Oldnall End has been up close and personal with the railway revolution for almost 200 years. The hamlet was bisected by the London and Birmingham Railway during the 1830s, and is currently being stripped, dug up, drilled and reconcreted ready for HS2. But the railway wasn’t the first transport revolution to make its mark on Oldnall End. Back in 1827, before the railway was even a gleam in the speculators’ eye, the hamlet’s residents came together against an ambitious but ultimately ill-fated proposal to build a canal straight through the middle of their land.

The Project

In the early, pre-railway years of the 19th century, the canal network was an essential artery connecting Midlands manufacturers with their primary market in London. However, Warwickshire’s rolling countryside meant its canals were chock full of locks (see above for the most notorious example), which slowed down travel, while users were annoyed by high costs and tariffs. In November 1827, local newspapers carried a proposal for the London & Birmingham Junction Canal, a new stretch of canal between the Warwickshire villages of Knowle and Brinklow which, the proposers said, would shorten the journey between Birmingham and Coventry by 18 miles and 36 locks (e.g. Coventry Herald, 16 Nov. 1827: 4).

The Canal’s promoters engaged the well-known engineer Thomas Telford to survey the route and he published his prospectus in February 1829, costing the project at £450,000 (around £30.5 million today, or about 0.001 of the original HS2 budget). Telford argued that ‘much lockage might be saved by keeping along that highest part of the country’ between Birmingham and Coventry’ which, as you can see from the map below, put his proposed route straight through the middle of Oldnall End.

The Resistance

The people of Oldnall End, like others along the proposed route, were not convinced. In December 1827, more than 120 ‘Owners and Occupiers of Land on the Line of the projected London and Birmingham Junction Canal’ published a letter in which they ‘do hereby declare our Determination to oppose the Undertaking, as unnecessary and injurious to our Property’ (e.g. Warwick Advertiser, 29 Dec. 1827: 3). Although the list doesn’t give addresses, it includes many familiar Oldnall End names, including the vicar Thomas Cattell, Richard Lant and William Floyd ‘for the Poor of Berkeswell’, Joseph Gilbert, Thomas Tidmarsh, William Cole, Thomas Smith, Sarah Reeves, John Brooks, Hannah Bates, John Smith, Joseph Farmer, William Reader, George Docker, William Docker, Samuel Reader, and William Cox.

In a move which will surprise no one, the prospectors ignored these objections. They opened a subscription to raise the funds for the construction, which they lodged in Parliament on 18 February 1830 along with a list of landowners through whose land the route would pass, stating whether they ‘assent, dissent, or are neuter’. Unfortunately, and in another move which will surprise no one, they were not entirely honest on either count. Three weeks later, the owners and occupiers of land along the proposed route submitted two Petitions to Parliament, arguing that although they had been listed as neuter, ‘the Petitioners deny they are neuter, as, on the contrary, they are decidedly opposed to the said undertaking’ (HoC Journal, 11 March 1830).

These Petitioners are no doubt the same who published another open letter in the local press two days later, stating that ‘We, the Undersigned Owners and Occupiers of Land on the Line of the projected LONDON and BIRMINGHAM JUNCTION CANAL, perceiving that … it will be injurious to our Property, do hereby declare our determination to OPPOSE the same’ (e.g. Leamington Spa Courier, 13 Mar. 1830: 3). The Oldnall End names are more or less the same as in the 1827 letter – and you will be able to spot many of them as owners of the land either side of the projected route on the map below (landowner details from the 1839 tithe map):

The End

On 18 May 1830, the Warwickshire MP Dugdale Stratford Dugdale raised the question of the Birmingham and London Junction Canal Company in the House of Commons. The list of subscribers lodged in February, he said, was false and fraudulent. Not only did it include fake names and others included without permission, but ‘a great number of the subscriptions were the names of needy and indigent persons of inferior station of life, who were quite unable to pay the sum affixed to their names’ (Hansard c.860). The committee eventually agreed that handling of the subscription was ‘a gross violation of the privileges of the House’ (plus ça change, you may say…) and the project stuttered to a painful end.

I imagine that after two and a half years of uncertainty the landholders of Oldnall End were relieved to see an end to the canal project. Their peace would not last for long. Almost exactly a fortnight before Dugdale exposed the canal fraud, a prospectus for a new London and Birmingham Railway was announced in the national and regional press (e.g. New Times, 28 Apr. 1830: 1). Construction began in 1833 and the line, passing through many of the same properties, was eventually opened in 1838. I wonder if any of the landholders wished that in hindsight they’d gone with the canal…

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Find out more

• Hansard. House of Commons. Vol. 24. 18 May 1830. cc858-63. Frauds in Canal Subscriptions.
• House of Commons Journal. Vol. 85. 11 March 1830, pp. 161-167.
• Thomas Telford, Map of proposed line of canal and report. 1829. National Library of Scotland.