April 2015 – Edition 121

This articles continues on from the article in the Jerrems Journal of July 2014, which concluded with a description of the Standedge Tunnel, on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal in Yorkshire.

The popularity of boats on canals reminds me of Ratty’s words in Kenneth Grahame’s famous 1908 children’s book “Wind In The Willows”:

“There is nothing-absolutely nothing-half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Of course, being a water rat, Ratty was an expert on the subject.

I will now describe some more of the interesting features of the British canals.

Aqueducts were used on some canals in hilly districts to carry canals across valleys. The building of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct pictured at the top of the article was started in 1795 and was completed in 1808. The aqueduct took ten years to design and build at a cost of £47,000 (possibly the equivalent of over five million dollars in today’s terms) and it is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain.

Built by William Jessop and the famous engineer Thomas Telford, it is 1,007 ft (307 m) long, 11 ft (3.4 m) wide and 5.25 ft (1.60 m) deep. Instead of having the usual brick or stone-lined canal it consists of a lighter cast iron trough towering 126 ft (38 m) above the river.

Thomas Telford FRS, FRSE (1757-1834) was a Scottish civil engineer, architect and stonemason, and a noted road, bridge and canal builder. After establishing himself as an engineer of road and canal projects in Shropshire, he designed numerous infrastructure projects in his native Scotland, as well as harbours and tunnels.

In addition, the Canal had two tunnels and a second aqueduct.

A graphic example is the Anderton Boat Lift, which is an incredible edifice. Perched on the banks of the River Weaver in Cheshire, north-west England, it is like some giant three-storey-high iron spider.

It was built by Edwin Clark in 1875 to lift cargo boats the 50 feet from the River Weaver to the Trent & Mersey Canal.

Like all great things, the concept is simple: two huge water tanks, each with watertight sealable doors carry boats up and down. The original counter-balanced system where water was transferred from one tank to the other was replaced in 1908 by electric operation, but the lift now works hydraulically again.

A Boat Lift would have had the advantage that it was much faster than the time taken to use the three or four traditional locks needed to lift a boat the same total height.

And now for something very modern and very expensive!

A major challenge was to link the Forth and Clyde Canal, which lay 35m (115ft) below the level of the Union Canal. Historically, the two canals had been joined at Falkirk by a flight of 11 locks that stepped down across a distance of 1.5km, but these were dismantled in 1933, breaking the link. The land occupied by the locks had been sold so the lock system (which in any case was far too slow) could not be reinstated.

What was required was a method of connecting these two canals by way of a boat lift. The Falkirk Wheel, the world’s first and only rotating boat lift, was the result.

Although they were quite common prior to the Industrial Revolution, their rate of construction increased significantly during the Industrial Revolution prior to the advent of the steam engine, providing a simple and cheap form of power.

It is necessary to distinguish between water wheels used to (a) lift water (b) provide power and (c) measure the amount of water supplied to a farm.

This photo shows water lifting wheels in Syria. This form of design, in a much smaller form, was used in early days on the Nile and other major rivers where river water was used for irrigation on the adjacent plains. Water lifting wheels were used to lift water from the rivers into supply channels. A distinguishing factor was the shape of the vanes on the wheels. For water-lifting wheels the vanes were scoop-shaped to hold water, whereas the wheels used to power machinery were equipped with vanes like paddles.

Another basic difference was that the lifting wheels were turned by humans or animals.

(a) overshot wheels where a water current landed on the top of the wheel (as shown in the above photo) and
(b) undershot wheels where water flowed under the wheel.
(c)

Overshot wheels (fairly common in United States and Australia, particularly for mining) had the advantage that they could be installed anywhere that a current of water could be brought in, for instance through a pipe or fluming carrying water from a nearby river or watercourse. Undershot wheels needed creeks or rivers with regular flows and were very common in Britain.

With water wheels, the rotating axles are connected to gear systems which distribute the power to the machines requiring the power.

It is not necessary to have a weir, but to have one ensures that a regulated supply of water is provided to the wheel and that the drop increases the velocity of the water.

In towns where a watercourse had been canalised factories were often built over the watercourse, with the water wheel being located under the factory. This meant that there were many more water wheels being used than met the eye.

The Romans built a fortified town at Lincoln (on the River Witham) upstream of Boston, and must have decided that it would be a good idea for trading purposes to extend the river in a westerly direction (by constructing a canal) to reach the River Trent, which was the fourth largest river in England and had a very large catchment area. This would have been preferable to widening the narrower downstream sections of the River Trent and provided a shorter route to the east coast. In effect the Romans completely bypassed the downstream section of the River Trent. This canal was later known as Fossdyke (or Foss Dyke) Canal.

A drawback of the canal, which joined the River Trent about ten miles downstream of Gainsborough where the Jerrems families lived, was that it was dug through sandy soil and silted up easily.

Relevance of the canal to the Jerrems families.
Two of Big Bill’s children (Ann and Elizabeth) had a connection with both Gainsborough and Boston. Ann (born in Gainsborough) married Boston-born William Gutteridge in Gainsborough and the couple then moved to Boston.

Similarly, a short time earlier Ann’s older sister Elizabeth had moved to Boston”.

This made me curious as to how they travelled the long distance (for those days) of 90 kilometres between the towns. The most obvious way would have been by road. However I located the Fossdyke Canal because I had read that people in Boston could travel to the Gainsborough area by using the canal network. Perhaps they used the canal.

Another person who may have used the canal was Big Bill. It seems very likely that Big Bill would have travelled to London to finalise arrangements for the issue of the tokens in 1811 and 1812, referred to most recently in the Journal of April 2013. The route to London via the canal and Boston would have had the advantage that it is shorter than the route following the River Trent all the way to the coast.

Conclusion:
Regardless of whether or not the Jerrems family used the canal system at some stage, I think you will agree that the construction and use of the canal system was an interesting episode in the history of England.