6
Cutting New Channels
We flash across the level.
We thunder thro' the bridges.
We bicker down the cuttings.
We sway along the ridges.
A rush of streaming hedges,
Of jostling lights and shadows,
Of hurtling, hurrying stations,
Of racing woods and meadows.
From W. E. Henley, "Journey By Train," 1876
The passage of time allows us to appreciate how relatively benign were the environmental effects on the homeland of the Victorian transport revolution. We have noted the conservative effect of this technological achievement on forest policy. More direct and significant was the effect of steam locomotion on channels of movement. By diverting long-range travel away from roads onto tracks and from private vehicles onto public transport, railways both facilitated travel and made sure it was confined to narrow corridors, thus tending to preserve the land and landscape.
But few early Victorians could have regarded the railway builders as preservationists. The prospect that railway engineers might soon be able to rearrange the topography of Britain and cut great channels through it inclined people to believe that a major reconstruction of the physical and visual environment was at hand. One reaction was pride in the growing power to manipulate nature and to assist it in realizing its own perfection. In 1837, the year before Robert Stephenson completed his line from
London to Birmingham, Cuthbert Johnson, a Grey's Inn barrister and prolific essayist on matters agricultural, enthused about the possibility of using this newest application of steam technology to redistribute in a massive way the nation's surface crust and, by so doing, eliminate infertility. It might now be possible to correct each local chemical imbalance by borrowing what was missing from somewhere else. He pointed out that the London and Birmingham Railway crossed the gravelly soil of Middlesex to reach, near Watford, the Hertfordshire chalk formation. It then passed over the gravelly chalk of Buckinghamshire to the stiff clays of Northhamptonshire and Warwickshire. Since chalk is an admirable fertilizer for thin soil and the oxide of aluminum in the clay works wonders when mixed with chalk and lime, there was every possibility that, given the versatility and huge carrying capacity of railways, all deviations from the norm might be done away with and the nation's soil be made uniformly productive.[1]
Railway promoters and agriculturalists exhausted all the copies of the first edition of Johnson's pamphlet in the first ten days. One wonders, however, in what mood landowners and their tenants received its message. Even if used for less ambitious purposes, the railway seemed bound to disrupt the fabric of life as well as of the land. It must have been a daunting prospect for most rural residents to hear that engineers and gangs of navvies were soon to arrive in the neighborhood and slice huge gashes (some fifteen acres were required to make a mile of railway) through their ordered countryside. To create these new corridors, engineers would also need to slice straight through land contours.
This was certainly the case with the building of the London and Birmingham Railway. A special feature of that project was that it cut across the grain. Its designer, the young Robert Stephenson, listened to the advice of George Stephenson, his famous engineer father, and kept the grade at an average steepness of no more than 1 in 330. That meant his contractors had to force their way for more than a hundred miles across valleys and through hills that lay, transversely, in their path. They cut deep slashes and filled whole valleys so that locomotives could speed along at a nearly constant level.[2] As one contemporary remarked, the result was that the whole line would need to be either a cutting or an embankment.[3]
Such a drastic act of defiance toward the lay of the land greatly troubled conservative-minded people. According to Sir Francis Bond Head, when Stephenson and his associate, George Parker Builder ("The Calculating Boy"), made a series of surveying walks along the proposed route, they
were looked upon by the people they encountered as "magicians, evil genii, or unclean spirits, whose unearthly object it was to fright the land from its property."[4]
In 1851, thirteen years after the line was completed, John Francis remembered that "blinded by ignorance and obstinacy" opponents in and outside of Parliament had made predictions about how fields and valleys would be violated, springs be dried up, soil be eroded, and meadows be made sterile: "Like an earthquake [the railway] would create chasms, it would upheave mountains; and it was pathetically added, the railway promoter was like an evil providence, unrighteously attempting that which nature was too kind to effect."[5]
Francis found this attitude pitiful or narrowly self-serving. He was an ardent booster of steam technology. Nevertheless, he did feel a need to acknowledge that some objections may have been sincere. "There are fancy spots in this our beautiful England which it would pain the most indifferent to destroy; what then must be the feelings of those who have lived and only wish to die there . . . ? If the nobleman disliked the destruction of his fine old English park, the yeoman deplored the desecration of his homestead. The one bore its splendid remembrances, the other its splendid recollections."[6]
From our perspective, what is interesting in this vigorous debate before and after the cutting and embanking began was the form in which the case for and against the new transport technology was made: the concepts and language available to both sides in the early days of the railway era. Already, as Francis's parenthetical aside reminds us, conservative sentiments would be expressed in aesthetic and social terms. We hear that there is a special beauty in the countryside of "this our England"; the landscape through which the rails slice discloses a harmony between nature and the cultivator, the product of intimacy bestowed only by long proprietorship. We note that Francis speaks of the nobleman and the yeoman but not of the tenant farmer, his employees, or any other inhabitants of the country whose connection with the soil, the hedges, the meadows, and the trees is, at least formally, indirect or transitory. Thus it is a continuity of "splendid remembrances" and "affectionate recollections" that makes "fancy spots" (places that are imaginatively evocative for those who know them well) worthy of conservation, or at least makes their destruction a matter of genuine regret.
