Despite a lowly upbring in rural Derbyshire, James Brindley became known as ‘the Father of English Canals’ as Roly Smith recounts in the latest of his series on great Derbyshire characters
‘He has chained seas together. His ships do visibly float over valleys, and invisibly through the heart of mountains; the Mersey and the Thames, the Humber and the Severn, have shaken hands.’
John Ruskin, the distinguished Victorian writer, philosopher and polymath, was describing the life of Derbyshire-born James Brindley, who is widely known as ‘the Father of the English Canal System.’
Despite being virtually illiterate, Brindley (1716-1772) was one of the most notable English civil engineers of the 18th century.
He built 365 miles of canals – one for every day of the year – in addition to many watermills and other machinery, during his short, 56-year lifetime.
Brindley was born in the tiny hamlet of Tunstead, near Wormhill, to a prosperous family of yeoman farmers and craftsmen in the heart of the rural Peak District.
Showing little aptitude for reading and writing, he received little formal education, being largely taught at home by his mother.
Encouraged by his mother, at the age of 17 he was apprenticed to a millwright in Sutton, near Macclesfield, where he soon showed exceptional skill and inventiveness.
Having completed his apprenticeship, he set up business for himself as a wheelwright in Leek. In 1750 he expanded his business by renting a millwright’s shop in Burslem from the pottery family, the Wedgwoods, who later became his lifelong acquaintances.
Brindley soon established a reputation for ingenuity and skill at repairing different kinds of machinery.
In 1752 he designed and built a water mill at Leek (now the Brindley Water Mill Museum) and an engine for draining a coal mine at Clifton in Lancashire.
Three years later, he built a spinning machine for a silk mill at Congleton. He married 19-year-old Anne Henshall in 1765 and the couple had two daughters, Anne and Susannah.
Brindley’s growing reputation as a civil engineer soon brought him to the attention of the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who was looking for a way to improve the transport of coal from his coal mines at Worsley to the burgeoning industrial city of Manchester.
In 1759 the Duke commissioned Brindley as the consulting engineer to the construction of the 39-mile Bridgewater Canal, which opened in 1761.
READ MORE: A video tour exploring the history of the Bridgewater Canal
The canal, which ran between Runcorn and Leigh, was a major engineering achievement, and is often regarded as the first British canal of the modern era.
The most impressive feature was the Barton Aqueduct, which carried the canal at a height of 39 feet over the River Irwell.
READ MORE: The Manchester Ship Canal celebrates its 120th anniversary
Brindley’s canal-building technique minimised the amount of earthmoving by developing the principle of contouring. He used routes following the contours of the land which avoided embankments, and tunnels rather than cuttings. This meant that his canals were often much longer than a more direct approach might have produced.
But perhaps his greatest contribution to canal engineering was his technique of puddling clay to produce a watertight lining for canals. Clay puddling was used extensively in UK canal construction after his death.
Brindley’s reputation grew rapidly, and he was soon commissioned to construct more canals, including the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the Coventry Canal, the Oxford Canal and numerous others.
He also extended the Bridgewater Canal to Runcorn, connecting it to his next major work, the Trent and Mersey Canal.
At the time, Brindley had never built a lock and he initially built an experimental lock in the grounds of his home at Turnhurst Hall, near Stoke-on-Trent. This determined the narrow canal locks which were to characterise most of the canals which were built in the Midlands.
These were for an elongated version of the boats designed for the underground system at Worsley, the so-called ‘starvationers’, which were subsequently became known as narrowboats.
But Brindley’s Great Idea was to try to link the four great rivers of England: the Mersey, Trent, Severn and Thames – the so-called ‘Grand Cross’ or ‘Grand Trunk’ canal scheme.
The Trent and Mersey Canal was the first part of this ambitious network, of which the Chester Canal, started in 1772, was another component.
Since the Potteries around Stoke-on-Trent were desperately in need of something steadier than packhorse trains to carry their fragile wares, industrialists like the Wedgwoods wholeheartedly supported the connection of Staffordshire to the Trent and the Mersey.
The first sod for the Trent and Mersey Canal was actually cut by Josiah Wedgwood in 1766 and typically, down-to-earth James Brindley carried it away in a barrow.
From Runcorn, the canal climbed by a series of 35 locks, passed through the 3,000-yard Harecastle Tunnel, then descended by a further 40 locks to join the Trent at Wilden Ferry, near Shardlow. Although the canal opened from Shardlow to near Stafford in 1770, it was to take another 11 years to drive the tunnel.
However, although Brindley and his assistants surveyed the whole potential system, he unfortunately did not live to see it completed.
The Harecastle Tunnel finally opened in 1777 and coal was finally transported from the Midlands to the Thames at Oxford in January 1790, some 18 years after Brindley’s death. Future development of the network was left to other engineers, such as Thomas Telford.
Throughout his life it’s been estimated that Brindley built 365 miles of canals, and he also constructed the watermill at Leek, which is now the Brindley Water Mill and James Brindley Museum.
In 1771, he began work on the Chesterfield Canal, but while surveying a new branch of the Trent and Mersey between Froghall and Leek, Brindley was caught in a severe rainstorm.
He was unable to dry out properly at the inn at which he was staying and he caught a chill. He became seriously ill and returned to his home at Turnhurst, where Erasmus Darwin attended him and discovered that he was suffering from diabetes.
James Brindley died at Turnhurst within sight of the unfinished Harecastle Tunnel in September 1772.
He was buried just nine days after the completion of his Birmingham Canal, at St. James Church in Newchapel, Staffordshire.
The inscription on his grave simply reads ‘James Brindley, of Turnhurst, engineer, was interred 30 September 1772, aged 56.’
He is remembered in Leek in the James Brindley Water Mill and Museum and by many other streets and colleges in the areas in which he worked.
His only local memorial is the triangular stone canopy which covers the well in the centre of the village of Wormhill, near Tunstead, which is dedicated to the parish’s most famous son.
It carries the simple inscription: ‘1875. In Memory of James Brindley, canal engineer, born in this parish. AD 1716.’
Rather perhaps unflatteringly described by JB Firth in his Highways and Byways of Derbyshire (1905) as ‘an ugly affair, hopelessly inartistic and crude’, it is nevertheless perhaps appropriate for the simple, uneducated man who almost single-handedly was responsible for transforming the system of transportation in this country, which inevitably led to the Industrial Revolution.
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