Today, Britain’s canals are the ideal places to enjoy a leisurely cruise – but in the 19th century, they had a vastly different reputation. Susan Law reveals how these waterways once served as the settings for brutal acts of alcohol-fuelled violence.
One Friday night in March 1809, a working boat fully loaded with brandy, rum and 10 barrels of gunpowder travelled down the Paddington Canal on its way to the countryside, manned by a crew of four. A few miles out of London, two of the boatmen fancied a nightcap and decided to steal some of the liquor on board.
Moving quickly by the flickering candle- light of a lantern, they bored a hole in one of the gunpowder barrels by mistake. It immediately caught fire and, in the words of a newspaper reporting on the incident, “blew up with a most dreadful explosion”. The two thieves were killed in an instant, and the resulting blaze spread into a nearby field, burning down three haystacks. Incredibly, one boatman asleep in the cabin escaped unharmed, as did a lad on the towpath beside the canal. The culprits had become the victims of their own crime.
Despite its shocking outcome, the sequence of events leading up to the incident would not necessarily have been a surprise to British newspaper readers. Boatmen were notorious for their hard drinking, violence and dishonesty, as were the navigators who dug the canal network, which had been spreading since the boom years of the industrial revolution.
- Read more | History explorer: the rise of the canals
These vital arteries of trade had slashed transport costs by almost half, bringing manufacturers increased profits and making products cheaper for all. But this welcome new prosperity had a price, and from the earliest days, canals – aflush with plenty of goods to steal and vast quantities of alcohol to drink – attracted crime.
Finding solace in drink
In many ways, crime on the canals was symptomatic of life in 19th-century Britain, particularly for the labouring classes who endured a precarious existence of drudgery, gnawing hunger and constant dread of unemployment. Workers flocked to urban manufacturing centres, where thriving industries like the cotton trade were serviced by this sprawling, 4,000-mile network linking towns to rivers and ports, carrying essential cargoes of coal, corn, fresh fruit, pottery and all kinds of finished goods.
Working long hours to meet the relentless demands of commerce, some people found solace in drink – with disastrous consequences. In September 1838, a London bargeman named Thomas Townsend went berserk following a weekend binge with “gin and shrub cocktails” and a skinful of beer at the Noah’s Ark pub in Limehouse. At 5pm on the Sunday, he refused to pay for a pot of porter and proceeded to punch the landlord, smash several windows, and boot the policeman who came to arrest him. It ultimately took several officers to drag him outside, and he was later fined £5 for assault.
- Read more | The 18th-century craze for gin
Yet, concerns about alcohol-related violence were neither new nor limited to the waterways. Fears that members of a drunken underclass were threatening the fabric of society had been voiced centuries earlier in pamphlets such as A Monster Late Found Out and Discovered, published by London writer Richard Rawlidge in 1628.
But as wine and spirit consumption soared – along with instances of disorderly behaviour – the government decided to tackle the issue by introducing the Beer Act. Passed in 1830, the law loosened restrictions on the sale of beer in a bid to wean Britons off more potent beverages, such as gin. It had a rapid effect: 24,000 beer shops opened their doors within the space of just six months.
- Read more | Where and when was wine first made?
Unsurprisingly, this only exacerbated the problem. In 1834, a parliamentary select committee was set up to investigate what one MP described as a “torrent of drunkenness that desolates the land”. One proposed remedy was education, with suggestions that libraries and museums should offer “more innocent refreshments than the liquid poison now consumed”.
But others defended the right to drink, with the Essex Standard exclaiming: “If a man be thirsty, what avails showing him an alligator stuffed, a dried monkey, or a snake in a bottle? Museums, indeed, for the chimney-sweepers, and the canal-diggers, and the coal-heavers, and the dustmen, and all the rest who, tired with work, like a little comfort.”
Abusive behaviour
For many, heavy drinking was simply a fact of life, especially among boatmen free to indulge whenever they wanted. Unlike other workers, men in the canal trade frequently found themselves in remote places away from the prying eyes of employers, but still close enough to the hundreds of canal-side pubs that lined the waterways.
The hardest drinkers were usually found on board the non-stop ‘flyboats’, whose four-man crews worked around the clock with very little sleep. This rough work tended to attract unsavoury characters, and in 1839 the reputation of the flyboats sank to an all-time low when a brutal attack on a lone female passenger created a national outcry.
On 15 June, a former magician’s assistant named Christina Collins had set out on a journey by flyboat from Liverpool on the way to join her husband in London. Two days later, however, her body was found floating in the water at Rugeley in Staffordshire. Witnesses testified that Christina seemed distressed at several places on the Trent & Mersey Canal, and confirmed that they saw abusive behaviour by the inebriated boatmen, who later said they couldn’t remember what had happened. Captain James Owen and boat-hand George Thomas blamed each other, while Bill Ellis, the other crewman, said Christina had left the boat of her own accord. “I never saw anyone ill-treat her,” he claimed.
In July 1839, Owen, Thomas and Ellis stood trial in Stafford, charged with wilful murder, rape, common assault and theft. The judge ruled there was no proof of any violence and directed the jury to acquit them of the rape charge. But the case made headlines when a second trial was ordered, specifically to include the evidence of a bigamist butcher who claimed that Owen had confessed his guilt while they were in prison together.
Conveniently side-stepping the legal principle of double jeopardy, which would have ensured that the defendants could not be tried on the same facts twice, this second hearing ended with all three men being found guilty and sentenced to death. It had effectively been a show trial, designed to secure convictions at all costs, but the verdict was seized upon by religious campaigners as proof they were right to demand far-reaching moral reforms, including the banning of all working and drinking on the Sabbath.
