still in use in 1850. Ibid., p. 71. J. Wheeler, Manchester: its political, social and commercial history (Manchester: Barton and Love, 1836), p. 450. Salt, Statistics and calculations, p. 67. Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheets 23–4, 26–7, 29, 32–5. Several matters relating to coal (P.P. 1871, Vol. XVIII), p. 1161. D. Buxton, ‘On the rise of the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 8 (1855–56), p. 206 (emphasis added). Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, pp. 70–2. JRL, MCK 3/4/3, Purchase Book, 1827–43, 31 October 1829, 21 January 1831, 5 August 1838, 15 February 1843. Ordnance Survey plan of Manchester and Salford (1851), sheets 29–30, 33. Manchester Mercury, 23 January 1810 (emphasis added). D. Bellhouse, David Bellhouse & Sons, Manchester (Ontario: Bellhouse, 2000), pp. 11–18. The only detailed attempt to reconstruct transport patterns in the cotton industry is Freeman, ‘Transport methods’. Mather, After the canal duke, p. 157. The same two factors explain W. & J. Galloway of Manchester’s greater use of canals than railways in the 1840s. First, water was cheaper: they informed a customer in London that shipping the goods via ‘Liverpool by Sea would be cheaper than Railway’. Second, on the key route to Liverpool, canals were preferred to railways because cargoes could be transhipped directly from the Bridgewater flats on to sea-going vessels, without accruing additional storage and cartage costs. See MALSU, MS Q 658 972 GA1, W. & J. Galloway, Letter Book, 1840–41, 6 March 1840, to John Hindle, London; 14 April 1840, to Leech, Harrison & Co., Liverpool. Freeman, ‘Transport methods’, p. 72. House of Lords, the Sessional papers 1801–1833, evidence on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, Vol. 209 (1826), evidence of Joseph Harrison, pp. 6–25, William Guyton, pp. 253–70, Joseph Kenworthy, pp. 271–80, and Thomas Ogden Lingard, pp. 280–90.

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71 JRL, MCK 2/2/20, McConnel & Co. Letter Book, 1832–33, 24 April 1833. The firm asked its Liverpool agents to ‘forward your purchases [of cotton] per New Quay as usual’. For canal shipments to Hull, see, for example, 28 March 1833 to Buckley & Co. For invoices from canal carriers, including charged for carting goods within Manchester, see MCK 3/5/1, Receipts and invoices, 1825. 72 MALSU, MISC 690, Folder 1, William Horsfall correspondence, 24 October 1836 to George Horsfall, Halifax. 73 Redding (ed.), Pictorial history, p. 11. Horse-drawn carts also hauled the bulk of raw cotton passing through Manchester to the satellite cotton towns. See University of Salford Archives, Duke of Bridgewater Archive, DBA/17/834b, 9 March 1850, Bridgewater Trustees to the Board of Trade; PRO, NA, RAIL 458/5, 16 May 1832, 15 June 1832. 74 A. Ure, The cotton manufacture of Great Britain, Vol. I (London: Charles Knight, 1836), p. 295; Redding (ed.), Pictorial history, p. 30. 75 See, for example, G. Head, A home tour through the manufacturing districts of England: In the summer of 1835 (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 8. 76 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/15, Minute Book, 1841–42, 11 November 1841; B2/1/1/20, Minute Book, 1853–56; B2/1/1/21, Minute Book, 1856–59, 6 August 1856, 4 February 1857. For factories sweeping ashes and cinders into rivers, see I. Douglas, R. Hodgson and N. Lawson, ‘Industry, environment and health through 200 years in Manchester’, Ecological Economics, Vol. 41 (2002), pp. 244–5. 77 Pollution of rivers (P.P. 1870, XL), pp. 37–54. Love describes Manchester’s waterways as ‘tinged with the hues that arise from matter proceeding respectively from gas, calico printing and dye works’; see his Handbook to Manchester, p. 46. See also Douglas et al., ‘Industry, environment and health’, p. 241. 78 Hassan, ‘Impact and development’, p. 37. 79 GMCRO, RCCP, B2/1/1/17, Minute Book, 1844–47, 11 November 1846. 80 Wheeler, Manchester, p. 450, cites transport costs for coal of 5d. per ton per mile by canal and 8d. per ton per mile by road. The canal cost may have been closer to 3d. per ton per mile but the road cost compares well with independent data from the records of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal Company. In 1836, we know that the main sources of Manchester’s canal coal were: (1) Bridgewater mines at Worsley (seven miles from Manchester); (2) the collieries surrounding the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal (mainly six to ten miles from Manchester); and (3) mines in Ashton (eight miles from Manchester). Allowing for an average distance travelled by coal along canals of six miles, and taking Wheeler’s figure of 5d. per ton-mile, we arrive at an estimated transport cost for canal coal of 2s. 6d. per ton. If we take a more probable figure of 3d. per ton, per mile, the transport cost for canal coal is reduced to 1s. 6d. The road carriage on the two-mile route from Pendleton to Manchester, at the rate of 8d. per ton-mile, incurred an estimated freight cost of 1s. 4d. per ton per mile. For the regions supplying coal to Manchester by canal, road and rail in the 1830s, see Several matters relating to coal (P.P. 1871, Vol. XVIII), p. 1161. 81 Gatrell, ‘Labour, power and the size of firms’, p. 97. 82 A.J. Taylor, ‘Concentration and specialization in the Lancashire cotton industry’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 1 (1949), pp. 121–2.

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83 I. Haynes, Cotton in Ashton (Tameside: Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, 1987); I. Haynes, Stalybridge cotton mills (Swinton: Neil Richardson, 1990); I. Haynes, Dukinfield cotton mills (Swinton: Neil Richardson, 1993); I. Haynes, Mossley textile mills (Swinton: Neil Richardson, 1996). 84 Quote relates to Ashton; see Haynes, Ashton, pp. 31–2. 85 Holden, ‘Water supplies’, pp. 49–50. 86 T. Balderston, ‘The economics of abundance: coal and cotton in Lancashire and the world’, Economic History Review, Vol. 63 (2010), p. 576 (including quote). 87 Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, pp. 113–14. 88 Hassan, ‘Growth of the British water industry’, p. 542 (including quote); Hassan, ‘Impact and development’, p. 37. 89 MALSU, M731, Box 2, William Armitage, diary, 18 April 1844. In fact, the firm followed only half of his advice. The factory was built on the Rochdale Canal in Ancoats. 90 Buxton, ‘Rise of the manufacturing towns’, p. 206. Baker’s data on minimum land values on 18 streets in central Manchester show an average increase from 1862 to 1871 of 185 per cent; see H. Baker, ‘On the growth of the commercial centre of Manchester: Movement of population, and pressure of habitation – census decenniad 1867–71’, Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1871–72), p. 94. 91 Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, p. 21 (including quote). 92 Hassan, ‘Impact and development’, p. 36. 93 Holden, ‘Water supplies’, pp. 40–4. 94 Freeman, ‘Transport methods’, pp. 1–2, 18–23. Dyos and Aldcroft, British transport, p. 113; Crompton ‘Canals’, pp. 93–110.

7

Canals, transport and the Industrial Revolution in Manchester

Manchester is closely associated with popular perceptions of the ‘first’ Industrial Revolution. Contemporaries had little doubt that Manchester underwent profound changes from the middle of the eighteenth century. Foreign merchants, including Americans, who came to Manchester in increasing numbers from the 1760s to expand their commercial contacts in the emerging emporium of the cotton trade were struck by the rapidity of industrial, commercial and urban advance. In 1776, for example, Philadelphia merchant Jabez M. Fisher found Manchester to be in a ‘most flourishing state: it increases with almost incredibly rapidity’. He continued that ‘one would suppose they [Mancunians] had already arrived to the summit of invention … yet we daily see some new and very important discovery in facilitating their operations’.1 By the early nineteenth century, visitors’ accounts of Manchester had lost some of their late eighteenthcentury triumphalism; their descriptions of the wealth created by the cotton industry, and manifested in the imposing textile warehouses and civic buildings around the Exchange, were juxtaposed with reports of the bleakness created by the smoke from the towering, austere factories that clung to the banks of the waterways at the periphery of the town, and the sounds and smells created by industry and by the people living in the terraced rows of crammed and shabby working-class housing.2 Numbers provide some context for the rapid changes taking place in the town in this period. From a small settlement of 8,000 people in the early eighteenth century, the population of Manchester and Salford’s immediate urban core had more than trebled to reach 27,000 people by 1773, and increased a further ten-fold to more than a quarter of a million people by 1850. The value of the final output of the cotton industry, for which Manchester provided both the foremost factory sector and the primary market, increased from £0.6m in 1760 to £46.7m in 1844–46.3 Canals, of course, played their part in establishing the image of Manchester as the ‘shock city’ of the industrial age;

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contemporary accounts of Manchester rarely missed the opportunity to praise the engineering achievements of canal builders or to acknowledge the importance of canals in the transportation of raw materials and manufactured goods. James Wheeler in 1836, for example, praised the ‘splendid genius of [James] Brindley’ whose works had extended the divine allocation of water resources so that ‘Lancashire claims special praise as having set the example to the country in the great modern arts of internal communication by … water’.4 Ure likewise described the Bridgewater Canal as ‘the most magnificent work of public utility ever executed by an individual, one which has proved an inestimable benefit to the industry of England … The cotton trade of England is under peculiar obligation to this truly patriotic capitalist.’5 Nineteenth-century commentators, however, also reflected on the pollution of the canals in this period of unbounded industrial expansion. In 1835, George Head described how his journey on the Bridgewater Canal was marred on approaching Manchester by the canal water becoming ‘as black as the Styx, and absolutely pestiferous, from the gas and refuse of the manufactories with which it is impregnated’.6 While Manchester’s place in popular accounts of the Industrial Revolution is assured, historians have increasingly downplayed the significance of the ‘heroic’ Industrial Revolution that Manchester represents.7 Such accounts have questioned the pace and depth of national economic and social changes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, highlighting the fact that many parts of Britain remained untouched by factories, steam engines, canals and other manifestations of the Industrial Revolution. While these accounts are persuasive at the level of national aggregation, the endurance of traditional modes of manufacturing, ruling elites and social relations in many parts of Britain only serves to underline the significance of the changes taking places in Manchester and other urban-industrial towns in the midlands and north. This chapter assesses the impact of transport, especially canals, on the major economic and social changes occurring in Manchester from 1750 to 1850. The first section assesses the part played by Manchester and its canals in the major historiographical debates surrounding the origins of the first Industrial Revolution, before the second section addresses the canals’ part in sustaining Manchester’s economic growth from the early nineteenth century to c.1850. The causes of the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution has generated a number of significant historiographical debates. The most important and long-running of these are the controversies on the scale and scope of the Industrial Revolution, the extent to which it was a decisive discontinuity in British and indeed global history,

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and the ‘standard of living debate’ that reflects on its social benefits.8 This chapter takes a different tack and analyses the debate on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, one which has come to the forefront of economic history research in recent years. This debate seeks to answer two related questions: why did the Industrial Revolution occur in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And why did it take place in Britain and not elsewhere? On one level, the issue is straightforward; most accounts regard the mainspring of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution as the introduction of new manufacturing technologies: the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the water frame, the mule, the powerloom, the puddling engine and so on. A second phase of growth was sustained by a shift to inorganic sources of energy, the growth of a modern engineering industry and the expansion of the world market.9 However, the underlying causes of the major technological breakthroughs in late eighteenth-century England have been subject to enduring debate; Crouzet has even equated the scholarly search for the origins of the Industrial Revolution with ‘the quest for the Holy Grail’.10 The causal explanations of England’s Industrial Revolution can be conveniently divided into two groups: first, those that identify unique but slowly maturing features in early modern England’s political, economic and social institutions that created conditions ripe for innovation; and second, explanations of long-run economic growth that are led by radical technological shifts, which cannot be directly explained by previous phases of development.11 Those writing from the first perspective have advanced a laundry list of potential causal factors. Hartwell, writing in the 1960s, adumbrated a comprehensive range: laissez-faire politics and inclusive social structures; scientific discovery; transport and market expansion; capital accumulation; and raw material endowment.12 While it is difficult to separate these factors into discrete strands, this framework does provide a useful starting point for discussing historians’ arguments on the causes of the first Industrial Revolution. England’s political institutions have formed the basis of a number of accounts of why Britain led the world in industrialisation. Douglas North, in particular, has argued that the Industrial Revolution was facilitated by secure property rights and a flexible legal system, as well as the absence of a centralised government imposing confiscatory taxation. Parliament’s victories over the Stuart monarchs in 1650 and 1688, he has argued, created an economic climate much more conducive to economic innovation than those present in other European nations.13 A Marxist variant on this argument links Britain’s precocious industrialisation to the development of stable agrarian capitalism in early modern England; most notably, Robert Brenner has argued that the decline of serfdom in the late fourteenth and

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fifteenth centuries created the conditions for economic growth from c.1500 by removing the constraints to land improvement inherent in the feudal economic system of the Middle Ages, a system that was characterised by limited labour mobility, arbitrary fines and taxes, and a lack of legal recourse.14 An entirely different framework is proposed by historians of science who link to the upswing in the supply of inventions in seventeenthcentury Europe, a development driven by the deepening epistemological bases of engineering activity.15 While all of these arguments have been subject to specific criticisms, these factors can, as Allen has recently argued, only be considered, at best, necessary but not sufficient conditions of the Industrial Revolution.16 Other historians have outlined specific mechanisms to account for technological change in eighteenth-century English industry. Brenner’s agricultural revolution argument is refined by connecting the early emergence in Britain of capitalistic agriculture to the Industrial Revolution via the creation of an enlarged domestic market for industrial goods; cheaper supplies of food released purchasing power for the consumption of manufactures.17 However, P.K. O’Brien’s detailed evaluation of agriculture’s role in creating a home market for industry has reached pessimistic results. He has shown that the inter-sectoral terms of trade between industry and agriculture moved in agriculture’s favour after 1750; agriculture’s inability to prevent price increases relative to industrial goods decreased demand for industrial goods by up to 20 per cent.18 Historians who portray the domestic market as the primum mobile of economic growth have shifted their attention to the emergence of spending patterns based on consumption for pleasure rather than for need, or have argued that people were prepared to substitute leisure time for work in order to purchase greater quantities of manufactured goods. McKendrick argued that eighteenth-century England underwent a revolutionary transformation that created a mass market in consumer goods. He described this ‘consumer revolution’ as ‘the necessary convulsion on the demand side of the equation to match the convulsion on the supply side’. The development, he argues, was led by the London gentry and spread, via emulation, throughout England and among all classes of society, with proletarianised women emerging as key consumers.19 De Vries provides an alternate conceptualisation of increased consumer spending – what he terms ‘the industrious revolution’ – in which people worked harder to raise funds to spend on manufactures rather than household-produced goods.20 However, these putative connections between the home market and the Industrial Revolution are undermined by the evidence that real wages increased slowly from 1750 to 1850.21 Horrell has further argued that the working class played a limited role in the consumption of industrial goods; a study of a sample of household budgets from 1787 to 1796 revealed that 88 per cent of household

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income was spent on food and other necessities.22 Doubts have also been raised about McKendrick’s focus on the gentry as progenitors of new consumption patterns; Weatherill’s study of probate inventories identified the growing urban and commercial middle class as the most innovative consumers. If home demand was a major spur to industrialisation, the impulse came from a redistribution of income to middle-class consumers.23 Other historians have argued that foreign trade provided the ‘spark’ that ignited the Industrial Revolution.24 O’Brien suggests that a key element of British economic growth was the deployment of state naval power which won for British industry an ‘inordinate’ share of world trade, especially a large share of colonised European lands in the Americas.25 The structure of the colonial markets is important: they had rapidly rising populations of European settlers, stable real incomes and were protected as markets for British industry through the exclusion of European industry and the prohibition against colonists developing their own industries to rival those of the mother country. The leading industrial sectors and regions of the Industrial Revolution, especially the Lancashire cotton industry and the Yorkshire woollen industry, exported large shares of their final output to foreign, and especially Atlantic, markets; trading to foreign markets also had huge spin-off benefits, especially in terms of financial development.26 Most historians, however, have downplayed the significance of foreign trade as a cause of the Industrial Revolution.27 Joel Mokyr has pointed out that many countries were active in foreign trade but did not experience an industrial revolution. If increasing domestic or foreign demand does not always lead to technological innovations, supply-side developments must have been more important than demand changes in determining the extent, pace and direction of invention. Thomas and McCloskey have argued that industrial growth stimulated the growth of trade, and not the reverse, and that a hypothetical British economy denied foreign markets would have reallocated economic resources to serve domestic needs, without encountering significant losses of productivity. Other scholars have suggested that the colonies’ purchases of British manufactures were not independent of domestic demand but were conditioned by British consumers’ ability to buy American sugar, tobacco and rice. Export growth was thus the function of British demand rather than autonomous stimulus to industry.28 Other historians, writing in the tradition of classical economists, have located the origins of the Industrial Revolution in accumulated saving and investments.29 Rostow, for example, argued that Britain’s economic ‘take off ’ from 1780 to 1800 was associated with investment in industry doubling from 5 to 10 per cent of national income. However, attempts to link original capital accumulation to the Industrial Revolution have foundered on empirical grounds. Feinstein’s pioneering estimates of capital accumulation, which

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suggested a fairly rapid increase in investment, have been re-worked by Crafts who concludes that capital investment rose from 7 per cent of national income in 1780 to just 7.9 per cent in 1801.30 Historians of industry, moreover, have shown that demands for fixed capital in industry were modest and did not require a major transfer of savings from other sectors. In the northern textile regions, the small amounts of required investible funds for industry were borrowed locally from relatives, widows, merchants and landowners or were financed through partnerships or through ploughed-back profits.31 While historians continued to debate the significance of these various explanations of the Industrial Revolution, from the 1970s to the early 1990s the leading historians of the Industrial Revolution began to explore models in which key aspects of its origins were stochastic or could not be directly explained by previous economic or social developments. Crafts expressed this view clearly in 1977, arguing that eighteenth-century Britain and France had experienced similar economic patterns of growth, which meant that it was not possible to predict ex ante that it would be Britain, and not France, which would achieve the crucial technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution.32 Mokyr also argued that long-run economic growth was not conditioned by a growth in demand or other economic inducements but sprang from exogenous technological changes in industry. Mokyr thus argued that the new technologies that underpinned British industrialisation ‘appeared more or less ab nihilo’; it was Britain’s strength in refining inventions to achieve productivity gains, rather than in generating them in the first place, which explained its success in a global context from the late eighteenth century.33 E.A. Wrigley provides a variant of this argument, proposing that the Industrial Revolution was powered by a shift from organic sources of energy (wood, water, wind, animals) to inorganic energy sources, especially coal. In this account, Britain’s lead in the Industrial Revolution can be explained by its exploitation of the abundant and easily accessible coal resources allocated by nature.34 However, by the early 1990s, historians began to reject the stochastic or ‘manna from heaven’ elements of these accounts: the abstraction of technological innovation from its economic context, they argued, produced the characterisation of an ‘accidental industrial revolution’, which had brought the study of industrialisation to an impasse.35 The blow seems to have struck home and since the late 1990s there have been considerable efforts to refine explanations of the origins of the Industrial Revolution, even among those historians favouring an explanation that leaves room for stochastic technological shocks as the mainspring of economic growth. This research effort has been substantial and fruitful and the debate on the causes of the Industrial Revolution has been restored to its position at the centre of the research effort on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain’s economic history.

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The direction of this change can be partly attributed to attempts to study the Industrial Revolution in a global context. The most influential study in this respect was Pomeranz’s The great divergence, published in 2000. This work re-opened the question of the West’s economic lead over the East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Crucially, Pomeranz showed that the most economically advanced parts of the East had similar levels of wealth, science and industry to the most advanced parts of Europe until as late as 1750 but lagged behind by a great distance by c.1900. This underlined the significance of the West’s industrial revolutions at the global level, while at the same time, by dismissing the Eurocentric portrayal of the West’s rise as an inevitable process derived from Europe’s superior institutions or cultures, Pomeranz argued that the rise of the West could be explained in a rational economic way. Specifically, he argued that the West’s lead stemmed from its advantageous coal resources and the easing of the land constraint that resulted from the opening of the ‘ghost acres’ of the American continent.36 Historians of the British Industrial Revolution have built on this global approach. Robert C. Allen’s recent work explains the Industrial Revolution as a function of increases in the demand for, and the supply of, technology. Britain industrialised first, he argues, because of its unique structure of wages and prices; when viewed from a global perspective, British wages were unusually high and its energy supplies were unusually cheap. Thus, it was profitable in Britain to invent and exploit technologies that substituted capital and energy for labour, but it was not so elsewhere. The key driver in Allen’s model was the growth of international trade in the early modern period, which promoted urbanisation and high wages.37 Other recent work has also suggested a more prominent role for international trade in the generation of new technologies. Findlay and O’Rourke have argued that foreign markets increased the incentives for British inventors to experiment with new technologies; a larger market created by foreign trade helped to offset the disutility of research and development by increasing the potential for profit.38 Inikori has shown that those industrial regions at the heart of the Industrial Revolution (Lancashire, Yorkshire and the west midlands) had already achieved a dominant position in British exports; export expansion preceded mechanisation and should properly be considered a cause rather than an effect of industrialisation.39 The mechanism linking foreign trade to technological change is not precisely specified in Inikori’s study but part of the answer may lie in the factors suggested by Smail’s account of the English wool-textile industry. The crucial element in Smail’s analysis was the interplay between consumers, merchants and production in Britain’s overseas trade: the foreign markets’ demands for specific products, at particular prices, to be supplied on a tight deadline acted to focus entrepreneurial energy on making improvements in production.40 Kenneth Morgan has developed

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Smail’s insights, and shown that they have a very wide application across England’s export trades to America in the second half of the eighteenth century.41 Finally, the supply-led account of the Industrial Revolution has been refined by a focus on scientific cultures. Jacob argues that ‘a new scientific understanding of nature preceded mechanized industry and … assisted in its development’.42 In Jacob’s account, the pan-European scientific revolution attained the greatest diffusion in Britain by c.1750, creating a scientific culture that permeated all elements of society. New knowledge and methods, and their wide assimilation in political, commercial and industrial circles, allowed Britain to take the lead in generating new technologies.43 Likewise, Mokyr has stressed the role of knowledge transmitted within a network linking several thousand British engineers, mechanics, physicians and philosophers – a development that he terms the Industrial Enlightenment – proposing that the ‘true key to the timing of the Industrial Revolution has to be sought in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century … This would explain the timing of the Industrial Revolution following the enlightenment and – equally importantly – why it did not fizzle out like similar bursts … in earlier times.’ Mokyr’s account places particular stress on the social structures that bridged the gap between savants and fabricants, as well as the legitimation of systematic experiment as a scientific method carried out by both scientists and technologists.44 McCloskey also argues that culture must be placed at the forefront of explanations of modern economic growth. It was not markets, commerce or property rights that led the Industrial Revolution but changes in the ways that people thought and spoke about them; it was the diminution of prejudice about commerce and free markets, she argues, rather than the economic developments themselves, which facilitated the transition to the modern world.45 As will be clear from this lengthy discussion of the historiography, transport has not commanded a significant position in the debate on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. In contrast to its role in sustaining economic growth in the first half of the nineteenth century, transport has rarely been treated to significant analysis in terms of causality. Szostak has provided the only monographic study to link transport developments with the genesis of the Industrial Revolution. His detailed study compares the road and water transport systems of eighteenth-century England and France, arguing that an improved system of transportation was necessary for the Industrial Revolution to occur in England and that the absence of an efficient transport network explains why industrialisation did not occur in France at this time. Transport, he argues, promoted regional specialisation, the emergence of new industries and increases in the scale of production; these three developments were significant in their own right but it was their role in

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bringing out the fourth key aspect of the Industrial Revolution – a dramatic increase in the rate of technological innovation – that highlights transport’s crucial role. After dismissing a range of potential causes of technological change, including foreign trade, domestic demand and secure property rights, Szostak asserts that transport improvement remains ‘the only reasonable way of explaining the Industrial Revolution in terms of something other than … an exogenous increase in the rate of technological innovation’. Although Szostak specifically states that a well-developed system of national transport was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the Industrial Revolution, in a number of passages he goes further and posits an explicitly causal role for transport. He thus states that ‘transport improvements … both allowed and induced the Industrial Revolution’.46 How well does Szostak’s framework explain the origins of the Industrial Revolution? Several questions must be raised. The first is whether transport improvements preceded industrialisation and thus can be considered, as Szostak asserts, an exogenous variable in explaining the Industrial Revolution?47 The transport system to which Szostak assigns a great deal of weight was a complementary mix of road and river transport: Thanks to centuries of attempts at road improvements, a system of good turnpike roads had been established through almost all England by 1750. The mid-eighteenth century is also the point at which a hundred years of river improvements, which had doubled the length of navigable waterway, gave way to the construction of canals. The fact that both road and water transport systems were largely in place before the Industrial Revolution was underway, and that both were the result of centuries of effort, is convincing proof that this transport system was not itself a result of industrialization.48

The value attached by Szostak to water transport lay in its well-established role as a low-cost carrier of heavy goods, while the importance of roads was their ability to disperse high-value goods in a speedy and reliable fashion across an extensive transport network. Given the timing of the first phase of manufacturing innovations in the period 1764–85, however, it is clear that canals can only have played a limited role in any of the early and fundamental technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Szostak addresses this issue by reiterating the significance of the long period of river improvement from c.1660 to 1740 and by arguing that England’s canal network was largely in place by 1789 and that nineteenth-century English canal investment merely filled in gaps at the regional level.49 From the perspective of Manchester, this account of water-transport provision is unconvincing. The Manchester of the 1780s, for example, had only one improved river (the Mersey and Irwell Navigation) and one canal (the Bridgewater). The completion of Manchester’s canal system had to await the construction of the ‘canal mania’ cuts that provided links with the textile towns of Bolton, Bury,

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Rochdale, Ashton and Stockport, as well as with the Yorkshire river navigations; a reliable water route from Manchester to London was likewise not developed until 1805. Waterway provision on a national level also remained skeletal before the early nineteenth century. Turnbull summarises the national picture in arguing that river transport was not in 1750 ‘anything like as pervasive as is commonly believed’ and that ‘it is difficult to speak of a country-wide network of canals in any meaningful sense before about 1810’.50 This is manifested in the length of Britain’s navigable waterways, which increased from 1,400 miles in 1760 to 4,000 miles in 1830. Szostak’s conclusion that a national system of waterways was in place before the Industrial Revolution is misplaced. It is evident, in any case, that it is roads rather than canals that are central to Szostak’s account: certainly, he argues that ‘the output of the two most important industries of the English Industrial Revolution, textiles and small metal wares, were usually shipped by land’.51 Road improvement, indeed, was significant before c.1770, when around 15,000 miles of road had been turnpiked in England and Wales, around 70 per cent of the total authorised by 1836. Only seven of the twelve turnpikes to central Manchester had been built by the close of the eighteenth century but as the later trusts controlled much smaller stretches of road, it is possible to assert that Manchester’s road network had been significantly improved prior to the cluster of textile innovations in the late eighteenth century. If transport changes are to be considered as a cause of the Industrial Revolution, road transport, rather than water transport, must carry the bulk of explanatory load; only in this mode of transport is there evidence of decisive change before the 1770s. However, it is not clear that intensive periods of transport development were independent of economic growth. On a theoretical level, the relationship between transport investment and growth can take two forms. The first is usually referred to as ‘development by shortage’ and the second ‘development by excess’. In the first situation transport investment occurs when congestion arises and transport improvements are designed to expedite existing traffic flows. In the second situation, transport investments occur in order to encourage new investment in activities that would benefit from a well-functioning transport system.52 Szostak favours the latter case mainly through establishing a chronology in which transport improvements were established before industrialisation.53 However, transport historians of the late eighteenth century have reached something of a consensus that ‘development by shortage’ was the governing principle of most transport investment.54 Given that the techniques used in building turnpikes and canals were not new, they were likely to be introduced when demand warranted it.55 Albert and Pawson have shown in classic studies of road transport that the pre-1770 turnpike schemes were responses and not stimuli to growing traffic

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levels and the difficulties they posed for road maintenance, while Freeman has stated that most turnpikes ‘were established in response to rising traffic levels so that the density pattern is reflective of the geography of economic growth up to 1770’.56 A return of activity in turnpiking in the 1790s and the early nineteenth century, after a pause from the mid-1770s, was concentrated in rapidly growing industrial regions which demanded transport investment. From 1791 to 1836, for example, the industrial counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire accounted for a third of the new turnpike Acts passed.57 Ward has shown that the timing of canal promotion also followed phases of trading expansion. He rejected Ashton’s thesis that the pattern of canal investment reflected movements in interest rates; instead, Ward argued that canal building was demand-led. Thus, when industry grew in the 1750s, 1760s, early 1770s and early 1790s, canal schemes flourished, while waterway projects declined markedly in the mid-1770s to late 1780s when industrial growth stagnated due to the deleterious impact of the American Revolution.58 Bogart’s recent enumeration of all parliamentary Acts to construct or improve roads, canals and ports from 1750 to 1830 likewise shows strong clustering in the trade booms of the 1760s, the 1790s and 1820s.59 In Manchester, the key decade of canal authorisation was the 1790s, when local cotton output had already begun its expansion on the complementary foundations of major technological innovation and increasing market opportunities at home and abroad. In 1795, Aikin explicitly argued that previous industrial growth led transport improvements, stating that the ‘vast extension of the Manchester manufactures after the peace of 1783, gave rise to various new schemes of water communication between the centre of that traffic and its principal stations in the surrounding country’.60 The link was tangible in that Manchester merchants and manufacturers were the leading investors in the north-west canal network.61 Bagwell and Lyth have also argued that canals were a response to Manchester’s previous urban growth: ‘if Manchester had not got so big it would not have needed Bridgewater’s coal’.62 There is clear evidence, moreover (as outlined in chapter 5), that canal companies were reactive rather than proactive in developing infrastructure to support canal trade. The development of warehouses followed upswings in economic growth, when the canal trade reached almost unmanageable levels before new facilities were established. Herson’s recent study of Chester shows that improvements to all modes of this town’s transport were introduced in the 1830s after they had become ‘sub-optimal in relation to the demands placed on them’.63 The foregoing analysis has questioned the extent to which transport provision had decisively increased before the Industrial Revolution and whether transport changes were extraneous to growth elsewhere in the

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economy. However, the most significant parts of Szostak’s model of the Industrial Revolution still hold if transport developments can be effectively linked to technological change. As described above, the dynamic links between transport and the generation of new technologies, in Szostak’s model, were its promotion of regional specialisation, new industries and the centralisation of production; these three developments, in their turn, encouraged technological change in industry. Szostak’s focus on regional specialisation is compatible with the ‘Berg– Hudson’ account of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the extensive research effort manifested in the ‘classic’ industrial histories of northern England.64 For Szostak, ‘the overriding reason for the concentration of various industries in particular regions during the eighteenth century is the drop in transport costs’. A better system of transport widened the market for individual firms and allowed producers in low-cost regions to oust high-cost producers who had previously maintained a hold on local markets due to the expense of bringing goods from elsewhere.65 This interpretation links well with Mathias’ contention that cheaper transport ‘cracked open’ local monopolies, and allowed the lower-priced and better-quality goods produced elsewhere to invade previously sheltered markets.66 There is a good deal of logic to this position. Industries cannot concentrate resources on core manufacturing activities without establishing dependable links with external regions, both because specialisation requires a larger market for its manufactures than one region can comfortably sustain and because specialisation in one prime economic function is likely to necessitate the delivery of food and raw materials to a region to supplement local supplies. However, there are two main problems with the analysis as presented in Szostak’s model. First, he provides no clear evidence of the magnitude of the decrease in transport costs required to engender the process of regional specialisation. Second, this approach leaves unexplained the most important aspect of regional specialisation: why it was that certain regions were able to produce specific goods more cheaply or better than others in the first place. Indeed, most historians who have provided detailed analysis of industrial concentration allot more weight to developments occurring internally to regions than to improved transport. England’s successful manufacturing regions in the north and midlands exhibited a number of distinctive characteristics. First, they were among the poorest counties in England in the mid-seventeenth century; their soils were sub-optimal for arable farming and their initial manufacturing activities supplemented pastoral farming on small plots. Second, the flourishing of these regions in the first half of the eighteenth century depended on the building up of local reservoirs of skills and experience. Thus, Rose attributes Lancashire’s pre-1770 success to the ‘skills, technology and work practices’ of an extensive network of rural cottage

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workers and the expertise of ‘a formidable array of middlemen’ who handled the supply and redistribution of raw materials and finished goods, financed manufacturing and marketing activities and transmitted demand signals to producers.67 O’Brien, Griffiths and Hunt argue that developments in Lancashire from c.1700 to c.1760 laid the foundations that supported later industrialisation by creating an industrial structure conducive to technological innovation: one that could emulate most kinds of foreign cloths and foreign technologies and generate its own product and process innovations.68 Wilson, Caunce and Smail have likewise convincingly argued that Yorkshire’s ‘supremacy’ in the eighteenth-century woollen industry lay in its regional economic institutions which ‘facilitated the processing of market information to create highly effective production strategies’.69 Inikori, meanwhile, has argued that the successful eighteenth-century industrial regions in the north and midlands achieved primacy over rival regions in the south largely through successful exploitation of foreign markets.70 The leading industrial regions also of course had extensive coal reserves, but this was more important to the nineteenth-century expansion of these regions than in the period of their emergence in the eighteenth century.71 A reduction in transport costs was thus important in helping low-cost regions to exploit their comparative advantage but it was not the ultimate cause of it. Stobart has rejected the view that transport significantly shaped spatial hierarchies within the north-west from 1700 to 1760, arguing that transport developments reinforced rather than created the spatial distribution of production and urban centres; specialist regions, moreover, were already apparent by c.1700 when turnpike development was in its early stages.72 Szostak’s account of the emergence of new industries, which he claims have not received adequate attention from historians, is different. In his view, ‘the greater availability of raw materials was the main inducement for the emergence of a number of new industries … [when] raw materials are not naturally placed in the most advantageous sites, the theoretical link between improved transport, the increased scale of industry, and the emergence of new industries becomes obvious’.73 Did the lowering of transport costs play an important role in the emergence of the cotton industry? Certainly the raw materials were not conveniently located; cotton, of course, was imported from the Levant, the Caribbean and North and South America. Szostak notes that Manchester’s distance from the main importing ports of London and Liverpool meant ‘inland transport improvements could … have a significant impact on the price of cotton facing manufacturers’.74 Unfortunately, no evidence is provided of how significant the savings might have been in the cost structures of Lancashire firms. Calculations for the 1830s, presented below, suggest that transport costs (whether on canals, rivers or railways) from Liverpool to Manchester amounted to less than 1 per cent of the price of