Francis scoffed when people expressed anxiety that large-scale intrusions into the realm of nature invited retaliation. He dismissed such fears as scare tactics. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt about the genuine-
ness of some of the apprehension. Again and again in the Parliamentary debates and the local protest meetings of 1832 and 1833, warnings about the consequences of arrogance came from disinterested people.[7] The unprecedented scale of the railway works was worrying. Canal builders had also filled in valleys and pierced through inclines but had done so on a far more modest scale. Series of locks provided some compromise between technology and the contours of the land. Railway builders, on the other hand, promised to punish the land unmercifully. The result, it was feared, would be erosion, washouts, soil sterility, and the drying up of springs. The loosened and troubled earth would give way; tunnels, banks, and arches would be certain to collapse.
R. Cort, son of Henry Cort, developer of the combined puddling-and-rolling process in iron making, was sure that excavations would destroy the natural "veins of water" and thus render sterile the pastures and sloping fields along the line. No amount of compensation could possibly make up for the defacing of fields and parks or the destruction of "the haunts of our forefathers": "Woe be to the land, whenever the love of their own green fields, their avenues, their trees, their cottages, becomes cold in the breast of our nobles and our chiefs." Surely the future, the younger Cort wrote, lies not with rails that tear asunder fields and parks, leaving "immense gashes and mounds" behind but with steam boats and steam carriages, moving along improved canals and roads.[8]
Worth noting is how Cort's case for retaining and remodeling the existing road and canal networks rested finally on aesthetic values. After much detailed analysis of the material damage railway builders would inflict, he ended by evoking the love of the settled, unbroken country, the land of our forefathers, noble avenues, green fields. He and other enemies of the railway must have recognized that engineers would eventually work out solutions to the formidable excavation problems facing them. By the late 1830s trust in engineering ingenuity was building, especially after George Stephenson managed to carry his Liverpool and Manchester Railway across two seemingly bottomless quagmires.
Therefore it was good strategy not to rest the case against the railway on technical difficulties but to direct attention to the railway builders' unreflective assumption that what could be done should be done. Influential voices joined in this kind of protest. "Utilitarianism"—wrote Wordsworth in his fiery protest to the Morning Post against the intended Kendal and Windermere Railway—while "serving as a mask for cupidity," is an "evil" that now makes railways and their reckless actions "its favourite instrument." The utilitarian mentality behind the railway is,
he warned, heedless of the sacred relics left us by our ancestors; it is incapable of comprehending that there might be "temples of Nature, temples built by the Almighty, which have a still higher claim to be left unvio-lated." Wordsworth was certain that if the poet Thomas Gray "were now living, how would he have lamented the probable intrusion of a railway with its scarifications, its intersections, its noisy machinery, its smoke, and swarms of pleasure-hunters, most of them thinking that they do not fly fast enough through the country which they have come to see."[9]
John Ruskin sounded the same notes thirty-two years later. Upon hearing that yet another railway was being proposed for the Lake District, he took up his pen against "the frenzy of avarice," that was "daily drowning our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children, and blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless waste of ashes." Since only vice can grow on waste, there must be, he warned, a "deterioration of moral character in the inhabitants of every district penetrated by a railway."[10]
The distinction between the "utilitarian" outlook and the "aesthetic/ moral" (often referred to in nuanced tones as the "sentimental") outlook was used to categorize railway advocates and railway resisters. As we have noticed, sentimentalists did not always express themselves with Ruskinian vehemence and only a few opposed the entire enterprise; likewise utilitarian engineers and promoters occasionally experienced flickers of conscience when their navvies and gunpowder obliterated famous beauty spots or remnants of past civilizations. Nevertheless, in the dialogue between the two sides one detects the same intemperance we have come to expect in present clashes between developers and their opponents.
Thus framers of the 1832 version of the bill to permit the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway tended to dismiss expressions of anxiety as hypocrisy or obscurantism, while, at the same time, making concessions to individual landowners whose estates lay along the right of way. They tried to reassure canal companies who feared that their water supplies would be jeopardized. Special provisions forbade contractors to build deviations that might disturb the surroundings and residence of Thomas Reeve Thornton at Berkhamstead. No spoil was to be deposited on any part of Chilcot's estate. River water was not to be diverted through lands belonging to the marquis of Hastings. Trustees of the Radcliffe estate at Woolverton were to be supplied with culverts to prevent flooding. The quiet and beauty of parks belonging to Lady Bridgewater, Lord Clarendon, and the earl of Essex, were to be respected.[11]
Missing in the bill, although not in some of the complaints about it, is
a recognition that making a cutting or an embankment must disturb, perhaps irreparably, the delicate pattern of relationships between the plant, animal, and mineral components of any site. Instead we find meticulous attention paid to problems of drainage in cuttings and erosion on embankment walls, not because the railway promoters were greatly concerned about the local human, animal, bird, insect, or vegetable populations (except for private game preserves), but because they worried about the effect of earth slippage, subsidence, flooding, and erosion on the excavation site. Committeemen subjected railway surveyors to the most careful questioning about the results of test borings along the prospective line and asked them to predict how various kinds of substrata would react if exposed to air and frost. In reply, Stephenson and his assistants displayed their command of details about the proportion of horizontal slope to vertical rise required for various clays, chalks, and marls.[12] They sounded more confident than they were: a century of canal building had built up no large store of data about such matters, the scale of these excavations having been smaller and the engineering difficulties less daunting.
