Late great engineers: James Brindley - Eighteenth century canal building pioneer

There can’t be many engineers to have their death broadcast in the local newspaper in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, but on 1 December 1772 the Chester Courant published an epitaph poem recalling the achievements of one of the major contributors to the birth of the ‘Canal Age’. While the anonymous verse lacks the lyrical grace of the great English poets of the day – Thomas Chatterton, Thomas Gray or Christopher Smart – it is fitting in that it gets the job done practically, properly and without fuss. ‘James Brindley lies among these rocks’, it begins before informing the reader that ‘he made canals, bridges and locks’. Towards the end of perhaps one of the only poems ever written to include the word ‘air-vessels’, we’re told that ‘there ne’er was paid such attention, as he did to navigation’.

That there were versifiers out there attempting to immortalise an English engineer with a roughly hewn ‘heroic sonnet’ – and that there were newspaper editors prepared to print their attempts – attests to the esteem in which the pioneer canal builders were held. Brindley’s name may be all but forgotten today, but in his heyday what the Canal & River Trust describes as the man behind the ‘first modern British canal’ was something of a celebrity, renowned for building 365 miles (587km) of canals in his lifetime as well as watermills. Brindley’s influential role in the rapid growth of narrow canal-building was such that almost a century later the most important of Victorian industrial historians Samuel Smiles called one of his many books on the subject James Brindley and the Early Engineers.