Savoy Hill

In 1983 or 1984 Jan and I took the BBC Club's narrowboat Savoy Hill for a cruise with two other couples, Steve and Sue and Kevin and Sue. We started from, I think, Tring, going south on the Grand Union to Brentford (with a side excursion on the Paddington Branch and Regent's Canal), thence up the Thames to Oxford, north on the Oxford Canal to Braunston, then south on the GU to Gayton. In a week.

Somewhere I still have the log: I must dig it out and remind myself of our dawn-to-dusk days. I remember we had to push it to get to Gayton for our rendezvous with the Inland Waterways Section's boat manager, the infamous DT. (Unless I'm mixing up that cruise with our next one.)


The photos here must be from our second cruise on Savoy Hill: the Warwickshire Ring, again, in a week. As I remember, we'd kept a bottle of fizz in the fridge to celebrate conquering Hatton locks. It's definitely a GU lock in the background, but is it Hatton bottom lock? I thought we'd done the ring clockwise, in which case we'd have brought out the bottle when we'd got to the top of the flight. So where was the photo taken?

Top photo left to right: Sue, Steve, Jan, Sue, me with OS map.

Bottom photo left to right: Kevin, Sue, me, Jan, Sue, Steve. I must have set up the camera on self-timer.

Edit to say: Oops! Where is that stern rope going?