Also impressive in the testimony was the attention Stephenson and his staff paid to the need to control or prevent earth slippage. When the construction of drainage systems, cesspools, and encasing walls began, no expense seemed to have been spared to get them right. Railway promoters could point to these costs as proof of their claim to be allies rather than foes of the arable farmer. Bristol and London Railway directors later used this evidence to reassure agriculturalists whose farms they intended to cross. If their plans were accepted, they said, it was "not too much to suppose, that many lands will be thereby greatly improved, which indeed has been found to be the case on other Railways."[13]
Other than their sheer extent, this concern about draining and preserving the stability of the cuttings is the most interesting environmental feature at Tring and at Blisworth, where London and Birmingham engineers carried out two of their largest excavations. Brick side drains at Tring ran the whole two-and-a-half-mile length. They were thirty-three inches deep and had capacious storage pools or "eyes." At ten-yard intervals, tiled underground culverts, placed well below the ballast that held the tracks, diverted subsurface water to the sides. Outside the cutting, crest ditches at elevated places drained away water that might otherwise have weakened the banks. Stephenson's dictum was: "Wherever water is known, or suspected to exist, its immediate source should be traced, and every possible means adopted for diverting it from the slopes
and adjacent surfaces."[14] In other words, the drainage of the chalk ridge of Ivinghoe was refashioned to serve the interest of the line of communication cutting through it.
The same can be said of the embankment built out of the Tring cutting. Every surveyor of a route had to concern himself with trying to balance, in the most convenient and economical way, what was dug out with what was to be piled up and in what order. This was a particularly difficult strategic exercise for a railway that had almost no level surfaces to build on. Asked what he would do if materials from cuttings were not sufficient to make embankments, Stephenson answered, "The line must be altered."[15] At Tring the exchange was about even. A million and a half cubic yards of chalk were moved to dig the two-and-a-half-mile cutting forty feet deep and another million when a second track was added.[16] Tracked wagons then hauled this material away and deposited it in the next Chiltern valley to make an embankment six miles long and thirty feet high.
The cutting at Blisworth, five miles from Northampton, was a mile shorter than at Tring, but it was deeper (in places, the rails were sixty feet below the surface) and caused the contractor so much misery that Stephenson had to take over supervision directly. Beneath the surface was a layer of sandy clay with loose stones and then a layer of flint-hard limestone that had to be quarried and blasted with 3,000 barrels of gunpowder to reach the thick bed of clay underneath. That bed rested on loose blue shale through which water ran copiously. With so treacherous a foundation, the cutting walls constantly slid or bulged. At great expense, a steam engine began pumping night and day, and 800 men and boys were set to work blasting, shoveling, and lifting a million cubic yards of muck and debris for locomotives at either end to haul away. Thick stone retaining walls buttressed by inverted arches held the clay bank in, and an elaborate system of drains and culverts did eventually prevent deterioration.[17]
The problem of keeping the embankment stable through the two adjacent valleys proved to be nearly as difficult, since the soft valley floors kept swallowing up the debris dumped onto them. Wrote Thomas Roscoe, one of the engineers on the line, "an engineer could wish no worse fortune than to be required to construct culverts upon a soft foundation under a deep embankment."[18] Eventually, however, the task was completed, and the trains got through to Rugby. When they arrived, Thomas Arnold, at one with Wordsworth and Ruskin in his reverence for the holy solitude of the lakes, nevertheless rejoiced that railways would be
"destroying feudality for ever"—a reminder of how ambivalent reactions could be to all of this digging down and piling up.
