Note 108 — Chapter IX · Birmingham—Matthew Boulton.

When the canal came to be constructed at the point at which it passed Soho, it occasioned him great anxiety through the leakage of the canal banks and loss of water for the purposes of his manufactory. The supply, especially in dry summers, was already too limited; but the canal threatened to destroy it altogether. Writing to Mr. Thomas Gilbert, M.P., on the subject in February, 1769, he said, “The very holes which Mr. Smeaton hath dug to try the ground, drink up the water nearly as fast as you can pour it in.... Let Smeaton or Brindley, or all the engineers upon earth give what evidence they will before Parliament, I am convinced by last summer’s experience that if the proprietors of the canal continue to take the two streams on which my mill depends, it is ruined. I might as well have built it upon the summit of the hill.” After the act had passed he wrote his friend Garbett, “I have seen the testimony of the two engineers, Smeaton and Yeoman, but I value the opinions of neither of them, nor of Brindley nor Simcox (in this case), nor of the whole tribe of jobbing ditchers, who are retained as evidence on any side which first applies for them.” His alarms, however, proved unfounded, as the leakage of the canal was eventually remedied; and in November, 1772, we find him writing to the Earl of Warwick, “Our navigation goes on prosperously; the junction with the Wolverhampton Canal is complete; and we already sail from Birmingham to Bristol and to Hull.”—Boulton MSS.