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ROUGH JUSTICE

Right from the start, canals were dark and dangerous places to be. Shovelling tons of mud and stones to dig out ‘the cut’ was tough work. And for hundreds of navvies, it meant long days of gruelling labour in all weathers, with the constant risk of accidents, serious injury or death.

They were rough men, with a fearsome reputation as hard workers and heavy drinkers, who terrorised the countryside with their fighting, cursing and stealing. When they went looking for trouble things could really get out of hand, and that was exactly what happened one spring afternoon in March 1795, when a riot broke out in the Leicestershire village of Kibworth.

A gang of labourers working on the Leicester& Northampton Union Canal decided to have some fun by attacking a detachment of guards from the Leicester Fencibles, trying to liberate two army deserters who were in their charge. Rioting and chaos quickly spread through the streets as the frightened villagers panicked. Around 3 p.m., the mayor summoned Captain Heyrick to bring in the troops and disperse the crowd. A horn sounded with the call to arms, and within ten minutes the Leicester troop of volunteer cavalry had assembled in the marketplace as the volunteer infantry marched into Kibworth with fixed bayonets.

Meanwhile, a few miles away on the Oadby turnpike road, soldiers were informed that a breakaway group had run off, taking the two deserters with them, and were now holed up in the Recruiting Sergeant public house at Newton Harcourt. The cavalry charged into the village to be met at the pub door by rioters, defending the premises with long pikes and refusing to surrender.

Mr Justice Burnaby, one of the local magistrates, read aloud the official words of the Riot Act and with that, cavalry officers dismounted, rushed inside the pub and frantically searched every room. But the deserters could not be found anywhere. Four navvies were arrested and sent off to Leicester under armed guard, while the cavalry galloped out of Newton Harcourt to scour the surrounding countryside, making their way up the line of the canal through Fleckney and Smeeton. By the time they arrived back in Kibworth at 7 p.m., all the rioters had disappeared.

Early next morning, the cavalry set out again to hunt down the ringleaders. They rode along the path of the canal under construction, scrutinising the working labourers to try and identify the culprits. Nine navvies were eventually dragged away under arrest, including Red Jack and Northamptonshire Tom, ‘two fellows notorious for being a terror to every country they have resided in’, according to theNorthampton Mercury. The newspaper reported that on 2 April the offenders all appeared before the magistrate, who committed four men for trial but freed the others.

Navvies were a tough breed of men, surviving in the harshest of conditions. They could be reckless and violent but had their own code of conduct and refused to be pushed around, enforcing their own kind of rough justice when they felt they had been badly treated. Living on the edge of villages, in scattered makeshift camps of wooden shacks near the canal, they existed alongside respectable country folk in an uneasy truce.

Many villagers resented this alarming intrusion into their lives, but well-paid navvies brought much-needed cash into the parish, which shopke