Drowned Lives

26

‘I only want the manuscript, Rachel,’ I said. ‘You can hang on to the letters for now.’

Rachel had barely managed to get her coat off after arriving home from the vet’s surgery when I called round at number four. She looked surprised, but rather pleased. It was quite a reversal, finding me watching out for her arrival.

‘You’ve decided to read it properly at last, have you?’ she said.

‘I’ve read some of it,’ I said defensively. ‘All right, where did you get up to then?’

‘I’ve covered William Buckley.’

‘Up to the point he disappeared?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘And what did you think?’

I shrugged. ‘What is there to think? He vanished. There had been suspicions that he was fiddling the books, and defrauding the canal company. The committee were told he’d run off with some of the money.’

Rachel glared at me and put her hands on her hips like an irate schoolteacher. She had a high colour in her face from the cold outside, and her hair had fallen loose. She always seemed to be dressed more smartly these days than I was used to.

‘Do you want me to do all the work for you?’ she said.

‘No. But William seems to have been dishonest, a criminal. It’s not much of a thing to find in your family history.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Did you read the second part of the manuscript?’

‘Yes, but the main part of the story has nothing to do with William Buckley. It’s about a different period altogether. Victorian.’

‘Is it?’ I said.

‘Yes, it’s about Josiah Buckley. He was William’s grandson. Josiah was found dead in the canal, but there’s a mystery about how he died.’

‘I know. Another mystery. That’s typical of the old man — going off at another tangent. But what happened to William? Does he just leave us hanging?’

‘It seems so.’

‘What can we do with incomplete information?’

‘I’ve been through everything,’ she said. ‘I’ve been through all the notes and all the papers. Then I went to look up the canal company minutes.’

‘In the County Record Office?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I hope you had better luck there than I did. They made me feel like an Egyptian tomb robber.’

She frowned at me impatiently. ‘It’s quite simple, as long as you follow the rules.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, the interesting thing is that only the assembly minutes are archived. The committee minutes are missing.’

‘I saw that. So what’s the difference?’

‘The assembly only happened once a year, and all the shareholders could attend. The committee ran the company’s affairs on a day to day basis, and they met at least once a month, sometimes twice. There must have been committee minutes, but they don’t seem to have survived when the Ogley and Huddlesford was taken over by the Birmingham Navigations in the 1840s.’

‘That must have been a blow to Great-Uncle Samuel. They would be full of information.’

‘Absolutely. But I’ve copied the assembly minutes from the relevant period, until after William Buckley disappeared. I think if we sit down together with the minutes, William’s letters, and Samuel’s notes, we might be able to piece something together.’

‘Come on, then.’

‘What, now?’

‘Unless you’ve got something else to do?’

‘No, I’m just surprised at this sudden burst of enthusiasm.’

‘I need to get on with it. I’ll explain why later.’

‘I suppose it’s best now anyway, since I’m going to be away for a few days.’

Rachel made some coffee, and we spread the contents of the files out on her sitting room carpet. We put Samuel’s incomplete manuscript to one side, stacked up the letters from William Buckley in the middle and the photocopies of the assembly minutes on the other side. We ended up with an untidy pile left over — notebooks, photocopied documents, clippings from old newspapers.

‘Rachel — have you come across any mention at all of my grandmother, Mary?’

She shook her head firmly. ‘None at all. There’s nothing about Samuel’s own life or his immediate family. Why? Did you hope there would be?’

‘No, quite the opposite.’

‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘All right. What we should try to do is get everything into chronological order and see how they relate to each other.’

‘That sounds very organised.’

But it didn’t work out like that. Within minutes, we’d both been distracted by individual items as the fascination of the voices speaking from the past took hold of us. We lost track of time as we sat on the floor exclaiming at intriguing items that we passed back and forth to one another, or laughing at the archaic language. It was as if we’d been transported two hundred years into the past by a pile of mouldy paper. I began to get an inkling of Great-Uncle Samuel’s obsession.

Gradually, a picture of William Buckley emerged. Rachel made notes as we went along, calling out snippets of information or interesting details.

As Samuel had written, William’s father had obtained him an apprenticeship with a contractor in Tamworth, who already had a business working on canal projects. Within a few years he was sent to be trained by the great engineer William Jessop. He learned surveying and map drawing skills, and in time he became assistant engineer on a big tunnelling project on the Leeds and Liverpool. Jessop was evidently pleased with him, and when the great man agreed to take on the role of chief engineer for the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal, he recommended William as resident engineer.

I was immediately struck by the fact that William was only thirty-two when he was appointed — the same age as me. My ancestor seemed to have achieved so much in a short life, whereas I...

‘Are you still with us, Chris?’ said Rachel.

‘Yes, of course. Carry on.’

When William Buckley married Sarah, the daughter of a local businessman, the canal company provided him with a house at Pipehill, and he was able to settle down within a few miles of his birthplace at Whittington. The couple’s only child, Edward, was born in 1798.

But, like so many other early canal companies, the proprietors of the Ogley and Huddlesford began to run into financial difficulties. Some of these were caused by inflation, some by shareholders defaulting on payments, or absconding without paying their debts, or going bankrupt. Other problems involved devious or dishonest contractors.