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the raw material. It is unlikely that transport costs made up a significantly greater proportion of the price of raw cotton in the mid-eighteenth century. Transport costs were higher, especially from London, but raw cotton prices were also higher.75 Moreover, the main constraint facing producers in making all-cotton cloth, rather than linen–cotton hybrids, was not access to raw materials but the difficulty of producing cotton warps at a price that would make them competitive with those spun in low-wage India.76 Finally, Szostak argues that ‘the emergence of the earliest workshops is a direct result of the impressive improvements to England’s transport system in the early eighteenth century’.77 The trend towards centralising production, he argues, was already evident in England by the 1750s and 1760s, suggesting that technology itself was not a cause of the rise in factory production.78 There are two proposed links between transport and centralised production: first, lower transport costs meant wider markets, which enabled firms to operate on a larger scale and achieve division-of-labour advantages; and, second, improved transport brought about a change in the methods of distribution that, in turn, created a need for a standardised product that could be best produced in factories. Hence, Szostak states, ‘a factory owner could be hurt more [than a putting-out purchaser] by a transport system which was slow, unpredictable, unprofessional, and potentially unusable for lengthy periods in the winter … the likelihood of a transfer to workshop production would increase as the transport system improved.’79 The first link is theoretically valid but, as mentioned above, Szostak does not provide telling evidence that decreases in transport costs were significant at a company level before 1770. The second link fits well with what we know of the significant changes in the distribution of Lancashire textiles between 1730 and 1770, when, as Szostak shows, Manchester manufactures ceased to be distributed to national markets via loaded packhorses; instead, they were sold by travelling salesman carrying samples, with orders despatched by road carriers. This shift in the organisation of marketing in the home trade, and the emergence of a wellfunctioning carrier system, must have optimised standardisation and encouraged investment in marketing. However, the rise of the factory has been subject to enduring debate, and few historians would now assert the primacy of either attempts to ensure standardisation and the control of production factors or the determinants of new technologies in explaining the emergence of factories. The most recent contribution emphasises the ‘complementarity’ between three factors: the growing size and sophistication of the economy; the emergence of new technologies; and the need to ensure product quality. Transport changes were important but not decisive.80 More importantly, it is not clear that centralised sites of production in the 1750s and 1760s in Lancashire were large in number or that they were more responsive to new technological opportunities than putting-out (i.e. non-

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centralised) firms. Indeed, the Peel family of Blackburn were the leading investors in factory production in the north of England in the late eighteenth century, establishing no fewer than 22 cotton-spinning mills in Lancashire and Staffordshire. Before spinning was mechanised, the Peels already occupied a leading role in the industry as putting-out manufacturers, employing many thousands of spinners and weavers in their own homes. This extensive production network did not impede the Peels’ lead in factory investment. An old but still plausible explanation of the search for innovation in textile spinning was the labour imbalance between spinners and weavers, which prioritised the search for labour-saving machinery in spinning.81 It may indeed have been the internal weaknesses of the putting-out system, rather than the early centralisation of production, that encouraged the substitution of capital for labour in cotton spinning. In sum, Szostak overstates the role of transport in the origins of the first Industrial Revolution. He is not able to show that transport systems had decisively improved before the mid-eighteenth century or that transport changes were an independent stimulus to economic growth. Neither is it likely that transport development was of prime significance in bringing about regional economic specialisation, new industries or centralised industry. Despite its prominence in the literature, Szostak rejects the significance of foreign demand as a stimulus to industrialisation and allots little space to scientific cultures, high labour costs or the political protection afforded to the cotton industry by the prohibition of Indian calicoes.82 No single explanation of the causes of the Industrial Revolution is likely to achieve wide acceptance for long but the case for a revolution stimulated by preceding changes in transport can command only limited support. Canals as a support for industrialisation If canals and transport appear to have played a modest role in initiating the major changes taking place in industrialising Britain, what roles did they play in sustaining economic growth in the period that followed 1800? This question is significant in that Britain’s ability to sustain economic growth after 1800 was what made the Industrial Revolution distinctive. Earlier periods and other cultures had witnessed important clusters of inventions but subsequently productivity gains fizzled out and living standards became stagnant.83 The pattern of transport provision shows that the critical period of canal trade in Manchester stretched from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of sustained railway competition in the 1840s. This remainder of this chapter analyses the contribution of canals to the acceleration of industrial growth in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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Canals and coal One way that the British economy cast off the Malthusian shackles was by shifting from organic to inorganic energy sources. Wrigley has hypothesised the ‘limits to growth’ inherent in an organic economy, where land is the prime source of food, fuel and raw materials: a fixed supply of land, subject to diminishing returns, imposed a ceiling on growth potential. Perhaps the clearest evidence of the limits to growth in England lies in the demographic sphere. The English population had reached its early eighteenth-century level of c.5–6 million people in the late medieval period and again in the midseventeenth century, but this population could not be sustained and was subsequently cut back by famine, epidemics and, more prosaically, celibacy and emigration. In contrast, after 1730, the English population of c.5 million grew rapidly to reach roughly 8 million by 1800 and 17 million by 1850. In Wrigley’s model, the transition to an inorganic economy powered by coal, rather than animals, humans, water, wind and wood, is key to explaining how Britain smashed through the ceiling imposed on advanced organic economies. A mineral economy can access a vast store of underground energy that allows industry to expand without competing for the resources required for human sustenance. Estimates of British coal production show a rapid expansion of coal output, charting an increase from 2.2m tons in the early eighteenth century to 11.2m tons in the early nineteenth century and 51.7m tons in the mid-nineteenth century. Coal’s contribution to English and Welsh energy consumption increased from 11 per cent around 1560 to 61 per cent around 1750 to 92 per cent a hundred years later.84 Clark and Jacks have analysed how far the Industrial Revolution could have been sustained to the mid-nineteenth century without coal. They conclude that organic sources could have supplied Britain’s energy needs until 1860 but only if Britain had been able to access the fruits of all its own lands and almost the entirety of the vast timberlands of Sweden, Russia and the Baltic states.85 The uses of coal in early nineteenth-century Britain were two-fold: to power steam engines in factories and mines and to supply energy to homes. In the late seventeenth century, more than half of Britain’s coal output was burned in the domestic hearth; this had fallen to less than one-third by 1840. From the 1820s, of course, coal was also required to power steam trains and steamships.86 Historians have shown the importance of canals in the development of the British coal trade. Deane has argued that ‘if Britain had to depend on her roads to carry her heavy goods traffic the effective impact of the Industrial Revolution may well have been delayed until the railway age’.87 Duckham likewise describes canals as the ‘golden key with which to unlock the riches of the coalfields’.88 Turnbull provides the most sustained attempt to link canals’ coal trade to industrialisation, rooting his analysis firmly at the level of the

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region. He notes, following Flinn, that canals did not change the market structure for coal: before the maturation of British railways in the second half of the nineteenth century, coal rarely travelled inland beyond a distance of 20 miles. The importance of canals in Turnbull’s account takes two forms. First, canals carried coal much more cheaply than did roads. Second, canals promoted intra-regional shifts within coalfield areas, allowing the richest seams to be mined rather than those advantageously located in terms of natural transport provision. The importance of cheap coal is highlighted by the fact that, by the 1830s, a regional map of industrial Britain was essentially a map of the coalfields.89 Manchester is located on the fringes of the Lancashire coalfield. The nearest exploited coal mines in the 1830s were located at Bradford (Lancashire), roughly a mile east of the centre of the township, and at Pendleton, around two miles to the west. By the mid-eighteenth century, Manchester’s coal came by road from pits within ten miles of the town; the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, Manchester’s only navigable waterway at this time, had a negligible coal trade. A contemporary petition from the mid1750s described the costs of land transport for coal in Manchester, even across these short distances, as being of ‘greater expense than the Prime Cost of the Coals’.90 This is confirmed by a look at the surviving price evidence: at this time, pithead prices of engine coal were around 4–5s. per ton91 and the price of coal in Manchester was roughly 12–13s. per ton, suggesting a transport cost by road of 8s. per ton.92 The Bridgewater Canal, completed from Worsley to Manchester in 1765, brought significantly cheaper supplies of coal to Manchester. The terms of the Bridgewater Canal Act committed the duke to supply coal to Manchester for 6s. per ton for forty years, roughly half the price of road-carried coal, transport by canal costing approximately 2s. per ton. The Bridgewater Canal, then, brought cheap coal to Manchester from 1765. In the first decade of the canal’s operation it carried roughly 30,000 tons of coal per year; this had doubled twenty years later. It would be wrong, however, to infer that the duke had immediately wrested control of Manchester’s coal supply from roads. Indeed, Aikin stated in 1795 that the supply of coal to Manchester ‘is chiefly derived from the pits about Oldham, Ashton, Dukinfield, Hyde, Newton, Denton, &c … the supply from the Duke of Bridgewater’s pits at Worsley is less considerable, although a very useful addition for the poor’.93 It was the completion of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, the Ashton Canal and the Rochdale Canal that dramatically increased supplies of canal-borne coal to Manchester, establishing water access to the important colliery regions to the east of the town mentioned by Aikin, as well to additional pits to the north around Bolton and Bury and in the Pennines. The completion of the link between the Bridgewater and the Leeds and Liverpool canals in 1821 opened up access to major coalfields

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around Wigan. Reliable data on Manchester’s coal supply are not available until the 1830s. These data show that canals dominated the supply of Manchester’s coal, providing two-thirds of the annual total of c.900,000 tons. The Bridgewater and the Ashton canals each brought c.200,000 tons to Manchester,94 with an additional c.175,000 tons brought by the Manchester, Bolton and Bury and Rochdale canals combined. In the 1840s, coal from the Wigan area, carried on the Bridgewater Canal, became the largest single component of Manchester’s coal supply, increasing from just c.40,000 tons in 1836 to c.300,000 tons in 1850. Road transport was not entirely displaced: around 80,000 tons of Oldham coal was brought to Manchester by road, with smaller quantities also carried by road from Hyde and Bradford (Lancashire). The main supply of roadborne coal, however, came from the Pendleton collieries, which provided 215,000 tons per year in the mid-1830s. These collieries were able to supply coal at prices that could rival canal-borne coal because they were located much nearer to Manchester than the canalside collieries. Railways played a small role in supplying coal to Manchester before the 1850s. In the mid1830s, rail supplied fewer than 30,000 tons of coal per year, although by 1854 this had risen to at least 175,000 tons per year, at a time when Manchester’s coal supply had reached 1.2m tons. Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century, canals brought coal to Manchester more cheaply than did roads, except for collieries situated in close proximity to the town. Canals lowered the price of coal from traditional coal-supplying regions within ten miles of Manchester and, by the 1840s, the spatial limits of Manchester’s coal-supply had been pushed out to allow affordable supplies of coal from Wigan. Canals and the emergence of a national market The standard view is that canals did not contribute significantly to national market integration. It is usually argued that canals were constructed and financed by, and designed to serve the interests of, regional industrial and commercial elites. The lack of standardisation in the lengths and widths of locks hindered the emergence of national trades, a problem exacerbated by the parochial management styles of canal companies. It is further argued that canals were economically best suited to bulk haulage over short distances.95 This verdict on Britain’s canal trade is largely inferred from a number of detailed studies of the canals’ coal trade and from the slow pace at which regional canal systems coalesced into a national network. These are weighty points and we have already seen that canals enjoyed significant cost advantages over roads in the distribution of heavy minerals and that a national canal network did not emerge until c.1810.

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As a result, historians have naturally framed their analyses of canal trade at the regional level. Langton has provided the most influential account of the contribution of canals in forging regional economic specialisation. He argues that, in the pre-industrial period, the main industrialising regions in England operated largely in isolation from each other: different regions developed contrasting production systems, even where they produced the same products, and they did not compete significantly in the domestic market. This pattern, he argues, originated from the high costs of inland transport in the early modern period and was further extended by the construction of canals from 1750, owing to the regional nature of their construction and operation.96 As a result, during the Industrial Revolution, British manufacturing regions became even more differentiated, internally integrated and separated from each other. Each region took its own economic path to industrialisation, a process shaped by the interplay of local raw materials, skills, capital and markets. Although, in this account, English industrial regions were largely separate from each other, they had well-established links to foreign markets: canal trade thus took the pattern of short hauls within regions, as well as ‘to and from the major coastal ports’. It was the major extension of the railway network after 1850 that significantly broke down regional barriers.97 Manchester provides some support for this characterisation of nineteenth-century regional industrial development. Studies of the cotton industry have shown that supplies of labour and capital were largely generated internally to the Manchester district, while social identities, political associations and trade unions in the town had assumed a markedly regional character by the first half of the nineteenth century.98 Likewise, for coal, patterns of commodity trade on canals show a clear concentration on short hauls within a 15-mile radius of the town.99 Furthermore, this explanation of transport’s role in regional development affords a key role to interchange trade with the port of Liverpool, which provided both a significant component of Manchester’s industrial raw materials and access to its main export markets. However, in other ways this account of the nature and scope of the canal trade is problematic. The major issue is that a representation of a highly localised canal trade, with strong links to export markets but weak links to other English regions, leads to the inference that English cotton textiles were widely worn in Lancashire and throughout the world but not in other parts of Britain. Freeman, in a critique of Langton’s argument, has pointed out that the turnpike road network was already pervasive in 1770 and was used by a well-organised group of professional road carriers serving national markets, a finding endorsed by Szostak’s study of eighteenth-century transport.100 One obvious solution to the problem would be to portray canals as cementing the

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pattern of intra-regional specialisation and roads as being responsible for binding regions into the wider national space economy. Historians have often inferred from a 1980 paper by Freeman that roads dominated the distribution of cotton textiles before the coming of railways.101 However, Freeman’s research was confined to the pre-1815 period and evidence of road-led transport patterns was equivocal for the only Manchester firm included in his study. From 1815, furthermore, there can be no doubt that canals had supplanted roads as the foremost mode of transport for Manchester’s key trades with Liverpool, London and Hull. In this subsection, I propose an alternative conceptualisation of the canal trade in which some components that have been considered as intra-regional trade are reclassified as inter-regional (or extra-regional) trades. To clarify this argument requires further consideration of two issues: the spatial extent of the Manchester industrial region and the commodity composition of Manchester’s canal trade. Historians have long emphasised that the ‘Lancashire cotton industry’ is a poor descriptor for the spatial distribution of the cotton industry. In the first place, the industry was not widespread throughout Lancashire but concentrated in the east of the county; secondly, many key sites of the industry had spilt over from Lancashire into neighbouring parts of Yorkshire, Cheshire and Derbyshire. Stobart has recently examined Manchester’s industrial region in the late eighteenth century, emphasising its strong links with a core area that comprised the fustian-weaving towns of Bolton, Bury, Leigh and Oldham and the check-weaving villages around Ashton and within the Manchester parish, but weaker connections with a marginal area that included the printing-cloth area around Blackburn and Preston, as well as the woollen-manufacturing zone in the north-east of the county.102 As cotton production spread, Manchester’s industrial region expanded, as towns in north Lancashire, west Yorkshire, north-east Cheshire and north-east Derbyshire were drawn more firmly into its commercial orbit.103 However, despite this expansion, it is difficult to refute King and Timmins’ conclusion that ‘the powerhouse of the early industrial revolution was … crammed into a very limited spatial box’.104 While the Manchester textile district was establishing itself in eastern Lancashire and its adjoining counties, a second industrial region was emerging to the west: a ‘mineral-based economic system’ around Warrington, Prescot, Widnes, St Helens and Liverpool, largely based on coal mining, chemicals and salt refining. This second region had ‘a distinct spatial focus and a very different geography’ from the Manchester textile district.105 Wilson and Singleton, and others, have emphasised that the two production regions had discrete development paths, with neither being subordinate to or dependent on the other: ‘it is vital to stress that the Manchester industrial

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district has never embraced Liverpool and the Merseyside region (including towns like Warrington, St. Helens and Widnes). Liverpool developed into one of the world’s leading ports independently of Manchester, while its immediate hinterland was a base for coal and chemicals.’106 The types of goods carried on Manchester’s canals also help to clarify the canals’ role in regional and inter-regional trade. As noted above, much of what we know about the canal trade is inferred from a number of detailed studies of the coal trade. As Wrigley and others have emphasised, water transport was well suited to carrying low-value bulk goods that could not bear a high cost of transport and had a punctiform pattern of distribution, in which large quantities are shipped along a single route.107 Short hauls within a radius of 10–15 miles of major towns and ports are thus characteristic of the canal trade in coal in Manchester and in other manufacturing regions, including south-west Lancashire. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Manchester’s coal came from Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Pendleton, Ashton, Oldham and Rochdale, towns that were functioning parts of Manchester’s textile economy. The pattern of distribution for coal was mirrored in other major canal trades, especially for Manchester supplies of flagstone, limestone, rubble and gritstone, which came from the upland quarries of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire within a 25-mile annulus of Manchester, a region which was broadly, although not absolutely, contiguous with that of the cotton-textile district. Other significant groups of commodities brought to Manchester by canals, however, reveal a very different pattern of trade. They were largely commodities that were not produced internally to nineteenth-century Manchester’s industrial district in any significant quantities: raw cotton, dyestuffs, corn and timber. These products were produced in national and international regions with markedly different economic structures to industrialising Manchester: in the plantations of the Atlantic world; the fields, prairies and forests of Ireland, the United States, Canada, the Baltic; as well as the English regions of Lincolnshire, the Vale of York and East Anglia. It was access to raw materials and foodstuffs produced outside the region that allowed Manchester and its satellite towns to concentrate their resources on core industrial functions. Ultimately, for Manchester canals, the key issue of inter- and intraregional trade rests on unpicking the town’s relationship with the port of Liverpool. As the canal trade in raw cotton, corn and timber required just a 30-mile haul between Lancashire’s two leading towns, historians may prefer to classify this as an intra-regional trade from a port to a hinterland manufacturing region. My view is that this classification as an intra-regional trade produces a misleading representation of the types of links created between Manchester and external markets. The two reasons for this have been hinted

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at above. First, the portrayal of Liverpool as a dependent element of Manchester’s industrial region clashes with historical work on south-west Lancashire’s own distinctive manufacturing history. Second, and more importantly, commodities moving from Liverpool to Manchester were produced in world regions with dramatically different comparative advantages and economic functions from the Manchester industrial district in the first half of the nineteenth century. The issue of food supply is a case in point. By the 1790s, Lancashire was not self-sufficient in food.108 As the population of the Manchester cotton district grew, it allocated a greater part of its economic resources to industry. Some foodstuffs were purchased from the fringes of the textile regions, in the immediately adjoining Cheshire agricultural belt, which supplied vegetables and other market goods, but before the railways, the bulk of food supplies were brought to Manchester by canals from specialist corn-growing regions of eastern England or from Ireland, Europe, the Baltic and the Americas via canal hauls from the port of Liverpool. Regional specialisation in the Manchester district required a reallocation of land, labour and capital from producing raw material inputs and food to producing cotton; without reliable trading links to regions able to supply food and raw materials, the kind of regional concentration that was characteristic of the first Industrial Revolution was not possible. These issues of defining inter- and intra-regional trade are underlined by an analysis of flows of goods out of Manchester. Foremost among these goods were, of course, cotton textiles, which achieved a wide dispersion in both national and international markets. It is possible to provide some very tentative round figures for the distribution of output for the industry. In 1840 the value of cotton output from the Manchester textile region was around 40.5m, divided in sales between foreign markets (£21.1m, 52 per cent) and domestic markets (£19.4m, 48 per cent).109 Almost all of the foreign trade in cottons was channelled through Liverpool and Hull by the 1840s. The canal data presented in chapter 2 show that, in weight terms, canals carried around 60,000 tons of cotton goods to Liverpool and around 34,500 tons to Hull.110 Using estimates of the average value of a ton of cotton yarn (£126) and a ton of finished goods (£189) inferred from Poole’s contemporary description of Liverpool trade, and assuming a ratio of 0.29 : 1 yarn to finished textiles inferred from Davis’s trade data, we can suggest that canals carried around £3.5m worth of yarn to ports for export and £12.7m worth of finished goods, a total value of £16.2m. These rough estimates would leave only £4.8m worth of cotton yarn and textiles to be distributed to ports for export by road and rail. While this figure seems low at first sight, it should be remembered that, in 1840, canals dominated transport on both routes. Canals still had the upper hand over railways in the Manchester–Liverpool trade, with roads no longer an important mode of transport for freight on this route. Railways

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were yet to be completed between Manchester and Hull, while roads still provided competition to canals in the Manchester–Hull trade. So, in the Manchester–Liverpool trade, data for the early 1840s suggest a 0.25 : 1 division between rail and water for ‘down goods’ from Manchester to Liverpool, equating to a further 20,000 tons of railway-carried cottons to Liverpool or a value of £3.4m, leaving roughly £1.4m worth of road-distributed yarn and cottons to Hull.111 These figures needless to say are very tentative, but they suggest that canals were vital modes of conveyance for carrying goods beyond the Manchester textile district at their apogee of commercial importance in the late 1830s. The figures suggest, furthermore, that Liverpool and Hull had the responsibility for the export of Manchester cottons: Hull providing the best point for despatch for the markets of northwest Europe, with Liverpool taking the lead in shipping goods to the markets of the Atlantic world and Asia. Both provided vital links between the Manchester cotton district and the diverse consumers of the world; these ports were not peripheral or dependent parts of a production region controlled by Manchester but were major coastal and international ports with a broad range of trading interests. The rough data marshalled above suggest that around 95,000 tons of Manchester cottons were consumed in the home market, which would equate to a value of £18m, a figure proximate to the overall value of domestic trade estimated at £19.4m given above. There might not have been a national market for coal in Britain before the railways but there was one for Manchester cottons. Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide an overall breakdown of the domestic markets of the Manchester cotton industry. Edwards has argued that London was the leading market for domestically consumed Manchester cottons until 1815, while Chapman has shown that the capital’s wholesalers remained central to the ‘home trade’ in the midnineteenth century, even eclipsing Manchester firms in the supply of goods to the British consumer.112 In the trade to London, like that to Hull and Liverpool, canals had supplanted roads as the major mode of transport by 1820. Rough figures would suggest that canals carried approximately 20,000 tons of cotton goods to London in the late 1830s, around one-fifth of the total supply to domestic markets. But London was not the only market for Manchester goods. The town’s merchants had established direct links with provincial retailers as early as 1750. These markets were mainly served by road carriers in the late eighteenth century but the data are not available to test whether canals were able to provide significant competition to road carriers on these routes in the early years of the nineteenth century. Trade directories do, nevertheless, provide some clues as to the broad shape of the national transport system for Manchester goods. In 1820, trade directories suggest that roads served 106 individual towns and villages compared to 77

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served by canals. There were more services by road than canal to destinations within Lancashire itself, as well as to the adjacent counties of Yorkshire, Cheshire, Cumberland and Derbyshire. Roads also ran more services to eastern England (including Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire), to the north-east and Scotland, and to Shropshire and North Wales. Canals, by contrast, ran more services to London and Liverpool, to the south-west (including Gloucestershire and Somerset), to the west midland industrial counties of Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcester, to Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, and to South Wales. There were an equal number of services by road and canal to Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. The pattern inferred from trade directories thus suggests that canals tended to dominate trade to the largest ports and towns and across a broad swathe of western England. Roads, at this time, held sway in markets close to Manchester and in eastern England (except London), with a contested middle ground around Nottingham and Derby.113 The Manchester industrial region, given its high-wage economy and high rate of urbanisation, must have provided a key market for the products of its own industry. It is implausible, however, that residents of the Manchester textile district consumed a preponderant share of £18–£19m worth of finished textiles per year, as might be inferred from a characterisation of a distinct and separate industrial region. There was, of course, a need for a large volume of intra-regional trade to move raw cotton, dyestuffs, yarn and piece goods between factories, weavers and the market centre of Manchester. However, it was roads rather than canals that carried the bulk of these goods, more often than not in carts owned and operated by mill owners rather the wagons of specialist road carriers. The failure of canals to draw this localised trade off the roads warns against assumptions that the canal trade always enjoyed unique advantages in short local hauls. The foregoing analysis endorses Mokyr’s recent rejection of the notion that nineteenth-century Britain consisted of a number of insulated regional economies. This representation, he argues is ‘specious, because if anything seems true to be true about eighteenth-century Britain it is regional specialization, supported by the growing importance of interregional trade as transport improved’.114 This brings us to the heart of the matter. Regions could not specialise in a core manufacturing activity without strong links to external regions that, on the one hand, could supply raw materials and foodstuffs that were not produced in sufficient quantities in the region and, on the other, could provide a market for those manufactured goods that could not be consumed internally to the production region. Some of the external regions that nineteenth-century Manchester traded with were international – Ireland, North America, the Baltic and Russia stand out – but others were within Britain. Especially significant here were the eastern English agricul-

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tural regions, with their markets in Hull, Leeds and Wakefield, and the slate quarries of North Wales. These regions were connected to Manchester by trade; canals may often have simply been the final leg on the journey to Manchester, but it was the nature of the commodities themselves that allowed Manchester to disinvest in the production of food and the gathering of raw materials and to concentrate on industrial activities. Canals served to draw together both regional and national economies. Canals and Manchester industry Manchester entered the factory age in the late eighteenth century. The cotton carding and spinning machinery invented by the famous triumvirate of Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton were adopted in Manchester in a range of production settings. Initially, the most visible locations of ingenuity were purpose-built Arkwright-type water-frame mills, which required a typical investment of £3,000–£5,000.115 The technology was water-powered and the siting of these mills in riverside locations led to a dispersion rather than a concentration of the cotton industry, as favourable locations for water power were prioritised over proximity to the long-established centre of the industry around Manchester, Bolton, Oldham and Blackburn. Arkwright himself built Manchester’s first water-frame mill in 1781, adopting a then-unusual pattern of using a steam engine to pump water from a reservoir to power the waterframe rather than using the flowing water of a river or stream.116 By the mid-1790s, there were a further ten Arkwright water-frame mills in the immediate vicinity of Manchester, a small number compared with the total of 211 water-powered cotton mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Hargreaves’ jenny and Crompton’s mule were initially powered by hand, seldom entailing a capital investment of more than £1,000, and were thus easily integrated into a range of production settings, including cottages, workshops and converted buildings. Free from power requirements, handpowered workshops proliferated in urban locations close to Manchester, thus benefiting from access to labour and markets. Evidence of jenny- and mulespinning workshops is abundant in Manchester for a brief period from the mid-1780s and early 1790s.117 It was the maturation of steam-engine technology and its use to power Crompton’s mule in the late eighteenth century that propelled Manchester to the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. The first steam engine to directly power cotton-spinning machinery in Manchester was used in Peter Drinkwater’s mill near Piccadilly, built in 1789, which stimulated an explosion of steam-powered, mule-spinning factories in Manchester in the 1790s. This was a decade of major technological advance with a focus on refining pioneer inventions into large-scale economically efficient industrial

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technologies, a development led by a small group of engineers who settled in the emergent capital of factory industry in the late eighteenth century; several leading machine technologists built their own cotton mills and established successful dynastic firms in Manchester. The building and equipping of steam-powered mule-spinning mills seldom required investments of less than £10,000. By 1799, the number of spinning factories in Manchester had reached 57, increasing to 86 at the close of the Napoleonic Wars; all of these new spinning mills were powered by steam rather than by water. In 1811, Crompton’s mule census revealed the rapid growth of cotton factory production in Manchester. He estimated that Manchester possessed around one-third of the mule spindles found within a 60-mile radius of the town. The first Factory Returns, produced in the 1830s, show that Manchester remained Britain’s foremost factory location for cotton, a position it retained until the late 1850s.118 Manchester also consolidated its position at the heart of the cotton industry, by providing its leading market and its foremost finishing sector. The industrial sector also diversified away from textiles. Most ‘new’ industries in Manchester were initially direct spillovers from the cotton sector, especially engineering, chemicals and paper, but others were attracted by general urban growth, especially corn mills, sawmills and leather processing. How important were canals to Manchester’s factory industry? As a starting point, we can note that canals were unimportant in the establishment of Manchester’s early mills, which were powered by water or hand and so did not require cheap canal-borne coal. The shift to steam power from c.1790, of course, made coal indispensable but, at this time, road-borne coal still provided the bulk of Manchester’s supply. From the closing years of the eighteenth century, however, canals began to play a more prominent role. First, canal banks provided the major sites for factory industry in Manchester. In 1800, Manchester already had a waterfront pattern of industrial development. The main mill sites were on Manchester’s three major rivers, as well as Shooter’s Brook, which ran from Ancoats to Medlock in the south-east of the township. Many of these industrial sites were water-powered mills developed in the 1780s.119 Many of Manchester’s early steam-powered mills also acquired riverside locations, to supply their steam engines with water for boiler feed and condensing jets. The completion of the canals through the centre of Manchester by 1800, and the subsequent rapid phase of private canal branch construction, greatly extended the provision of viable waterside factory sites in Manchester, easing the burden on river sites, which already housed 20 textile-finishing sites by 1800. By the 1820s, most new mills were found on canal banks and, by 1850, a major phase of mill building, as well as the demise of older mills, meant that as much as 85 per cent of the rateable value of the borough of Manchester’s mills was levied on sites with 20 yards

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of a waterway. Engineering works, which spread after the Napoleonic Wars, also favoured canal sites, as did glass works and sawmills; river sites remained popular for textile-finishing works, chemical works, paper and corn mills, and tanneries. The summation of these developments was a spatial pattern of factories that was defined by Manchester’s waterways, with the bulk within a southern-eastern collar of the township. Railways, in contrast, had a minimal impact on industrial location. Hawke, writing in 1970, argued that the railways had a relatively minimal impact on industrial geography during the nineteenth-century steam era.120 Crafts and Mulatu have recently reexamined Hawke’s conclusions in the light of theoretical developments in the ‘New Economic Geography’, endorsing his view that falling transport costs brought about by steam-powered transport had a negligible impact on the national location of industry.121 The example of Manchester shows that there was no tendency for cotton factories to locate near railway tracks or stations before 1850. By the mid-nineteenth century, indeed, two decades of railway competition had induced no changes in the intra-urban spatial layout of industry in Manchester. The second key benefit of canals to the factory sector in Manchester related to their core transport functions. This book has provided detailed evidence on Manchester’s canal trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. Coal was, of course, indispensable to the powering of steam engines. The most spectacular factory boom in Manchester’s history from 1798 to 1804 was coterminous with the completion of the canal network, which may have provided a stimulus to mill building, although the national and international trading conditions were also buoyant at this time. Certainly, by the 1830s, we can be sure that canals brought most of Manchester’s coal. The location of factories on canal banks further cheapened coal because barges could unload their cargoes directly on to factory wharves, avoiding the need for the additional costs of carting coal. Canals also provided the foremost mode of transport for raw cotton, spun yarn and piece goods on all major routes in and out of the town until 1840, as well as for Manchester’s domestic trade with London and western England. Social savings Social savings methodologies have been used by historians to explore the impact of transport and economic growth. The bulk of this work has been applied to railways. Until the mid-1960s, historians had little doubt that railways had been a prime stimulus of economic growth in the Western world. Marx described the railway as capitalism’s ‘crowning glory’, while Rostow, author of the ‘noncommunist manifesto’, portrayed railways as the ‘leading sector’ that created growth in the wider economy. However, Robert W. Fogel’s pioneering analysis of

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US railroads, expounded in his 1964 book Railroads and American economic growth, challenged the overall economic significance of railways. This ‘social savings’ approach calculated the railways’ contribution to national economic growth by estimating the cost savings brought about by railways compared with the next best transport alternative. Fogel’s analysis of American railroads concluded that railways’ freight traffic accounted for only 4.7 per cent of national income in 1890, and so concluded that railways were not indispensable to the USA’s nineteenth-century economic growth. Hawke applied this approach to British railways. Anchoring his analysis on 1865, he calculated that the use of railways for freight traffic provided a social saving of 4.1 per cent of national income, although Foreman and Peck later adduced a much more generous figure of 10.1 per cent for Britain in 1890.122 Social savings methods have fallen out of favour. The methodology requires the estimation of a hypothetical transport system without railways, which is of course highly inferential and subject to a number of assumptions that may be questionable. Social savings, moreover, is a static analysis designed to provide a snapshot of the cost savings brought about at a particular moment of history. It does not include an analysis of the ‘dynamic effects’ brought about by transport, such as their effects on savings and investment, product mix, scales of production, technology, urbanisation and flows of capital and labour. As such, a calculation of the cost savings for transport provision does not capture the full scope of the potential links between transport and the economy. The strength of the approach is that it reminds us that if transport has a small share in the aggregate economy, then it follows that productivity improvements in this sector can only have a correspondingly small impact on the national economy. McCloskey, indeed, using a much more simple procedure informed by Harbinger’s Triangles, has suggested that transport improvements from 1780 to 1860 provided a national income saving of between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent.123 Counterfactual scenarios are worth exploring. For the present purposes, some discussion of the extent of cost savings brought about by canals is instructive: how significant were the cost savings of canals compared to the next-best available alternative? This can be approached for individual commodities. Coal, for example, was carried by road at a cost of roughly 8d. per ton per mile in the first half of the nineteenth century compared to around 3d. per ton per mile on canals.124 In 1836, we know that roughly onethird of Manchester’s coal supply of 900,000 tons came by road from pits close enough to Manchester to have similar transport costs to canals. Had canals not been available, and the remaining 570,000 tons of coal been carted by road from the same pits as served by canals, it would have increased the cost of coal in Manchester by £11,875 in 1836 or around 7 per cent of the pithead price of £171,000.

