The Life and Times of Josiah Clowes

Canal enthusiasts can always rattle off the names of a few engineers: James Brindley and William Jessop, perhaps John Rennie or Andrew Smeaton and, of course, the great Thomas Telford. But how many might mention Josiah Clowes? Not only was he the surveyor or engineer – and sometimes both – to eight major canals but he also invested in several new waterways between 1776 and 1794. Clowes built the Thames & Severn Canal and helped pioneer several famous tunnels which were, quite literally, ground-breaking projects at the end of the 18th century. 

Early life and work 

Clowes was born in 1735 at Norton-in-the-Moors, on the eastern fringes of the Potteries, where his wider family had lived for at least 300 years. His older brother, William, developed early business interests in both coal and ceramics and he married Jane Henshall, from nearby Newchapel. Her sister, Anne, later married James Brindley.

Anne’s brother Hugh was busily acquiring engineering skills with Brindley on the Trent & Mersey Canal and he is known to have taken a keen interest in the work. In 1758, Brindley surveyed the route for the first Harecastle Tunnel and Clowes and Hugh may well have been able to assist.

Clowes married the sister of a colliery owner in 1762, but she sadly died just eight weeks after the wedding. In sorrow, he spent time and energy investigating opportunities linked to the Trent & Mersey Canal. When Josiah Wedgwood cut the first turf, near Tunstall on 26th July 1766, Clowes made sure he was there and even found a way to cut himself a celebratory sod. 

Brindley died in 1772, though not before he had found the excavations at Harecastle to be much harder than had been expected. Hugh Henshall took over the supervision and Clowes was engaged as the contractor. In 1775, Clowes advertised for labourers to help get the job finished and a couple of years later, once the Trent & Mersey was complete, he formed a carrying company with Hugh. At the same time, he relocated north to Middlewich in Cheshire, where the shift in waterway dimensions required him to manage broad barges as well as narrowboats.

Clowes was now keen to develop other canals and in 1778 he visited the southern Cotswolds and supervised lock construction on the emerging Stroudwater Canal. A short time later, he became surveyor and engineer for the Chester Canal Company but was firmly told he was supposed to be permanently resident in the vicinity of the works and should not travel away without written approval. But within just a few weeks he was off repairing a lock near Beeston and, sure enough, he received a formal written warning.

William Jessop and contractor John Pinkerton were subsequently taken on to supervise his work and, with further absences, Clowes was summarily dismissed at the end of October. Pinkerton completed the work and Clowes now drifted south towards the booming canal trade in the Midlands, while keeping a base in Middlewich.

The saga of Sapperton Tunnel

The Cotswolds beckoned once again and the connection under the watershed between the rivers Thames and Severn was going to need appropriate tunnelling experience. In 1783, Clowes was appointed surveyor and engineer – and chief carpenter – with obligations to determine the alignment of the canal and what subsequently became known as Sapperton Tunnel. 

Clowes moved to Cirencester and was due to work with surveyor Robert Whitworth but he once again became distracted, just at the time when the tunnel contractor, Charles Jones, was starting to cause difficulties. Clowes and Jones argued about the amounts of spoil and related payments, and the latter even ended up in a debtor’s prison in Stroud. His property was then confiscated by the canal company and in retaliation his son, George, threatened to kill the clerk of the company. 

Problems were piling up at Sapperton too, with unstable fuller’s earth (this was very much an unknown quantity in the 18th century) in the western and central sections, and the need to double-puddle the canal between Coates, at the eastern portal, and the length approaching Thames Head. Whitworth described the land as “bad and rocky; the worst I have seen any canal cut through for such a continued length.”

Jones had not made the tunnel wide enough under Hailey Wood (to the south of today’s A419 between Cirencester and Stroud) and it was unable to house Clowes’s innovative driving frame, which may have included a movable centring mechanism. Water was also flooding the workings, Jones wasn’t paying his labourers and the canal proprietors were critical enough to describe him as “vain, shifty and artful in all his dealings”.