Embankments made far more obvious visual impressions on surroundings than did cuttings; and, because embankments were made of imported material and exposed steep banks to rain and sunlight, they developed special environments of their own. To prevent earth slippage and erosion, railway companies and sometimes private individuals conducted experiments to see what would grow in these miniature environments.[19] A Congregational minister with a passion for railways, Frederick Smeeton Williams, noted that it was common practice in Scotland to cover "travelled" earth on railway banks with the kind of trees that "permeate and interlace" rather than sending their tap roots straight down. He quoted this excerpt from a letter to the Gardener's Magazine :
I had the pleasure of seeing perhaps half an acre of strawberries the other day on a railway embankment. They were planted thickly and broadcast, the whole ground being covered with them, and they were loaded with bloom. Perhaps this is the best way of growing strawberries on railway embankments, as the whole ground is thus covered with them; and the fierce sunshine, though intensified by the slope of the ground, cannot burn the roots.[20]
Authors of early railway travel commented on how quickly the scars had healed, so quickly that travelers might easily forget the heroic labors needed to construct the smooth rights-of-way. Edward Osborne's London and Birmingham Railway Guide (1840) informed readers that a once raw cutting just beyond Pinner had already become a "series of beautiful gardens of wild flowers . . . the clusters of violets, the harebell, the forget-me-not, and the germander speedwell." He expressed hope that directors would plant trees and shrubbery all along the line, thus assisting nature in reconciling the railway with the landscape.[21]
Like most of the other guide writers of the time, Osborne was not content simply to reassure the apprehensive that railways had not, in fact, permanently torn the countryside apart; he and the others went on to suggest that railway travel was opening up to the wider community a new way of experiencing and appreciating natural beauty. People, he noted, can now journey for thousands of miles "with greater personal ease than they formerly could over fifty." He was sure that in the process they would shed prejudice, superstition, and all the other evils of parochialism. Visually, too, they would be uplifted by being exposed to the extended rather than the immediate point of view. Looked at closely, Blisworth cutting would disclose fascinating fossils, too small to see from the window as the train sped through the gap. Reward would come,
however, the moment the train rushed onto the embankment: "[On] leaving the cutting, a noble scene presents itself; the view to the north is bounded by the distant hills, and the intermediate valley gently undulated and filled with pastures and cornfields."[22]
In The Railway Journey , Wolfgang Schivelbusch cites passages from guidebooks to show how the "mechanization of motive power" brought about a perceptual transformation and, in doing so, created a new landscape in which "mechanical regularity triumphs over natural irregularity."[23] Foregrounds flash by. Trees along the way, once experienced on foot or from a coach as discrete entities, become "racing woods and meadows" for railway travelers, The eye of the fast-moving observer reaches out beyond the "rush of streaming hedges" to the "gently undulated" valleys, which seem to be in motion, rising and falling as the train flashes through on its smooth and level course. The "noble scene" on the outside of the window does seem to present itself to the seated passenger. The train's velocity reveals the orderly whole even as it blurs the irregularly close and particular.[24]
Most guidebooks of the early railway era express this idea. They assume that the way one experiences landscape depends on one's vantage point but also on the speed of the conveyance and the degree of closeness it allows between the passenger and the natural world outside. Arthur Freeling's The Railway Companion, From London to Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester (1837), James Scott Walker's An Accurate Description of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1832), and James Drake's Road Book (1839), promised patrons of their respective lines that they would experience something unique in history. On the London and Birmingham they would rush through a constantly changing panorama while comfortably seated in a sealed compartment: now charging along a high embankment with the topography spread out before them, now plunging into a dark tunnel or a cutting, suddenly to emerge again into an entirely different prospect. On the more level terrain of the Liverpool and Manchester, there would be few dramatic plunges and rises but, instead, the "steady succession of scenery," the springy sensation when riding across Chat or Parr Moss—like "skimming over a sea of oil." For the price of a ticket, ordinary people, once restricted by cost and stunted imaginations, could now be moved by impressions "at once pleasing and sublime" and at the same time be protected from the rigors and terrors once endured by seekers after sublimity.[25]
One of the most insightful commentators on the connections between speed, conveyance, and landscape was Francis Roubiliac Conder, the ap-
prentice engineer on the London and Birmingham, whose enthusiasms about steam agriculture have already been noted. Like others in his profession, he could be lyrical about the transforming power of steam energy; what was unusual about him was his capacity to see that some of the exhilaration would go out of travel once people were able to dash through the countryside in hermetically sealed containers. His duties for Stephenson required that he move quickly from place to place along the line of construction, using a four-in-hand coach. When the weather and road conditions were just right, he recalled, such vehicles were capable of moving along as fast as sixteen miles per hour. On such occasions, the experience of speed from the top of a coach was thrilling because directly received by all the senses—"so much more enjoyable," he recalled in 1868, "than that to which our iron roads have accustomed us." Given "four well-conditioned horses" and a "crack whip," he testified, nothing "has yet been discovered to equal the physical enjoyment" of rushing down country roads on an old first-class coach at sunrise. One of his favorite stretches was between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury. Along that road, he said, the rider is in nature:
The fresh morning air, the fragrance of the wide hedgeless bean-fields, the distant ragged outline of the great Malvern range, clear in the early morn before you; the purple glory of the sunshine bursting over the Cotswolds behind; the steady, unswerving, rapid motion, combined to give a sense of exhilarating power for which the greater speed of the dusty, noisy, uninteresting train can afford no substitute.[26]
Conder thought railway travel was boring. Not only are the senses of the seated travelers dulled but so is their understanding of the landscape, since they are only able to see the passing scene in glimpses and have no way of anticipating what lies ahead. In the old days, he recalled, it was possible to prepare the eye and the mind. He offered as an example the approach to the Black Country as it used to be made by road travel. Then transitions were gradual. Long before entering that intensely industrial landscape, distant smoke and flame would have warned observers that they were about to pass through the gates of Lucifer's palace. But now, he wrote, the passenger looks up from his page to behold a suddenly "carbonised landscape" with "a pair of lofty cupolas vomiting flame. All around, the earth is black; the hideous, unarchitectural buildings are black; the half-stripped men, toiling to fill the ever-devouring furnaces, are black; the sky is a dense canopy of smoke, glowing and angry with the reflected light of the undying furnaces." Having been suddenly offered this scene out of Paradise Lost , the rider then has it snatched away
and turns back to book or newspaper, not having smelled, heard, or felt the reality of the scene. Thus the modern traveler, Conder concluded, must, unfortunately, be reconciled with the "natural abhorrence of the steam-engine for the picturesque."[27]
In 1857, a decade before Conder's reflections appeared, Thomas Hughes had made a leading theme in his Tom Brown's School Days the need to adjust institutions and perceptions to the steam era. As the narrative proper begins, Tom is leaving home by stagecoach to start his life at Rugby School; at the end Tom and his fellow graduates are breaking off their cricket match unfinished so that the visiting team can catch its train to London. But before beginning to trace Tom's spiritual and physical growth under "The Doctor," Hughes leads his schoolboy readers on an excursion, by means of the Great Western Railway, to the White Horse Hill just beyond Swindon. He asks them, "if they have a few hours to spare," to disembark at the Shrivenham station and walk with him to the highest point. He promises to show them the glorious view and then some of "the relics of bygone times," relics that only practiced eyes can see. In the voice of an old man, carried away by nostalgia, he exclaims: "O young England! Young England!—you who are born into these racing railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten, in a five week's holiday, why don't you know more of your own birthplaces?"
