_The Transition from the Horse to the Vehicle: The Distinctive Mark
of the Later Seventeenth Century: The Turnpike System and the Making
of the Modern English Road: The Underlying Idea of the Turnpike and
its Effects for Good and Ill: Its Decline and the First Emergence of
the General National System in 1810: Thomas Telford and His Work:
The Movement Connected with the Name of Macadam: The Coming of the
Locomotive and its Results on Canals and Roads._
i
The next great change came with the change in local government to
which I have alluded. It gave us the first Acts of Parliament, taking
the place of the old customary upkeep of the roads, but acting, oddly
enough, at a period during which the road was declining everywhere.
Even the civil wars did little to amend what had become a badly decayed
scheme of communication.
One of the reasons for this was that the great arm of the civil wars
was the cavalry, and cavalry is not tied to roads as infantry is.
Another and better reason was the comparatively small numbers engaged.
The civil wars loom large in our political history because they marked
the destruction of the monarchy and the beginning of aristocratic
government, but in military history they are no very great affair: a
sort of local epilogue to the Thirty Years’ War and the great religious
struggle upon the Continent.
What _did_ make a difference was the sudden increase of wheeled traffic
with the end of the seventeenth century.
There has been a great deal of exaggeration in this matter. Sundry
historians have written as though wheeled traffic were unknown until
very modern times. That, of course, is nonsense. But the distinctive
mark of the later seventeenth century and early eighteenth was the
gradual substitution of ordinary passenger traffic by wheel instead of
on horseback. The public vehicle comes in much at the same time as the
private vehicle, developed by the new great landlord class for their
convenience in their country rounds. As has been the case with the
internal combustion engine in our own time, the instrument preceded
the change in the road. As wheeled traffic for passengers becomes more
common you get increasing complaints on the condition of the roads
and increasing motive for improving them, and out of that grows the
_turnpike system_, which, with its later development, has carried us on
to the present day.
[Illustration: TOLL HOUSE ON THE BATH ROAD]
ii
THE TURNPIKE SYSTEM, by a process which originated in small beginnings
and ended with a revolution in general communications, made the modern
English Road.
It sprang from that character in the economic society of Britain
(closely connected with the new aristocratic government of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) whereby, in the destruction of
the monarchy, individual action became supreme.
The same force which had forbidden great national roads to rise, to
wit, the absence of a central all-powerful authority (such as was the
French monarchy just over the Channel, with its great roads planned
and constructed throughout the whole realm on one model)--which had
maintained local diversity and local usage and kept back the proper
development of the road--made for a change which should be due to
private enterprise.
We all know of what value this individualist and aristocratic economic
system was to the expansion of English trade overseas, and how it is
at the foundation of what is to-day called “the Empire.” In domestic
affairs it meant, of course, the sacrifice of the interests of the
community to a comparatively small wealthy class, but that did not
prevent this wealthy class from acting very efficiently under the
opportunity for gain within its own sphere. The mass of Englishmen
became, and have remained, impoverished, but the total wealth of the
country and its population have vastly increased.
The idea of the turnpike was to give a small body of capitalists the
right to exploit certain sections of road. They would improve the
surface and broaden the gauge where necessary, etc., but they would
put up gates where they could charge for the passage of all and sundry
and thus earn the interest upon their money. They had also powers to
borrow. They had certain powers for using the public rates, etc., and
in general, through this system, the roads of the country were more and
more given over to what we call to-day capitalist exploitation: for
although very often the sections of road thus exploited were short they
formed an interruption to general travel.
Popular resentment against such an innovation was, of course, bitter,
especially when it extended to large areas. There were periods of riot
in which the toll-gates were destroyed, and there was something like
a little civil war in the matter in South Wales, but the interests of
the wealthier class were supreme, the populace was suppressed, and the
system continued. It also vastly extended.
