Chris Upton reflects on the colourful life of an English pioneer of the waterways.

He has been called England’s first canal engineer, as well as the father of English political economy.

Here was a man who, in the years after the English Civil War, had a vision of the Industrial Revolution a century before it happened. Yet the name of Andrew Yarranton is rarely so much as whispered today.

Now, you might not want to spend the next 10 minutes of your life in the company of a canal engineer and economist.

So let me tempt you with a more dramatic profile. Andrew Yarranton was also a swashbuckling army officer, a fierce republican, a spy (allegedly) and a man as combative as they come.

Yarranton’s sticky end, communicated by the gossipy John Audrey in his Brief Lives, seems to sum up the chap’s life perfectly. “Captain Yarrington,” reported Audrey in 1684, “dyed at London about March last.

The cause of his death was a beating and throwne into a tub of water.”

For a pioneering canal engineer, could there be anything more poetic? Andrew Yarranton was born at Astley, just south of Stourport-on-Severn in Worcestershire in 1619, the son of a yeoman farmer. An attempt to apprentice him to a linen-draper in Worcester was unsuccessful, and Yarranton scraped around for a few years, before being swept up in the Civil War, where he rose to the rank of captain.

Yarranton was a Parliamentarian, and was successful enough in the role to merit a bounty of £500 from Parliament for his part in capturing a group of Royalist conspirators in 1648.

With the war over, however, Yarranton began to pursue the two interests that would occupy much of the rest of his life: ironworks and navigable waterways.

He was one of a group of speculators who set up forges at Shelsley and Astley, and at Sudeley in Gloucestershire. With men like Andrew Yarranton and Dud Dudley at the helm, the Midlands was at this time at the forefront of industrial development.

The trouble was, Dudley was a Royalist and Yarranton a Cromwellian, and their lasting internecine rivalry undermined any chance of real progress. In 1673 both men lodged counter-claims over the other’s patent for manufacturing tin plate, and the result was an unproductive stalemate.

The Restoration did nothing to forward Yarranton’s commercial ambitions, of course.

He was twice thrown into prison for “uttering treasonable words against the King and Government”, but the direct evidence against him was slight.

The plots he was said to be involved in were more likely plots by his enemies to get rid of him.

So, at least, claimed Yarranton, and the jury believed him.

And so we move on to Yarranton’s waterways schemes.

“I made it my business,” he wrote in later life, “to survey the three great rivers of England and some small ones; and made two navigable and a third almost completed.”