In his day, continues the narrator, when the old coach disembarked schoolboy passengers at the crossroads on the first day of holidays, no modern entertainments awaited when they reached their homes. There would be little to do but walk or ride on country lanes, listen to country stories and ways, and make friends of "the fields and woods and hills. . . . We were Berkshire or Gloucestershire or Yorkshire boys," he says, "and you're young cosmopolites, belonging to all counties and countries. No doubt that's all right,—I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out of the Vale of the White Horse, and that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away Alfred's Hill to make an embankment."[28] Of course Alfred's Hill was only carried away figuratively by the Great Western's speeding locomotives. Brunel and his contractors would have used human and animal muscle to level the hill and fill the next valley. "Racing railroad times" did not set the pace of construction and steam technology did not, except on rare occasions, greatly lighten the task.
In The Railway Navvies , Terry Coleman describes how one navvy was expected to fill fourteen sets, a set being a string of wagons brought in on rails to the cutting or along an embankment. This meant lifting twenty tons of earth a day. If the excavated earth was not intended for the construction of an embankment but needed to be deposited at the sides of the cutting, a workman would guide a barrow, pulled by a horse-powered windlass up a steep plank run.[29] An engineer named James Day wrote a book about excavation and embankment techniques and included a drawing of an ingenious device by means of which a horse could, alone, pull a barrow to the top, dump its contents, and lower it empty. Although the inventor won a gold prize from the Society of Arts, his invention apparently did not find favor with contractors. The sight of men rapidly and skillfully guiding barrows up and down slopes continued to be a sight-seeing attraction at excavation sites all through the century.[30]
These links with older technology and with older ways of perceiving remained (since trains were, except in London, mainly for distance travel) well after steam excavation had come of age. That age began in Britain with the construction in 1887 of a canal to bring oceangoing ships thirty-five miles inland and turn Manchester into a major ocean port. There were precedents for using machines. According to an article in the Builder for 1846, an "American Devil," a sixteen-horsepower "steam navvy", was brought from the United States to construct the Victoria Dock at Hull. It had a crew of five and could do the work of thirty men.[31] Only a few years before, William Smith Otis had developed the prototype of this machine to help build a railway line from Springfield to Worcester in his native Massachusetts.[32] But such early innovations were exceptional. Steam excavators were a rarity on construction or excavation sites until 1876, when the Lincoln firm of Rushton and Proctor introduced its efficient steam shovel. Several of these excavators were used to make cuttings during the construction of the West Lancashire Railway, where stiff brown clay made hand digging difficult and where the absence of boulders made conditions ideal for the rail-mounted machines.[33] (See Figure 6.)
The first real test in Britain for steam excavating came a decade later with the digging of the Manchester Ship Canal; indeed, this huge project would not have been undertaken had steam shovels and dredges not already demonstrated their capacities. Sixty Rushton and Proctor excavators, supplemented by seven larger French and German machines, were trundled along tracks to the site. Working with them were 194 steam cranes, 2 floating steam dredges, and 173 locomotives. Two hundred and
Figure 6.
Excavating scoop (1878). Heavy excavators, moving on rails, could only be used
economically on major projects like the Manchester Ship Canal. This scoop,
pulled back and forth by two steam engines, aimed at the earth-moving flexibility
eventually achieved by the bulldozer. (Engineering 25, 1878)
twelve steam pumps assisted in the process of digging 53,500,000 cubic yards of earth, transporting 460,000 bricks, and pouring 1,250,000 cubic yards of concrete. Three hundred and twenty Wells's portable oil lights of 2,000 candlepower and three electric light installations allowed some of this work to go on at night.
