I have spent the last few months frantically scrabbling around researching and recording the YouTube videos for Heatherfield Heritage’s contribution to the annual Heritage Open Day’s event, (shameless plea, go online and watch them so I haven’t gone grey for nothing) and the theme this year was “routes, networks & connections.”
Sticking to home territory, I explored Preston Brook wharf’s links and connections - the Wharf Wide Web - but the caveat I had to work with was to keep it mostly family-friendly. This, you can probably already guess, was a struggle for me and thus the topic of today’s scribble; I have to tell someone some of the grisly details.
The canal arrived at Preston Brook around 1770. At the same time, the village’s new owner, Thomas Brock, was beginning an extensive plan of modernisation and expansion to match. Brock and his family were all solicitors, and at least 3 of his close family were working directly for the Duke of Bridgewater so Brock knew exactly what was coming and how to capitalise on it.
The local area now had an influx of fit men with heavy machinery and it had a dirty, great, water-filled building site slashed across the countryside.
Inevitably, the first casual casualty came quickly. 26 year old Thomas Potts was heading back to his home on the outskirts of Norton near the Keckwick Brook when he, presumably, fell in the water and didn’t manage to climb out. I say presumably because the parish register only states “Kill’d in the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal.” The phraseology is curious, as the clerk is usually more specific in saying ‘drowned’. Could there be a more sinister story behind it?
A few months later, a Preston Brook man is buried and the clerk notes he drowned. Closer inspection of the registers suggests that this was a labourer who’d moved to Preston Brook with the work. Accidents were a common occurrence, and it appears that either fatal occurrences lost their fascination or the bishop put his foot down as the clerk stopped noting such things. However, it’s almost certain that the two labouring brothers interred on the same day a few months after that were killed during an accident of the tunnel construction.
The tunnel managed to go 16 years before it claimed a boater, and even sadder than the simple loss of life was the fact he remains unidentified to this day. What had probably happened was his body had been dropped off at the wharf and the boat carried on after collecting a replacement crew. Wharf men organised transport to the churchyard and when the clerk came to record the man’s name, it was realised that no one knew it and the boat was too far gone to find out, if her crew even knew it in the first place, as at that time it was very common for a man to be known only by his by-name such as “Black Jemmy” rather than the one he was baptised with.
Another boatman drowned the following year, this one named William Hurstfield. This young man was known by someone in the area, for the clerk was able to note that the deceased was 26 years old.
It wasn’t just drowning that occurred at Preston Brook. One of Thomas Brock’s most calculated constructions was that of the Red Lion Inn, completed in 1776. There was already an inn up the hill, the Royal Oak, but by all accounts that one was more of a multi-use farm, and it was, of course, up a hill.
Brock’s new inn was close to the shiny new canal, directly on the side of the A56 and was purpose built. The Royal Oak never stood a chance of competing.
Brock was Chester’s legal-beagle and so not only did he have quasi-insider knowledge of the canal plans through his family, he also knew what the local civic area were planning. He would have been well aware that there were serious efforts to get the Warrington to Chester road made into a turnpike so as to make it less wheel destroying, thereby allowing the fancy new mail coaches to pass through and hopefully stop some of the highway robbery.
It would take a further 10 years before the road was actually turnpiked, and by that point Brock was dead, and the Red Lion was actively used by the local highway, thieves and vagabonds on their way about business.
Indeed, the big stables at the Red Lion were regularly full of boat horses, and more than once also held stolen horses in their ‘sick bay’, with an apocryphal tale being that one stolen horse was discovered after it was sold to a boatman whose own horse had dropped dead, and this new one took a look (fell in the canal) on the way to Runcorn, and came out of the water a different colour.
Another of Brock’s constructions was a windmill, in the field directly behind the wharf, and there was a quiet rumour that it was used as a hide for highwaymen and/or stolen goods, with things being hidden in sacks of flour and sent off by boat. There’s no evidence to confirm or deny this, nor the tale I found that some of the barrels of “brandy” being sent along the canal bound for Liverpool also contained pickled corpses for the anatomy tables.
