2. Song of the Bridge Words by J Cunningham; music traditional (Good King Wenceslas)
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A major confrontation occurred at Wolverton in 1834, immortalised by J Cunningham’s Song of the Bridge. It was written for the local community musical documentary drama All Change[1], about the coming of the railway to the Milton Keynes area in the 19th century.
Robert Stephenson’s railwaymen were working on the new London to Birmingham railway line; Thomas Lake’s ‘navvies’[2] from the Grand Junction Canal fiercely opposed what they saw as a threat to their livelihood. When Stephenson ordered that the railway navvies should build a temporary bridge across their canal, the canal navvies were incensed… The Grand Junction had been the first-ever canal built between London and Birmingham, contracted at a meeting in 1792 at the Bull Inn, Stony Stratford between the engineer, James Barnes and the funder, the Marquess of Buckingham. A year later, an Act of Parliament authorised the survey and construction of a new canal and its Company was established with shares made available to the public. It would be 90 miles long - including the highly problematic 1¾ mile Blisworth Tunnel in Northamptonshire – and would involve the creation of 121 locks. The canal finally opened in 1805 after 13 years’ hard slog by – and several fatalities in - the workforce. Horse-drawn barges now provided the bulk of traffic, but in 1826, the first steamboat London to Birmingham used the canal: the future looked bright. However, the threat of a much faster route via the railway came just eight years later: ‘The railway wanted to build a temporary bridge over the Grand Junction at Wolverton, which meant driving piles into the canal banks. The Grand Junction disputed the right to erect this bridge. Stephenson assembled a strong workforce and began building the bridge on the night of 23rd December 1834. They worked non-stop and had finished this bridge midday Christmas Day. Thomas Lake, the northern district engineer, came to this bridge with a strong body of canal employees and proceeded to demolish the bridge completely.[3] It was a fraught time, but the matter was swiftly settled in the railway’s favour in the Court of Chancery: in 1835, the Railway Company successfully obtained an injunction to prevent the Grand Junction Canal Company from destroying any of the railway works. Whilst the railway continued to thrive throughout the 19th century, canal trade declined. The Grand Junction had transported 72,000 tons of coal through the Milton Keynes area annually, but even cuts in toll charges could not stem the flow of trade away from its waters. In 1929, it amalgamated with the Grand Union Canal. [1] All Change was the first of a dozen large-scale community musical documentary dramas to be researched and produced by Living Archive MK from the 1970s . A download of the song is supplied on the webpage THE MILTON KEYNES SONG BOOK - Home (mksongbook.org) from the original performance of 1977. See www.livingarchive.org.uk for more information. [2] The term ‘navvy’ originally described men who built the first navigation canals in the 18th century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. [3] From Alan Faulkener’s Grand Junction Canal Book (D & C 1972) |
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