Steam machinery finally had an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to cut deep grooves through the surface of the earth, yet it would not be strictly true to say that steam built the Manchester Ship Canal. One hundred and twenty thousand men, most of them using shovels, barrows, and other hand tools, also took part in the digging, building, and hauling, as well as 2,000 horses and 6,300 sturdy wagons.[34] All through the nineteenth century, machines acted as extensions of, and supplements to, muscle power. In turn, the operation of machines depended upon a large reserve of manual labor. Every steam excavator required a crew to shift the tracks it moved upon and to dispose of the material it scooped up. A steam land dredger, developed by Messrs. J. Boulet and Co. of Paris for use on the Suez Canal, was put to work on the Manchester Canal project. Known as "the Frenchy," it needed from twenty-eight to forty-three attendants and a locomotive to pull it.[35]
Machines like these displaced hand labor and created additional uses
for it. In earth moving as in agriculture, mining, quarrying, and transport, steam gradually took over certain functions and skills but did so without displacing or even threatening to displace almost the whole range of traditional implements and handcrafts. Most workmen who built the London and Birmingham Railway in the 1830s or the Great Western shortly afterward could have set to work on the Manchester Ship Canal and found accustomed tasks awaiting them. Only a few would have needed retraining.
There were other continuities. As in the case of the London and Birmingham Railway, the proposal to build the canal stirred furious debate between vested interests. Liverpool shipping firms were understandably apprehensive about the emergence of so close a rival, as were railway owners and existing canal and river navigation companies. Manchester businessmen, politicians, and the less timorous among their bankers and stock promoters were excited by the prospect of an economic revival in their city. Each of these interests brought forward its own specialists to show why and how the project would be the making or breaking of the region's economy, even the nation's.[36] Talk about self-interest was restricted to the board rooms. Both sides were far more conscious than early Victorians seemed to have been of the need to appear public-spirited rather than narrowly self-interested. Consequently, they rested a fair proportion of their arguments on estimates of how little or how much the canal would affect the physical environment. For this reason the discussion can give us some notion of the range and scope of late Victorian environmental consciousness and competence.
Spokesmen on either side had little to say about the ethics of interfering with natural processes or about the aesthetic effects of creating new channels for the Mersey River and its tributary or for the river Irwell, which flows (if that is the word) through Manchester and Salford. They were aware that natural process, in the sense of a river being allowed to take its course without human intervention, had ceased long ago. On the scale of artificiality, the Mersey and the Irwell would have found places at the top. From the eighteenth century, dredging and other means of channelization had made this river system navigable for barges and small cargo ships; but after the railway went through in 1829, navigation ceased to be as profitable as before and the disposal of industrial and urban waste gradually became its most important function. The textile mills of densely industrialized south Lancashire dumped dyes and other chemicals, Manchester discharged untreated sewage, and Salford deposited partly treated sewage. This sludge collected on the river bottoms,
raising them, in places, four to nine feet.[37] As one might expect, the Irwell, which drained this urban area, was the more polluted of the two. A report in 1860 estimated that filth was accumulating on its floor at a rate of two or three inches every year.[38] When riverside mills Were forbidden to dump their refuse directly into the river, they simply placed it on the banks and waited for flood waters. One way or another, 33,000 tons of cinders found their way into the river yearly.[39] One sanitary expert claimed in 1907 that it was "the hardest worked and foulest stream in the world."[40]
In his Endangered Lives , Anthony Wohl used the subject of river pollution to support his generalization that "the Victorians were probably far more successful at improving their urban, than protecting their natural environment."[41] He pointed out that rivers were turned into sewers because reformers, alarmed at death rates in cities, placed urban sanitation higher on their priority list. They could rationalize this decision to remove human and animal wastes from city streets and drains and dumping it, untreated or only partially treated, into water courses by pointing out (as some still do)[42] that rivers contain natural self-cleansing processes. Since, to quote Lord Salisbury, "drainage must be put somewhere,"[43] it seemed to follow that fouling notorious rivers like the Irwell was a legitimate exchange for allowing the residents of Salford and Manchester to live longer.
During the debate over the canal, such reasoning as this was more subtextual than explicit. Occasionally critics of the proposal, particularly landowners whose estates fronted on the Irwell or the Mersey, spoke of the terrible stench and predicted that the canal would concentrate the effluvia and, being an artificial watercourse, would have negligible purifying capacities.[44] The 1870 Report of the Rivers Pollution Commission contains the facsimile of a letter written using fluid from the Irwell instead of ink.[45] Sir Edward Leader Williams, the engineer-designer of the project, tried to reassure a House of Commons committee by stating that much of the dark color came from dye works and that the probable effect of this additive was to deodorize and to act as an antiseptic, or, as he put it when questioned at another hearing, a "mordant." Canal supporters produced a chemist to support this contention that the stench given off by industrial wastes actually promoted good health. He added that his own garden ended at the edge of the Irwell, so he would be certain to know if noxious vapors had any ill effects.[46]
Salford spokesmen used the occasion to criticize Manchester for making no serious attempt to treat sewage, and Manchester spokesmen prom-
ised that sewage works would soon be on their way. An act of 1892 followed up on that promise, but, as in the case of clean air legislation, the effect of improving standards and vigorously enforcing them was more than canceled out by large increases in the volume of pollutants produced and discharged. The canal took over the evil reputation of the rivers it absorbed. A fairly recent contributor to the "Notes and Queries" section of the Manchester Guardian Weekly remembered seeing, when a boy in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a sign in a local bus that directed, "Do not spit in the bus. Use the Manchester Ship Canal."[47]
The deadly equation continues to apply in the present: increasingly higher volumes of increasingly less contaminated emissions damage the environment more than the less restricted but smaller volumes of liquid, solid, and gaseous emissions. Where we appear to have an advantage is that the concept of an ecosystem is now more familiar to conservationists and the public. That means it can be used as a conceptual framework for understanding the consequences of pollution and for suggesting control guidelines. George Perkins Marsh had, of course, already demonstrated how an environment might be perceived as a unit in which organisms interact and exchange material with the physical surroundings. But the engineering profession in the half century between the building of the London and Birmingham Railway and the Manchester Ship Canal had tended steadily toward specialization, not integration.