While it had the social disadvantages just mentioned, it had the
economic advantage of creating bit by bit longer and longer sections
of really good road up and down the country. To the turnpike system we
owe that development of the English roads which made English coaching
and gave us, in the generation before and during the Napoleonic wars,
on the whole, the best system of local communications in Europe, though
we still grievously lacked _continuous_ national communications between
distant centres.
iii
The date to which must be referred the great change in this
respect--the date from which we must count the growth of general
national communications continuous throughout the island--is the year
1810. The turnpike system did indeed die slowly and only much later.
It lingered on to well within living memory, and those who are curious
to watch the rise and decay of institutions may even argue that some
relics of it remain among us still. But in practice 1810 is the date of
the first experimental change which was ultimately to produce the road
system of to-day.
If we consider the use and character of the Road, its texture and
appearance, its effect upon the landscape, its connection with society
as distinct from the legislation connected with it, 1810 is much
more of a pivotal date than such dates as 1555 or 1822, which mark
the political changes in the statutory powers of dealing with roads.
Already stage coaches driven from the box, and every year increasing
the rate of travel, had been upon the road for a generation--for
twenty-six years; and already great lengths of turnpike trust roads
had come to a sufficient excellence of surface to permit travel at an
average rate over those branches of ten miles an hour. But, as I have
said, there was not as yet _one continuous piece of road designed to
connect two important termini, of equal value throughout, and ordered
in all its length towards that one end of making equable and rapid
transit possible between the two extremities_. That is the point. The
thing had not existed in this island (save in the “four Regal Ways”)
since the breakdown of the Roman central government in the fifth
century.
What happened in 1810, and what makes it such a memorable date, is
the appointment, under the pressure of the Postmaster-General, of a
stonemason who had risen to the practice of road engineering--Thomas
Telford--to the overlooking of the Holyhead Road.
The initiative came from the Post Office Department: the administrative
and engineering genius came from Telford. Incidentally, we should
remark, as one of the innumerable examples of unforeseen and
exceedingly important side developments in history, the fact that this
great revolution in British roads ultimately derived from Pitt’s Act
of Union with Ireland, which was already nine years old. It was the
necessity of communication between London and Holyhead, and especially
of postal communication, which did the business.
Telford had been in the employment for some years past of the Highland
Roads Commission. He had therefore proved his capacity, and from it he
was appointed to a Government position in the re-establishment of the
Holyhead Road after the affair had been examined by a Parliamentary
Committee in this year (1810). It was not only Telford’s skill, it
was still more his energy and intense application to detail which
wrought the change. His nominal masters were ten Commissioners and
three Ministers at their head; his real chief was Parnell, later
Lord Congleton. But it was Telford, by his ceaseless travelling and
investigation and overlooking of everything, who pushed the thing
through.
The whole distance to be reorganized was one of 194 miles. Of this
the larger part, 109 miles, fell under seventeen English Trusts; the
remaining 85 miles were under six Welsh Trusts, the latter with far
less local traffic to provide them with income, and, it would seem,
also of less general efficiency.
Telford’s task may be appreciated when we remember that the new policy
gave him no direct statutory power to override trusts. Each one had to
be argued with, bargained with, and persuaded. This at least was true
of the English Trusts and the six Welsh Trusts. The Commissioners, or
rather Telford and Parnell, despaired. The trusts controlled so very
much the larger part of the trajectory that it was necessary in some
way to dispose of them.
More than seven years passed before this could be done. But Parnell
succeeded in persuading them, by industrious attendance before various
meetings, to accept an Act of Parliament which cast them all into
one body of fifteen, and they were, by statute, compelled to employ
a professional civil engineer, who was, of course, Telford. The 85
remaining miles were taken over, scientifically divided into sections
under assistant surveyors and foremen below them, and by 1830, after
the labour of twenty years, the whole thing was done. A suspension
bridge had been thrown over the Menai Straits, Holyhead Harbour had
been improved. These, with the reconstruction of the road, had drawn
from Parliament grants of three-quarters of a million. From that moment
there existed at least one complete road in Britain, uniting two
definite termini and everywhere making possible the rapid travel at the
time. The tolls were, of course, maintained. Their cost was increased
by one-half. The anomalies, complexities, and corruptions involved in
the system were no more done away with on the Holyhead Road than on any
other, except in so far as a closer supervision helped to alleviate
things and in so far as amalgamation of trusts also helped. But, at any
rate, there was at least one continuous and excellent road from the
capital to a distant port, and we have the date 1830 for the completion
of the great task which was begun in 1810.
iv
Contemporary with this first great complete model of a road in England
went the movement connected with the name of Macadam. It was far less
of a revolution than has since been represented. The Continent had
made experiments similar to those of Macadam long before him, and what
he effected over here was no more than an improvement, for it was not
wholly novel.