But the documents revealed that there was also a long-standing dispute with one of the company’s own major proprietors, Anthony Nall, who owned several coal mines with wharves served by arms of the canal. Nall had been elected chairman of the canal company, though some must have regretted it in the light of subsequent events. It seemed remarkable, from a viewpoint two centuries later, that the chairman should have been involved in such a bitter dispute with his own company without being replaced or thinking of resigning. Nall had an influential brother, too — Joshua, who’d been made Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the county.

The dispute seemed to have begun over the water supply, a common problem on early canals, which had come to a head with the building of a wharf at Fosseway. The Nalls were suffering from severe water shortages at their coal mines, for in 1799 the most that could be promised on the summit pound where the mines were situated was enough water for fifteen-tonne boats. Eighteen months later Anthony Nall petitioned Parliament for a Bill to permit him to bypass the canal by building a railway.

But the Ogley and Huddlesford scheme relied on carrying his goods. Fosseway Wharf had been built largely to serve Nall’s limeworks, and the company claimed that he was bound by agreement to transport his lime by the canal, as well as coal from his mines and corn to his brother’s mill. For some reason Anthony Nall had abandoned use of the wharf after a couple of years. Perhaps his lime quarry had closed. In any case, the company found it was no longer benefiting from the tolls and tonnage rates. The committee ordered the company secretary, Daniel Metcalf, to begin proceedings against Nall.

It was clear that the dispute had concerned William Buckley greatly. There seemed to have been some suggestion that his estimates for the building of the Fosseway wharf were wildly inaccurate, and this was the reason the company was losing money. William defended himself strongly. And he redeemed himself by uncovering a fraud that was being perpetrated by two of the proprietors themselves, which had drained the company of much of its resources.

It was Rachel who came across a reference in the assembly minutes.

‘This is interesting,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

She was reading about a disaster that had hit the canal company in 1799, when the embankment of the reservoir at Cannock Heath had burst. According to the newspaper report: ‘the water swept everything before it in the line it took through Shenstone, Hopwas, Drayton &c till it fell into and overflooded the Tame at Tamworth. At Blackbrook, seven miles from the reservoir, the new stone bridge was blown up; numbers of sheep and some cattle were drowned. The damage sustained is calculated at many thousand pounds. At Hammerswich, near Lichfield, the meadows are twelve inches deep with the gravel the water brought down’. The report was dated 10th June 1799.

‘Is that Chasewater Reservoir?’ she said.

‘Yes, they reinforced it when they rebuilt it after the flood, and it’s lasted perfectly well ever since.’

‘That’s lucky for the people living near it.’

‘Hundreds would be killed if it happened now,’ I said, thinking of Frank and Sally Chaplin in their house at Chasetown. ‘The population of Burntwood has multiplied vastly since then.’

At some stage, Rachel had produced a plate of cheese and tomato sandwiches, a chocolate cake and a bottle of Buxton Spring Water. I wondered briefly whether I was keeping her from something else she ought to be doing. But she made no complaint, so I said nothing.

Then I noticed there was an oddity in the sequence of minutes. The records showed that a meeting had taken place in January 1800, four months before the normal time of the annual assembly.

‘What’s going on here?’ I said, frowning at the handwriting that followed. ‘It says it’s a special meeting.’ I turned back a page to the previous assembly. ‘There’s no mention of it earlier on. It must have been called some time during the summer.’

‘Well, generally a certain number of members can get together and call for a special meeting, or the chairman can do it himself. Yes, it’s here, I think. On the request of five proprietors under standing orders. Then the proprietors are named — there’s Geo Wilkinson, Wm White, Adam Henshall. And there are our old friends, Anthony and Joshua Nall. There was a proposal that “the Conduct of certain members of the Committee has been such as to merit the Approbation of the Company present”.’

‘Hello? What were they getting steamed up about this time?’

‘Oh, blah, blah... blah, blah. Mmm. It seems they’d discovered the company was owed more than four thousand pounds by defaulting proprietors. It says here they thought there was “great Neglect somewhere to have allowed so large a Balance to become due”.’

‘Four thousand quid or so?’ I said. ‘What’s that in modern terms?’

‘Multiply by fifty, that’s the usual reckoning.’

‘Two hundred grand? Not to be sneezed at.’

‘I’ll say. Remember the original amount raised to start the canal was only £25,000. And the shares were worth £125 each,’ said Rachel.

‘Right. So that’s a pretty big chunk of shares not paid for, isn’t it?’

‘Or a big chunk of money gone missing somehow.’

‘And does it say who’s taking the blame for all this?’

‘Not clear. Not from these minutes anyway.’

‘Was William Buckley there?’ I asked.

‘Yes, his name’s on the attendance list.’

‘I wonder which side he was on. His letters don’t give any clue, do they?’

‘January 1800?’ She opened the box file and turned over the letters. ‘This second one’s from 14th January that year. But if he had any idea about it, he doesn’t mention it to Reuben Wheeldon.’

I leaned over her shoulder to read the second letter. ‘Oh yes, he does. Look at this: “God give me patience, but I have been in so uneasy a state of Mind as not to be fit to write. Things have happened lately of great Perplexity.” Later on he says: “I am extremely sorry to have given you any uneasiness, but I will call on you tomorrow week. I hope also to bring you the documents of which I spoke.”’

‘So he was going to visit Wheeldon. I wonder how long he stayed away.’

‘Why?’

Rachel had turned past the special meeting to the next page of minutes. ‘It’s just that William Buckley’s name isn’t on the attendance list at the next assembly meeting. And it was the first assembly he’d missed in four years.’