Canals, and the inevitable "barge", in The Times newspaper

The Weekend section of today's Times contains a four page pullout featuring 30 "great spots on the canals".

It's heralded with an almost full page photo of a sunny summer's day at Caen Hill locks.

Unfortunately, under the narrowboat sporting an impressive floral display (as well as a drying vest), are the words "Jump on a barge, walk on the towpaths plus the best waterside pubs."

This is careless. The Times should know better. But what if the paper is merely reflecting the fact that most people call narrowboats barges? Should not we boaters admit defeat and accept that "barge" is an alternative to "narrowboat"? Well, no, I don't think so. There is a distinction - barges are today considered to be commercial boats with a beam greater than seven feet, whereas the beam of narrowboats never exceeds about seven feet - and the waterways would be poorer without it.

All groups of like-minded people accumulate and defend their own technical language, using it sometimes as a litmus paper to tell who's "in" and who's "out". It wouldn't take long for a newspaper man or woman to suss that I know little about their industry, for example. Besides, what better way is there of detecting a boating novice than their reference to "barge" when they mean "narrowboat"?

And what are the 30 top spots on the canals, according to The Times?

• Gloucester Waterways Museum
• Fradley Junction
• Foxton Locks
• Bingley Five Rise Locks
• Little Venice
• Tring Reservoirs
• National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port
• Pontcysyllte Aqueduct
• Brecon Basin
• Albert Dock, Liverpool
• Stourport Basin
• Hatton Locks
• Dudley Tunnel
• Stoke Bruerne Canal Museum
• Standedge Tunnel
• Castle Wharf, Nottingham
• Newark
• Three Mills and Olympic Park
• Anderton Boat Lift
• Caen Hill Locks
• Pocklington Canal
• Sprotborough
• Saltaire
• Camden Lock
• Lincoln
• The Falkirk Wheel
• Lune Aqueduct
• Sowerby Bridge
• Wigan Pier
• Banbury

I wonder how they came up with that list. I expect they asked CRT.

So what would your top waterways places be? I'm not asking for 30: three will do. I'll kick off with mine:

Bugsworth Basin; Farmer's Bridge Locks; Standedge Tunnel.

(Actually, that was really difficult. I love all canals!)

Solar powered narrowboat reviewed in Canal Boat magazine

I've just read with great interest an article on a narrowboat powered solely from solar energy. In the latest (September) issue of Canal Boat magazine Martin Parry describes how he has fitted a 32' GRP boat with four 220W solar panels and an electric motor connected directly to the prop shaft.


I'm looking forward to part two in next month's issue where Martin promises to tell us how the all-electric boat performs in daily use. Will he be able to cruise in the winter months, I wonder?

NarrowBoat Magazine available in a newsagent

Passing through Foxton Locks a couple of years ago I got a second-hand copy of NarrowBoat Magazine from the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust's museum shop. I hadn't come across it before, and found it a good read. Reading that it was normally available only through subscription I put it to the back of my mind.

And then, just before Christmas, I found the Winter 2010/11 issue in WHSmith with a printed "sticker" on the cover stating "EXCLUSIVE TO WHSmith". I bought it, and had another jolly good read.

The magazine is splendidly glossy, with a wonderful smell, and is full of authoritative articles on historical aspects of the waterways. You won't find a cruising guide to a popular canal, nor a write-up of the latest 150 grands-worth of luxury narrowboat. Neither - and this is the best thing - will you find much advertising. Indeed, in the last issue of 48 pages within the cover, there are just three pages of adverts, and even these are just promoting subscription deals or books connected with the magazine.

It's stuffed full of fabulous photos and compelling copy. (Captain Ahab, you'd love it.)

Its editor is Hugh Potter, of Waterways World. The two titles are sister magazines.

To give you an idea of what you'd get if you bought NarrowBoat, this was in the last issue:

• an analysis of photographs of a "Jam 'ole Run" with a wealth of detail about boat working practices (7 pages)
  
  
• a feature on a tug boat built in the 1920s for the Regent's Canal (2 pages)
  
  
• an article on a fleet of boats which served the Potteries for a century (4 pages)
  
  
• boating during the second world war with extracts from the diary of a woman training "Idle Women" (4 pages)
  
  
• photographs of boating activity at Leighton Buzzard in the 1930s (2 pages)
  
  
• the story of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal (11 pages)
  
  
• a map with various early nineteenth century proposed routes for a Western Junction Canal linking Aylesbury to Abingdon (2 pages)
  
  
• a collection of photographs of traffic and tunnels onthe Trent and Mersey in the 1950s and 60s (4 pages)
  
  
• an examination of the Carclaze-Scredda tub boat canal in Cornwall (2 pages)
  
  
• readers' letters (5 pages)
  
  
• a few pieces of heritage news (2 pages)

NarrowBoat Magazine's website home page tells you that the mag is not available in newsagents.


But click on "see the contents" ... and it tells you that, as I found, it is indeed available in a newsagent, namely WHSmith.




I've just realised an interesting thing: between designing the cover for the website and printing it for the paper version - aside from the extra text on the Smith's version - an extra female boater has been inserted in the centre of the picture. And, in case the scene wasn't seen as wintry enough, a tree covered in hoar frost has been added (see top two images).

Raking the cut

The other day my father asked me if I'd heard of "raking the cut", and sent me a transcription of a letter sent in to The Oldie magazine (October 2009 issue).