Eventually, Jones called for arbitration to assess the fees due for 1,478 yards of tunnel. John Gilbert of Bridgewater Canal fame was called in by the company while Jones offered the work to Hugh Henshall, brother-in-law to Clowes. Illness, however, prevented him from making representations to the court.

Nevertheless, the 3,817-yard tunnel was the longest on the developing canal system and, remarkably, it was built in only half the time it took to burrow the 2,919 yards under Harecastle Hill, north of Stoke-on-Trent. George III, who had declared an interest in waterways, visited the works with his family in July 1788 and he was so impressed that he gave consent for the canal between Tarlton Road Bridge and the eastern portal to be known as the King’s Reach.

The tunnel was filled with water in April 1789, but Clowes complained since he was not happy with the levels, clay puddle and brickwork, though it was known up to three million gallons were being lost from the summit each day. The underlying geology was far from ideal.

He wrote: “The tunnel loses water, I myself heard it and have ordered red lead be used to mark any place that could be heard. And I would recommend for all the rock parts that are not arched to be very carefully examined, and sounded and get down those parts that are not sound and firm immediately.” 

He also suggested re-puddling to the correct depth, along with some replacement brickwork and gravelling to the invert “when the water is of a proper height”. And to prevent further leakage, he fitted short but solid oak beams into the tunnel’s scaffold holes, requested the removal of remaining rubble and the installation of iron rings to enable boatmen to haul their loads through.

There were also level differences between Daneway, near the western portal, and Siddington, just south of Cirencester – Clowes sought to overcome these by raising the cills at Siddington. But the canal company formally wrote to stress he was at fault, identified at least eight errors and asked for these to be made good at the earliest opportunity. He was displeased with the criticism: “I told you there were some parts in the tunnel higher than I would wish. I was put by my design when you were here last, by the water being hurried into the tunnel and a large boat dragged through before I was ready.”

A further letter in July 1789 expressed exasperation: “I would rather you had wrote me my discharge than to have seen such orders. I have done all that I could to discover any errors in the danger of my life many times.” He said that, despite the problems, a 60-ton barge had successfully passed through even though the water was almost two feet below the final anticipated level. Errors had occurred but perhaps the problem was an overload of work since he was also building three locks on the Upper Thames at Buscot, St John’s and Osney. This work, assisted by a stonemason from Daneway, helped improve the navigation between Lechlade and Oxford. 

Any mistakes may, perhaps, have been the result of his relative isolation from the mainstream engineering now taking place in the Midlands and further north. His work on the Thames & Severn Canal was assisted only by a superintendent and at one point he asked the company to send him “a man that understands canal navigations and then he may inform the gentlemen his opinions”. Elsewhere, well-known names were often working together and sharing years of experience. 

A little memorial to Clowes’ work in the Cotswolds can be seen on a Grade II-listed bridge which crosses the yet-to-be-restored Thames & Severn Canal in the valley below Chalford. Here, by the old Red Lion Lock, the keystone on the west-facing side of the arch is inscribed with the words ‘CLOWS ENGINr 1783’.

The splendid portals are also monuments to his achievement. The western entrance at Daneway was built in Gothic style with battlements and finials, whereas the classically proportioned eastern portal remains elegantly flanked by columns topped with a pediment. Two niches, two roundels and a space for an inscription (which was never completed) were also included. The niches were due to have been occupied by the figures of Father Thames and Madam Sabrina but it is doubtful these were ever installed. In 1976, the Cotswold Canals Trust commissioned a local stonemason to carefully rebuild and restore this portal.

A public footpath runs along the top of the western portal of the tunnel to the rear of the castellated stonework. Jonathan Thacker

The western portal of Sapperton Tunnel with decorative Gothic castellations and finials. 
Don Cload

This photo taken in the cutting near the eastern portal shows the layers of limestone which had to be excavated by navvies in the 1780s. Robin Webster

This section of the Thames & Severn Canal between the eastern end of the tunnel and Tarlton Road Bridge was named the Kings Reach following the visit of George III in July 1788. 
Stuart Logan

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A wide range of waterway work

Clowes returned to the Midlands where he supervised the closure of the working shafts, no longer needed for ventilation, on Dudley Tunnel, which opened on 7th February 1792. He was subsequently invited north to Foulridge on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, where tunnel construction was underway between the border of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Here, he bumped into Whitworth again and suggested this bore could have been made 350 yards shorter. Whitworth’s plans remained in place but it is thought Clowes may have offered advice at Standedge Tunnel too.

