Dark Side of the Cut E-Book

Susan C. Law

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 465

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

There is something strangely compelling about the waterways. Isolated places on the edge of society, they have always had their own distinctive way of life and a certain shady reputation. Ever since the earliest days, canals have attracted crime, with sinister figures lurking in the shadows and bodies found floating in the water. When a brutal murder in 1839 created a national outcry, it seemed to confirm all the worst fears about boatmen – a tough breed of men surviving in harsh conditions, who were swiftly branded as outlaws by the press. Drawing on a rich collection of original sources, Dark Side of the Cut brings to life dramatic stories that are gruesome, shocking and tragic. These evocative snapshots of rough justice uncover the secret world of the waterways, revealing the real human cost of the Industrial Revolution.

Leseprobe

For the thousands of forgotten navvies who dug out the cut, and generations of decent, hard-working canal-boat families who endured a tough existence with dignity and humour, to survive the

hardships of that lost way of life.

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Susan C. Law, 2023

The right of Susan C. Law to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9331 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   Rough Justice

2   Water Gypsies

3   Murder Mysteries

4   Perks of the Job

5   Desperate Remedies

6   Dangerous Liaisons

7   The Curse of Britain

8   ‘An Atrocious Crime’

9   The Whole Truth

10  Beyond All Reasonable Doubt?

11  Intoxicating Liquor

12  Gruesome Facts

13  A Cry from the Boat Cabins

14  Gangs of Ruffians

Notes on Sources

Select Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

As you sit peacefully at a canal-side pub, sipping a cool drink in the sunshine while dappled shadows play gently across the grass, it’s hard to imagine the darker side of the water. But crime, poverty, drunkenness and violence were facts of everyday life in past centuries.

Today, canals are tranquil places to escape on a narrowboat or take a relaxing stroll along the towpath, enjoying countryside, trees and wildlife. For us they mean freedom, leisure and a chance to get away from the stresses of work. Step back in time to the early years of the waterways in nineteenth-century Britain and it was a very different story.

The canal network was the lifeblood of the Industrial Revolution and a vital trade route for goods in the new consumer society. But this expanding prosperity had its price. The dark side was crime and many sinister figures lurked in the shadows. Inside rough beer shops scattered along canal banks, the poor and desperate huddled in front of crackling log fires, drowning their sorrows in pint pots of tepid ale. Almost half of violent crime today is caused by alcohol, but in Victorian Britain, when heavy drinking was common, nine out of every ten offences were said to be committed under the influence of intoxicating liquor.

There is something strangely compelling about the waterways. Isolated places set apart on the edge of society, they have always had their own distinctive way of life and a certain shady reputation. Ever since the earliest days, canals seemed to attract crime. And often there were no witnesses. Whenever a dead body was found floating in the water, it might have been the victim of an accident, murder or suicide – there was always room for doubt.

So, facts became tangled with rumours, to create myths and intriguing murder mysteries. Colourful myths were handed down through generations about ‘the Cut’, as the canal was known, and working boatmen – roving water gypsies, who were too often condemned for their hard drinking, fighting and dishonesty – lived tough lives by their own rules. Decent, hard-working boat families found their reputation was tarnished by the crimes of a notorious rogue minority.

Canals were the silent witnesses to shocking stories of passion, tragedy, greed and revenge – smooth, untroubled waters, stretching out through bustling cities, placid villages and lonely green fields, just watching and waiting as so many different people passed by. Now you can follow the echoing footsteps of forgotten characters along the towpath and discover what life was really like back then.

1

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:

The disturbance at Barrow on Soar … has indeed been productive of the most fatal consequences; but this, it should be recollected, was among that newly-created, and so wantonly multiplied set of men, the diggers and conductors of navigations, or as they are called in the language of the country, navigators.

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:

… a singular instance of depravity, which may perhaps operate as a useful example to others. Several men employed upon the Union Canal, usually called Navigators, had stolen from a public-house in Kibworth, a keg of gin, about four gallons, and not having prudence to make a temperate use of their booty, they proceeded to drench themselves till the whole was emptied, and one of them died upon the spot … they have all been compelled to flee the country, to avoid a prosecution.

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.

†††

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 slept, and swore she glimpsed a large disembodied, white arm suspended over her bed. In another bed chamber, a large iron candlestick crossed the wooden floorboards with an eerie grinding noise, threw itself at the bedstead and fell onto the pillow. It was all very peculiar.

Thanks to a series of letters printed in the Taunton Courier from a Tiverton clergyman, describing what he had witnessed in Mr Chave’s house, the Sampford Ghost soon became a national celebrity and featured in more than 100 press reports. Some people believed it was merely a clever trick to scare off an unwanted tenant, while others said it was a deliberate hoax to con gullible visitors into paying a fee to look round the house. Newspapers vied with each other to solve the mystery for their readers and even offered a substantial cash reward to anyone who could reveal the ghost’s true identity. The Taunton Courier ridiculed ‘the pretended visitations of the monster’, and the Evening Mail in London condemned Chave as a huckster acting out a ‘vile farce’.

Meanwhile, hundreds of navvies were hard at work digging out the new Grand Western Canal, which was being cut right through the centre of Sampford Peverell. It was common practice for employers to pay them in tokens, which shopkeepers would exchange for goods or cash, although some tradesmen did not trust canal companies to redeem the tokens and would not accept them.

One Saturday, a large group assembled in Wellington, but after being refused change for their wage tokens, they started boozing and getting rowdy. On the following Monday, they went to the cattle fair at Sampford Peverell for an all-day session of heavy drinking, and by early evening 300 drunken navvies were still loitering in the village. The mood hardened suddenly when some of them recognised Mr Chave being driven home in a cart. Jeering and shouting abuse, they followed him along the road.

We don’t know exactly why the mob turned on Mr Chave. Shopkeepers were never popular with navvies anyway. Perhaps they had been overcharged for goods in his shop or been tricked into paying for one of his so-called ghost tours after dark. Perhaps they were hoping to uncover the truth about the hoax, to claim the huge reward being offered. But Mr Chave was by now a known huckster and infamous character, suspected of perpetuating a dreadful fraud. Travelling alone on the road accompanied only by his carter, he must have seemed like a natural target to a gang of aggrieved navvies in a fuddled, alcoholic haze.

Chave jumped down from the cart, dashed into his house and managed to slam the door just in time. He was followed by a hail of stones from the encroaching mob, who surrounded the carter and badly beat him. Windows were smashed and the furious navvies threatened to pull down the whole building, brick by brick. Terrified of what they might do next, Chave fired a pistol into the crowd and shot dead a navvy named George Helps. Another shot severely wounded a second man.

Eventually the mob dispersed of its own accord and returned to camp. But the Taunton Courier expressed the anger of locals, who felt they had been abandoned and left defenceless by the authorities, reporting:

It is impossible not to feel the deepest abhorrence for the proceedings of a savage ungovernable banditti, whose ferocious behaviour we hope will be visited by the heaviest punishments of the law. Let Mr Chave’s conduct have been ever so criminal, it will form not a shadow of excuse for the daring outrage of which these men have been guilty. The fate of their companions is of their own seeking, and to their conduct is it alone to be attributed. Chave has acted as most men would have done in defence of their home; nor will, or ought, the law to injure a hair of his head for the vigorous resistance he made to this attack. It is a most extraordinary circumstance that the whole neighbourhood should have been kept in a state of the greatest terror and commotion for more than twenty-four hours, and no efforts of the Police or Military made to quell the tumult. In the name of Justice, where are the Magistrates!

Predictably, Chave was not held liable for murder. At an inquest into the death of George Helps, before Devon coroner, Charles Daly Pugh, several witnesses were called to recount events leading up to the fatal shooting, but the jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide.

The mystery of the Sampford Ghost was never solved, but it lived on to haunt the imagination in a popular ballad performed in the London theatres. The unlucky navvy was buried in the village churchyard of St John’s, close to the canal he was employed on – just one forgotten casualty of a small battle, in a much larger campaign to build Britain’s waterways.

†††

In fact, he was only one of hundreds of navvies killed during the many decades of canal construction. Although the men could earn wages of 2 shillings a day in the 1790s, which was far more than farm labourers received, the work was well paid because it was physically much harder and highly dangerous.

Incredibly fit and strong, navvies worked on site for long days in appalling conditions, many clad in leaky boots and sodden clothing drenched by driving rain. Hot weather or freezing winters made things even worse. To fuel all this hard labour, they existed on huge quantities of oatmeal, bread and potatoes, washed down with 8 pints of ale every day. Using only basic picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, it was estimated that each man could move 12 cubic yards of earth and stone a day, which weighed a hefty 18 tonnes. For the impatient contractors, however, the work was never fast enough.

A total of 165 Canal Acts were approved by Parliament between 1758 and 1802, a third of which were agreed from 1792 to 1795 during a short-lived enthusiasm known as ‘canal mania’. Investors were constantly pressing canal companies to complete the work as rapidly as possible, and the safety of the workforce was not a priority. Pushed to work faster in harsh conditions, it is not surprising that serious injuries and deaths were commonplace. They were accepted merely as an inevitable part of construction and few, if any, records of accidents were kept because they were simply too numerous to count.

Some sections of canal were particularly difficult to build, and men faced the greatest danger of all in the tunnels. Probably the most ambitious and expensive project was the Blisworth Tunnel on the Grand Junction Canal, near Stoke Bruerne. Work to cut through nearly 2 miles of stone beneath the Northamptonshire hillside started in 1793, but there were a series of technical problems which engineers struggled to solve, floodwater was seeping in and the line of the tunnel veered off course due to contractors’ errors.

Then, in 1796, real disaster struck. A gang of navvies hacking away the rocky outcrop in a shadowy underground cavern, lit only by candlelight, suddenly struck quicksand with their pickaxes and the whole roof collapsed, piling tons of clay and boulders down onto them. Fourteen men were buried alive beneath the rubble. There was nothing more to be done. The ill-fated tunnel was hurriedly bricked up with the bodies inside and work stopped for the next six years.

No one can be sure what actually happened down there in the darkness, 140ft deep underground. Labourers were usually blamed for causing accidents through their own carelessness, though in many cases the contractors had clearly failed to anticipate obvious dangers or take adequate precautions to safeguard their workers. There was no chance of dubious incidents like the one at Blisworth being properly investigated, or criminal charges being brought against employers held liable for gross negligence.

In all, more than sixty men are believed to have been killed during the construction of the tunnel, which was the last section of the canal to be completed. It was eventually opened with joyful public celebrations attracting large crowds on a warm spring day in March 1805.

The Sun newspaper in London reported that the Northamptonshire Militia band struck up as canal proprietors and local dignitaries, on a procession of boats, made their way through the tunnel lit by flaming torches where ‘the company seemed lost in contemplating the stupendous efforts by which this amazing arch of brick-work … had been completed’. More than 5,000 happy, cheering people gathered to watch them emerge at Stoke Bruerne and go down the locks. Later on, more than 100 special guests sat down to an excellent dinner at the Bull Inn, Stoney Stratford, and raised their wine glasses to drink a series of toasts. ‘The utmost harmony and conviviality prevailed … till near twelve o’clock, when they broke up. All the other inns in Stoney Stratford were filled with company, and many of the parties did not separate till a late hour.’ The navvies would have loved it.

Since then, many boaters passing through the dank and eerie tunnel, its brickwork dripping with icy water, have told of ghostly happenings. Rough shouts have been heard echoing along the walls, and the glow of flickering candles has been seen lighting up a fork in the canal where the old, abandoned tunnel entrance was sealed off.

The long-gone navvies have at least won their place in canal mythology, as one Victorian traveller later wrote:

We entered Blisworth tunnel, about which all sorts of ghost stories, frightful apparitions, dreadful murders, and a thousand other things, enough to make your hair stand on end, have been said, and by the superstitious seen. Some boatmen of the present day still believe in them.

2

WATER GYPSIES

Secretly emptying a few pints from barrels of liquor was easy enough after plenty of practice. One of the hoops was deftly prised off and two small boreholes pierced in the wood to siphon out the pure spirits. Then water was poured in to refill the cask, the holes pegged up with greased cork and the hoop replaced to hide the damage. As simple as that.

Boxes and packages were just as easily plundered for sugar, china or cutlery, with stones or bricks added to make up the weight, before they were carefully retied with matching twine. Even large bales of valuable silk or wool could be tackled with a length of thick cord and a hook which pulled out pieces from the middle, while leaving the bale apparently intact.

The same furtive thieving was happening on boats all over the waterways. Sometimes in the dead of night, but usually in broad daylight, crates were being broken open and sacks of wheat, yards of cloth or parcels of just about anything were disappearing from canal boats loaded with cargoes too tempting to ignore. In fact, nothing stowed away in the hold was entirely safe from the skilful smuggling methods of old hands, who could disguise any theft, so it was not discovered until long after the goods were delivered.

Many such small, audacious acts of robbery taking place throughout the country added up to enormous losses from stolen property that could be sold on for ready cash. And the main culprits were the boatmen themselves, who soon came to be known as a rootless, lawless group of men capable of the worst sort of behaviour. Usually, they got away with it as most crimes went undetected, with only perhaps one offence in every 100 being prosecuted or even known about. Loads were passed between so many different workers that goods could go missing anywhere along the way and few thefts could ever be traced back to the true culprits.

Nineteen-year-old Benjamin Thompson and Richard Gibbert, aged 20, were among those hapless boatmen who were caught and punished, after stealing 140 yards of cloth valued at £17 10s from their boat on 29 September 1802. The package containing five pieces of printed calico was being returned by Samuel Croughton, a London dealer in bedding, to Lancashire clothmakers Jacksons in Preston, on one of the many boats run by leading canal carriers Pickfords. The material was packed up at Croughton’s by John Oliver and handed in to Pickfords’ porter John Meakin, who signed the receipt and sent it on by wagon to the warehouse clerk at Paddington, who, three days later, helped load it on board a boat at the wharf.

Boatman James Wright led the horse along the towpath pulling the boat, and about 8 miles along the canal he noticed Gibbert taking calico out of the parcel then refilling the hole with a piece of sheeting pulled off another package. At ten o’clock in the morning, they moored up at Berkhamstead to take a sick horse to the farrier, then went on to the Cow Roast public house. On the road, the boatmen met saddler William Bailey, who offered to take the animal for a good price if it did not live. Thompson asked if he might be interested in buying handkerchiefs or cloth, and that afternoon called in at his shop and offered a sample of calico for sale. The saddler became suspicious when Thompson promised to return at midnight with more cloth and he decided to tip off the local constable.

The men didn’t turn up that night, however, but appeared at the shop door before six o’clock next morning, when William Bailey quietly gave his assistant the nod to run and fetch the constable. Gibbert waited outside, while Wright and Thompson were taken into a small back room, where they initially agreed to sell all the calico ‘by the lump’ for £4, plus a pot of beer apiece. Gibbert then insisted it had to be 4 guineas. Pretending to go along with the deal, William Bailey said he would meet them at a public house with the cash, and the boatmen set off to feed their horses.

Shortly afterwards, Bailey and the constable apprehended the felons on their way back from the pub. At a brief hearing in the Old Bailey criminal court on 12 January 1803, Croughton’s clerk, George Bateman, was able to identify the calico because the official crown mark required by the custom house had been omitted by mistake on those pieces. Gibbert denied everything and merely said in his defence, ‘I know nothing about it, but am innocent. Thompson asked me to go and drink with him, I went, and we were coming down the town, when they took me along with him.’

Both men were found guilty of grand larceny and sentenced to seven years’ transportation overseas. It was a common sentence for thefts even that small and was supposed to deter other would-be offenders. Wright was not charged with any crime, probably because he gave evidence against the others. Although he did admit to carrying one of the bundles of stolen calico, he swore rather unconvincingly in the witness box that he never had any intention of sharing in the money.

Plenty of other thefts did not turn out quite as planned. A barge master and his four crew, working the Paddington Canal, were all charged with the theft of valuable fine china from their boat on its way to London from the Spode manufactory at Stoke-on-Trent. When the crates were unloaded, they had obviously been tampered with, and the stolen china was found hidden in the cabin.

By the early 1800s, canal boatmen had become notorious for dishonesty, flagrant acts of theft and rough behaviour. Like the navvies, they too had to be tough characters to survive on the waterways where relentless hard work and punishingly long hours were the norm. There were also constant time pressures to contend with, as men were only paid on delivery of the cargo, so violent punch-ups would often erupt whenever boats were held up at tunnels and locks, and after fighting it out, the toughest crews went through first.

Derbyshire clergyman, Reverend Stebbing Shaw, writing about a memorable journey by candlelight through the tunnel beneath Harecastle Hill on the Trent & Mersey, vividly described the oaths and curses of boatmen carrying coal that he encountered:

The voices of the workmen from the mines were rude and awful, and to be present at their quarrels, which sometimes happen when they meet, and battle for a passage, must resemble greatly the ideas we may form of the regions of Pluto.

In Greek myth, Pluto was the god of the underworld, which was said to be separated from the kingdom of the living by a river, and Reverend Shaw’s words conjure up a powerful image of the canal as a forbidding otherworldly realm inhabited by ruffians.

On wharfs there could also be tussles over who unloaded first, and angry disputes with toll collectors or lock-keepers often led to assaults. One canal company agent who had to deal with boatmen on a daily basis, at the busy Braunston Wharf on the Grand Junction in Northamptonshire, summed them up as a ‘vile set of rogues’.

There was widespread criticism of the boatmen’s unruly behaviour, and they were condemned not only as habitual thieves, but for their general lifestyle, drinking, brutality and ‘decided wickedness’. This bad reputation gradually worsened over the years, until eventually a crime would take place that was so shocking it seemed to confirm all the worst fears about the waterways.

†††

From the earliest times, boatmen working on the rivers traditionally had a bad name, and this ill repute seems to have been passed down to canal men. A popular ballad entitled Will the Waterman recounted a sorry tale of lowlife robbery to impress a cunning harlot, in which young Will confessed:

I went a thieving night and day, to maintain her fine and brave,

All I could get I valu’d not, to her I freely gave.

At last to Newgate I was sent, fast bound in fetters strong,

About my heels they do remain, she laughs to see me wrong.

The ballad ended with Will repenting of his wrongdoing:

I shall be reckon’d a Newgate bird among the boatmen all,

And to jeer me will be the word, among both great and small.

I must needs own the fact is true, dear brothers all, I pray,

Pity the folly of my youth, that first led me astray.

The first boatmen came onto the waterways from many different backgrounds. Some were farmers, labourers, carters or navvies who stayed to work on the cut, and some had previously been river boatmen. But as more boats needed more crew, hirers could not afford to be choosy, employing unsavoury characters wanting casual labour and men escaping justice by working on the hoof. Of course, there were still many decent, hard-working boatmen, but unfairly, they all came to be seen as a disreputable and separate underclass living outside society – outlaws.

This was particularly true when the original slow boats carrying iron and coal were joined in the 1790s by flyboats, the fast non-stop delivery service of goods between ports, towns and cities. One of the largest flyboat companies was run by the Pickford family, who had built up a successful road transport business as waggoners, before moving onto the waterways with their distinctive boats marked with a diamond painted on the sides. Starting with ten vessels in 1795, Pickfords rapidly expanded the fleet to nearly 100 boats and established a London base at Paddington with extensive wharfs and warehouses.

Flyboats were manned by crews of four who did shifts around the clock, taking turns to snatch a few hours’ sleep in the cabin. They travelled long distances using relays of horses to pull the boat, working seven days a week and fifteen or more hours a day.

Boatmen had their own jargon of slang words which were heavily laced with expletives, using terms such as ‘down a thick and through the ’ole’, which meant to travel down a flight of locks then under a bridge, and to ‘bell oil’, something which meant the boat had hit it hard.

According to popular mythology, boatmen were of Romany Gypsy blood and had left their colourful painted caravans for life on the cut. They soon became known as water gypsies, but although little evidence supported such romantic ideas about their origins, the folklore persisted. Perhaps it was because of a certain intriguing mystique attached to boatmen with their distinctive clothes, wooden horse-drawn boats and roaming lifestyle. They were a secretive and rootless set of men travelling freely about the country at a time when most people rarely ventured further than the nearest market town. Inevitably, they were regarded with suspicion, as outsiders who could not be trusted.

Casual poaching and petty thefts from farmland alongside canals were regular occurrences. They took poultry, turnips, grass or clover for horse fodder, clothes left outside to dry, and there were even reports of boatmen milking farmers’ cows in fields at night. Only a small minority of unlucky culprits were apprehended, like the bargeman Edward Crawford, who was committed to Oxford Gaol in January 1803, charged with stealing six geese from Binley in the city suburbs, the property of Samuel Seckham. We don’t know his fate, but those convicted of theft could expect extremely harsh sentences.

Petty larceny cases involving goods worth less than a shilling were usually tried at local quarter sessions courts and could be punished with a maximum sentence of transportation. Where goods valued at more than 1 shilling were stolen, the offence was deemed to be grand larceny, which could bring the death penalty, although courts had substantial discretion in sentencing.

Boatman John Peggs and 10-year-old Thomas Key were convicted of stealing hay worth 3 shillings from a field in Chelsey, 2 miles from Paddington. Farmer Joseph Smith had employed a watchman after repeatedly having his crops stolen, and one June night the boatmen were seen taking a large haycock and loading it into their barge, which was moored on the canal. The pair were found guilty and, as the age of criminal responsibility was then 7 years old, there was no special leniency for the boy. Both were sentenced to be confined in the House of Correction for one year and publicly whipped. Whipping was a typical punishment for minor crimes like this, with felons being stripped down to the waist and flogged at a public whipping post.

In another case, bargemaster John Morgan, aged 20, and his three boat hands, Richard Chapman, Joseph Cook and Joseph Daniels, were all charged with feloniously stealing six live geese, valued at £1 5s, and two goslings, valued at 6 shillings, on 2 August 1808. The geese were kept by farmer William Mason, who lived a mile from the canal at Hillingdon in Middlesex, with his sister, Elizabeth Cox, and her husband. Mrs Cox was woken between two and three o’clock in the morning by the noise of geese in the barnyard, and jumped out of bed, calling to her brother that they were being stolen. William Mason ran outside to find the gates were open, six geese missing and a trail of footprints leading down to a barge on the water.

At six o’clock the Hillingdon constable, William Read, tracked four sets of prints, some of bare feet, down to the canal and noticed traces of geese dung and feathers on the boat. Some fowls and ducks were lying on deck. The men were at breakfast and Morgan, the bargemaster, said he was welcome to search the fore cabin as he was sure there was nothing there.

The constable later described the violent tussle that ensued when he had handcuffed Morgan and boat hand Joseph Cook:

… made use of desperate words [and] said he did not mind two or three men; I took hold of his collar; he kicked me on my legs and kicked me on my private parts; I told him I would chop his head off if he resisted any more; after I secured him I broke open the cabin and there I found eight live geese, one hen and three or four ducks.

The boatmen were examined by the magistrate then locked up in the cells at Uxbridge, where they tried to bribe the constable by offering cash if he would get them off. At nine o’clock that night, another constable took the prisoners some beer, bread and cheese for supper, locked the cell door and stood outside to listen, where he overheard one of the boatmen say to another, ‘If it had not been for your bare feet, they would not have found us in the morning.’

At their trial on 14 September, none of the accused men called character witnesses in their defence. Daniels was found not guilty, but the other three were sentenced to be transported overseas for seven years.

Pilfering cargoes could be safely done, with little risk of being spotted, anywhere on a quiet stretch of canal with no passers-by or nearby houses. Boatmen regularly bartered buckets of coal and other goods with friendly lock-keepers in exchange for a few loaves of bread, a bag of plums or perhaps a pot of home-made jam. Theft of coal was particularly common as it could readily be sold to cottagers, public houses or other acquaintances they met along the route.

Canal companies were aware of the many different fiddles being carried out and tried various measures to clamp down on the practices, usually without much success. Some lock-keepers on the Thames & Severn Canal were known to be an easy touch, with boatmen buying their silence in return for gifts of alcoholic drink or meat, while at Birmingham an official notice was sent out warning that ‘lock-keepers be not permitted upon any occasion to take coals for their own use off any of the Boats upon pain of being prosecuted’.

Small cottages were scattered along canals at flights of locks, built by each canal company to house its lock-keepers and their families. They had their own cottage gardens where they grew vegetables and fruit trees, kept a few poultry or pigs. Lock-keepers had to ensure waterway traffic stayed on the move, and to do so, they were on call to open lock gates at any time of day or night. After dark, they could keep a lookout for boats through a narrow, slit window set in the bedroom wall.

They were responsible for water control, maintaining canal property and preventing damage to the heavy wooden lock gates by impatient boatmen who crashed their boats into them or smashed gates against stone lock walls. This was a criminal offence, which could be prosecuted, and the Birmingham Canal Company sternly reminded its staff:

You are expected to see the Passage of every Boat through the Locks under your care and in case of any damage … occasioned by the negligence of any of the Boatmen … that you do (on pain of dismission) … report the same that the offenders may be dealt with according to Law.

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There was bound to be constant friction between salaried canal company officials trying to enforce the rules and tired, angry boatmen in a hurry to reach their destination where they were paid. Many of the problems, the brawls and illegal activities, were undoubtedly caused by heavy drinking. Drunkenness was an inevitable part of working-class culture, as London magistrate Patrick Colquhoun noted in 1803:

As the too prevalent habit of drunkenness among the lower classes of the people produces much misery and distress, both to themselves and families, … while this vice tends not only to the corruption of morals, but to the commission of many criminal offences, it is the bounden duty of all constables to admonish those persons who are particularly addicted to this evil habit.

Originally a merchant in the Glasgow linen trade, Patrick Colquhoun later moved to London and became a magistrate for Middlesex. He was an energetic campaigner for legal reform, producing a series of influential pamphlets on social problems, which included economic and crime statistics to support his arguments. Drawing on his experience in the courtroom, he was certain that alcohol consumption corrupted morals, health and family life, and frequently led to criminal offences.

Colquhoun proposed radical new guidelines for publicans to help curb unruly behaviour in public houses and disorderly alehouses. To discourage apprentices, journeymen and labourers from loitering away their time, he wanted a ban on unlawful taproom games such as cards, dice, shuffleboard, draughts, four corners, bumble puppy and ringing at the bull.

Colquhoun suggested that constables should regularly visit licensed houses ‘to see that good rule and order are kept … that the labouring people are not suffered to lounge and tipple until they are intoxicated’. All publicans were advised that premises should not stay open later than 11 p.m., and they should not harbour reputed thieves, rogues, vagabonds, common prostitutes or loose, idle and abandoned characters.

Alcohol was well known to cause social problems, but concerns about drunkenness were nothing new and had been around at least two centuries earlier. In the early seventeenth century, six different Acts of Parliament were passed to regulate alehouses and tackle excessive drinking by strengthening the licensing laws which were enforced by magistrates. A pamphlet published back in 1628 voiced fears that a huge increase in the number of alehouses was creating mass drunkenness and disorder in society. Titled A Monster Late Found Out and Discovered, it estimated that London had 122 churches but more than 3,000 alehouses, ‘wherein the devil is daily served and honoured’.

As the population grew rapidly, so too did the number of outlets for alcohol. Licensed premises included large inns and posting houses used by travellers from coaches and wagons, taverns or houses of entertainment, hotels for lodging strangers, coffee houses, tea gardens licensed to sell ale, common alehouses and liquor shops selling only spirits.

By 1806, there were an estimated 50,000 licensed alehouses ‘constantly holding out seductive lures to the labouring classes, in every part of the country’. London had one pub to every thirty-seven families living in the neighbourhood. Because there was so much competition for trade, some publicans resorted to any means necessary to attract customers:

Thieves, burglars, highwaymen, pick-pockets and common prostitutes are harboured and encouraged; low games are introduced, and every device resorted to, which can excite a disposition to expend money, producing intoxication, quarrels, lewdness and every species of profligacy.

Ironically, a mini crimewave swept through alehouses in London and the surrounding villages, with customers habitually stealing the pewter pots they were drinking from. Vast numbers of these small thefts added up to £100,000 annually in stolen tankards, and landlords lobbied Parliament for tax relief to offset their losses. Colquhoun said these astonishing figures were ‘shocking proof of the vast extent of petty offences and the depraved state of morals in vulgar life’. He criticised the ‘habit among the labouring people, in every district in England and Wales, of spending the chief part of their leisure time in alehouses’.

All these drinkers consumed a staggering quantity of alcohol. In London alone, tipplers paying 5d a pot consumed roughly 1.2 million barrels of porter and ale in 1806, totalling £3.5 million. (It is difficult to calculate comparative values, but that is loosely equivalent to more than £210 million today.) In addition to the pints of ale, glasses of home-made spirits totalling £5 million were knocked back and a further £12 million worth of beer was purchased from public houses.

Boatmen were no different to other working men, and regularly stopped for a few pints by the fireside at one of the many canal-side inns with stabling for their horses. They enjoyed a drink, but it’s fair to say that, like many others, they probably felt they needed the solace of alcohol to cope with the daily grind. Up at dawn, outside in all seasons, often working in pouring rain, dank fog or bitterly cold conditions, it could be a wretched and miserable existence with few comforts to look forward to, especially during the bleak winter months.

They trudged miles along muddy towpaths every day, leading the plodding horses on monotonous journeys they had made many times before. Only the dull thud of hooves and creaking leather harness broke the silence. At lock flights they uncoiled freezing ropes with numb, calloused fingers and wearily pushed solid oak beams to open immense, darkly dripping lock gates.

In tunnels, the boat had to be ‘legged’ through by two men lying flat on their backs with their boots on the side wall or roof, stepping slowly along in the gloom, sometimes for an hour or more. Equally tiring was ‘shafting’ the boat through a tunnel, using a long pole to press against the brick wall. On arrival at the wharf, boatmen were expected to unload their own heavy cargoes and on flyboats they immediately loaded up the hold with more goods and set off once again.

Although flyboat captains and master boatmen were well paid, for ordinary boat hands it was relentless hard, physical work on low wages, like most labouring jobs. But the constant travelling also meant that crews were only rarely able to visit their homes and families on land. Habitual drinking became a way of life to help men get through long working hours in harsh conditions. While boatmen put up with a grim existence, flyboats delivered welcome new prosperity to many other, more fortunate people.

3

MURDER MYSTERIES

It was warm and smoky in the Spotted Dog at Westbourne Green, a cosy refuge from the winter chill, and the public house was crowded one morning a few weeks before Christmas in 1802. The low hum of voices, with occasional bursts of laughter, rose above the noisy clatter of dishes and pewter pots.

A log fire was crackling in the broad stone hearth, blackened with soot, as George Foster sat at a table with his wife Jane and their baby daughter, tucking into plates of tasty beefsteak and sipping mugs of beer. A tall, well-built man of 32 years old, George was well paid as a skilled coachmaker in a respectable job and could afford to treat them both to a good dinner. Landlady Eleanor Winter noticed Jane, wearing an old, black bonnet and black gown, who seemed to be in very low spirits. She had been crying and was overheard saying to her husband, ‘I have been here three times after a man who owes you money, and I am disappointed; I am determined I will never come again.’

The couple stayed there for over two hours and drank a large glass of rum each to keep out the cold. At around 1 p.m. they left the pub, setting off along the Paddington Canal, through the countryside and out of London. By now, it was little more than 4 degrees above freezing. After a 2-mile walk, they were shivering and weary when they reached the Mitre Tavern, built in a peaceful rural setting by the canal, opposite the solitary green expanse of Wormwood Scrubs Common.

The family arrived at 2 p.m. and spent several hours in the tavern, where they were served with a quartern of rum, and two more pints of porter beer with some bread and cheese. It was almost dark at 4.30 p.m. as they were leaving on that bleak afternoon, and the temperature was plummeting. Jane carefully wrapped up 9-month-old Louisa, who was dressed in a little straw bonnet and white bedgown. As they were going out, she threw her thin shawl over the baby for added warmth and said, ‘This is the last time I shall ever come here.’

A minute or two later, George returned to the pub to look for a shoe which he said had dropped from his baby’s foot, but it could not be found anywhere, and he followed Jane out into the darkness along the muddy canal bank. It was bitterly cold by the murky water. And very quiet.

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The next morning, around eight o’clock, bargeman John Atkins was travelling on the canal when he made the terrible discovery of a baby’s small, frozen body beneath the bow of his boat, about a mile from the Mitre. He quickly raised the alarm and Sir Richard Ford, the magistrate, ordered him to drag the canal. It took three days of searching before a woman’s body was found wedged in beneath the window of the Mitre Tavern, entangled in the branches of a loose bush.

The two bodies were identified and eventually the authorities tracked down George to tell him that his wife and child were dead. He explained that he last saw Jane walking away along the canal on Sunday, 5 December, and when they said goodbye, ‘she was a little in liquor’. They parted ways, as she was going to her mother’s lodgings, and he intended to start out on the long journey to Barnet. Despite his indignant protests of innocence, he was arrested and taken into custody at the Brown Bear public house in Bow Street. Here, the cellars were used to hold prisoners awaiting trial, as it was conveniently sited opposite the office of the city’s magistrates and courthouse, just north of the River Thames.

What really happened out there on the deserted and muddy canal bank that winter afternoon? Could Jane simply have had an accident, slipping on the wet ground after the showery rain of the day before? Perhaps she stumbled in the dark, trying to clutch the baby tightly to her chest, and feeling more than a little tipsy after several hours drinking a potent alcoholic mix of rum and the popular dark, strong beer known as porter. Was it a case of murder, maybe even suicide, or just a tragic accident? Was her husband, in fact, completely innocent?

When George’s employer, the coachmaker James Bushnell, heard the shocking news of the arrest, he went straight over to Bow Street to see if there was anything he could do to help. George said, if it was not too much trouble, he would thank him to find a witness who could provide an alibi for the Sunday afternoon and establish his innocence.

On Tuesday, 28 December, the Morning Chronicle reported that George Foster appeared before magistrates at the Public Office in Bow Street, along with several witnesses who had seen the couple together on the day of the tragedy, noting, ‘He has a most excellent character with respect to his sobriety, humanity, good nature, and in every other respect, was considered as a very harmless man.’ There were clearly many questions that needed to be answered, and after the hearing he was committed for further examination.

Early in the new year of 1803, a brief paragraph appeared in the Sun: ‘George Foster, in custody on charge of suspicion of murdering his wife and child, was brought to the Office, underwent a final examination, and was committed for trial at the ensuing Sessions.’

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Ten days later, on Friday, 14 January, George was on trial at the Old Bailey criminal court, charged with the wilful murder of his wife and infant child by throwing them into the Paddington Canal, where they drowned. He stood silently in the dock of the packed courtroom as prosecution counsel Mr Knowles addressed the jury with his opening remarks, saying the charge was one of the most awful that could be brought against any human being. He told jurors that ‘no distinct fact would be proved against him’ and there was no direct evidence of the crime, but he stressed that circumstantial evidence was often the most convincing sort to prove guilt.

The first witness to be called was the victim’s mother, Mrs Hobart, who said her daughter had been living with her at lodgings in Old Boswell Court since November. Before that, Jane had been forced to go into the workhouse, where her baby was born, because she was separated from her husband. The couple had four children – one who was dead, two now in the workhouse at Barnet and baby Louisa, who drowned. Jane usually went to stay with him every Saturday night. She left for his lodgings just before four o’clock that Saturday and never returned.

The rocky marriage was confirmed by Joseph Bradfield, at whose house George lodged in North Row, near the wealthy area of Grosvenor Square. He said that from the manner in which the couple spoke to one another, they appeared not to be on good terms, because Jane wanted to live with her husband again. The deceased used to call round once or twice in the week, besides every Saturday evening, he supposed for the purpose of getting some of the week’s wages. He remembered she arrived with her child and slept there on 4 December. Next morning, they breakfasted and went out together about ten o’clock and George returned alone between eight and nine o’clock that night.

The waiter at the Mitre, John Goff, recalled how he had stood at the kitchen window and watched the Fosters walk from the tavern towards London on that side of the canal where there was no footpath, which was rather an unusual way. They had no clock in the house, but he had no doubt of the time because it began to grow dark. The Mitre’s landlady, Hannah Patience, recollected serving drinks to the couple and said they left about half-past four, as far as she could judge.

A little girl of 9 years old, Sarah Daniel, was called into the witness box and recounted how she went to the Mitre to buy a candle for her master on that Sunday. She met the prisoner with a woman carrying a child in her arms, walking along the banks of the canal. Could it have been three o’clock? No, she was certain it could not be so early, as it was nearly dark and so late in the evening that the people were at tea.

Charles Weild, who worked in the coachmaker’s shop with George, said they met on the Sunday evening in question, at about half-past six o’clock in Oxford Street, and went to the Horse Grenadier public house for a drink. While they were chatting, he asked, ‘Why can’t you live happy with your wife, as I do with mine?’ and George replied that he should never live with her again. He made no mention of having been with his wife that day and did not seem to be flurried.