Sat 29 Oct 1831
To Gloucester & Berkeley Canal Co (W B Clegram)
Gloucester
Concerning the supply of water from the River Frome to the G&B Canal
To W B Clegram
Clerk of the Gloucester & Berkeley Canal Co
Canal Office Wallbridge 29th October 1831
Sir
I am directed by the Committee of the Stroudwater Navigation to reply to your letter of the 25th Inst on the part of the Committee of the Gloucester & Berkeley Canal. And I beg to inform you that the order for shutting the Lock Gates near Whitminster Mills, to which you refer, was made solely,, because it appeared to the Committee (as it did also to the Proprietors at their General Meeting on the 27th Inst) necessary to keep up their level called the Bristol Road Level uniformly to its proper height.
If the object of the Order had been to cutt off the supply of water from the Gloucester & Berkeley Canal,; or had this (as its affect) been in the minds of the Committee of the Stroudwater Navigation, the order would have been communicated directly to the Committee of the Gloucester & Berkeley Canal. It has however been represented that this order does in effect prevent or retard the supply of Water. And as the Committee of the Stroudwater Navigation are desirous of avoiding in as much as possible, any such inconvenience, to the Gloucester & Berkeley Company, I am direct to say that if their Committee desire the Lock Gates to be kept open for the present, in order to afford them time to devise a plan for feeding the Canal without requiring this Lock to be kept open for that purpose, the same will, I doubt not, be readily ordered. I am also to assure the Committee that if any plan for attaining the above object, and also with providing some less objectionable mode of taking the Water than that which has been recently resorted to, should be laid before the Committee of the Stroudwater Navigtion, the same will be immediately considered.
