May I atone for my crass gaffe, with this note from Viv Bird's tome that in 1769 Samuel Simcox, under the supervision of a not very well at the time James Brindley, completed a Canal in Brum some 22 miles long at a cost of only £70,000. You could buy shares in the construction for £140 a time evidentally, but only ten per person. One investor was Aidan's favourite poet John Freeth, who, as was his wont, marked the occasion by immediately breaking out into verse thus:
Then revel in gladness, let harmony flow.
From the district of Bordesley to Paradise Row;
For true feeling joy in each breast must be wrought.
When coals under fivepence per hundred are bought.
And Birmingham, for every curious art
Her sons invent, be Europe's greatest mart;
In every Kingdom, ever stand enroll'd,
The Great Mechanic Workhouse in the World.
The canal wharf in Birmingham ran almost up to Paradise Row and was not closed until 1926.
As a postscript, Freethy must have been well chuffed as the shares shot up to £400 each by 1782, when a Parliamentary Bill passed the Wednesbury to Birmingham link project, and the World went generally mad on canals. A rich Poet, now there's a paradox...