Death on the canal

One Friday night in March 1809, a working boat fully loaded with brandy, rum and 10 barrels of gunpowder travelled down the Paddington Canal on its way to the countryside, manned by a crew of four. A few miles out of London, two of the boatmen fancied a nightcap and decided to steal some of the liquor on board.

Moving quickly by the flickering candlelight of a lantern, they bored a hole in one of the gunpowder barrels by mistake. It immediately caught fire and, in the words of a newspaper reporting on the incident, “blew up with a most dreadful explosion”. The two thieves were killed in an instant, and the resulting blaze spread into a nearby field, burning down three haystacks. Incredibly, one boatman asleep in the cabin escaped unharmed, as did a lad on the towpath beside the canal. The culprits had become the victims of their own crime.

Despite its shocking outcome, the sequence of events leading up to the incident would not necessarily have been a surprise to British newspaper readers. Boatmen were notorious for their hard drinking, violence and dishonesty, as were the navigators who dug the canal network, which had been spreading since the boom years of the industrial revolution. These vital arteries of trade had slashed transport costs by almost half, bringing manufacturers increased profits and making products cheaper for all. But this welcome new prosperity had a price, and from the earliest days, canals – aflush with plenty of goods to steal and vast quantities of alcohol to drink – attracted crime.

Finding solace in drink

In many ways, crime on the canals was symptomatic of life in 19th-century Britain, particularly for the labouring classes who endured a precarious existence of drudgery, gnawing hunger and constant dread of unemployment. Workers flocked to urban manufacturing centres, where thriving industries like the cotton trade were serviced by this sprawling, 4,000-mile network linking towns to rivers and ports, carrying essential cargoes of coal, corn,