- Read more | The strange history of drinking
Yet, despite the introduction of new measures, such as Sunday morning closing, pub numbers continued to grow – particularly in expanding urban areas such as Bolton, which had one alehouse to every 170 people by 1849. Residents were forced to put up with unruly behaviour in the streets, with one Boltonian complaining that the public house was a “full-grown monster”.
A radical solution was teetotalism. The temperance movement, which had both religious and political aims, was flourishing, and by the mid-19th century, most towns had a temperance group urging workers to ‘take the pledge’ and quit drinking altogether. And yet these were mere drops in the ocean of liquor still swilling about the country.
On 9 December 1854, a dramatic report headlined “CANAL BOATMEN RUNNING ‘A MUCK’” appeared in the London Evening Standard. The landlord of the City Arms, near Regent’s Canal, turfed out a riotous group at about 1am, who ran wild knocking down anyone they met. Two of the men, George Johnson and John Jones, were fined by the local magistrate, who commented: “Your conduct in this assault is one quite peculiar to the brutal class of boatmen to which you belong. You come up to this place heavily charged with strong beer, and bring with you that stupid and most savage spirit, that is very early and easily engrafted on you.”
Signs of a struggle
Of course, it wasn’t just boatmen who committed crimes on Britain’s canal network. Located in isolated places on the edge of society, canals became convenient places for other people to dispose of dead bodies – and details of such incidents often caught the attention of newspapers and their readers.
One particularly dramatic case began to unfold on 15 February 1886, when a police constable named William Hine left a canal-side pub in the Warwickshire village of Fenny Compton. After waiting for the last customer to leave the premises, he set off at about 10pm to walk the mile back to his cottage and waiting family. By midnight, however, he had not returned home.
There was still no news of him the next morning, so police officers began searching fields and wharf buildings, while men on the canal banks slowly dragged the water in two-foot sections. Four days later, a pocket-knife was found in a ditch hidden under a thick bramble hedge, one blade open and smeared with blood. Six feet away, near a footpath, the search party found signs of a struggle, and further on discovered a police helmet with a long dent across it.
Press interest in the case spread rapidly, and the Birmingham Daily Post even dispatched a reporter for an exclusive interview with Hine’s parents. Finally, nine days after he vanished, drag lines deployed by a search party on the Oxford Canal snagged on something submerged beneath the water, a quarter of a mile from the public house. The drag hooks caught on Hine’s greatcoat and eventually brought his body to the surface, plastered with mud. A watch in the waistcoat pocket had stopped at 11.06pm.
One suspect was a farmer named William Albert Kingerise, who had been drinking at the Wharf Inn until 10pm on the night of Hine’s disappearance. Nothing could be proven, however, and an inquest jury returned a verdict of “wilful murder against some person or persons unknown”. The culprits may have been poachers, but in the absence of any conclusive evidence it was just guesswork, and the case was never solved.
Illegal and immoral
Such horrifying stories made the public jittery. The growth of Britain’s railways meant the canal trade was in sharp decline, leaving miles of neglected waterways with overhanging trees and dilapidated towpaths, which were condemned as outdated relics.
Canals were now a byword for everything illegal and immoral, and in 1884 the country’s chief inspector of canal boats, John Brydone, reported: “The one great cause underlying the whole of the matter is the old, old story – drink. The lingering about for hours at a time, day after day in the public house, spending money, time, and energy soon induces poverty, strife, blasphemy, vice, squalor and misery, besides cruelty of many sad descriptions.” This was simply the story of 19th-century Britain, and it seemed as though nothing was ever going to stop alcohol-fuelled crime.
Thankfully, that dark and dangerous world of the waterways is long gone. When canal transport was superseded by cheaper alternatives and working barge traffic diminished, the traditional way of life along ‘the cut’ disappeared. By the mid-20th century, the old barges had been replaced by new generations of boats for leisure cruising.
Today, inland waterways are safe and peaceful places to escape on a narrowboat or take a relaxing towpath stroll. Canals that were once silent witnesses to shocking crimes are now calm, untroubled waters.
Fake news
Victorian newspapers often stretched the truth when reporting on violent crime
In August 1865, details of a grisly killing appeared in the pages of many British newspapers:
DREADFUL MURDER IN CHESHIRE – On Saturday night, a boatman in the employ of Shropshire Union Canal Company com- mitted a most brutal murder on his wife at Calveley, six miles from Crewe. He severed her head with a razor, all but a ligament of skin.
It was a disturbing tale, but the main problem was that it was actually a work of fiction. This was by no means an accident: 19th-century newspaper editors knew that gruesome crimes sold extra copies, and so deployed wildly exaggerated stories as weapons in the circulation wars, which were then picked up and copied by their competitors.
Indeed, when the truth about the aforementioned ‘murder’ was revealed, the Cheshire Observer referenced the media’s appetite for sensationalism in its own correction, confirming that the woman had not, in fact, “been sacrificed as an offer- ing to the newspapers”.
Sometimes the time of year also had an impact on the appearance of such stories. According to the Cheshire Observer, sensational murders had more coverage when parliament wasn’t sitting, because without parliamentary speeches, “newspapers have to fill up with the most exciting news they can obtain. A murderer who would have a paragraph devoted to him is honoured with a three-column report and a leader in The Times.”
Susan Law is a journalist and social historian. Her book Dark Side of the Cut: A History of Crime on Britain’s Canals was published by the History Press in October 2023
This article was first published in the February 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine