MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL, an important artificial waterway affording passage for ocean-going vessels between the inland city of Manchester, England, and the Mersey estuary open ing into the Irish sea. This great undertaking plays so important a part in the commercial life of Lancashire that there is some times difficulty in remembering how new it is. Its making began on Nov. II, 1887, and on May 21, 1894, Queen Victoria attended its formal opening.
Manchester lies on a plain whose many streams provided the power which made possible a prosperous cotton industry. The city became the reservoir into which the product of the hills sur rounding the plain naturally flowed, and its task of disseminating that product was easy enough, as it could be carried on by pack horses and mules so long as commerce was content with the leisurely ways that preceded the Industrial Revolution. Even before that great upheaval Manchester was looking towards the sea. Barge traffic had long been in existence on the river Mersey between Liverpool and Warrington ; and a body of men called the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Proprietors was empowered by an act of parliament dated 1720 to carry this process further, and to make the Mersey and its tributary the Irwell navigable from Warrington into the heart of Manchester. A second contact with the sea was given to Manchester by the third duke of Bridge water, who, working with his famous self-taught engineer James Brindley, had made a canal to carry coal from his estate at Worsley into Manchester. Brindley, overcoming difficulties which were new to modern engineering, made the Bridgewater canal from Manchester to Runcorn, at the head of the Mersey estuary.
Thus in the 18th century Manchester had two ways open to the sea : a canal and a navigable river. Barges were used on both, and they could not carry much more than 5o tons at a time. The beginning of the 19th century saw a third way open: the Man chester-Liverpool railway. But none of these things was of much use to Manchester. Richard Arkwright's spinning jenny and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule had revolutionised the manu facture of cotton goods. The leisurely days were gone for ever. Manchester, if she was to survive, must become a port.
The position was grave when the second half of the 19th cen tury had set in. A plague of empty houses came upon Manchester. Everywhere the fatal sign might be seen : another family gone, fol lowing the factories to the coast. In 1881 there were 18,632 empty houses in the town. In the Ancoats district alone, ten months before the canal opened, establishments employing 12,650 workers had been closed, and there were whole streets unin habited. Fifty houses, with a rental of £14,000 per annum, were
to let in the centre of the city. Nor could anyone wonder at this state of things. Trade could not prosper with Liverpool as its main outlet, for the railway charges to Liverpool, added to the Liverpool dock dues, were ruinous. A ton of goods could be car ried in 1881 from Manchester to Calcutta for 195 3d, and Its 6d of this had been charged before the goods left Liverpool. Liver pool dock dues were so heavy that Oldham spinners could buy cotton in Bremen or Havre, pay shipping freights to Hull and railway charges from Hull to Oldham, and still save a farthing a pound on the price they would have paid for the same cotton at Liverpool. On June 27, 1882 a group of men met at dinner in the house of Daniel Adamson at Didsbury, and after dinner they and others talked about how the situation might be met. They fell back on the proposal of not a barge canal but a ship canal ; in a word, the transforming of an inland town into a port. That dinner party was the turning-point in Manchester's fortunes.