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The position for raw cotton is slightly different. Here, we can compare 1825 and 1840. In 1825, canals had almost completely monopolised the supply of cotton to Manchester. The total transport cost for raw cotton from the port of Liverpool by canals to Manchester mills was 17s. per ton (including 2s. per ton for carting in Manchester) and the total road cost was 40s. per ton. The Liverpool price of cotton in the mid-1820s can be estimated at 6d. per lb or £56 per ton, with a total quantity of 67,050 tons brought to Manchester worth £3,754,800. Hence, the total transport cost for cotton on canals was £56,993 in 1825. If this trade had been shifted on to roads (assuming that this entailed no cost increases for road transport) Manchester’s transport costs for cotton would have increased to £134,100. Thus, the saving brought about by canals for Manchester cotton in 1825 was £77,107 or roughly 2 per cent of the value of the raw cotton. By 1840, railway competition had brought down the cost of cotton transport to 12s. per ton (assuming 2s. per ton carting costs). The average Liverpool price of the raw material had fallen to 5d. per lb or £46 per ton, while the total canal and railway conveyance of cotton had increased to 122,640 tons with a value of £5.8m. The savings attributable to railways can be calculated as the difference between the 1840 rate and the prevailing pre1830 canal rate. At the pre-1830 rates, the transport bill for Manchester cotton would have been £104,244 but, at the 1840 rate, it was £73,238. Hence, a lowered transport cost of £31,006, or 0.5 per cent of the Liverpool price of the raw material, was attributable to the advent of railways. These simple static calculations suggest that transport innovation did reduce the costs of raw materials supplied to the manufacturers. As suggested above, these estimated savings were likely to be small in relation to the total costs. Even for coal, which with a low price-to-bulk ratio was particularly sensitive to transport costs, the saving amounted to only around 7 per cent of the pithead price. For raw cotton, cost reductions brought about by canals comprised a much lower proportion of total value, although the commodity’s high value relative to coal meant that the monetary saving to Manchester industry was much higher. Canals carried goods much more cheaply than roads, bringing about a reduction of one-half to three-quarters in the prevailing transport rate. Canals also had a more dramatic impact in reducing transport costs than railways, which brought down freights by perhaps one-third from the pre-railway canal rates. Summary and conclusions Canals occupy a small but significant space in the history of the first Industrial Revolution. Although canals were not a decisive technological innovation, they combined a particular mix of engineering knowledge and

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capital concentration with a belief that natural resources could be improved for commercial advantage, which was characteristic of the Lancastrian Industrial Revolution. These substantial infrastructural projects absorbed a large share of British investible funds in the 1790s and used these financial resources to increase national productivity. For these reasons, canals, along with other transport modes, are recognised as one of only a small number of ‘modernising’ sectors in the dominant paradigm of the character of the Industrial Revolution, which contrasts the rapid growth in these dynamic sectors with the sluggish performance in the great bulk of ‘traditional’ sectors. Canal transport, however, should not be considered as an autonomous cause of the Industrial Revolution. The major transport developments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain are best interpreted as responses to eighteenth-century industrial and trading growth rather than independent stimuli to the economy. The canal network of both Manchester and England, moreover, was not complete until the early nineteenth century and one could not disagree with Turnbull that ‘by conventional dating, the industrial revolution progressed substantially without canals’.125 Indeed, Manchester became one Britain’s leading canal regions precisely because it had already emerged as one of Britain’s leading industrial regions. Canals were thus lagged responses to industrial growth. Historians seeking to explain the onset of the first Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century must cast their gaze elsewhere, but when the canal system was fully operational in the first half of the nineteenth century, it did confer a number of significant benefits on Manchester’s textile economy. Britain’s industrialisation was a regional process. The regional specialisation of the economy was rooted in comparative advantage: regions with rich lowland soils, especially in the south and east of England, became increasingly specialised in agriculture, while many parts of the north and west of England with less fertile soils began to develop ancillary industrial activities from the seventeenth century. Geography was not, of course, the only factor at work in this process. In the early modern period, regions developed their own distinctive mixes of products, markets and skills; the most successful regions were those that were well supplied with local entrepreneurial and engineering skills, active in foreign trade, and had access to reserves of cheap coal. Improvements in transport in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reinforced regional specialisation by reducing the costs by which industrial and agricultural regions could trade with each other. Turnpikes had already developed a national system of transport by the mid-eighteenth century; canals and railways later developed their own extensive networks, which in their different ways strengthened connections between regions over and above those forged by turnpiked roads.

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Most studies of canal trade have taken a regional approach but have emphasised the canals’ role in consolidating connections within, rather than between, regions. This conforms to a view of regional development in which specialist regions were isolated enclaves in the domestic economy but with dynamic links with foreign markets. This characterisation of canal trade is embedded in the view that canals were principally used for the intra-regional shipment of heavy unrefined goods or short hauls to coastal ports. Much of Manchester’s trade fits this pattern, especially its coal and stone trades and, more contentiously, the interchange trade with Liverpool. This chapter, however, has argued that canals were much more important in developing inter-regional trades than is usually allowed. This is based on two premises. First, the characterisation of trade flows between Manchester and Liverpool as intra-regional overlooks the extent to which these towns were part of separate industrial regions. Second, canals lowered the cost of Manchester’s access to a broad range of national and international markets, based on the exchange of commodities between regions with contrasting factor endowments. The exchange of raw cotton, corn and timber for cotton textiles at Liverpool was just one of these links; Manchester also developed strong canal trade connections with Hull and London and across a broad swathe of western England. At the strongest points of the canal system, it was able to take trade from the roads on long-distance routes, although the roads’ greater speed and reliability allowed them to withstand canal competition within Lancashire. These points challenge the view that contrasts a canal transport system that integrated the regional economy and a road transport system that integrated the national market. Canals were built to carry goods to and from Manchester but once constructed they also played a key role in shaping urban developments in the south and east of the Manchester township. The rapid growth of steampowered factories from the 1790s in Manchester coincided with the expansion of industrial sites afforded by the construction of canals (and private branches) within the town’s urban core. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a pattern emerged in which canals replaced rivers as the key locations for mechanised industry, especially cotton factories, engineering works, sawmills and glass works; industries that required larger volumes of water – textile finishing, paper and chemicals for instance – continued to adopt river sites. The use of canal water to supply steam engines allowed the distinctive clustering of Manchester mills and augmented the inadequate supplies of water from the Manchester and Salford Waterworks Company. Cotton factories benefited from cheap coal brought by canals and, before 1840 at least, from canal conveyances for raw cotton and finished goods to towns and ports. The canal age was thus relatively short. It had barely begun by the time Manchester was embracing the Industrial Revolution and had

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passed its zenith when railways had formed a national system in 1850. But for a half a century, the complex and strong links made between industry and canals helped to fashion and sustain the remarkable economic growth of the world’s first industrial city. Notes 1 K. Morgan (ed.), An American Quaker in the British Isles: the travel journals of Jabez Maud Fisher, 1775–1779 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 236. 2 See a range of visitors’ accounts in L.D. Bradshaw, Visitors to Manchester (Swinton: Neil Richardson, 1987). 3 Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution, p. 436. 4 Wheeler, Manchester, p. 275. 5 Ure, Cotton manufacture, p. 179. 6 Head, Home tour, p. 8. 7 The description ‘heroic’ is taken from J. Mokyr, The British industrial revolution: an economic perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 76. 8 For a synoptic account, see H. Voth, ‘Living standards and the urban environment’, in R. Floud and P. Johnson (eds), The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain: Volume 1, industrialisation, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 268–94. 9 For recent statements, see J. Mokyr, The lever of riches: technological creativity and economic progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Macroinventions, economic growth and “industrial revolution” in Britain and France’, Economic History Review, Vol. 48 (1995), pp. 591–8; R.C. Allen, The British industrial revolution in global perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1. For a more cautious view of the transformative impact of technology, as well as more emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century, see E. Griffin, A short history of the industrial revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 10 F. Crouzet, Britain ascendant: comparative studies in Franco-British economic history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 100. 11 In these accounts, it is the refinement of new techniques into working and profitable technologies that generates the bulk of productivity growth. See, for example, Mokyr, Lever of riches. 12 R.M. Hartwell, ‘The causes of the industrial revolution: an essay in methodology’, Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 18 (1965), pp. 164–82. 13 D.C. North, Structure and change in economic history (London: Norton, 1981), pp. 150–70. 14 R. Brenner, ‘Agrarian class structure and economic growth in pre-industrial Europe’, Past and Present, Vol. 70 (1976), pp. 30–75. 15 A.E. Musson and E. Robinson, Science and technology in the industrial revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969). 16 Allen, British industrial revolution. 17 A.H. John, ‘Aspects of English economic growth in the first half of the eighteenth

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century’, Economica, New Series, Vol. 28 (1961), pp. 176–90; D.E.C. Eversley, ‘The home market and economic growth in England, 1750–1780’, in E.L. Jones and G.E. Mingay (eds), Land, labour and population in the industrial revolution: essays presented to J.D. Chambers (London: Arnold, 1967), pp. 209–52. P.K. O’Brien, ‘Agriculture and the home market for industry, 1660–1820’, English Historical Review, Vol. 100 (1985), pp. 773–800. N. McKendrick, ‘Consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb (eds), The birth of a consumer society: the commercialisation of eighteenth-century England (London: Europa, 1982), p. 9. J. de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Feinstein, ‘Pessimism perpetuated’. S. Horrell, ‘Home demand and British industrialisation’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 56 (1996), pp. 564–82. L. Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660–1769 (London: Routledge, 1988); Horrell, ‘Home demand’, p. 595. Toynbee, Lectures; E. Williams, Capitalism and slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); K. Berrill, ‘International trade and the rate of economic growth’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 12 (1960), pp. 351–9; Deane, First industrial revolution, pp. 53–92; Hobsbawm, Industry and empire. P.K. O’Brien, ‘Inseparable connections: trade, economy, state and empire’, in P.J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford history of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 54–77. J.M. Price, ‘What did merchants do? Reflections on British overseas trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 49 (1989), pp. 267–84; Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution, pp. 314–61. See Davis, Industrial revolution; J. Mokyr, ‘Demand vs. supply in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 37 (1977), pp. 981–1008; R.P. Thomas and D.N. McCloskey, ‘Overseas trade and empire 1700–1860’, in R. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (eds), The economic history of Britain since 1700, Vol. 1: 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Deane and Cole, British economic growth, pp. 85–92; M.W. Flinn, Origins of the industrial revolution (London: Longman, 1966), pp. 61–2. T.S. Ashton, The industrial revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 8–9; A. Lewis, The theory of economic growth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), p. 208. Rostow, Stages of economic growth, pp. 20–7, 41–5. P. Hudson, The genesis of industrial capital: a study of the West Riding wool textile industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Rose, ‘Introduction’, pp. 20–1. N.F.R. Crafts, ‘Industrial revolution in Britain and France: some thoughts on the question “Why was England first?”’, Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 30 (1977), pp. 429–41; Crafts, ‘Macroinventions’, pp. 591–601. Mokyr, Lever of riches. E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, chance and change: the character of the industrial revolu-

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tion in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 35 W.W. Rostow, ‘No random walk: A comment on “Why England First”’, Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 31 (1978), pp. 610–12; D.S. Landes, ‘What room for accident in history? Explaining big changes by small events’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 47 (1994), pp. 637–55; J. Smail, Merchants, markets and manufacture: the English wool textile industry in the eighteenth century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 3–11; Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution, pp. 110–11. 36 K. Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 37 Allen, British industrial revolution. 38 R. Findlay and K. O’Rourke, Power and plenty: trade, war and the world economy in the second millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 39 Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution, pp. 476–8. 40 J. Smail, ‘The sources of innovation in the Yorkshire wool textile industry’, Business History, Vol. 41 (1999), pp. 1–15. 41 K. Morgan, ‘Business networks in the British export trade to North America, 1750–1800’, in J.J. McCusker and K. Morgan (eds), The early modern Atlantic economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 62. 42 M. Jacob, Scientific culture and the making of the industrial west (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 43 Ibid., pp. 1–11, 99–115, 187–92. 44 J. Mokyr, The gifts of Athena: historical origins of the knowledge economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 28–85, quote p. 29. 45 D.N. McCloskey, Bourgeois dignity: why economics can’t explain the modern world (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 46 Szostak, Role of transportation, pp. 5, 40. 47 Ibid., p. 5. 48 Ibid., p. 85. 49 Ibid., p. 56. 50 Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, pp. 540 (footnote), 541. 51 Szostak, Role of transportation, p. 52. 52 Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 18–21; Ville, ‘Transport’, pp. 324–5. 53 Szostak, Role of transportation, p. 5. 54 Freeman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 21–3; Ward, Finance of canal building, pp. 163–9; Pawson, Transport and economy; Albert, ‘Turnpike road system’. 55 C. More, Understanding the industrial revolution (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 130. 56 M.J. Freeman, ‘Transport’, in J. Langton and R.J. Morris (eds), Atlas of industrializing Britain 1780–1914 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 80. 57 Albert, ‘Turnpike road system’, p. 39. 58 Ward, Finance of canal building, pp. 161–9; Deane, First industrial revolution, p. 75. 59 Bogart, ‘Inter-modal network externalities’, pp. 316–22. 60 J. Aikin, A description of the country from thirty to forty miles round Manchester (London: Stockdale, 1795), p. 129.

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61 Ward, Finance of canal building, pp. 55–64. 62 Bagwell and Lyth, Transport in Britain, p. 15. This point is also made in Deane, First industrial revolution, p. 71. 63 Herson, ‘Estimating traffic’, p. 139. 64 H. Heaton, The Yorkshire woollen and worsted industries from earliest times up to the industrial revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920); Daniels, Early English cotton industry; Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade; Redford, Manchester merchants; Chapman, ‘Fixed capital formation’; Edwards, British cotton trade; R.G. Wilson, Gentlemen merchants: the merchant community of Leeds 1800–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971); D.T. Jenkins, The West Riding wool textile industry 1770–1835: a study of fixed capital formation (Edington: The Pasold Fund, 1975); R.L. Hills ‘Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton: why three inventors?’, Textile History, Vol. 10 (1979); Hudson, Genesis of industrial capital; Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, Manchester; Timmins, Last shift; Smail, Merchants, markets and manufacture. 65 Szostak, Role of transportation, p. 13. 66 P. Mathias, The first industrial nation: an economic history of Britain, 1700–1914, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 97–8. 67 Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 68 P.K O’Brien, T. Griffiths and P. Hunt, ‘Theories of technological progress and the British textile industry from Kay to Cartwright’, Revista de Historia Economica, Vol. 14 (1996), pp. 547–8. 69 R.G. Wilson, ‘The supremacy of the Yorkshire cloth industry’, in N. Harte and K.G. Ponting (eds), Textile history and economic history: essays in honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 225– 46; Smail, Merchants, markets and manufacture; S. Caunce, ‘Complexity, community structure and competitive advantage within the West Yorkshire woollen industry’, Business History, Vol. 39 (1997), pp. 27–41, quote p. 28. 70 Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution, pp. 476–8. 71 Wilson, ‘Supremacy’; E.A. Wrigley, Energy and the English industrial revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 101. 72 Stobart, First industrial region, pp. 2, 186–8. 73 Szostak, Role of transportation, p. 4. 74 Ibid., p. 170. 75 Wadsworth and Mann cite evidence for West Indian cotton at Liverpool costing between 10d. and 14d. per lb in 1770 and 19d. per lb in 1780; this was substantially higher than the price of ‘middling’ American raw cotton in 1830s, which cost around 6d. per lb. See Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton trade, p. 523, and N. Hall, ‘The emergence of the Liverpool raw cotton market, 1800–1850’, Northern History, Vol. 38 (2001), p. 73. 76 S. Broadberry and B. Gupta, ‘Lancashire, India and shifting comparative advantage in cotton textiles, 1700–1850: the neglected role of factor prices’, Economic History Review, Vol. 62 (2009), pp. 279–305; Allen, British industrial revolution. 77 Szostak, Role of transportation, p. 9. 78 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

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79 Ibid., pp. 19–20. 80 T. Geraghty, ‘The factory system in the British industrial revolution: a complementarity thesis’, European Economic Review, Vol. 51 (2007), pp. 1329–50; see also Rose, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12–13. 81 For variants of this argument, see Baines, Cotton. p. 117; J. James, A history of worsted manufacture in England from the earliest times (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857), p. 358; R. Guest, A compendious history of the cotton manufacture (Abingdon: Frank Cass, repr. 1968 [1823]), p. 11; T. Ellison, The cotton trade of Great Britain: including a history of the Liverpool cotton market and of Liverpool cotton brokers (Liverpool: E. Wilson, 1886), pp. 14–16; Landes, Unbound Prometheus, pp. 84–8; Walton, Lancashire, pp. 104–5. 82 P.K. O’Brien, ‘Political components of the industrial revolution: parliament and the English cotton industry, 1660–1774’, Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 44 (1991), pp. 395–423. 83 Mokyr, Enlightened economy; Allen, British industrial revolution. 84 Wrigley, Energy, esp. chapters 1–2. 85 G. Clark and D. Jacks, ‘Coal and the industrial revolution, 1700–1869’, European Review of Economic History, Vol. 11 (2007), pp. 39–72. 86 Wrigley, Energy, p. 37; B. Mitchell, Economic development of the British coal industry, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 12. 87 Deane, First industrial revolution, p. 73. 88 Duckham, ‘Canals’, p. 128. 89 Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, pp. 552–8. 90 Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 19. 91 Mitchell, Economic development, p. 284. 92 Another contemporary account cited in Hadfield and Biddle, Canals of north west England, Vol. I, p. 20 refers to land transport costs for coal brought to Manchester of 9s.–10s., providing support to the rough calculations made here. 93 Aikin, Description, p. 205. 94 At this time, Wigan coal accounted for around 20 per cent of the coal carried on the Bridgewater Canal, with the remainder coming from the Bridgewater collieries. 95 For a useful recent statement, see Bagwell and Lyth, Transport in Britain, p. 15. 96 J. Langton, ‘The industrial revolution and the regional geography of England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 9 (1984), pp. 145–67. 97 Ibid., pp. 162–3. 98 Walton, Lancashire, pp. 76–77, 123; Langton, ‘Industrial revolution’, pp. 149–62. 99 Langton’s own work on south-west Lancashire also very effectively shows the intra-regional orientation of the trade in coal. See J. Langton, Geographical change and industrial revolution: coal-mining in south-west Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 100 M.J. Freeman, ‘The industrial revolution and the regional geography of England: a comment’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 9 (1984), pp. 507–12; Szostak, Role of transportation. It should be clarified that the

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114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

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critique of Szostak presented above referred to transport’s role as an independent stimulus to the Industrial Revolution and did not challenge the view that road transport was well developed in the eighteenth century. Freeman, ‘Transport methods’. For this inference, see, for example, Timmins, Made in Lancashire, p. 142; Wrigley, Energy, p. 109. Stobart, ‘Manchester and its region’, pp. 69–71. Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. S. King and G.T. Timmins, Making sense of the industrial revolution: English economy and society 1700–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 36. Stobart, First industrial region, p. 98. J.F. Wilson and J. Singleton, ‘The Manchester industrial district: clustering, networking and performance, 1750–1939’, in J.F. Wilson and A. Popp (eds), Industrial clusters and regional business networks in England, 1750–1970 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 45. See also a similar point made by Walton, Lancashire, pp. 103, 113–14. E.A. Wrigley, ‘The supply of raw materials in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol. 15 (1962), pp. 1–16. Walton, Lancashire, p. 122. This assumes that the Manchester district supplied 90 per cent of total British cotton output and conformed to the national distribution of exports and domestic consumption calculated by Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution, p. 436. This assumes that 80 per cent of the ‘merchandise’ sent from Manchester to Hull was cottons, with the respective figure for Liverpool being 75 per cent. The slightly different proportions are explained by the fact that Manchester also transhipped Yorkshire woollens and heavy machinery to Liverpool. If these figures are broadly representative they would suggest around 8,200 tons of cottons for export was carried on roads at this time. As roads were rarely used to transport cottons after 1830, the bulk were probably carried to Hull. If so, this would equate to a 19.2 per cent share of the trade to the canals’ 80.8 per cent. Edwards, British cotton trade, p. 162; Chapman, ‘Commercial sector’, pp. 82–3 Data of this type do not tell us much about the loads carried. Canal boats, fully loaded, could carry 15–40 tons, while road wagons generally carried fewer than ten tons, but more than one wagon could serve the route on any given day. Mokyr, Enlightened economy, p. 155 (emphasis added). Chapman, ‘Fixed capital formation’, p. 239. Nevell, Manchester, pp. 83–7. Miller et al., A. & G. Murray, pp. 15–16. Williams and Farnie, Cotton mills, p. 21. Nevell, Manchester, pp. 86–90. Hawke, Railways and economic growth, pp. 382, 395. Crafts and Mulatu, ‘Location of industry’, pp. 575–607. Fogel, Railroads; Hawke, Railways and economic growth. Given that (i) transport accounted for around 6–10 per cent of national income from 1780 to 1860; (ii) transport innovations (canals and railways) brought

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down transport costs by around half of the road cost; and (iii) this saving only applied to around half of national transport (because of the continued importance of road transport), the savings attributable to transport in relation to national income growth can be captured by dividing the 6–10 per cent of national income in half and half again. This equates to a saving of 1.5–2.5 per cent. See D.N. McCloskey, ‘1780–1860: a survey’, in R. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (eds), The economic history of Britain since 1700, Vol. 1: 1700–1860, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 259. 124 In the mid-1830s the pithead price of coal was roughly 6s. per ton. Hence, coal carried for 24 miles on canals would double the pithead price. For roads, the equivalent was nine miles. 125 Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, p. 541.

