Dark Side of the Cut (eBook)

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ROUGH JUSTICE

Right from the start, canals were dark and dangerous places to be. Shovelling tons of mud and stones to dig out ‘the cut’ was tough work. And for hundreds of navvies, it meant long days of gruelling labour in all weathers, with the constant risk of accidents, serious injury or death.

They were rough men, with a fearsome reputation as hard workers and heavy drinkers, who terrorised the countryside with their fighting, cursing and stealing. When they went looking for trouble things could really get out of hand, and that was exactly what happened one spring afternoon in March 1795, when a riot broke out in the Leicestershire village of Kibworth.

A gang of labourers working on the Leicester & Northampton Union Canal decided to have some fun by attacking a detachment of guards from the Leicester Fencibles, trying to liberate two army deserters who were in their charge. Rioting and chaos quickly spread through the streets as the frightened villagers panicked. Around 3 p.m., the mayor summoned Captain Heyrick to bring in the troops and disperse the crowd. A horn sounded with the call to arms, and within ten minutes the Leicester troop of volunteer cavalry had assembled in the marketplace as the volunteer infantry marched into Kibworth with fixed bayonets.

Meanwhile, a few miles away on the Oadby turnpike road, soldiers were informed that a breakaway group had run off, taking the two deserters with them, and were now holed up in the Recruiting Sergeant public house at Newton Harcourt. The cavalry charged into the village to be met at the pub door by rioters, defending the premises with long pikes and refusing to surrender.

Mr Justice Burnaby, one of the local magistrates, read aloud the official words of the Riot Act and with that, cavalry officers dismounted, rushed inside the pub and frantically searched every room. But the deserters could not be found anywhere. Four navvies were arrested and sent off to Leicester under armed guard, while the cavalry galloped out of Newton Harcourt to scour the surrounding countryside, making their way up the line of the canal through Fleckney and Smeeton. By the time they arrived back in Kibworth at 7 p.m., all the rioters had disappeared.

Early next morning, the cavalry set out again to hunt down the ringleaders. They rode along the path of the canal under construction, scrutinising the working labourers to try and identify the culprits. Nine navvies were eventually dragged away under arrest, including Red Jack and Northamptonshire Tom, ‘two fellows notorious for being a terror to every country they have resided in’, according to the Northampton Mercury. The newspaper reported that on 2 April the offenders all appeared before the magistrate, who committed four men for trial but freed the others.

Navvies were a tough breed of men, surviving in the harshest of conditions. They could be reckless and violent but had their own code of conduct and refused to be pushed around, enforcing their own kind of rough justice when they felt they had been badly treated. Living on the edge of villages, in scattered makeshift camps of wooden shacks near the canal, they existed alongside respectable country folk in an uneasy truce.

Many villagers resented this alarming intrusion into their lives, but well-paid navvies brought much-needed cash into the parish, which shopkeepers and innkeepers were eager to get their hands on. The migrant workforce wore distinctive clothing of moleskin breeches, neckerchiefs and brightly coloured garments in yellow, red or blue. Unusual nicknames and their own private language, similar to cockney rhyming slang, set them apart from mainstream society with a formidable gang identity. This made them easy scapegoats when trouble erupted.

A few months later, in August 1795, canal boats carrying grain down from Liverpool were hijacked by townsfolk in Stafford, while at Barrow-upon-Soar in Leicestershire, the locals stopped a wagon loaded with corn. These were just some of the many riots sweeping Britain during the turbulent years around the turn of the century, when a series of bad harvests left thousands hungry. It was a time of unrest and desperate poverty, when angry protests about food shortages and high prices often ran out of control, ending in pitched battles. The authorities in Leicestershire and Derbyshire even cancelled annual races and parish feasts to prevent excessive drinking, which could set off riots.

There was no sympathy for rioters, and the Derby Mercury noted grimly, ‘Led on by the vicious and abandoned, the people have committed acts of outrage and violence which can only tend to increase the distresses of which they complain, and heap calamity on their heads.’

In the Barrow-upon-Soar protest, villagers drove the corn wagon away to the church and refused to surrender their load to magistrates. The Riot Act was read, and the Leicester troop of cavalry arrived, but the mob assailed them with brickbats and began firing shots from adjacent houses. The soldiers fired back, leaving three dead and eight dangerously wounded.

The village was right alongside the canal and navvies were blamed for the whole incident, as an indignant contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote:

They were weather-beaten and muscular, big, powerful, boisterous men who needed an outlet for enormous energies in their rare hours of freedom. Their amazing capacity for hard drinking soon created a notoriety that the newspapers enjoyed sharing with readers. The rowdy Kibworth navvies made news again when the Chester Courant reported:

Other law-breakers did not escape punishment so easily, however, such as Joseph Hunt, a canal labourer known as Wild Nathan, who was found guilty at the court sessions in Boston, Lincolnshire, of stealing a silver pint mug from the landlord of The Plough public house and sentenced to seven years’ transportation overseas.

Alcohol was usually the cause of any trouble, as canal companies knew only too well. In Scotland, the Caledonian Canal Committee did their best to address the problem by keeping a herd of cows and setting up a brewery at Corpach near Fort William, when work began on site, to try and persuade their navvies to drink fresh milk or beer instead of whisky.

Another foolhardy case of binge-drinking reached the newspapers in April 1793, when the Leeds Intelligencer noted, ‘a dreadful instance of the effects of excessive drinking’, discovered one Sunday morning at a public house in Tipton near Birmingham. Two canal labourers had gone to the pub on Saturday night, got drunk and asked the landlord if they could stay the night. But instead of going to sleep, they sneaked down to the cellar when the house was quiet, drank a great quantity of spirits and took more supplies upstairs to the kitchen. Next morning, the pair were found ‘in a state of the strongest stupefaction’ and a surgeon was sent for, but despite trying bleeding and other means of recovery, ‘both of them soon after expired’.

Despite all the problems caused by a volatile workforce, nothing could stop the progress of a massive national construction plan to create a waterway network to carry raw materials and goods for the new industrial centres, linking them to major ports via the River Thames, River Severn, the Trent and the River Mersey. In a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine of September 1795, signed ‘A Friend to the Improvement of his Country’, the proprietor of a new canal being cut from Walsall said that during the past thirty years in Staffordshire, 200 miles of canal had been completed. It was now a busy route for boats transporting coal and limestone, adding £100,000 per annum to the county’s income.

It was the same all over Britain. Canals were spreading inexorably across the countryside, with mile after mile of land being dug out by the navvies. As one commentator explained, ‘Inland navigation, to a manufacturing country, is the very heart’s blood and soul of commerce.’ Shorter routes cut the price of goods, but they had to be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible. What really mattered was money.

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A dispute over pay brought mayhem to a Devon village, some years later, when navvies went on the rampage at Sampford Peverell, near Tiverton, where some very strange and spooky things had been happening for months in the house of shopkeeper John Chave. The haunted house had previously been used by smugglers. At night, there were loud thumps and crashes, footsteps pacing the floor and bed-hangings agitated so violently that the brass curtain-rings rattled.

The 18-year-old domestic servant, Sally Case, was slapped round the face by an invisible hand as she...