|
ADMINISTRATION:
|
The
Manchester
Ship Canal
The
Proposal for a Canal to Manchester
By the latter half
of the 19th century, Manchester had become a major industrial city.
It was a fast growing city; the population of the Manchester region
had risen from an estimated 322,00 in 1801 to over 1 million by 1850,
and would rise to over 2 million people by 1901. Not only was the Lancashire
cotton industry (in which many of these people worked) expanding, but
the city had developed a leading technology in the engineering and manufacture
of machinery for textile production. Its growing population also needed
feeding and servicing. Yet,
because it was a landlocked city, all goods had to be transported by
road or rail to Liverpool docks in order to be exported abroad, and
incoming goods were delivered by the same route.
Daniel Adamson,
Lord Egerton of Tatton
and Thomas Walker
Liverpool tolls
and harbour dues were prohibitive and significantly reduced profitability.
Mancunian businessmen had long objected to Liverpool's commercial monopolies,
and of the stranglehold which that city's port authorities held on Manchester
trade.
Oldham merchants were quoted as saying that it was cheaper to send their
goods the 100 miles by road to the port of Hull on the east coast than
to transport them the 35 miles to Liverpool and have to pay exorbitant
harbour dues and levies.
Manchester Ship Canal
Aerial Photo Courtesy of www.webbaviation.co.uk © 2008
Construction
of the Manchester Ship Canal
Although some goods
were still transported by narrowboats on the Bridgewater Canal, the
railways had largely taken over this function by the 1850s. In the 1890s,
however, Manchester was to come up with a radical new proposal to connect
it directly to the sea by a new man-made canal - the Manchester Ship
Canal. After the depression of the late 1870s and mid-1880s it's construction
would be seen as a sign of the city's long overdue economic revival.
The depression had been as a result of Union blockades on cotton supplies
in from the southern states in the American Civil War, and the resultant
cotton-starvation experienced by the cotton mills of the Manchester
region.
The first
moves to make the idea a reality were made when Daniel
Adamson, a leading local industrialist, called a meeting
to form the Manchester Ship Canal Company on 1st January 1882 at his
home at "The Towers" in Didsbury. As a result, a committee was formed
to obtain parliamentary permission for the project. It
was to take three attempts over the next few years to secure the passage
of the Manchester Ship Canal Bill through parliament, and this was followed
by a great celebration in the city, with a huge procession to Belle
Vue and an ox-roasting at Eccles. A great deal of civic pride rested
on the success of the project.
The company
needed to raise £5million before work could begin, and this was raised
by floating a share issue. Construction began in November 1887, when
the first turf was ceremonially cut at Eastham by the new chairman,
Lord Egerton of Tatton. Earlier
that year, Adamson had resigned as chairman, and was to die shortly
afterwards. The project contractor was Thomas Walker, an experienced
and celebrated civil engineer who had already been involved in the building
of the Severn Tunnel for the Great Western Railway Company. He estimated
it would take 4½ years to complete at a cost of £5¼million. His estimates
were to be far from realistic, however, and the canal would eventually
cost over £15million by the time of its opening in 1894. Navvies' wages
alone accounted for over £1,000,000.
Walker's death before
its completion also caused a severe loss of confidence in the company
and the withdrawal of many financial backers, so that the Manchester
City Council had to step in with another £5million, and take over 51%
of the Ship Canal Company shares. The construction of the canal was
fraught with many other problems - particularly with the boggy ground
and the bad weather, which halted work on numerous occasions through
flooding.
But construction
methods were to be state of the art, with new machines and devices employed
alongside the army of "navvies" (an abbreviation of "navigators" - the
men and boys who dug the canal). Equipment included over 100 steam excavators,
7 earth dredgers, 6,300 railway wagons, 173 locomotives, 124 steam cranes
and a workforce of 16,000 men and boys. Several
major engineering feats were accomplished to deal with the several railway
lines which crossed the canal - many bridges had to be reconstructed
or raised to allow headroom for large ships to pass beneath. At Salford,
the Barton Swing Aqueduct was built to allow the Bridgewater Canal to
pass over it, as was the Swing Road Bridge at Salford Quays.
The
Expansion and Success of the Ship Canal
Barton Road Bridge
and Trafford Road Bridge were closest to Manchester, and were originally
swung by means of hydraulic power. In recent times three new bridges
have been built across the Ship Canal : Barton High Level which carries
the M60 Motorway, the Thelwall Viaduct, carrying the M6 and the Widnes-Runcorn
Link Bridge.
East of Warrington,
the canal joins the River Irwell, and the two become one waterway from
there to the Mersey estuary. Dock facilities needed to be constructed
at various points along the canal, and some of these are still operational,
though the ones nearer to Manchester have long since ceased to be used.
The lower
reaches of the canal are still quite busy today, particularly around
the huge Queen Elizabeth II Dock at Eastham, which handles ships delivering
at its large oil tanker terminal. From the outset, it had been decided
to dig the canal deep enough to allow passage of large ocean liners,
on the same principle as the Suez Canal, and that its depth could be
increased when necessary by dredging. It was said that up unto the Second
World War there were only six ships in the world too big to use the
Ship Canal.
Six locks
were installed to raise ships some 60 feet 6 inches over its 35.5 miles
- at Port Sunlight-Eastham, Latchford, Irlam, Barton and Mode Wheel
at Salford. Port Sunlight Lock connected the Ship Canal to the tidal
channel of the River Mersey, and acted as a control stop lock, so that
vessels moored above the lock could remain afloat even when the tide
was out.
It was also
the home of the Lever Brothers factory where soap and detergent products
were manufactured. The factory exported some 1600 tons of Sunlight Soap
a week through the Ship Canal. Before the construction of the Ship Canal,
Eastham had been a popular day trip venue for the people of Liverpool,
and it was known for its beautiful gardens - the canal in some ways
made it more accessible, particularly after the construction of the
pier in 1874 and the running of regular services from Liverpool.
In other ways, the
canal sounded the death knell of Eastham as a tourist resort, as it
became the focus of large commercial seagoing traffic, and its character
of "the Richmond of the Mersey" was lost. Besides export goods, Manchester
had become a major centre for the distribution of imported food and
raw materials - hence its Corn Exchange and its Coal Exchange. While
the Ship Canal had been primarily intended as a means of reviving the
ailing cotton trade, it actually promoted Manchester engineering, and
became a major attraction to food and raw material importers.
Most of Britain's grain and corn imports came via the Manchester Ship
Canal. By 1914 the Canal had secured 5% of all UK imports, and over
4% of domestic exports. The city had also built many large warehouses
to store these goods in transit, and a great deal of employment and
commerce had been created in the storage trade. The 20th century has
seen the Manchester Ship Canal fare well and worse. One major factor
in its success was Trafford Park Industrial Estate. This large park
through which the canal passes directly, is so strategically placed
on the south-western approaches to the Cities of Salford and Manchester,
that it has seen many companies locating, or relocating their industries
in Trafford, due in no small part to the canal, its direct accessibility
to the sea, and thereafter to the whole world. Apart from the predictable
textile companies, Trafford Park saw the arrival of food production,
vehicle manufacture, electronics and brewing companies.
The British
Westinghouse Electric Company bought up a huge tract of the park to
establish the largest engineering works in the UK; the Co-operative
Wholesale Society (the CWS) located its distribution warehouses in the
estate; a Ford Motor Car factory was situated there from 1910 and for
many years before relocating to Dagenham; Kelloggs (of Corn Flakes fame)
still have a major processing plant in Trafford; Hovis Bread and Brook
Bond Tea is still produced there. Engineering works included the manufacture
of the Manchester Bomber, and later over 1000 Lancaster Bombers in World
War Two, as well as the Rolls Royce Merlin engines which powered fighter
planes like the Spitfire. The Ship Canal and the Manchester Docks had
become vital components in the success of Manchester commerce and industry.
The
20th Century Decline of the Manchester Ship Canal
When the canal reaches
Manchester (or more properly Salford) it enters a web of quays and jetties.
The old Salford-Manchester Docks disappeared in the early 1970s, in
the wake of improved road, air and rail freight systems, and over the
past few decades, as Manchester has ceased to be the strong centre of
manufacturing that it used to be, the canal has fallen largely into
disuse. The docks were redeveloped as Salford Quays, a large, prestigious
inner city regenerative project of quality waterside housing, enterprise
zone, entertainment and recreational complexes, and light industry.
Ironically, it had been the Ship Canal which had made possible the boom
in exports of Manchester-made textile machinery, and it was this in
itself which was to be responsible for its own decline. The importation
of cheaper foreign textiles in the 1950s and 60s, often made on machines
which originated in Manchester, was to render local production uneconomic,
and as the mills began to shut down around Lancashire, the need for
the canal declined with it. In the 1960s, the gradual opening of more
fast through-route motorways made road transportation easier and cost
effective, and the development of the World Air Freight Terminal at
Manchester Airport was to be a tough competitor. The last nail in the
coffin of the Manchester Ship Canal was the introduction of containerised
freight transportation. New
container systems were introduced in British coastal ports and docks,
and Manchester lost out in this modernisation - it did not have the
space to store large numbers of containerised goods at the waterside,
which the system demanded - the Ship Canal had simply outlived its usefulness.
It remains today as a tribute to Victorian Manchester's engineering
ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, and the farsightedness which inspired
its native industrialists.
Sources: See
Bibliography - Books about Manchester
See Also:
|