The real point of Macadam in our road history is his intense devotion
to his task. He was one of those men who, having seen clearly a
principle which others have also seen, and which, indeed, should
be obvious, so emphasizes it and represents it that he brings it
into practice where other men would have abandoned it. The obvious
principle which Macadam grasped and reiterated to weariness was the
principle that perpetual legislation and experiment in the type of
vehicle best suited to a road was of less importance than the surface
and weight-carrying capacity of the Road. Get the best road you
can first, and after that discuss the traffic along it. In certain
technical details posterity has criticized it--in its insufficient
allowance of foundation, for instance; in its postulate that a
well-drained natural surface was sufficient to bear anything in the
way of road traction. Such criticism can only be conducted by experts,
but it is certainly true that Macadam transformed the surface of the
English Road, not perhaps by any special or novel conception of his own
either in the material or in the sizes of that material, but rather in
the unique insistence with which he carried on his whole task.
Just as the Post Office had been the Government department for using
Telford, so the Board of Works was the Government department backing
Macadam.
These two men between them, and these two departments between them, had
remade the English Road, and the system was fairly launched towards
such a change as would perhaps have given us a completely transformed
road system, the value of which we should have appreciated when the
new traffic of the internal combustion engine presented us with the
problems of the present day.
For instance, Telford himself had suggested--and there was nearly
achieved--a reformed stretch of the Great North Road between
Peterborough and York on a straight line, avoiding the windings of
the old trace, and twenty miles shorter: worthy to rank in every way
with the great roads of the Continent. This, had it been realized,
might well have proved only the first of a great number of similar
constructions, until we should have had all the great centres of
England united in the same fashion and a habit of broad, straight,
and excellent roads established. Unfortunately, a great historical
accident intervened to sidetrack the whole business. It was an example
of the way in which the advantages of spontaneity and inventiveness,
making normally for the benefit of the community as a whole, will, if
there is no central direction, do incidental hurt which has later to
be repaired, if at all, at great expense of energy. The reason we have
to-day the innumerable narrow winding roads of England, the lack of any
general system, the absence of any system of good roads from London to
the ports (to this day half the exits from London are blocked by absurd
“bottle necks,” the most notorious of which, of course, is that on the
West road, which is now at last being remedied), is that the English
genius produced the locomotive.
v
Stephenson’s great revolution was begun in 1829. The great Holyhead
Road was completed in 1830. The coincidence of dates is significant.
England developed immediately an immense system of railways. Not only
was she twenty years ahead of the rest of the world in the business,
but she alone, for a long time, could produce railways. The railways
on the Continent had to be built often by English engineers and always
upon an English model. The transformation which this effected in the
national life was so rapid that it warped judgment. Men began to talk
as though the road would fall out of use. It was the same sort of
exaggeration as led people about ten years ago to tell us that shortly
horses would no longer be seen in the streets of London or even on the
country roads.
The introduction of the railway had two deplorable effects upon the
economic life of England, each of which was grave, and one of which we
must, if we can, immediately remedy on peril of decline. Neither of
them can be remedied save at a new expense of energy: (1) It killed the
canals, (2) It killed all the schemes for widening, straightening, and
rebuilding the national road system; while upon the Continent, and
especially in France, the great broad, straight roads of the eighteenth
century formed the model continuously applied, so that the most recent
examples to-day are in the same tradition as those of two hundred years
ago and yet amply fulfil their function. Here the whole story of our
roads from the middle and the end of the nineteenth century and on to
the beginning of this century is the story of improving the surface
while keeping to the old winding and narrowness. Here and there we
have had extensions of space which create really new roads in the
neighbourhood of towns, especially as exits from towns, but nowhere
as yet have we a complete scheme for the remodelling of a road in the
fashion whereby, a century ago, the great Holyhead Road was remodelled.