Two of the leading experts on hydraulic engineering in the 1880s and 1890s, Leveson Francis Vernon-Harcourt and W. H. Wheeler, wrote detailed texts on the motion of water in rivers; the action of tides and currents; the effects of dredging; the mechanics that govern the buildup and shifting of bars in tidal rivers and estuaries; the effects of embankments and "training" walls on sedimentation, channel depth, and rate of flow.[48] For both of these authorities, rivers and their basins, sources, and mouths formed discrete systems, each with complex mechanisms. They cautioned about the difficulties of predicting the effect of management and control in a complex system where one intervention was bound to have such a variety of consequences. Vernon-Harcourt, like Marsh, spoke about the effect of deforestation on the rate of evaporation and water runoff and its consequence for river velocity and about the connections between the permeability of the underlying strata of the drainage basin and the characteristics of denudation and sedimentation.[49] He said nothing, however, about the place of other living things in these systems. Both Wheeler and Vernon-Harcourt believed (again like Marsh) that a "good" or "natural" river was one where all or most parts were in a dynamic
but stable balance and that a well-managed river was one where the engineering works opened a channel for navigation and at the same time maintained or promoted that balance. Thus the approach of the two engineers was systematic. But their system was not an ecosystem.
Engineers who took such a prominent part in the discussion about the merits and defects of the various Manchester Ship Canal proposals confined their testimony to estimates about the effects of this or that feature on the Mersey estuary and the capacity of that volatile estuary to carry ship traffic. They also gave their judgment upon what effects the canal might have on the propensity of the Mersey basin to flood seasonally.[50] Scarce indeed, however, is any mention of possible consequences for fish, bird, insect, animal, or vegetable life, even though it was known at the time that estuaries and marshes are usually rich in nutrients and support a diversity of species. Overshadowing every other concern was Liverpool's fear about an exodus of commerce and Manchester's hopes for a revival of her export industry. In the controversy, economics was the senior partner, and the environment appeared in a supportive role.
That role, however, was far closer to center stage than it had been in the equally spirited struggle over the building of the London and Birmingham Railway. Fifty years later, all sides in the argument had available well-articulated rules about the behavior of rivers and estuaries and an abundant supply of engineering expertise. All sides recognized the need to invoke the authority of science and technology to legitimate their appeals.
Since much of the public discussion took place in committees of Parliament among many who had no direct stake in the economic welfare of Mersyside, it does seem curious that so few conservation-minded politicians or groups raised the issue of the possible aesthetic consequences. Apart from a few landowners who objected to damage to amenities on their estates, one of the few occasions where anyone expressed regret about the destruction of some beauty spot is a brief observation in Sir Bosdin Leech's history of the canal. This vigorous champion of the project did at one point regret the necessity of spoiling the landscape around Eastham. "It almost seemed a desecration," Leech wrote, "to invade such a pretty rural spot with its beautiful woods and foliage stretching down to the estuary." He noted that Liverpool ramblers and picnickers called the spot "The Richmond of the Mersey."[51] But he hastened to remind his readers that great engineering works have an aesthetic quality of their own. He recalled being stirred, while on a night visit to the construction site for the canal entry at Eastham in 1888, by the sight
of the Rushton and Proctor steam navvies digging into the landscape under the brilliant illumination provided by Wells's oil lights.[52]
Presumably Liverpool residents who used the fields and lanes of Eastham for weekend excursions also regretted the loss of this stretch of greenery. There is no evidence, however, that they articulated their feelings in any organized way or that spokesmen with access to print took up the cause. There is abundant evidence, on the other hand, that the public was attracted in the same way Leech was to the spectacle of the surface being violated by huge and powerful machines. If there was organized tree hugging around Eastham or any other place, it went un-reported. Trees had, after all, a long history of suffering in that part of Lancashire and Cheshire. Widnes, Runicorn, Ince, and other notorious examples of industrial dereliction along the Mersey had for years been written off as possible beauty spots. The damage done to nature there had been so thorough and prolonged that nostalgia must have seemed, even to those temperamentally inclined toward it, decidedly misplaced: indeed, watching great ships move in a straight line far inland through so thoroughly industrial a landscape must have had considerable appeal.
Therefore it proved to be effective strategy on the part of the canal's critics to concentrate on the possible danger to the special environment of the Mersey estuary. Through the narrow mouth, flanked by the Liverpool and Birkenhead docks, heavy tides flowed into the bottle-shaped basin and, by tidal scour, kept the sandbar at the entrance open to ocean ships. From the mid-1820s, engineers had debated how the channel into the Mersey River might best be improved without disrupting this vital current. One engineering expert, John Frederic La Trobe Bateman, who will appear later in his role as master reservoir builder, noted that most of the scouring took place when the ebbing tide left the sandbanks and concentrated its flow in the channels. In 1840 he proposed that a barrier be placed across the river entrance at Runicorn, creating a navigable lake stretching as far as Warrington. When the ebb was midway, the barrier could then be opened, briefly, several times a week, to flush accumulated sediment out into the ocean. This and other schemes were considered by the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company and then shelved.[53]
When the Ship Canal Bill was being prepared forty years later, its drafters faced up once again to the now much-discussed problem of how to manage tidal flow in the Mersey basin. One of the company's engineers, Hamilton Fulton, suggested that a deep, straight, tidal canal be dredged all the way to Manchester so that scour would keep both canal and estuary open. The difficulty was that such a cut (Manchester was
sixty feet above sea level) would place docks and quays far below the surrounding surface. Therefore the planners gave approval to another plan, developed by Leader Williams, who proposed to bring a set of retaining walls, with a dredged channel in between, from the Mersey at Runicorn to the middle of the estuary and by means of a series of locks and sluices to raise and control the canal waters leading to the docks at Manchester. This decision to prefer an engineered rather than a somewhat more natural form of estuarine and channel management became the sticking point between the two sides when the bill was ready in 1882.
Early the next year, committees of the Houses of Commons and Lords listened to testimony from a parade of witnesses, including most of the leading British hydraulic engineers of the time and Captain James Buchanan Eades, the extraordinarily versatile American engineer who had succeeded in keeping the mouth of the Mississippi clear for navigation. Although Eades was forced to admit that the tides affecting the Mississippi delta were comparatively weak and other experts had to concede that well-understood hydraulic principles had to be applied to entirely different sets of circumstances in each case, the weight of the argument went against the promoters. Witnesses reminded questioners that the harbor at Chester silted up because an eighteenth century navigation company had ignored the natural channel and made a "trained cut" through the Dee estuary.[54] So, on the reasoning that inactivity was the best policy when the risk of calamity was great and when the testimony of experts conflicted, Parliament refused to pass the first Ship Canal Bill.
The leader of Liverpool's resistance was Sir William Forwood, a wealthy merchant. He recalled later that he knew his cause was lost when an engineer for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board was asked what he would do to protect the bar at the entry to the estuary from silting up. In what Forwood thought an excess of professional zeal, this supposed Liverpool ally answered: "I should enter at Eastham and carry the canal along the shore until I reached Runicorn, and then I would strike inland."[55] The point having been conceded that a safe solution was possible, Williams revised his plan accordingly, thus preserving, or so he argued, existing tidal conditions.[56] Despite this concession, the battle between the experts or, more accurately, between the interest groups and their experts, continued; and it took two more bills, the expenditure of even vaster sums, and another year before Parliament gave, in 1885, its authorization to Williams's revised plan.
In a way this was a considerable success for Victorian environmental reform. Neither Parliament nor the national press was swayed by the ar-
gument that since all progress involves risk, the benefit of doubt should go to the promoter. A majority rejected the contention that a cautious response would be like saying, as one witness before a committee put it, "good-bye once and for all to the material progress of Great Britain."[57] Politicians retained a healthy skepticism about engineering expertise and evocations of professional authority. Lords and Commoners seemed to have had no inhibitions about confidently offering personal experience as evidence. Lewis MacIver, M.P., felt perfectly free to instruct the House of Commons on the strength of long experience as a participant in sailing regattas about the condition of the harbor bar and the contortions of the estuary. Since his constituency included a section of the Port of Liverpool, he could hardly have been regarded as unbiased; yet many of his colleagues must have agreed with his warning about a bill that would allow contractors to dump several million tons of stone into the Mersey when "no person in the world, whether he be an engineer or anybody else, knows what the effect would be."[58] In a special edition at the time of the canal's opening in 1894, one of the leading professional journals, Engineering , admitted that the judgment of the politicians had been the correct one and that the threat to the estuary had been real.[59]
In view of the fact that the construction of the canal depended on the participation of steam technology for its successful completion (even a steam cement mixer was experimented with)[60] and that this technology was in the process of extending in a radical way the capacity to change the character of river channels and estuaries, the often-lamented late Victorian and Edwardian wariness about engineering innovations had something to be said for it. A century after the Manchester Ship Canal project got underway, a Dutch expert on estuaries cautioned about the potential harm in constantly tampering with environments where the "see-saw" effect of experiments and the disrupting power of our modern earthmoving machines—so much more agile, mobile, and versatile than their counterparts in the steam era—are apt to upset delicate balances and do so in unpredictable ways.[61] Our present awareness of ecological complexities gives that warning additional force. Argument and pressure have caused companies and agencies to concede that care of the environment is a legitimate obligation. Yet the carrying out of great excavations remains far too serious a matter to be left to the excavators.