On leaving Leeds there is ample choice of routes. It is equally easy to make
for the lake districts of Cumberland and Westmoreland, or to proceed to York,
and on by Newcastle to Scotland, or to take the road to the east coast, and
compare Hull with Liverpool--a comparison which will not be attended with any
advantage to the municipal authorities of Hull.
The aldermen of Hull are of the ancient kind--"slow," in the most emphatic
sense of the term. For proof,--we have only need to examine their docks,
piers, and landing-places; the last of which are being improved, very much
against the will of the authorities, by a Lincolnshire railway company.
From Hull there is a very convenient and swift railway road open to London
through Lincolnshire, which, branching in several directions, renders easy a
visit either to the Wolds, where gorse-covered moors have been turned, within
the last century, into famous turnip-land, farmed by the finest tenantry in
the world; or to the Fens, where the science of engineers learned in
drainage, greatly aided by the pumping steam-engine, has reclaimed a whole
county from eels and wild ducks.
Lincolnshire is not a picturesque county; both the wet half and the dry half,
both the Fen district and the Wold district, are treeless; and the Wolds are
only a line of molehills, of great utility, but no special beauty. But it is
the greatest producing county in England, and the produce, purely
agricultural, is the result of the industry and intellect of the men who till
the soil. In Devonshire and Somersetshire we are charmed by the scenery, and
amazed by the rich fertility of the soil, while we are amazed by the
stolidity of the farmers and their labourers--nay, sometimes of the
landlords--whose two ideas are comprised in doing what their forefathers did,
and in hating every innovation. There fences, guano, pair-horse ploughs,
threshing machines, and steam-engines, are almost as much disliked as cheap
bread and Manchester politics. But on the Wolds of Lincolnshire a race of
agriculturists are to be found who do not need to be coddled and coaxed into
experiments and improvements by the dinners and discourses of dilettanti
peers; but who unite the quick intelligence of the manufacturer with the
hearty hospitality for which the English used to be famous. Among the
Lincolnshire farmers rural life is to be seen in its most agreeable aspect.
The labourers are as superior to the southern peasantry as their employers to
the southern tenantry. Books, newspapers, and music may be found in the
farm-houses, as well as old ale and sound port wine. At Aylsby, six miles
from Great Grimsby, Mr. William Torr has a fine herd of short horns and a
flock of pure Leicester sheep, well worth a visit. The celebrated Wold
farmers are about ten miles distant. Any one of them is worth six Baden
barons.
After crossing from Hull, if a visit to these Wold Farms be intended, Grimsby
is the best resting-place, a miserable town of great antiquity, which, after
slumbering, or rather mouldering, for centuries on the profits of
Parliamentary privileges and a small coasting trade, has been touched by the
steam-enchanter's wand, and presented with docks, warehouses, railways, and
the tools of commerce. These, aided by its happy situation, will soon render
it a great steam-port, and obliterate, it is to be hoped, the remains of the
squalid borough, which traces back its foundation to the times of Saxon sea-
kings. We must record, for the credit of Great Grimsby, that it evinced its
improved vitality by subscribing a larger sum to the Exhibition of Industry
than many towns of ten times its population and more than ten times its
wealth.
The execution of the railway and dock works, which will render Great Grimsby
even more important than Birkenhead, has been mainly due to the exertions of
the greatest landowner in the county, the Earl of Yarborough, who has wisely
comprehended the value of a close connexion between a purely agricultural and
manufacturing district.
His patriotic views have been ably seconded by Mr. John Fowler, the engineer
of the Manchester and Lincolnshire Railways, and Mr. James J. M. Rendel, the
engineer of these docks as well as of those at Birkenhead.
The Grimsby docks occupy thirty-seven acres, cut off from the sea. The work
was courageously undertaken, in the midst of the depression which followed
the railway panic, by Messrs. Thomas, Hutchins, & Co., contractors, and has
been carried through in an admirable manner, in the face of every kind of
difficulty, without an hour's delay. They will open in March next. The
first stone was laid by Prince Albert in May 1849, when he electrified the
audience at dinner by one of those bursts of eloquence with which the events
of the Great Exhibition have made us familiar. It was on the occasion of his
ride to Brocklesby that Lord Yarborough's tenantry rode out to meet the
Prince, and exhibited the finest farmers' cavalcade for men and horses in
England.
Lord Yarborough has done for Lincolnshire what the Duke of Bridgwater did for
Lancashire; and, like the Duke, he has been fortunate in having for
engineering advisers gentlemen capable of appreciating the national
importance of the task they undertook. It is not a mere dock or railway that
Messrs. Fowler and Rendel have laid out--it is the foundation of a maritime
colony, destined not only to attract, but to develop new sources of wealth
for Lincolnshire and for England, as any one may see who consults a map, and
observes the relative situation of Great Grimsby, the Baltic ports, and the
manufacturing districts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire.
For the sake of the future it may be well worth while to visit these great
works. It may be a pleasant recollection for the man who, in some ten or
twenty years, beholds the docks crowded with steamers and coasters, and the
railway busy in conveying seaborne cargoes, to recall the fact that he saw
the infancy, if not the birth, of that teeming trade; for it is not to every
man that it is given to behold the commencement of such a future as seems
promised to gloomy, swampy Great Grimsby.
At Great Grimsby we are in a position to take a large choice of routes. We
may go back to London by Louth, famous for its church, spire, and comical
coat of arms; {209} by Boston and Peterborough; or take our way through the
ancient city of Lincoln to Nottingham and the Midland Counties, where the
famous forest of Robin Hood and the Dukeries invite us to study woodland
scenery and light-land farming; but on this occasion we shall make our way to
Sheffield, over a line which calls for no especial remark--the most noticeable
station being East Retford, for the franchise of which Birmingham long and
vainly strove. What delay might have taken place in our political changes if
the M.P.'s of East Retford had been transferred to Birmingham in 1826, it is
curious to consider.