8

Conclusion

Canals have never found a prominent place in British history. This is not because of a dearth of sources; in fact, researchers interested in British canals have a broad range of primary materials at their disposal, including canal company archives, parliamentary papers, business records, shareholder circulars, maps, rate books and trade directories. This book has drawn on these sources to provide a new look at the history of Manchester, one of Britain’s leading centres of canal trade. One of the main aims of this book has been to extend our understanding of the geography and commodity composition of canal trade; this is necessary to make reasonable judgements on the role of canals in both extending transport provision and contributing to broader economic and social developments. Much of the material presented in this book has been quantitative. Indeed, the book has shown that readily available sources provide two important measures of the extent of canal trade and allow comparative analyses between canals and other modes of transport: first, the volume of trade in tons and, second, the canal company income from traffic in monetary values. Tonnage data is the most conventional measure of the extent of a canal’s trade but, when analysed in isolation, it can produce misleading impressions of a canal’s economic strength. For example, in the early 1840s, we found that seven railway companies, each with capitalisations in the millions of pounds, carried fewer goods by weight than just one of Manchester’s canals, the Bridgewater. While this shows that the pace with which railways supplanted canals in carrying the freight trade of early Victorian Britain should not exaggerated, it also offers a useful example of the kinds of distortions that can be inferred from gauging the commercial vitality of a canal from tonnage data alone. A second example derives from the history of the Rochdale Canal. In the mid-1840s, this canal hauled around 800,000 tons of freight traffic per year; however, around 400,000 tons of this trade, half the weight, comprised shipments of coal that were carried less than two miles from the interchange lock with the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield towards central Manchester, rarely travelling eastwards beyond

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the industrial suburb of Ancoats. These kinds of very short hauls of heavy goods can misrepresent the true trading position of canals. Analysing the tolls paid by canal or rail users for freight, alongside the raw tonnage data, makes it possible to make much clearer judgements on the scale and scope of transport provision. Returning to the two examples just mentioned, the seven railway companies that carried a smaller volume of trade than the Bridgewater Canal actually received around five times more income; in this example, the weight of goods carried does not provide a clear picture of the canals’ and railways’ relative contribution to British transport provision. The Rochdale Canal Company’s 400,000 tons of coal trade in the mid-1840s, meanwhile, netted the company just £4,000 or only 13 per cent of its total income: coal thus comprised half of the canal’s trade by weight but less than one-seventh of its income. Future studies of canal trade must endeavour to analyse the volumes of tonnage carried and the income that these traffic volumes accrued. The quantitative data presented in the book confirm the popular impression that the Bridgewater Canal was central to the operation of Manchester’s canal system before the Ship Canal opened. The Bridgewater’s trade also exemplifies the two general patterns of Manchester’s canal trade uncovered in the book, itself reflected in the two sub-periods of its construction. The first phase of the Bridgewater Canal, complete by 1765, linked the duke’s mines at Worsley to the growing urban market of Manchester, around eight miles to the east, before a second phase established a canal route to the port of Liverpool, via the Mersey estuary at Runcorn. The first phase of the canal’s history demonstrates the key features of Manchester’s trade in heavy, unprocessed raw materials. These bulky goods had very low value-to-weight ratios and thus were highly sensitive to the cost of transport, so much so that Manchester’s coal supply by canal was confined to collieries located within a 15-mile radius of the town. Stone was likewise mainly found locally, first from the sandstone beds in the immediate vicinity of the town and later from the quarries of the Pennines and the High Peak. These short hauls of heavy minerals have been emphasised in previous studies of British canals, in part because the sheer weight of coal meant that it was usually the foremost item in canal companies’ tonnage accounts and in part because of the importance of coal as an energy source for Britain’s Industrial Revolution.1 By the 1830s, indeed, reliable data show that the greater part of Manchester’s coal supply was brought by canal, the Bridgewater, the Ashton and the Manchester, Bolton and Bury canals being the main providers. Heavy raw materials, though less historically conspicuous than the cotton manufactures that made Manchester famous, were vital for the region’s industrial and urban growth: coal powered Manchester’s factories and heated the homes of its inhabitants; stone was essential for road building

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and paving, as well as for the construction industry; and timber was extensively used in construction and furnishing. The second phase of the Bridgewater Canal, complete by 1776, provided water transport between Manchester and the port of Liverpool, opening up an entirely different commodity trade to that of coal. The Manchester– Liverpool trade comprised a range of international tradeables, including incoming flows of American raw cotton, Irish, American and Baltic corn, and Canadian softwoods, and outgoing shipments of Manchester cotton textiles. These were mainly lightweight but high-value goods carried over long distances to urban markets and major ports. The junction between the Bridgewater Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal at Preston Brook, complete by 1779, also linked Manchester to an extensive network of canals in the midlands, south and south-west. Although trade on these transport routes developed relatively slowly in the late eighteenth century, from around 1800, and especially from 1815, they enjoyed a rapid expansion and successfully captured the bulk of the freight traffic from roads in the Manchester’s key trades to Liverpool, the west midlands and London. The completion of the ‘canal mania’ cuts by 1804 both strengthened transport provision to Manchester’s satellite cotton towns and established an important link to the river navigations of Yorkshire and from there to the important market and distribution centres of Leeds, Wakefield and Hull. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there were few significant local or national markets that could not be reached by canal or by a combination of canals and coastal shipping; Manchester’s canal network improved transport to local markets and promoted integration with wider national and international markets. England’s industrialisation should be understood as a regional process; industrial ingenuity was not distributed evenly throughout the country but clustered in a core of modernising regions in the midlands and north. 2 Regional economic specialisation was rooted in developments occurring both internally and externally to regions. Initially, poor upland soils and low wages in the west midlands and the north encouraged the development of ancillary industrial activities and, by the mid-eighteenth century, a number of identifiable manufacturing regions had built up distinctive regional mixes of products, markets and skills. The most successful of England’s industrialising regions were well supplied with local engineering skills, were active in foreign trade and were well endowed with reserves of cheap coal. Improvements in transport in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reinforced regional specialisation by reducing the costs incurred when industrial and agricultural regions traded with each other. Turnpikes had already developed a national system of transport by the late eighteenth century; canals and railways later developed their own extensive networks, which in

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their different ways strengthened connections between specialist manufacturing and farming regions. Most studies of canal trade adopt a regional approach. These accounts have established the important part played by canals in facilitating trade within Britain’s increasingly specialised industrial regions. This characterisation of canal trade is derived from the extensive use of canals to move heavy, unrefined raw materials from mines and quarries to towns and industrial premises. This pattern is certainly found in Manchester, especially in the distribution of coal and stone. This book, however, has argued that canals were also significant in developing Manchester’s inter-regional trades in the first half of the nineteenth century. Canals, together with adjoining river navigations, played the key role in connecting Manchester to its major ports of Hull (until 1840) and Liverpool (until 1850). Although these were relatively short hauls, these trade flows should not be characterised as intra-regional because they carried a broad range of national and international tradeables, based on the exchange of commodities between regions with contrasting factor endowments. From c.1810, Manchester’s canals formed part of a national network of waterways, which laid particularly strong foundations in western England and from there to London. In Manchester’s trades to these regions, canals succeeded in taking freight traffic from roads, although the roads’ greater speed and reliability allowed them to withstand canal competition within the Lancashire cotton region. It is thus necessary to avoid characterising the English transport system in the first half of the nineteenth century as one in which canals established strong intraregional connections while roads drove the integration the national market. Canals and roads both developed significant local and national transport links during the first Industrial Revolution. The reality of a canal trade that traded both within and between regions is manifested in its organisation. Carriage on canals was divided into two major groups, public and private carriers, with services operated by the canal companies themselves comprising a relatively minor aspect of the transport system. Public carriers operated scheduled services for transport users between stated destinations, mainly hauling high-value raw materials, manufactures and corn; by 1835, there were almost fifty canal carriers providing services to and from Manchester and its major markets in Liverpool, Hull, London and the midlands; by the 1820s, most public carriers on canals offered fly-boat services that established a greater regularity of despatch and a shortening of journey times. Private carriers, in contrast, transported heavy goods and foodstuffs belonging to their own firms from canalside industrial premises and were particularly active in the carriage of coal, stone and timber – the wharf trades – as well as in corn and flour. The specifics of the organisation of carriage thus remind us that canals performed two key transport

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functions: they moved coal and other heavy goods within regions and they carried lightweight and valuable goods between regions. Recent research on transport history has been informed by ‘T2M’ approaches, an inter-disciplinary framework that seeks to broaden the dimensions of transport history to encompass social and cultural aspects, as well as to encourage the study of transport not by particular modes but by the consideration of holistic systems.3 While much of this book is written from an economic history perspective, it has also developed insights from T2M approaches in terms of its focus on the intermodality of transport provision and the role played by transport infrastructure in shaping urban development. This book has thus emphasised that canals formed just one component of Manchester’s transport system from 1750 to 1850. Roads, coastal shipping and canals each formed important and partly inter-dependent components of Manchester’s transport system. Since the late 1970s, a substantial body of research has questioned the once-prevailing view that road transport was in an appalling state before the nineteenth century; we now know that investment in turnpike trusts and the emergence of a specialist road-carrier network had already produced a reliable and national system of transport before the extensive development of canals in the second half of the eighteenth century. The broad coverage of the road system within towns and regions and throughout Britain, moreover, was itself of great benefit to canals from the 1760s and railways from the 1820s. These latter ‘point-to-point’ transport systems used roads to receive and redistribute cargoes at transport nodes: canal basins and later railway stations thus became the prime sites for inter-modal transhipment. Recent studies have noted the complementary aspects of transport provision, but the crucial role played by roads in underpinning this process should be further emphasised. The links between road and canal transport were cemented by the carrier system. A professional system of road carriers had already emerged by c.1750 and when the canal network began to coalesce into a national network of waterways in the early nineteenth century, many road carriers began to shift some of their resources to the canals: Pickford & Co. is the best known example but this practice was adopted by a number of firms deserving of greater recognition in the history of Manchester transport, including Carver & Co., Welsh & Sons, Buckley & Co., Jackson & Sons and Barnby, Faulkner & Co. The advent of the railways from 1830 provided a new opportunity for carriers, notwithstanding their investments in canal stock. Many railways initially welcomed carriers on to their railways on payment of the standard toll, which included charges for locomotive power and the hire of carriages. Pickford & Co. and Carver & Co., both already leading carriers by land and canal, were particularly active in this respect but most Manchester carriers transferred a portion of their business to the railways in the 1830s and 1840s.

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By 1850, however, great changes had taken place to the carrying business at Manchester, as railway companies undertook their own carrying services, and previously independent carrying firms found themselves reduced to railway agents, prohibited from carrying by road or canal on railway routes, with their roles largely restricted to loading and unloading at railway stations and the distribution of goods by road in the locality of the stations. Furthermore, by the mid-nineteenth century, the railways, through leases of waterways or through outright purchase, controlled the bulk of canal mileage in the Manchester region and ensured that these waterways did not offer stern competition to railways serving the same routes. A final major type of transport intermodality associated with Manchester trade was formed between canals and coastal shipping. The trade between Manchester and Liverpool provides the best evidence of this symbiosis: the Bridgewater Canal and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation carried goods from Manchester only as far as the Mersey estuary, before using coastal flats to carry goods for the 16 miles to Liverpool docks, where the goods were directly unloaded on to international vessels. The links between canals and coastal shipping were strengthened by the shift to steamers in the coastal trade from the 1820s, encouraging the greater use of coastal shipping in the freight trades to Glasgow and London from Liverpool, and to London and Edinburgh from Goole and Hull. Canals and railways, in contrast, were not complementary transport modes: the two modes competed for traffic on Manchester’s key transport routes and rarely transhipped between each other. Canals should not simply be thought of as transport conduits; they also played an important part in Manchester’s urban development by extending the town’s waterfront. While Manchester’s three major rivers flowed at the periphery of the built-up area, canals brought the waterfront much closer to the heart of the town. Five extensive canal basins were established by the major river and canal navigation companies in Manchester and Salford. The basins were dominated by large-scale, multi-storey warehouses, the most valuable buildings of their type in Manchester before 1850, which handled the key commodities of Manchester’s expanding national and international trades. The warehouses featured internal shipping holes that enabled barges to unload directly into the building, an innovation in warehouse design pioneered by Manchester’s canal companies. Less visually obvious but certainly not economically less significant were the wharves laid out between the warehouses, providing the connection between water and land transport for coal, stone and timber, as well as other high bulk–low dispersion commodities, such as sand, bricks, iron and manure. Private canal branches further extended the Manchester waterfront, each becoming a focus for industrial and commercial activity and contributing to the dynamic and diverse economy of the self-proclaimed ‘metropolis of manufactures’.

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The new canal waterfront areas dominated a southern collar of Manchester that had remained largely undeveloped in the early 1790s, but which had become the city’s foremost factory area by 1850. As late as 1850, canals and rivers defined the spatial layout of factory industry. The first generation of Manchester cotton factories (1770–95) proliferated on the river banks to exploit the motive power of flowing water. From the mid-1790s, steam-powered cotton factories came to the fore, requiring water for two different purposes: to feed boilers and to condense steam. Canals and their private branches, as well as rivers, were by far the major sources of water for Manchester steam engines before 1850, and municipal water remained a minor source of factory supply until the second half of the nineteenth century. The age of steam in textiles was characterised by changing patterns of water use rather than the relocation of industry away from waterways. Canalside works also had the advantage over non-waterfront sites in accessing coal, which could be unloaded directly on to factory wharves, minimising the costs of transhipping this heavy raw material. River locations were also important as sites for cotton mills, as well as being the prime location for finishing works, corn/paper mills and tanneries, which required very large quantities of water. Canals and rivers thus played a key role in Manchester’s emergence as a leading factory sector in the first half of the nineteenth century. One should not overstate the pace of railway advance over canals in Manchester. In fact, the periodisation by which railways eclipsed canals in freight traffic contrasted significantly by route. In the trade between Manchester and Liverpool, undoubtedly the key interchange trade so far as the cotton industry is concerned, the waterways carried the bulk of the trade as measured by both volumes of goods carried and the tolls these flows generated until 1850, a transport pattern enshrined in a traffic-sharing agreement between canals and railways that reflected the prominent position established by the waterways. This was a relatively short and flat route, served by only a single waterway company by the 1840s. Elsewhere, the canals were much less resilient when faced with railway competition. For Manchester’s eastern canals the opening of the Manchester and Leeds Railway was the decisive turning point, the railway eclipsing the canals’ key trades within a matter of months in the most remunerative inter-regional trades in corn and manufactured goods. The canals’ lack of resistance in this trade reflected the disadvantages of water transport on an upland route: the first 32 miles of the water route to Hull contained no fewer than 92 locks. For other canals in Manchester, true competition was not allowed to materialise and, even before traffic by rail was established, railway companies purchased rival canals to suppress competition. By the 1850s, it was evident that the canal age had passed; it was left to

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railways to carry the significant increase in trade produced by mid- and late Victorian England, before they came themselves under threat from a revival of road transport after 1918. The Manchester Ship Canal, completed in 1894, showcased the advantages of water transport on the short, flat and heavily trafficked route between Manchester and Liverpool. The scale of this undertaking was, moreover, much better suited to meeting the transport demands of the late Victorian period than the pre-1804 canals. Recent economic history research has reopened the debate on the causes of the first Industrial Revolution, the most recent explanations focusing on either Britain’s unique structure of prices and wages, which created economic incentives for technological innovation not present outside Britain, or a distinctively developed innovative culture that allowed Britain to exploit fully pan-European increases in scientific knowledge.4 This study has shown that canals did not play a major role in the genesis of Manchester’s industrial revolution. The maturation of the canal network was not complete until the early nineteenth century and one could not disagree with Turnbull that ‘by conventional dating, the industrial revolution progressed substantially without canals’.5 This reason alone requires a dismissal of canals as an autonomous cause of the Industrial Revolution. However, arguments linking any mode of transport to the origins of the Industrial Revolution cannot be sustained. This study of Manchester reinforces Freeman’s view that the major transport developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are best interpreted as responses to eighteenth-century industrial and trading growth rather than independent stimuli to economic growth.6 Indeed, Manchester was one of Britain’s leading canal regions precisely because it had become one of Britain’s leading industrial regions. Canals were thus a lagged response to industrial growth. Nevertheless, when the canal system was fully operational in the first half of the nineteenth century, it did offer significant support to the development of Manchester’s textile economy. First, Manchester canals supplied the bulk of the coal required to power the steam engines of cotton factories and engineering works and performed this transport function much more cheaply than did roads. Second, until the 1840s, canals and navigable rivers were the leading mode of transport for Manchester’s key trades with Liverpool, London and Hull, towns that supplied the town’s requirements for raw cotton and food, as well as being the prime outlets for manufactured yarn and textiles. Finally, canals and river banks became the key sites for Manchester’s cotton factories and engineering works. In an era of weak municipal water supplies, canals provided the abundant supplies of cold and clean water necessary for the operation of factory steam engines. The canal age was a brief episode in Manchester’s history. It had barely begun by the time Manchester was embracing the Industrial Revolution and

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had passed its zenith when railways had formed a national system in 1850. But for a half a century, strong links were formed between canals and industry in the world’s first industrial city. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

See, for example, Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’. The clearest expression of this point is Berg and Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating’. Moms, ‘What kind of transport history?’; Divall and Revill, ‘Cultures of transport’. Allen, British industrial revolution; Mokyr, Enlightened economy. Turnbull, ‘Canals, coal, and regional growth’, p. 541. Freeman, ‘Introduction’.

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Index

Ackers, James 161 Ackers, Whitley & Co. (Bickershaw colliery, Leigh) 138 Adshead, Joseph, map publisher 201, 205, 223 n. 9 Aikin, John 239, 245 Aire and Calder Navigation 9, 29, 56, 93, 99, 101, 131 Airey, Thomas, flagstone dealer 139 Albert, W.A. 238 Albion Mills, Manchester 82 Aldcroft, Derek 87 Allen, Robert C. 235 Ancoats, Manchester 11, 53, 82, 138–9, 168–70, 172, 182, 189, 215, 221, 254, 268 cotton mills 202–3, 205, 209, 211–12 engineering works 205, 209 Anderton Carrying Co. public carriers 118 Antràs, P. and Voth, H.-J 13 Ardwick 95 202 cotton mills 204 Arkwright, Richard 6, 253 cotton mill, Manchester 214 Armitage & Ward, cotton manufacturers 221 Ashton Canal basin (Piccadilly) 10, 11, 163, 168–72, 188 coal trade 48, 52, 53, 62, 139, 145–6 railways 96–9, 101 stone trade 48, 49, 60, 139, 170 tolls 49–50 trade 29, 32–3, 47–50, 93 warehouses 169–72, 178, 185, 188 wharves 87, 172, 181–2, 185–6

Ashton, T. S. 239 Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire 5, 9, 83, 122, 219, 238, 245, 248 collieries 52 Aspin, Chris 6, 202 Atlas works, engineering 209 Audenshaw, Lancashire 72 Bache & Co., public carriers 127, 134, 135 Bagwell 77, 87, 239 Baines, Edward 53, 75 Bancks’s Plan of Manchester (1832) 153, 161 Barber & Worthington, road builders 180 Bardsley colliery, Oldham 139 Barker, T.C. 15 Barnby, Faulkner & Co., public carriers 120, 132, 136, 175, 177, 271 see also Faulkner, C.T. & Co. Barnsley Canal 95 Barnstable, Devon 77 Barton, John & Co., engineers 209 Baxendale, Joseph, carrier 108 n.71, 147 n.100 Bee Hive Mill, Ancoats 213 Bellhouse & Co. timber carriers 59, 129 Bellhouse, J. & W. (sawmill) 129, 215 Berg, Maxine, 11–14, 240 Beswick, Manchester 47 Bibbington & Co., stone merchants 141 Birley & Co., cotton manufacturers 204 Birmingham canal carriers 125–6 railways 83, 84, 92, 135 roads 74, 80 Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal 92, 118

Index Blackburn, Lancashire 5, 9, 80, 95, 130, 219, 243, 248, 253 Blisworth, Northamptonshire 126 Bogart, D. 103, 239 Bolling, E. & W., private carrier 138 Bolton, Lancashire coal trade 52 cotton mills 220 railways 50, 162 road transport 71, 95 textiles 5, 81, 248 trade with Manchester 81, 130–1 Bradford, Yorkshire 9, 59 Bradley, Thomas, engineer 166 Bradshaw, Capt. James (Bridgewater Trust) 159 Braunston, Northamptonshire 80 Brenner, Robert 231–2 Bridge, John, public carrier 131 Bridgewater Canal Act (1759) 245 carriers 113–18, 142 Castlefield basin 154–9, 174–5, 188, 189 coal trade 35–7, 39, 52, 53, 138, 245–6, 268–9 construction 1, 2, 8–9 corn trade 38, 54–5, 269 cotton trade 38, 55–6, 269 income 31, 32–3, 38 and Manchester 268–9 manufactured goods trade 58 and railways 88–9, 90, 92, 95, 98, 104 and road transport 58 timber trade 38, 59, 269 tonnage carried 29–30, 32, 34, 38, 61, 88 trade 28–9, 34–9, 88, 127–8 trade with Liverpool 35, 37–9, 40, 62, 128–30, 272 trade with Manchester 33–7, 269 trade with Midlands 126–7 trade with Potteries 37, 40, 62 Bridgewater, Francis Egerton, Third Duke of 8, 35, 113, 119, 156, 181–2, 245 Bridgewater Trustees, carriers 59, 89, 91, 98, 115–18, 123, 130, 132, 140 and railways 87, 89, 100 warehouses 159, 173, 174 Brindley, James 230

299 Bristol, Gloucestershire 9, 96, 125 Broadheath, Cheshire 36, 40, 175 Brockbank & Co., private carriers 141 Brownbill, Bromilow & Co., private carriers 138 Brownsfield basin (private) 182, 187 wharves 163, 182–3, 184 Brumhead, Derek and Wyke, Terry 3 Buckley & Co., public carriers 57, 79, 134, 216, 271 see also Buckley, Kershaw & Co. Buckley, Kershaw & Co., public carriers 132, 136, 176 see also Buckley & Co. Burnley, Lancashire 9, 83, 219 Bury, Lancashire 5, 9 quarries 60 railways 97 roads 71–2, 81, 186 Buxton, David 214–15, 220–1 Buxton, Derbyshire 71 Calder and Hebble Navigation 9, 29, 32, 53–7, 93–5, 131 Canals basins 83, 103, 123, 150–73, 187–9 272 canal branches (private) 10–11, 18, 163, 210, 212, 221 canals and industrial growth 18, 229–60, 272–4 canals purchased by railways 96–102 canal trade (composition) 28–62, 267–8 carriers (canal companies) 113–20 carriers (private) 137–41 carriers (public) 123–37 carrying trade 112–43, 271–2 chemicals 6–7 209–19 and coal 51–4, 244–6 and coastal shipping 69–70, 103–4 and engineering 6, 18, 208–9 and glass manufacturing 18, 209 historiography 2–4 industrial demand for canal water 200, 210–17 and industrial location 200–22, 254 273 and industrial revolution 1, 11–14, 247, 257–60

300 and Manchester development 7, 10, 148, 229–60 and national market 246–53 and paper manufacturing 210 and railways 83–102 and road transport 71–83 and textile factories 202–7 and textile finishing 207–8 transport intermodality 69–104, 269–72 and urban growth 7–8 10 warehouses 149–54, 174–79, 188 and waterfront development 148–90, 272–3 wharves 179–87 see also individual canals Carriers Canal Carriers Acts (1845, 1847) 113, 121 Canal Company carriers 54, 113–22, 142, 270 carriers’ charges 57, 76, 86, 94, 96, 179 organisation 112, 242, 271 private carriers 17, 112, 137–41, 174, 270 public carriers 17, 33, 82, 112, 123–37, 142, 153, 157, 167, 169, 170, 174, 175–6, 216, 270 and railways 71, 90–1, 134–7, 142–3 road carriers 55, 58, 74, 79, 86, 242, 251 270 Carver & Co., public carriers 134, 135, 137, 177, 271 see also Chaplin, Horne & Carver Casson, M. 87 Castlefield, Manchester canal basin 136, 154–9, 174–5, 181, 188, 267 carriers 157 warehouses 156–9 wharves 155–6 Caunce, S. 241 Chaplin & Horne, public carriers 136 Chaplin, Horne & Carver, public carriers 137 see also Chaplin & Horne and Carver & Co. Chapman, Stanley D. 15, 251 Chard, Somerset 58 Cheetham, Manchester 7, 202, 208

Index chemicals, manufacture 6, 200, 203, 209–10, 220 Chester 239 Chester and Birkenhead Railway Co. 118 Chorley, Lancashire 81, 83 Chorlton upon Medlock, Manchester 7–8, 202, 206, 208 Clapham, Sir John 12, 87 Clarke, G. and Jacks, D. 244 Clayton, Manchester 47 Clifton, colliery 49, 53 Clitheroe, Lancashire 83 coal and Ashton Canal 48, 122, 139, 245, 246 and Bridgewater Canal 35–7, 39, 114, 138, 245, 246 carried by railways 94–5 carried by road 82, 246 carriers 130, 137–9, 143, 180 coal trade 28, 51–4, 61, 82, 94, 137–9, 179–80, 254, 268–9 coalfields 8, 9, 35, 83, 245 and industrial development 255, 259, 268–9, 274 and location of industry 22, 148, 214–15, 217, 254 and Manchester Bolton and Bury Canal 50–1, 61, 122, 138, 245 and Rochdale Canal 37, 44–5, 47, 94, 139, 245, 267–8 savings by canal 256–7 transport costs 82, 227n.80, 256 wharves 155, 156, 162, 165, 167, 171, 180, 183–6, 187, 215, 273 coastal shipping 69–70, 102, 103 Cogswell, James, public carrier 173 see also Cogswell, Job Cogswell, Job, public carrier 121, 128, 129, 131 see also Cogswell, James Colne, Lancashire 83 complementarity, transport 4, 70, 103, 242 condensing water 224n.30 Cornbrook, Hulme 55 corn mills 210 cotton before industrial revolution 5 cotton goods to Liverpool 250–1

Index fixed capital 15 location of mills 202–7, 218, 219 Manchester, centre of industry 6, 14–15, 200, 218–21 mills in Manchester 188–9, 202–7, 217–22, 248–9 markets 248, 250–2 mechanization 6, 253–4 raw cotton supply to Manchester 5–6, 38, 40, 43, 55–6, 62, 156, 200, 257, 269 274 role in industrial revolution 12–14, 15 trade, cotton goods to Hull 45, 57–8, 131, 250, 251 trade, cotton goods to Liverpool 250, 251 transport of cotton (canals) 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 90, 94, 102, 215 transport of cotton (railways) 57, 85, 91, 94, 102–3 transport of cotton (roads) 75, 78–9, 81–2, 102 transport costs 241–3 water supply for mills 211–13 Coventry, Warwickshire 126 Crafts, N.F.R. 11–14, 234, 253–4 Crompton, Samuel 202, 254 Cropper, James, merchant 40 Crouzet, François 231 Crowley, Hincklin, Batty & Co., public carriers 128 Cuenca-Esteban, J. 13 Darch, Dickenson & Co., public carriers 127 Darcy Lever, Lancashire 53 Darwen, Lancashire 83 Dawson, Robert, quarryman 141 Davis, Ralph 250 Deane, Phyllis 12, 13, 14, 244 Dearne, Yorkshire 95 Dent, Abraham, stone merchant 180 De Vries, J. 232 Dickinson, John & Co., paper manufacturers 210 Doncaster, Yorkshire 71 Drinkwater, Peter, cotton spinner 253 Ducie, Lord 163, 169

301 Duckham, B. F. 16, 70, 244 Duckworth, George, attorney 183 Duke’s Warehouse, Castlefield 157, 193 n.41 Dukinfield, Cheshire 47, 83, 122, 139, 219 Dunkirk Coal Co. (Dukinfield) 139 Dutton, George & Co., private carrier 138 Dyos, H.J. 87 Eccles, Lancashire, 72, 83 Edinburgh 104, 272 Edwards, M.M. 251 Ellesmere Canal 92, 115, 118, 119, 126 Ellesmere Port 109 n.108, 118, 148 engineering 6, 90, 269 location of firms, 208–9, 219 Fairbairn, William & Co., engineers 209 Farnie, Douglas A. 200, 210, 220 Faulkner, C.T. & Co., public carriers 137 see also Barnby, Faulkner & Co. Faulkner, Samuel, mill owner 221 Feinstein, C. H. 13, 15, 233 Findlay, R. 235 Fisher, Jabez Maud 229 flagstones, trade 42, 60, 139, 141, 166, 171, 249 Fletcher, Ellis, private carrier 138 Fletcher, John (Ladyshore) private carrier 138 Flinn, Michael W. 245 Fogel, Robert W. 255–6 Fogg, private carrier 137 food supply, Manchester 54, 69, 79, 102, 128, 159, 249, 274 Freeman, Michael J. 15, 70, 75, 77, 78, 81, 239, 247, 248, 274 Gainsborough, Lincolnshire 54, 141 Galloway, W. & J., engineers 90, 209, 211, 226 n. 68 Gerhold, D. 80 Gibson, John, private carrier 139 Gibson, Keith 2 Gilbert & Burgess, public carriers 125 Gilbert, John 139 Glasgow, cotton trade 78, 95, 272 Glass works, Manchester 201, 203, 209, 213

302 Glossop, Derbyshire 5, 83 Goole, Yorkshire 57, 79, 93, 101, 104, 131, 148, 272 Gorton, Manchester 47 Gourvish, T. R. 15 Grand Junction Canal 8, 48, 80, 126 Grand Junction Railway 87, 91, 92, 118, 135 Griffiths, T. 241 Grocers’ Company 78, 128–9, 157, 173, 175, 178, 216 Grocer’s Warehouse, Castlefield 155, 157–8, 172 Guide Bridge, Lancashire 122 Hadfield, Charles and Biddle, Gordon 2 Halifax, Yorkshire 9, 123, 134 Halifax and Rochdale Merchants’ Company 123, 131, 132, 133, 167, 175, 176, 177, 178 handloom weaving 6, 80–1 Hanover Mill Co., cotton manufacturer 203 Hargreaves & Craven, private carriers 95 180 Hargreaves, James 6, 253 Hargreaves, John & Son, public carriers 95, 130, 135 Harley, C. K. 11–14 Harrington Timber Carrying Co. 59, 129, 140 Harrop, Jonah & Co., colliery owners 139 Hartwell, R.M. 231 Haslingden, Lancashire 83 Hassan, John 213–14 Hawke, G. R. 255–6 Head, Sir George 230 Heap, William, builder 166 Heaton Norris, Stockport 47 Henshall & Co., public carriers 125–6, 158 Herson, J. 1, 4, 29, 137, 239 Hewes, Thomas Cheek, engineer 166 Higginson & Co., public carriers 127 Holcombe, Lancashire 81 Holden, W. 200, 210, 219 Horrell, S. 232 Horrockses, cotton spinners 80–1 Horsfall, William, card manufacturer 82, 216 Houldsworth & Co., cotton spinners 203, 212

Index Hoyle, James, corn miller 141 Hoyle, Thomas & Sons, calico printers 208 Huddersfield and Manchester Railway Co. 96, 99 Huddersfield Canal 9, 29, 47–9 basin 170, 172, 178 carriers 122, 124, 132–3, 167 railways 91, 96–7, 99, 100 stoppages 57, 77 tolls, 33 tonnage 32 Hudson, Patricia 11–14, 240 Hull, Yorkshire 17, 18, 45, 57, 71, 77, 79, 80, 93, 94, 96, 102, 131, 250, 251, 252, 259, 269, 272, 273 Hulme canal basin 154–7, 159, 177, 181, 189 rateable value 202, 204 turnpike 72 Hulme Hall 155 Hulme Locks 50 Hunt, P. 241 Hyde, Cheshire 5, 9, 52, 72, 83, 122, 219, 245, 246 Ince Hall Coal Co. 138 industrial archaeology 3, 18, 149, 153, 171, 179 industrial location, determinants 210–17 industrial revolution causes 230–43 features 11–16 historiography 230–8, 274 transport in 1, 2, 4, 15, 236–43 Inikori, J.E. 235, 241 Irk, River 7, 204, 210 Jackman, W.T. 86, 88, 115, 116 Jackson, George, carrier 100 Jackson, Gordon 57, 79 Jackson, Samuel & Co., private carriers 140 Jackson, William & Sons, public carriers 132, 137, 168, 176, 271 Jackson’s Warehouse, Piccadilly 168 Jacob, M. 236 Johnson & Sons, public carriers 134 see also Johnson, John

