THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. I
The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century laid the foundation
of modern manufacturing England. With remarkable rapidity great
industries came into being, and new methods of making all kinds of
manufactured goods. And the first cause of this revolution was the
discovery of coal, or rather the discovery of what you could do with
coal. For coal was all at once in great demand to provide the power of
steam, and in 1769 James Watt, the discoverer of the power of steam,
showed that the steam engine could be used to drive machinery hitherto
worked by hand.
Coal was first found in Cheshire about the year 1750. A colliery was
opened at Denhall in Wirral, where coal is worked to this day. In East
Cheshire coal was found by an accident. A farmer near Poynton had to
fetch his water from a considerable distance, and asked his landlord,
Sir George Warren of Poynton Hall, to sink him a well on his land. While
the workmen were boring the well they came across a seam of fine coal
quite near to the surface. Many other collieries have since that time
been started in the same neighbourhood, and now coal is taken out of the
earth nearly all the way from Stockport to Macclesfield. There are pits
at Norbury, Middlewood, and Bakestonedale. The coal-field extends
northwards also, and all along the Tame valley there are pits, and
especially in the neighbourhood of Dukinfield, where some of the
workings reach a depth of over two thousand feet below the surface of
the land.
The earlier Cheshire canals were made as a result of the discovery of
coal. The Duke of Bridgwater, who owned rich coal-mines at Worsley near
Manchester, made very little profit out of them on account of the
expense of carrying the coal by carriage to the shipping ports. A clever
engineer named James Brindley was the first to suggest to him the
making of a canal by which barges might take the coal to the river
Irwell. This was the first canal made in England, and was finished in
the year 1761.
The Bridgwater Canal was afterwards extended and carried over the Irwell
by an aqueduct. It enters Cheshire at Stretford, and passing through
Altrincham and Lymm extends a distance of twenty-four miles to Runcorn,
where it descends by a series of locks to the tidal waters of the
Mersey.
[Illustration: AN OLD CANAL: MARPLE]
The canal turned out so successful that the manufacturers in the
Potteries of Staffordshire asked Brindley to make a canal across the
Cheshire plain to unite the rivers Trent and Mersey. This was the
beginning of the Grand Trunk Canal, which now winds through the heart of
England and connects the great industrial towns of Lancashire and
Cheshire with the metropolis.
At Harecastle the canal is carried under the hills that separate
Cheshire from Staffordshire by a tunnel nearly three thousand yards
long. At first the boatmen pushed their barges through the tunnel by
'legging' along the roof. This was such a laborious and troublesome way
that another engineer named Telford, the great road-maker, afterwards
built a second tunnel large enough for horses to tow the barges through
it.
The Ellesmere Canal connects the estuaries of the Dee and the Mersey,
and thus cuts off the Wirral peninsula from the rest of the county. When
this canal was being made, layers of fine sand and sea shells were
found, proving that at some not very remote period the estuaries of the
Mersey and the Dee were connected with one another.
In the east of Cheshire the Peak Forest and Macclesfield Canal enters
the county at Dukinfield. One portion goes southward to Macclesfield and
the other crosses the river Goyt at Marple by an aqueduct a hundred feet
above the river. The Shropshire Union Canal connects the Dee and the
Severn; and thus all the great rivers of the north midlands, the Mersey,
Dee, Severn, and Trent, are united with one another by this network of
Cheshire canals.
The canals proved a blessing not only to the coal owners and
manufacturers, but were also used by the people of the country villages
in order to travel from one part to another. Passenger barges called
'fly-boats' enabled the country women to take their butter and cheese to
the market towns.
James Brindley was a man of humble birth, and for several years worked
as a labourer on a farm, amusing himself in his spare moments with
making wooden models of machinery with a pocket-knife. He was so clever
that he was often called in by the mill-owners of Macclesfield and
Congleton to repair their machinery. When he was first employed by the
Duke of Bridgwater he was paid only half a crown a day. He was a very
practical man, and gained his knowledge not from books but from his own
experiments. When he was called to the House of Commons to explain his
scheme for carrying a canal over the Mersey, which many people laughed
at as absurd, he took with him a Cheshire cheese which he cut in halves
to represent the arches of the bridge, and made a complete model of his
proposed work which greatly amused his audience, and at the same time
proved that he was well able to overcome his difficulties.
The rivers also were dredged and made suitable for navigation wherever
possible. An artificial channel was made for the waters of the Dee which
had become choked with silt and sand, and small ships could once more be
towed as far as Chester. The Weaver was made navigable from Winsford to
the Mersey, so that salt, which was taken out of the earth in ever
increasing quantities, could be taken to Runcorn in barges at a much
smaller cost than on wagons.
Salt is necessary in every home for cooking and other household needs.
But still greater quantities are required for alkalis and other
chemicals, the making of which is the chief occupation of the workpeople
of Runcorn and Weston Point. Thousands of tons are also exported every
year to other countries where salt is scarce.
Salt has been worked in the towns on or near the Weaver from Roman days.
The earlier way was simply to mine it as we do coal now. Some of the
mines at Northwich cover many acres, and when lit up by electric
coloured lights are very beautiful. The roof of a mine is held up by
columns of salt which are left in position for that purpose, but they
frequently give way and the buildings above them are wrecked.
The coarser kinds of rock-salt are still taken out in lumps. You may
often see pieces in the Cheshire fields which farmers have put there for
cattle to lick. For salt contains health-giving properties, and
salt-mining is not injurious to health as coal-mining is. Brine baths
have been made at Nantwich for people suffering from certain diseases.
In the Middle Ages, wells or brine-pits were sunk and the water carried
in leather buckets to the salt-houses. Edward King, a Cheshire
historian, who in the seventeenth century wrote a book called _Vale
Royal_, says that 'at Northwich there was a salt spring on the bank of
the River Dane, from which the brine runneth on the ground in troughs of
wood until it comes to the "wich-houses", where they made salt. Some old
leaden salt-pans may still be seen at Northwich, pieces of charcoal
still sticking to them on the under side, showing that the brine had
been heated over wood fires.'
[Illustration: THE MILL TOWNS OF N.E. CHESHIRE]
Modern science has found better and easier ways of making salt. The
white salt which you use daily is still obtained by evaporation. The
brine is first pumped into a reservoir and taken by pipes to large
shallow salt-pans heated by furnaces beneath them. As the water
evaporates the crystals are formed and scraped from the sides and the
bottoms of the pans. You may see specimens of the different kinds of
salt in the Salt Museum at Northwich.