Anatomists were a terrifying reality back then, and one packet boat arrived at the wharf with two young men and a suspiciously heavy box. They managed to heave the box off the boat and eventually persuaded the reluctant coachman to allow them tickets to Chester. They’d only gone 8 miles down the road when a fellow passenger made a hole in the box and screamed like a banshee because there was a coffin in it. The two young men were arrested and it later transpired the occupant of the coffin was the 15 year old sister of one of the men, who’d died in Manchester and they were trying to get her home to Hawarden. They, and the coffin, were released to carry on their journey.
The packet boats were heavily used, with a calculated passenger figure of around 33,000 people in 1800. The boats, though intended to carry 80 and 120 passengers respectively, were often grossly overloaded, and this could lead to serious problems if one passenger just happened to be ill. In 1849, Margaret Nixon was sick with cholera but got on the packet boat in Manchester to go to Liverpool. The newspaper described how the “deceased complained of being very sick, vomited violently, and her bowels were relaxed”, only an hour after leaving Manchester.
A doctor travelling on board advised the helpless captain to get the boat to Runcorn, presumably because that was where there was a quasi-cholera hospital, as fast as possible. Around Preston Brook it seems she was transferred into a narrowboat and another doctor was retrieved, who treated her as best he could as the boat hastened to Runcorn.
Unfortunately, the word had clearly spread that cholera was on board and it took two hours before someone would let them bring the patient ashore. She was eventually taken off the boat but died shortly afterwards, leaving the captain of the passenger boat to be accused of “impropriety” and of hastening the death of the woman in allowing her to be removed. He also, of course, had to scrub his boat from stem to stern with carbolic soap.
The train station was regularly drenched in blood, with people getting mown down as they endeavoured to cross the lines. The newspapers tended to alternate between gory detail (“his teeth having been found on the engine on arrival at Crewe”) and coy euphemism (“His clothes in great disorder and rucked up,”) and when the Bridgewater cashier Mr Halliwell became a casualty in 1848, the Liverpool Mercury plumped to go for the middle road and describe the injuries, but politely, in deference to the high regard in which he had been held.
Where boatmen made mistakes, the papers had no such qualms. Eli Pollard was poling his boat along the wharf when his foot slipped and his head was flattened, or possibly removed entirely, between the moving boat and one moored up on the wharf, while John Wilkinson fell asleep on the sidebed as his boat was coming through the tunnel and his clothes caught fire from the range. He was still on fire by the time the train of boats came out of the tunnel and they finally managed to put him out, by which time there was no saving him.
The newspapers all agreed that it was Shocking, Horrible and great for selling copy.
Animal cruelty was common and therefore less interesting as far as the newspapers were concerned, but some cases were recorded.
The Speed brothers took a boat from Preston Brook to Manchester and beat their horse so hard it died a few hours after arriving. The magistrate fined them the equivalent of 10 days wages, plus costs, and made a point of telling the Bridgewater Trustees they needed to keep a better watch on the conduct of their employees.
A couple of decades later, a long suffering horse finally snapped and actively attacked its owner as they made their way to the tunnel. The boatman suffered broken ribs, lacerations and the loss of 3 fingers, while the horse was allegedly put down for being dangerous.
It wasn’t all death and destruction though. Both the Red Lion and the light-fingered boaters were distributing liberal amounts of alcohol to the population with predictable consequences, and the village constable was regularly called out to attend for drunk and disorderly people. A set of Irish labourers, well lubricated, were walking back up the hill late one night and started a bout of fisticuffs for unknown reasons. One participant rolled down the hill and into the wharf while another carried on the argument with a tree.
A couple of “women of loose character” found themselves being sentenced to hard labour for “disorderly conduct”, and another was found passed-out in a hedge near Daresbury with her 3 year old grandson crying nearby.
Some drunkenness was less distressing; a boatman was charged for refusing to stop singing a dirty song, and even when he was being arrested continued singing because he wanted to get “to the good bit”. History doesn’t relate what the song was, but we can presume it was fairly filthy or he was an especially bad singer, given the noise and music that surrounded the canals at the best of times!
Keats’ description of Autumn brings to mind a rich image and a distinct feeling, with the growing chill in the air, the earthy scent of leaves underfoot and the rich colours of the trees, hedgerows and fields.
