The first public notice of the matter appeared in the _Worcester Journal_ of November 12, 1835, when a provisional committee was announced, and the inhabitants of Worcester called together to give their opinion upon the plan. This meeting was held on the 30th November, when Mr. Jonathan Worthington was called to the chair, and Mr. Bedford read the committee’s report, which proposed that a pound lock should be erected at Gloucester, below the ship basin lock, from which a channel of 500 yards in length should be cut to pass Gloucester bridge, and a weir erected near Over bridge. The Haw, Mythe, and Upton bridges were to be passed by similar cuts, and the estimated cost of the whole scheme was £180,000; at which sum, it was thought, a depth of twelve feet might be obtained all the way from Gloucester to Worcester, and six feet thence to Stourport. Mr. Leader Williams explained the details of his plan. The Earl of Coventry declared that he should give it his hearty support; and the objections raised by other landowners were satisfactorily answered. The money required was to be raised in £20 shares, and the press and public of Worcester were singularly unanimous and enthusiastic in favour of the project. The formal prospectus of the company presently appeared—Mr. Thomas Rhodes was announced as the chief, and Mr. E. L. Williams the resident engineer. At a very numerous meeting of the shareholders held in October, 1836, over which Mr. J. W. Lea presided, Mr. Rhodes’s report was read; and it was decided, by a very large majority, that application should be made to Parliament to sanction a scheme for increasing the depth of the river to twelve feet. Some of the landowners proposed that the depth sought should only be six feet six inches, but this suggestion met with no support from the general body of subscribers. As soon as the people of Gloucester found that the project was taken up thus seriously, they entered into a systematic opposition, in which the selfish motives that actuated them were at first sought to be flimsily concealed, but were afterwards unblushingly avowed and unscrupulously worked out. At the first meeting which they convened upon the subject, it was pretended that the health of the city of Gloucester would be endangered by a stagnation of the river at the proposed lock; that the salmon fisheries would be destroyed, and the lands on the banks overflowed: therefore they, the citizens of Gloucester, felt bound to oppose the scheme! Afterwards they distinctly declared that they would fight it tooth and nail, because it would take part of their trade further up the river. Many of the landowners, too, could not be convinced but that any alteration of the river, if it did not increase the floods, would at least impede the drainage, and render their lands permanently cold and damp. The Shropshire traders, and a majority of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal