James Brindley
The greatest enthusiast in favour of artificial navigations that ever existed.
J. Phillips, A General History of Inland Navigation, 1792.
If the Duke of Bridgewater was the ‘father of canals’, then James Brindley‡ was the ‘midwife’, for he was certainly the man who brought the duke’s conception into the world. But somehow, the idea of Brindley as anything but a rough, down-to-earth engineer seems ludicrous, so it is probably as well to settle for calling him the first great canal engineer.
James Brindley was born in 1716 near the hamlet of Tunstead in the Peak District of Derbyshire. The family was poor, partly because the father was rather more interested in sport than in work, and was frequently lured away by the dubious delights of the bull ring about 3 miles from their home. As soon as he was old enough, the boy was set to work. He received no formal schooling of any sort, apart from a little rudimentary instruction from his mother. In 1733 he was bound to a seven-year apprenticeship to a wheelwright and millwright, Abraham Bennet of Sutton, near Macclesfield.
The millwrights’ training was well suited to a career in engineering, and many of the eighteenth-century engineers, including Rennie, began in this way. There was no acknowledged engineering profession, so the millwright who had to be a self-sufficient workman in wood and metal, and had to develop a considerable practical experience with a variety of engines and mechanical devices, was as good a master as any. In theory, the apprentice learned his trade from the master – but in Brindley’s case the master preferred drinking to teaching and the job of instruction was passed on to his journeymen who were too often away working to bother about the boy. Consequently, Brindley found himself being given work which he had no idea how to perform and which no one had the time or the patience to teach him. At first he made a mess of everything he tried, and was cursed by his master. But Brindley hung on, teaching himself by quietly watching and copying until he became a competent craftsman. Probably, this period of his life left a lasting mark on his character – he became a solitary worker, unwilling or unable to learn from others, preferring to solve problems on his own and in his own way.
James Brindley poses with a surveying instrument with, inevitably, the Barton Aqueduct in the background. (City Museums, Stoke-on-Trent)
His first major job as a millwright came when he was employed on a small silk-mill near Macclesfield. Very much to the surprise of his master, he completed the work perfectly, and at the celebration when the job was finished, James Milner, the superintendent of the mill, showed his good judgement or clairvoyance by prophesying that Brindley would soon be a better workman than any of the others, which no doubt pleased Brindley, but could hardly have endeared him to his workmates.
Soon afterwards, Brindley gave a convincing demonstration of his ability to take in details of quite complex machinery and carry those details around in his head without the benefit of any written notes or diagrams.
‘His master having been employed to build an engine paper-mill, which was the first of the kind that had been attempted in those parts, went to see one of them at work, as a model to copy after. But notwithstanding this, when he had begun to build the mill, and prepare the wheels, the people of the neighbourhood were informed … that Mr Bennet was throwing his employer’s money away, and could not complete what he had undertaken. Mr Brindley, hearing of this report, was resolved to see the mill intended to be copied: accordingly, without mentioning his intentions, he set out on a Saturday evening, after working the day, travelled fifty miles on foot, took a view of the mill, and returned back in time for his work on Monday morning, informed Mr Bennet wherein he had been deficient, and completed the engine to the entire satisfaction of the proprietors.’
Phillips, op. cit.
Making allowances for the way in which stories tend to grow when related about famous men – a hundred-mile walk and a full engineering survey all in one weekend sounds a little excessive – it still shows that Brindley was a remarkable young man. His master, Bennet, obviously thought so, for soon afterwards he wisely retired to his bottle and left Brindley alone to run the whole shop. When Bennet died, Brindley was an experienced millwright, and set off for Leek in Staffordshire, where he began his own business in 1742. At that time, the local potters were just beginning to use flint in their manufacturing process, and Brindley found himself well and profitably occupied in building flint mills for the new ‘flint potters’ such as John and Thomas Wedgwood. He began to gain a reputation not only as an efficient workman, but also as an ingenious inventor, so that when the proprietors of the Clifton coal mines found they had difficulties in draining their pits, they called in Brindley. He solved the problem by constructing a 600-yard underground channel, along which the water was drawn by a waterwheel powered by the River Irwell. It was, in a way, Brindley’s first canal.
His reputation grew steadily and spread beyond the Staffordshire potters and their neighbours. In 1755 he was asked by Patterson of London to build the big wheels for their new silk mill at Congleton in Cheshire. When he arrived he found work had already started. The ‘engineer’ in charge of the mechanical construction took a very poor view of Brindley, whom he described as a ‘common mechanic’, and refused even to let him see the plans. As the engineer in question had himself been unable to make any sense of the plans or to devise any way in which to make the machinery work, his high-handed attitude seemed merely absurd. Brindley complained, the engineer said either he went or Brindley went, and the engineer went. Brindley then took over, built the machines, which worked perfectly, and even suggested some improvements of his own. His reputation went up another notch.
About this time, Brindley became interested in the new atmospheric engines that were just coming into use. He went over to Wolverhampton, inspected a Newcomen engine, then came home and, as usual, decided he could do as well himself, if not better. In 1756 he received a commission to construct an engine for a Mr Broade. He began by trying, somewhat disastrously, to build an engine with wooden cylinders. But he continued, doing everything himself, until he started to get something more like a working engine. It took about a year to complete and was not an outstanding success. The trials began in November 1757 with eight days of ‘Bad louk’; a little more tinkering by Brindley and he was able to record ‘Midlin louk’; but it was not until March of the following year that he was able to write, triumphantly, ‘Engon at woork 3 days’, to be followed a little later by ‘driv a-Heyd!’ Although the engine gave him trouble, he was sufficiently pleased with the results to start work on a second, and then to apply for a Patent for his design.
In the midst of his work on steam engines, he was approached with the first proposal regarding canals. He was asked by Lord Gower to survey a possible line for a canal from the Trent to the Mersey. As far as one can see, Brindiey had had no previous experience in surveying, but, with his customary self-confidence, he undertook the job, made his report, and went back to his engines. The decisive event in Brindley’s life came in the spring of 1759 when John Gilbert, the Duke of Bridgewater’s agent, recommended consulting Brindley about the proposed new canal, partly, no doubt, because of Brindley’s reputation in general engineering and mechanics, and partly because he was one of the few men with any kind of experience in canal surveying. So Brindley duly set off to make an ‘ochiler survey or a ricconitring’. The canal brought Brindley praise and acclaim:
‘An all-contriving power was given to the great Mr Brindley, sufficient to encounter all difficulties, and to remove the most perplexing obstacles. To his perforating hand the immense hills and stubborn rocks were no unsurmountable difficulty; and he could with the greatest ease carry water over waters.’
Rev S. Shaw, A Tour of the West of England in 1788, 1789
But some, while no less enthusiastic, hinted at least that he was not alone in his endeavours:
‘It was the duke’s great happiness to meet with a man of Mr Brindley’s genius, which broke out like the sun from a dark cloud, he having been totally destitute of education: it was no less advantageous to the public, that under such a patron, Mr Brindley was called forth and encouraged, but other very ingenious men have assisted in carrying it on, particularly Mr Morris and Mr Gilbert.’
William Bray, Sketch of a Tour into Derbyshire and Yorkshire, 1777
In recent years there has been a tendency for the emphasis to move away from Brindley and shift towards Gilbert, notably in a biography of John Gilbert and his brother Thomas. There are many indications that John Gilbert was very much the man on the ground, overlooking the day-to-day work of canal construction, and he may well have been largely responsible for the design of the Barton Aaqueduct. It is, at this distance in time, difficult to disentangle the parts played by the main participants, but one contemporary, who spent a good deal of time at the works, seems to have got it about right. Sir Joseph Banks described the Duke as ‘the author’ of the scheme, John Gilbert as his ‘chief executive’, and he gave Brindley full credit for his ‘many useful and ingenious inventions’.1
The canal itself can be used in evidence. The first branch of the canal was level throughout the whole length from Worsley to Manchester, which accords with Brindley’s predilection for long stretches of dead water. He disliked rivers intensely, and described any water flowing downhill as a giant running along destroying everything in its path, whereas if the giant could only be got down flat on his back, all its destructive force would disappear. However, the design of the famous Barton Aqueduct, a majestic structure crossing the river on three high arches, is very different from that of Brindley’s later aqueducts. These seem more tentative, the arches low and mean and the whole structure more massive, as though the engineer doubted the ability of his arches to support his canal. They are altogether cruder and it is difficult to see them as the work of the same man.
Whatever contemporaries, or indeed later historians, might have thought about the division of praise, all observers were in agreement about the efficiency and impressive scale of the operations. The spectators were right to be impressed, for the work was superbly well handled, particularly since there were no precedents for what Brindley and his workers were attempting:
‘Arriving at the head of the works, we were struck with the excellent and spirited appearance of active business; for the little village of Worsley looks like a river environ of London. Here is a very large timber-yard, well stowed with all sorts of wood and timbers for framed buildings, and building boats, barges, and all kinds of floating machines. The boat builder’s yard joins, and several boats, barges, &c. are always on the stocks. Next to these is the stone mason’s yard, where lie vast piles of stones, ready squared, for loading barges with, to convey to any part of the navigation where they may be wanted, either for building, or repairing of bridges, aqueducts, wharfs, warehouses, &c. The quarry is just by the mouth of the mine, and much is brought out of the mine itself, in working for the coals. Thus every part of the whole design acts in concert, and yields mutual assistance, which is the grand art of economical management.’
Young, op. cit.
Arthur Young was describing the end of the construction period of the canal, but the same methods had been used throughout. As sections of the canal were finished, they were filled and used, so that materials from Worsley could be taken to the next set of workings. The necessary workshops, for carpenters and smiths, were housed in barges which were floated along the canal to keep pace with the workings. Other boats were especially adapted for taking waste from the diggings, and for discharging it where it was likely to be needed, and, as Arthur Young noted with satisfaction, where particularly rich soil was brought up from the diggings, it was taken away to be laid on the Duke’s lands.
The first great task that Brindley faced was the Barton Aqueduct, and it says a great deal for the confidence of all three of the leading figures in the canal’s construction that they were able to withstand the ridicule they received during the years of building. There is no record of what Brindley’said or thought of his detractors, but it must have been particularly unnerving for a man with no education and no previous experience of this type of work to be told by men who had the best of educations, and were supposedly learned, that what he was attempting was impossible and that he was an idiot to try.
Apart from the aqueduct, Brindley also had to cope with constructing a waterway across the boggy ground that lay on the route to Runcorn – a stretch of land that was to give just as much trouble to a later engineer, George Stephenson, when he came to build the Liverpool to Manchester Railway. An anonymous writer described Brindley’s methods in a letter to the St James’s Chronicle on 1 July 1765.
‘He has finished the cut quite across Sale Moor, and will soon compleat it over the meadows on each side of the River Mersey; the entrance of which, troni the low and boggy situation was, by men of common understanding, deemed his ne plus ultra. At this place, Mr Brindley caused trenches to be made, and placed deal balks in an erect position, backing and supporting them on the outside with other balks laid in rows, and screwed fast together and on the front side he threw the earth and clay, in order to form his navigable canal. After thus finishing forty yards of his artificial river, he removed the balks, and placed them again where the canal was designed to advance.’
Quoted in Anon, A History of Inland Navigation
In his work on the Bridgewater Canal, the illiterate Brindley was unable to draw on the experience of others. He is traditionally credited with inventing ‘puddling’, the technique for making canals watertight in porous ground. More accurately, he reinvented it. This technique involves kneading together clay, sand and water to make a semi-fluid ‘puddle’, which is then used, usually in two or three layers, to line the bottom and sides of the channel. No one ever found a better way of doing the job. Although the Barton Aqueduct received all the attention when it was built, the high embankments that carried the canal to the Irwell were in their way just as impressive as engineering achievements. Brindley also devised a system of stop locks and drains whereby any one section of the canal could be isolated, so that repairs could be carried out.
If Brindley was not the untutored genius who carried the whole weight of the enterprise on his shoulders, why was he afforded so much adulation? The answer can be found in what happened after the Bridgewater Canal was proved successful. John Gilbert was to be involved in other canal schemes in which the Duke took an interest, notably the Trent & Mersey and the Caldon, but never again was he to be so totally committed as he had been in his first venture. His career was not to be devoted to canals, but was to remain largely tied to the vast Bridgewater estate. Brindley was a free agent, available and eager for work. Even before the work on the Bridgewater was finished, Brindley found himself in demand from other canal promoters. Canals began to occupy more and more of his time, until eventually they virtually monopolised it. From being an ordinary, if more than ordinarily competent, millwright, he found himself elevated into the position of the country’s leading expert in canal construction – for a time, in fact, its only expert in canal construction. His new glory reflected back over his earlier career. When the promoters of the Trent & Mersey scheme needed the services of an engineer, it was to Brindley that they turned. Although the first section of the Bridgewater had by then been successfully finished, Brindley was still very far from being the complete canal engineer. For a start, he still had not tried to build a lock. When he did have to do so for the Runcorn extension, he showed that he still had a great deal to learn about canals. The episode of Brindley’s first lock showed up the strengths and weaknesses of the man. Although the principles of lock building had been established for centuries, he was unwilling to take anything on trust – if locks had to be built on the canal, then they would be Brindley locks built to a Brindley pattern. He made arrangements for a trial lock to be built. In theory, this was unnecessary – but Brindley had never seen a canal lock, and he was unable to read an account of one; so he would do what he had done before, follow his own instincts. It was by following this method that Brindley had, in the past, been at his most successful: this time he was not. It was only the Duke of Bridgewater’s insistence that older methods be followed and adapted that saved Brindley from making a major engineering error by following his own plans for the locks. But at least, at the end of the affair, he had learned about locks in the only way he really understood – in practice.
Brindley’s exalted position as the leading expert took him away from his accustomed surroundings and brought him to London to face the Parliamentary Committee (see Chapter 5). He did not enjoy the life of the capital, but he did his best to fit in with the strange surroundings. When he rode up to give evidence in January 1762, he was persuaded to invest in a set of new and fashionable clothes for the event. He was even prevailed upon to visit a theatre, and went off to see the great Garrick as Richard III. The evening was not a success: ‘it had disturbed his ideas, and rendered him unfit for business. He declared, therefore, that he would not go to see another play on any account.’2
The canal basin at Stourport: a whole new town developed from where the Staffs & Worcester Canal met the Severn. (British Waterways)
The Trent & Mersey plan presented Brindley with a new problem; his projected line involved tunnelling for almost 3,000 yards through the hill at Harecastle. It was to be the country’s first canal tunnel. There were the usual sceptics who said that such a tunnel was impossible, but, having proved the pessimists wrong in the past, Brindley found that this time he had supporters. People were beginning to express their faith in James Brindley; he also had faith in himself, and the faith seemed to be justified as the work got under way, and the usual tourists came to look, wonder and report back to the London papers:
‘Gentlemen come to view our eighth wonder of the world, the subterraneous navigations which is cutting by the great Mr Brindley, who handles rocks as easily as you would plumb-pies and makes the four elements subservient to his will … when he speaks, all ears listen, and every mind is filled with wonder, at the things he pronounces to be practicable. He has cut a mile through bogs, which he binds up, embanking them with stones which he gets out of the other parts of the navigation, besides about a quarter of a mile into the hill Yelden; on the side of which he has a pump, which is worked by water, and a stove, the fire of which sucks through a pipe the damps that would annoy the men, who are cutting towards the centre of the hill. The clay he cuts out serves for brick, to arch the subterraneous part.’
Anon, A History of Inland Navigation, letter dated 8 September, 1767
But the work at the Harecastle tunnel proved rather more difficult than that optimistic account suggests: hard rock held up the tunnellers at some points; soft ground that became virtually a quicksand held them up at others. The water that collected in the workings was at first removed quite simply by pumps driven by wind- and water-mills, but, as the tunnellers drove deeper into the hillside, flooding became a serious problem and Brindley again had to get to work on an atmospheric engine. The primitive steam engine he constructed had to be kept working night and day to keep the tunnel drained. The four elements were not to be so easily controlled after all, and doubts about the progress were again raised. Josiah Wedgwood reported on a meeting of the Canal Committee:
‘Mr Brindley was there & assured the Gentn, that he could complete the whole in five years from Xmas next, & there being a Gentn, present (not one of the Committee) who doubted of the possibility of its being completed in so short a time & seem’d inclin’d to lay a wager upon it, Mr B. told him, that it was a challenge he never refused upon anything which he seriously asserted & offer’d them to article in a Wager of £200 that he perform’d what he had said.’
Letter dated 12 March 1767
Brindley lost the bet, but never had to pay – he died before the Harecastle tunnel was completed. By later standards, it was a crude enough affair – a rough hole hewn through the hillside, partly arched with brick, but mostly bare rock. When John Rennie went to survey it in 1820, he described it as ‘being small and crooked with brickwork that was generally bad’. All of that was true, but at the time it was built it was an astonishing piece of engineering. It was the first tunnel of its type – and it was no minor affair. The main artery stretched for 2,897 yards through the hill, with tributaries branching off to the coal that lay under the hill, so that the mineral could be loaded straight into boats and out into the main channel. It was a great work – and it took eleven years to complete.
As the work on the Trent & Mersey and the Bridgewater continued, other canal schemes were begun; and all seemed to require Brindley’s presence. The most important of the plans in which he became involved was the Grand Cross – this was the name given to the canal system, which included the Trent & Mersey, and which was to link the industrial Midlands to the three great sea ports of Bristol, Liverpool and Hull. The section joining the Potteries to the Severn, the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal, presented Brindley the surveyor with a new and irritating obstacle. He needed to select a point to make a junction between the canal and the river, and he went first to the most obvious place, the thriving port of Bewdley on the Severn. This was the main centre for Worcestershire traders, and, at its busiest periods, as many as 400 pack horses would be stabled in the town.
According to one popular version of what happened next, the local inhabitants showed no interest in new-fangled canals and suggested, somewhat impolitely, that Brindley’should take his ‘stinking ditch’ elsewhere. In fact the story reverses reality. The citizens of Bewdley, far from scorning the canal, at once saw its advantages and petitioned for it to join the Severn near the town. Unfortunately for them a long ridge stretches along the eastern bank of the Severn, which would have proved a daunting obstacle even to the boldest of Brindley’s successors. The gentleman himself did exactly what one would have expected him to do; he opted for the easiest route along the convoluted valley of the River Stour. He eventually reached the Severn at a lonely spot, marked by a solitary inn. Here, just as the citizens of Bewdley had feared, a new inland port grew up, with offices and warehouses, docks and basins. Stourport was Britain’s first canal new town, and, as it grew and prospered, so the port of Bewdley dwindled and declined.
The two Harecastle tunnels: Telford’s new tunnel is on the left, Brindley’s original on the right.
Throughout the 1760s, Brindley was inundated with requests to work on canal projects as chief engineer or, at least, to give the promoters the benefit of his expert advice. He laid out the line for the Leeds & Liverpool Canal; he went to work on the Oxford and on the Coventry Canal. He was consulted on the Forth & Clyde Canal. He was even called in by the City of London to survey a possible canal from Sonning, on the Thames near Reading, to Monkey Island, near Richmond, but that scheme came to nothing:
‘The bill met with such a violent opposition from the land owners, that it was defeated. Those fine gentlemen would not suffer their villas to be disturbed by noisy boatmen, or their extensive lawns to be cut through for the accommodation of trade and commerce; though it was from trade and commerce that most of their fine villas and extensive lawns had derived their origin.’
Phillips, op. cit.
Brindley’s existence became practically nomadic. He had very little time for any social life and, indeed, seemed to be more attached to his horse than he was to other people – his only big quarrel with John Gilbert was over the treatment of the mare. However, he did find time, when talking to John Henshall, the surveyor employed on the Grand Trunk, to notice that Henshall had a daughter, Anne. When they first met, in September 1762, Anne was still at school and Brindley got into the habit of filling his pockets with gingerbread when he went to visit Henshall. When she left school, Brindley proposed to her and was accepted. It was a bizarre courtship and an incongruous marriage between a rough fifty-year-old engineer and a young girl straight out of school. No one ever accused Brindley of having an excess of charm, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the father must have exerted some influence in favour of a match with such obvious advantages for his own career. However, the Brindleys settled down happily enough and the young bride was taken to Turnhurst, a large house with a suitably romantic view – it looked out on the work in progress on the Harecastle tunnel.
The demands on Brindley’s time were excessive – everybody required his services on almost any terms, and he found it difficult to refuse any of them. The companies were glad to get as much of his time as they could. The Coventry Canal Company, for example, appointed Brindley as engineer and surveyor at £150 a year, ‘he undertaking to give at least two months attendance in the whole in every year’.3
However, any canal company that signed Brindley up found that it did not always get quite what it expected: Brindley was a man who went his own way. The Oxford Committee began by taking a resolute stand with their wayward engineer. ‘Resolved,’ they wrote firmly,’that Mr Brindley hath in no Degree complied with the Orders of the Committee.’4 A year later they were taking a rather different line: ‘Have read with great surprise and concern a Letter from you to acquaint us of your intended Resignation. We are very sorry that anything has happened that has given you Offence and shall always be ready to place the greatest Confidence in you … Your letter mentions no Reason for this sudden step …’5 Brindley accepted the apology and withdrew his resignation – there is no record to show that he ever enlightened the mystified Committee as to why he resigned in the first place. Only one company, the Coventry, actually had the temerity to fire the great, but intensely irritating, Brindley.
The trouble was that Brindley was desperately short of time to give to all his different undertakings. Although an outwardly robust man, he suffered from diabetes, which remained undiagnosed until the time of his death. His constant travelling on horseback must have exhausted him, and not every job that he undertook received the care that it deserved. But it required a strong personality to stand up to Brindley, even when he was in the wrong. He met his match in John Smeaton, who, with Brindley and a third engineer, had been employed to survey the proposed Forth & Clyde Canal. Smeaton was more than ready to trade punches with Brindley:
‘Mr Brindley recommends to begin at the point of partition, because, he says, it is his ‘constant’ practice to do so, and, in the present undertaking, it seems particularly advisable ‘on many accounts’: but pray, Mr Brindley, is there no way to do a thing right but the way you do? I wish you had been a little more explicit on the many accounts: I think you only mention one, and that is to give more time to examine the two ends: but pray, Mr Brindley, if you were in a hurry, and the weather happened to be bad, so that you could not satisfy yourself concerning them, are the works to be immediately stopped when you blow the whistle, till you can come again, and make a more mature examination? … That my brother Brindley’should prefer the Printfield passage I can readily comprehend: a late author has very solidly demonstrated that every man, how great so ever his genius, has a certain hobby horse that he likes to ride; a large aqueduct bridge over a large river does not happen to be mine.’
Report of 28 October 1768 in Reports of the Late John Smeaton, FRS, 1812
Brindley’s endless journeying from canal work to canal work had its inevitable finale. In September 1772, he returned to his home at Turnhurst too ill to work. He died there on 27 September. There is a story, quoted by Smiles, that even when he lay dying he was still besieged by canal promoters seeking his advice. One group told him, despairingly, that their canal would not hold water. ‘Puddle it’, said Brindley. They replied that they had already done so. ‘Then puddle it again – and again.’ The story is probably untrue, but it at least demonstrates the incredible dependence which canal builders still felt on his word.
Throughout his life Brindley remained, in appearance at any rate, the simple country craftsman: ‘he is as plain a looking man as one of the boors of the Peak, or one of his own carters’. His speech too remained heavily overlaid with the country dialect – you can almost hear the voice of Brindley from the few written notes, in which his spelling follows his pronunciation. But the simple countryman amassed a considerable fortune and rose to great importance. He was obstinate, single-minded and often narrow in his outlook – but this was, to some extent, an attitude that developed from the circumstances of his life. He was a man who had risen to pre-eminence by following his own ideas in the face of criticism – this led to a complete self-sufficiency but, because he could only work from his own experience, it led to inflexibility. His method of canal construction, for example, never really changed. He built, as far as possible, on the level, so that the canals he laid out tend to meander across the face of the countryside; today, the canal user finds the routes charming – the boatman of the eighteenth century who had spent the best part of a day going round in circles presumably had other thoughts (see, for example, the map on p.69).
Brindley was a fascinating man in many ways. Because of his lack of a formal education, he had to devise his own method for solving engineering problems. He had an extraordinarily retentive visual memory, being able to look over quite complicated machinery and keep the details in his mind without the use of notes. Faced with a difficult problem, he would retire to his bed in a darkened room and lie there for as long as two or three days, emerging only occasionally to make a diagrammatic note as one part of the problem was solved. Then, when he was sure he had everything sorted out, he would leave the room and give a perfectly detailed account of his answer. Not that all the answers were entirely practicable – for a long time he harboured a pet scheme for building a floating canal to join England and Ireland – but the majority were.
At his death, most of the canal projects that he had begun were still unfinished, but he left behind the beginnings of the great canal network. If his canals now seem to be too narrow and too crooked, if the tunnel at Harecastle was crude and if even the famous Barton aqueduct was overshadowed by larger and more spectacular successors, it must be remembered that his were the first. He was the pioneer, and other engineers could learn from his examples. When he died, his friend, Josiah Wedgwood, wrote in a letter to Bentley:
‘What the Public has lost can only be conceiv’d by those who best knew his Character & Talents – Talents for which this Age & Country are indebted for works that will be the most lasting monument to his Fame, & shew to future Ages how much good may be done by one simple Genius, when happily employd upon works beneficial to Mankind.
Mr Brindley had an excellent constitution, but his mind, too ardently intent upon the execution of the works it had plann’d, wore down a body at the age of which originally promis’d to have lasted a century.’6
That can stand as a fair epitaph.
‡ The two main sources of biographical information on Brindley are Samuel Smiles, Lives of the Engineers, Vol. 1, 1874 and Phillips, op. cit. For modern accounts of his part in the construction of the Bridgewater Canal, see Hugh Malet, The Canal Duke, 1961, and Peter Lead, Agents of Revolution, 1989, which offer different views of the relative importance of the roles of Brindley and Gilbert.