Index Johnson, John, carriers 139 see also Johnson & Sons Johnson, William, surveyor 164, 183 Jones, William & Co., colliery owners 139 Kearsley, Lancashire 53, 138 Kenworthy & Co., public carriers 128, 130, 134, 135, 137, 174 Kenworthy’s Warehouse, Castlefield 158 Kidsgrove, Staffordshire 9, 48 King, S. and Timmins, G. 248 Knowles, Andrew, private carrier 137, 139 Lamb, Joseph 213 Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway 83, 95, 100, 136 Landless & Dickinson (Littleborough) 139, 140, 167 Langton, John 247 Lees, Jones & Co., (Werneth colliery, Oldham) 138 Leech, Daniel 163, 182 Leech, Thomas 183 Leeds, Yorkshire 9, 29, 59, 79, 83, 93, 101, 119, 252, 269 Leeds and Liverpool Canal 9, 29, 35, 56, 116, 130, 138, 245 Leigh, Lancashire 5, 8, 29, 35, 40, 83, 116, 138, 248 Lewis, M. J. 149 Leyland, Lancashire 81 Lillie, James, engineers 169 limestone 29, 47, 50, 60, 139, 169–70, 180–1, 249 lime works 209 Lindert and Williamson 12 Lingard, Thomas Ogden, river navigation agent 153, 178 Little Bolton Colliery Co. 122, 138 Littleborough, Lancashire 56, 121, 139, 168 Little Lever, Bolton 53 Liverpool canal carriers 78–9, 81, 115, 117, 118, 128–30, 131 canals, competitiveness 89–90, 91, 99, 101 corn trade 54–5

303 cotton trade 55–6, 62, 81, 91, 104 docks 103, 117, 120 Lancashire 8, 9, 37, 38–9, 40–42, 247, 248, 250, 272 manufactured goods trade 58 railways, impact 83–90 road carriers 58–9, 74, 76, 78 stone trade 62 timber trade 59–60 trade with Manchester 37, 38–9, 40–2, 43, 114, 121, 127 Liverpool and Bury Railway 90–1, 97 Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1, 56, 70, 78, 83, 85 and cotton 56, 215 freight 33, 87–9, 118 impact on canals 38, 88, 118, 123, 153 pilferage 90 receipts 90 Livesey, Thomas & Co., private carriers 139 Lloyd, George 156 Lloyd-Jones, Roger 149 Loch, George, canal trustee 36, 117 London 17, 18, 80, 102, 251, 259 canals to Manchester 9, 37, 48, 75, 76, 77, 80, 86, 102, 126–8, 238 carriers 126–7 coastal shipping 90, 135–6 corn market 54 railways to Manchester 59, 83, 85–6, 132–3 road transport 71, 74, 76, 79 London and North Western Railway 59, 83, 91, 95, 99, 100, 122, 136, 186 Longridge, Lancashire 81 Lymm, Cheshire 36 Lyth, P. 239 Macclesfield Canal 9 48 carriers 134 and railways 96, 98, 99, 122 Mallalieu, James 169, 171 Manchester canal basins 150–73 canal trade 28–62, 267–8 canals and industrial growth 18, 229–60, 272–4 carrying trade 112–43, 271–2

304 chemicals 6–7, 209–19 and engineering 6, 18, 208–9 and glass manufacturing 18, 209 and industrial revolution 1, 11–14 location of factories 200–22, 273 and paper manufacturing 210 population 7, 14, 229 railways 83–102 road transport 71–83 textile factories 202–7 textile finishing 207–8 transport intermodality 69–104, 269–72 urban growth 7–8, 10 visitors’ impressions 229 warehouses 174–79 waterfront development 148–90, 272–3 wharves 179–87 streets: Alport Lane 156 Atherton Street 154 Back China Lane 163 Brewer Street 163, 182 Castle Street 157 Charles Street 152, 153, 154 Chorlton Street 173, 189 Crown Street 173 Dale Street 164, 167 Dickinson Street 172 Dolefield 155 Ducie Street 164, 167, 171, 172, 177 Great Ancoats Street 168 Junction Street 170 Knott Mill 156, 157, 158 Leech Street 163, 164 Lees Street 163, 164, 167, 168, 177, 182 Liverpool Road 153 London Road 163 164 Lower Irwell Street 152 Marsden Street 172 Mather Street 170 Meadow Street 172 Miller Street 214 Oak Street 205 Oxford Street 11, 82, 172, 189, 203, 206, 209, 212, 215, 221 Port Street 183 Quay Street 150–1, 152, 154 Shooter’s Brow 163 Stanley Street 167, 168, 187

Index Swan Street 214 Trafford Street 173 Union Street 189 Water Street 150–2, 162, 172, 188 Manchester and Birmingham Railway 80, 83, 85, 87, 92, 118, 125 Manchester and Bolton Railway 84, 85, 87, 95 Manchester and Leeds Railway 43, 79, 93, 97 and canals 101, 104, 136, 168, 212, 273 warehouses 55, 179 Manchester and Liverpool Union Co., public carriers 128, 132, 167, 173, 175 Manchester and Salford Junction Canal 9, 50, 185 basin 154, 159, 162 Manchester and Salford Waterworks Co. 214, 259 Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal basin 160–3, 185, 187 carriers 119–20, 122, 130–1, 137–8 coal trade 51–2, 130–1, 268 and railways 91, 97, 100, 104 and road traffic 81 stone trade 60, 139, 141 tolls 51 trade 49–51, 60, 81 wharves 82, 162, 187 ‘Manchester Goods’ 5, 251 Manchester Grammar School 168 Manchester, Sheffield and Ashton-underLyne Railway 85, 87, 96, 99 Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway 83, 95, 100, 122, 136, 186 Manchester Ship Canal 2, 17, 19–20, 268, 274 Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Railway 83 markets international 235, 250, 252, 270, 272 inter-regional 2, 17, 62, 83, 249–50, 270 intra-regional 2, 16, 28, 69, 94, 249–50, 259, 270 Marple, Cheshire 9, 47, 48, 122, 141 Marsden, Hartley & Co., public carriers 128, 129, 132, 134, 136 see also Marsden, J. & L. warehouse 165, 166, 167, 175

Index Marsden, J. & L. 168, 176 see also Marsden, Hartley & Co. Mather, Frederick C. 2, 87, 117, 118 McAdam, John Loudon 72 McCloskey, D. 233, 236, 256 McConnel & Co., cotton spinners canal transport 56, 58, 66 n.66, 75, 78, 79, 82, 95, 216 coal supply 215 cotton supply 56, 216 location 203, 211 road transport 58, 77, 78, 82, 216 water supply 212 McKendrick, Neil 232–3 Medlock, river 7 industries 185, 189, 203, 207, 210, 212, 224 n.25 pollution of 213, 217 Merchants’ Warehouse, Castlefield 158–9 Merchants’ Warehouse, Piccadilly 167, 178 Mersey and Irwell Navigation basin 150–4 carriers 113, 118–21, 128, 129, 212 corn trade 42, 54–5, 62 cotton trade 42, 56, 58, 215 and railways 89–90, 97–8 receipts 33, 41 stone trade 60, 139, 181 timber trade 59, 62, 181 tonnage 39, 41–4 trade 39–43 warehouses 151–4, 175, 189 wharves 185, 187 see also Old Quay Company Middle Warehouse, Castlefield 159 Midland Counties Railway 136 mobility history 4, 271 see also transport history, approaches Mokyr, Joel 14, 233, 234, 236, 252 Molyneux, Webb & Co., glass manufacturers 209 Morgan, Kenneth 235–6 Mossley, Cheshire 219 Mottram, Derbyshire 5, 72 Murray, Adam & George, cotton spinners 189, 203, 211, 215 New Botany Quay 151, 153, 160

305 New Garratt print works 213 New Quay Co., public carriers 42, 56, 78, 119, 128–9, 153, 188, 216 North, Douglas 231 North Staffordshire Railway 97, 118 Nottingham 58, 79, 126, 252 O’ Brien, Patrick K. 232, 233, 241 Occleshaw, William, plumber 167, 168, 195 n.94 Ogden, Robert & Co., cotton manufacturers 203 Oldham, Lancashire 5, 71, 82, 83, 220, 246, 253 coal industry 52–3, 139, 169, 245 Oldknow, Samuel 141, 169, 170, 196 n.122 Old Quay Company 8, 40, 42, 55, 59, 89, 116, 119–20, 129, 142, 151–4, 159, 160, 162, 188 189 see also Mersey and Irwell Navigation Openshaw, Lancashire 47 Ordnance Survey, town plans 153, 170, 201, 205 Ormskirk, Lancashire 81 O’Rourke, K. 235 Orrell City Colliery Co. (Orrell) 138 Oxford Street Twist Co., cotton spinners 204 Owen, David 2 Paisley, Renfrewshire 95 paper mills 203, 210, 220 Patricroft, Lancashire 36 Pawson, Eric 238 Peak Forest Canal 29 48–9 Bugsworth basin 141 carriers 132, 134 limestone trade 50, 60, 141 Piccadilly basin 163, 169, 172 and railways 95, 96–7, 99 tolls 33, 50 Peel, William & Peel, engineers 209, 214 Peels, cotton manufacturers (Blackburn) 80, 243 Pendleton, Lancashire 49, 52, 82, 245 Pendleton Colliery Co. 138, 217 Percival, Yates & Co., glass manufacturers 209

Index

306 Philips, John 35 Philips, McNiven & Co. 212 Philips, Tate & Co. 182 Piccadilly, Manchester, canal basin 122, 136, 163–8, 203, 207, 209, 221 Pickford & Co., public carriers 17, 92, 112 London trade 126–8 and railways 95, 96, 134–7, 142–3, 172–3 warehouses 198 n 156 Picton, C. & J., public carriers 119, 131 Pilkington, Lancashire 72 Pomeranz, K. 235 Poole, Braithwaite 100, 250 Pooley, John, cotton spinner 205, 214 Porteous, J.D. 148, 190 Pratt, Edwin A. 116 Prescot, Lancashire 71, 248 Preston Brook, Cheshire 8, 29, 35, 36, 37, 114, 117, 125, 175, 269 Prestwich, Lancashire 53 railways advantages over canals 84–5 and canal carriers 134–43, 271–2 competition 32, 45, 70, 86–91, 117, 120, 273–4 complementarity 70, 103, 272 coal trade 53–4, 82, 246, 256 corn trade 55 cotton trade 56, 57, 58, 257 freight rates 86, 88 freight volumes 86–8 and industrial location 255 Manchester network 83–5 ownership of canals 95–102 pilferage 85 and road traffic 95 social savings 3, 255–7 timber trade 59 rateable values assessment 149–59, 201–2, 204 Reddish, Cheshire 47 river pollution 214, 217 road transport coal trade 51, 52–4, 61, 82, 245–6, 256 competition from canals 74–83, 90, 103, 142, 250–1, 259, 269

competition from railways 96, 272 complementarity 69–70, 74, 82–3, 103, 237–8, 271 cotton trade 55, 56, 58, 66 n.66, 81, 91, 95, 102, 216, 237, 248, 252, 257 Manchester network development 71–4 road carriers 71, 74, 79, 123, 126, 134, 247, 251, 271 road improvements 237–9 Roberts, Richard, engineer 209 Rochdale, Lancashire 5, 9, 71 83 coal trade 52, 53 Rochdale and Halifax Merchants Warehouse 131, 167 Rochdale Canal Act (1794) 211, 213 carriers 120–1, 123, 124, 131–2, 136, 139–41, 175–7, 178, 179 coal trade 37, 53, 137, 267, 268 complementarity 103 construction 9, 11, 29 corn trade 44–5, 54, 94, 141 cotton trade 56 industrial location 203–5, 209, 210, 215 manufactured goods trade 57, 94 Piccadilly basin 163–8, 173, 188–9, 190 railway competition 44–5, 47, 55, 93–4, 96–7, 99–102, 104 stone trade 45, 60, 139 timber trade, 59 tolls 43, 44, 46–7, 61 ,94 warehouses 11, 163–7, 166, 174–7 water supply for factories 211–13, 217 weather stoppages 77 wharves 180–2, 185–6, 190 Rock House Warehouse 150, 191 n.9 Rooth, John & Co., public carriers 132, 134, 139, 170–1 Rose, Mary B. 240 Rostow, W.W. 233, 255 Runcorn, Cheshire 8, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 69, 116, 117, 148, 156, 175, 181 St Helens, Lancashire 83, 248, 249 Salford, Lancashire canals 9, 122 canal basin 10, 51, 60, 151, 160–3

Index carriers 131, 137–8, 141 coal trade 52 quay 118–19 152 railways 84 roads 72–3 wharves 82 185 187 streets: Chapel Street 160 Oldfield Road 160–1 Ordsall Lane 84, 160, 162 Stanley Street 82 160 162 Salford Quay Co. 118–19, 152 Sandars, Joseph & Co., corn merchants 116, 141 Sattersfield & Cresswell, lime burners 167, 180 saw mills 186, 201, 203, 209, 215 Scola, Roger 54 Scowcroft, John & Co., private carriers 138 Selby, Yorkshire 93, 101 Severn Warehouse, Castlefield 155, 173 Sharp Brothers & Co., engineers 209 Shaw, Hugh & Co., cotton spinners 203 Sheffield, Yorkshire 74, 95, 119 silk industry 5, 85, 200, 205 Singleton, John 248 Smail, John 235, 241 smallware factories 6, 7, 200, 205, 218, 219 Smith, Thomas, public carrier 122 Snell, Robins & Snell, public carriers 128 social savings 3, 255–7 Soho Iron works, Ancoats 209, 215 Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire 9, 45, 47, 93–4, 123, 134, 167 Staffordshire Warehouse, Castlefield 158, 189, 192 n. 36 Stalybridge, Cheshire 5, 122, 219 Starkie, Mr 160–1 Stirling, William & Walter, cotton manufacturers 203 Stobart, Jon 241, 248 Stockport, Cheshire 5, 8, 9, 47, 57, 83, 100, 122, 219, 238 Stone Warehouse, Piccadilly 164 stone works 204, 209, 220 Stourport, Worcestershire 125, 148 Stretford, Lancashire 36, 40, 71, 155 Strutts, Belper 81

307 Sutcliffe, James & Co., private carriers 138, 139 Sutherland, First Duke of 159 Szostak, Rick 236–7, 238, 240, 241–2, 243, 247 Taylor, William Cooke 82, 216 Temin, Peter 12 textile finishing industry, location 207–8 Thomas, R.P. 233 Thompson, F.M.L. 96 Thompson, M’Kay & Co., public carriers 55, 131, 132, 136, 137, 175 Thornton, George, public carrier 132, 175 timber trade 17, 38, 40, 43, 59–60, 104, 129–30, 156, 180–1, 183–7, 215, 269 Timmins, Geoffrey 219 Todmorden, Yorkshire 8, 53, 59, 132, 141 Tomlinson, Victor 158 Tooke, Edward 163, 164 transport history, approaches 4, 271 transport and industrial revolution 236–60 Trent and Mersey Canal 8, 35, 37, 47–8, 80, 93, 114–15, 117–18, 125–6, 142, 172, 269 Turnbull, Gerard L. 1–2, 16, 28, 52, 74, 112, 126, 200, 238, 244–5, 258, 274 turnpikes development 71–3 and industrial revolution 238–9, 258, 269 Manchester turnpikes 71–4 transport costs 74–81 Union Warehouse, Manchester 165, 173 University of Manchester Archaeology Unit (UMAU) 149, 153, 164 Ure, Andrew 216 Veevers, James & John, public carriers 132, 133, 167, 175, 176 Veevers’ Warehouse, Piccadilly 167 Ville, Simon 15 Wade & Co., public carriers 132 Wakefield, Yorkshire 9, 54–5, 93, 119, 131, 141, 253, 269 Walmsley, George, public carrier 139, 140

308 Ward, J. R. 238 warehouses Ashton Canal 168–87 Bridgewater Canal 116, 154–9, 175, 178 business 174 canal 5, 58, 90, 149–50, 178, 189, 239, 272 Manchester Bolton and Bury Canal 160–3 Manchester and Irwell Navigation 119, 122, 150–4, 175 and railways 90, 109 n. 97, 136 rateable value 188–9 road transport 82, 83 Rochdale Canal 11, 123, 163–8, 175, 176–8 Warrington, Lancashire 8, 36, 42, 71, 83, 118, 150, 157, 248 Warwick and Birmingham Canal Co. 198 n.156 waterfront location, advantages 210–17, 221–2 Weaver Navigation 118 Welsh & Sons, public carriers 134, 271 wharves 18, 52, 82, 116, 150, 154, 179–87 189–90 coal wharves 53, 138, 143, 162–3, 167, 179–80, 186

Index private wharves 181 183–7 public wharves 179–81 stone wharves 170, 179–80 timber wharves 59, 179–80, 186 Wheatcroft & Sons, public carriers 134 Wheeler, James 214, 230 Whitehouse & Co., public carriers 128 Widnes, Lancashire 248, 249 Wigan, Lancashire 35, 36–7, 52, 61, 72, 83, 137, 143, 246, 249 Willan, T.S. 15 Williams, Michael 200, 210, 220 Wilmslow, Cheshire 71, 186 Wilson, Thomas, canal agent 99, 108 n.79 Wilson, R.G. 241 Winter, Gilbert, railway director 85 Wrigley, E. A. 234, 244 Wolverhampton, Staffordshire 9, 118, 127 Wood & Westhead, smallware mill 207 Worthington, Gilbert & Co., public carriers 92, 125, 158, 173 Worsley, Lancashire 9, 35, 36, 39, 51, 113, 175, 245 Worsley, Robert, private carrier 138 York and North Midland Railway 94 Yorkshire and Lancashire Railway 55, 186