Shropshire Routes to Roots

The Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal: Thomas Langford's Story

On 25th May, 1869, heavy rain caused a breach in the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal. The story below is derived from the report of an eyewitness, given in the Newport Advertiser and Market Drayton Chronicle, 29th May, 1869:

How it rained that evening! Four hours of it. It stopped about eight o'clock, and about an hour later I went out of my cottage by the canal for a breath of air. Then I heard a noise. It sounded like a steamer on the canal - you remember when they tried steam-powered tugs on about twenty years ago. Instead of the water being virtually still, like it usually is, it was flowing quickly past.

I walked along the towpath and found that the embankment near Soudley Bridge [now Bridge 52] had given way. It's about ten feet high there, and there was a break in it about fifty feet long. What I'd heard was the water gushing out through the gap. It drained about seven miles of the canal from the top of Tyrley locks to the Shebdon water gate. That's a gate which is normally open to allow boats past, but which will be pulled closed if there's a big flow of water. It's there in case there is a breach in Shebdon embankment, which is much higher than the one which broke. It's lucky it was there, because otherwise seventeen miles of canal would have been drained.

I heard later that the breach had been caused by water building up above the embankment because the culvert carrying the stream had been blocked. Two cottages down at Ellerton Wood were flooded. The Chester Chronicle [5th June, 1869] said that the breach happened at the big embankment over the River Tern at Market Drayton, but this was wrong, it was here near Cheswardine. If it had been over the River Tern, it would have caused a lot more damage and flooded the gas works and the mills.