He was now travelling around the country and came back to Sapperton to oversee the removal of the horse gins, used for excavation, and arranged their transfer to tunnelling work at Oxenhall, near Newent, on the Herefordshire & Gloucestershire Canal. He had already been employed here to survey a potential route and he also appeared before Parliament to offer comments on plans for the Worcester & Birmingham Canal and the Leominster Canal, as well as barges on the Upper Thames.

In the meantime, his fame had spread and he had to start turning work away. The fledgling Worcester & Birmingham Canal was keen to employ him to carry out a survey for construction purposes and, after a 12-month delay and a plea to Smeaton, who vouched he was of good character, he was commissioned and drew up plans which included a combination of broad tunnels and narrow locks. 

He also worked with John Snape, who had surveyed the land for the Birmingham canals in 1782, and looked at the routes of the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal and the Dudley No 2 Canal. These formed part of a plan to partly avoid tolls linked to the Birmingham Canal Navigations while exporting coal into rural Warwickshire and carrying agricultural produce back into the Black Country. 

Despite the arguments at Sapperton, and seemingly bearing no grudges, Clowes went on to employ Charles Jones at Dudley in 1792, where they surveyed a 13-mile route to link Tipton with Parkhead to the west. This had a direct link with his work in the Cotswolds because the planned tunnel would allow coal to be carried, via Stourbridge and the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal, down the Severn to the western end of the Thames & Severn Canal at Framilode. 

The proposal included 5 miles of tunnels, including the 3,795-yard passageway at Lapal beneath the California coal mines and a 557-yard tunnel under Gosty Hill. However, Clowes died before the work on the Dudley No 2 Canal was complete and William Underhill (yes, that was his real name!) continued the work. 

Clowes was also actively involved on the Shrewsbury Canal and by the end of 1793 he had prepared detailed proposals, which included guillotine gates to help save water and yet another tunnel, the 970-yard bore at Bewick, which was the first to be built with an integrated towpath. A cast-iron aqueduct, which carried the canal over the river at Longdon-on-Tern, was built by Telford and, though no longer in use, this remains an important waterway landmark. But it should not be forgotten that, here, Telford made full use of the large stone buttresses constructed by Clowes, whose original structure was unfortunately washed away in floodwater in 1795.

In 1794, Clowes came back to the Cotswolds and the Stroudwater Canal, where he had first worked in 1778, to make improvements to the junction at the Severn at Framilode. He had previously surveyed a line for the Gloucester & Berkeley Canal, parallel to the east bank of the river, but this was one project where his ideas were not built to plan. One would hope he took the opportunity to travel east through Stroud and the Golden Valley towards Daneway and his Sapperton Tunnel. There may have been teething problems, and a few arguments along the way, but the Thames & Severn Canal was now annually carrying more than 16,000 tons of coal between the two main rivers. 

Josiah Clowes passed away at Middlewich at the very end of 1794. He died a wealthy man – his daily consultancy fee of 29 guineas in 1792 was equivalent to more than £5,000 today – with several properties, including a farm, as well as valuable shareholdings. His second wife inherited much of his estate and this subsequently passed to a nephew with successful dealings in the pottery industry.

Most of his major projects took place during the last five years of his life, and his work and travels must have been exhausting at times. He may have lacked the scientific nous of Rennie or Smeaton and he might not have followed a seven-year apprenticeship, like Brindley, but he had boundless energy and clever inventiveness. His trials and errors with tunnels no doubt influenced other canal engineers and, ironically, probably helped pave the way for the railways.

The first great tunnelling engineer was buried in the churchyard at Norton-in-the-Moors, just 5 miles from James Brindley’s grave at Newchapel, and from where there are views out in two directions: east over the bucolic bends of the Caldon Canal and west to the conurbation of the Potteries.