In response to a regular Memory Lane feature and the question, "What were you doing 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago?", Rosemary Hoggard writes:

70 years ago this autumn, I found myself in charge of a wheelbarrow on the towpath by a disused lock on the Grand Union Canal in Leicester. I was five years old and about to participate in a new pastime. I watched as my grandpa clambered up onto the lock gates and balanced precariously.

War had just broken out and we had been warned by the government to expect shortages. But Grandpa had an answer to that. He had decided to revive the old custom of 'raking the cut' (the cut was what local people called the canal).

"Be careful Grandpa", I shouted.

"You stand well back", was his reply as he prepared to trawl the bottom of the lock with his home-made apparatus - a garden rake with a long rope secured to the top of the handle. Holding the rope he cast the rake into the murky water then hauled it in.

Grandpa was a small chap with a dodgy ankle, legacy of a wound collected on the Somme, so he struggled. But gradually the canal gave up its bounty. He flung each hard-won treasure to land with a splosh on the path beside me. Stout pieces of timber handy to 'mackle up' the gaps in his home-made shed. Rougher bits of wood which could be dried out and burned as fuel on the living-room range. A cycle tyre which, cut and shaped, would serve to sole our shoes. An industialised oval fish tin (probably from a factory canteen) which, by dint of being scoured then 'purified' in the range fire later, became the hull of a pull-along sailing ship for my brother (a toy much followed by the neighbourhood dogs, who could doubtless still smell the fish).

Today the enterprise might be termed 'freecycling' but all those yesterdays ago it was completely in line with the government policy of 'make do and mend'. This was only the first of many such expeditions for Grandpa and me. We always felt really chuffed after a trip with the wheelbarrow, over the bridge, to slog away at the time-honoured tradition of the poverty-stricken - raking the cut.

***************

And here is someone 'raking the cut' in modern times. This man was using a grappling hook to recover old bikes from a bridge hole on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal Leigh Branch in July 2008. At the time he told me that he got £200 for each van load of the scrap metal thus obtained.



(edited to add date info about the magazine)

Heeding the warning at Stanstead Lock

Our copy of Nicholson's Guide to the waterways of London, the Grand Union, the Oxford and the Lee is second-hand. The previous owner has gone over part of the navigational notes to Stanstead Lock with a blue highlighter pen. It's a warning about having to be "extremely careful" when ascending the lock - I wonder if they had problems there?


I'm always very cautious when opening gate paddles to fill a lock. This lock has no top ground paddles, so the only way to fill it is by opening the paddles on the top gates, which can, if they're opened too quickly, create enormous turbulence in the lock. This can cause boats to lurch around, or even flood them. In such situations I'm a little nervous when other people "help" with the lock operation, especially when they say there's nothing to be worried about.


In the event nothing went wrong: the paddles were opened (reasonably) carefully. I still would have preferred to have done it all myself, though.

Here's David holding Willow steady at the bow; Penny and Jan are the other end.


I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find out about the building with the interesting roof beside the lock. Anyone know what it is/was?

I tried to buy a copy of Waterways World yesterday ...

... but failed. After bumping into and congratulating a colleague who has just swum the Channel (he's now off work with pneumonia - oops!) I called in to WHSmith to see if Andrew Denny's "first edition" of Waterways World was in.


It was, so I took it to the till. There the sales assistant (as I suppose I'll have to call him, although he did nothing much to assist) was talking to a customer and making a phone call as the queue grew longer. If he had just acknowledged us waiting, and perhaps promised to be with us very soon, I would have stayed. But he ignored us. I went to the other till on the other side of the shop, but there was a queue there too. I put my £3.50 back in my pocket, returned the copy to the rack and walked out.

Two for Sarah and one for the Ducks

The latest (May 2010) issue of Canal Boat magazine has an article by Hugh McKnight about old posters which depicted waterway scenes. With one exception they're all from the first half of the twentieth century, and they're all works of art.

Inconveniently they are not on the magazine's website, and I'm not sure about the legality of photographing and reproducing some examples here, so this will be that very rare post from me: one with no pictures. (Oh, all right, just the one of the magazine cover.)

To the title of this post. The first poster the magazine shows is of narrow boat Sarah in an 1875 scene painted by Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis in 1951. The boat is being towed by an out-of-frame horse on the north Oxford Canal; a steam train passes on the adjacent railway line at Brinklow. The poster is an example of "carriage art", displayed originally in railway coaches.

On the next page is a reproduction of a 1929 poster advertising the charms of Chertsey; and facing it is an UndergrounD one publicising the 1913 Boat Race (book to Shepherd's Bush and thence by Tram to Hammersmith, Putney or Turnham Green). Mr. McKnight writes, "Limited use of colour and a concentration on the essential subject matter to the exclusion of all else has produced an image that feels modern even today."

So that's two posters for Sarah and one for James and Amy.

One horsepower travel

Waterways World Vol. 1 No. 2 (October 1972) had an article which began:

It's been described as "motion asleep". Certainly, it's something like that. Lying on the cabin top with your eyes closed you are completely unaware that the boat is on the move. There is no noise, no vibration, no surging of wash, no "stirring up the mud and knocking down the banks". Open your eyes and the trees overhead are passing by at a hypnotic rate. What is the secret?

The secret, of course, is the horse at the end of a cotton towline.

The article had several photographs of horses in canal scenes; here are two of them with their original captions:


One horse power pulling a day trip boat on the Grand Union Canal near Berkhamstead - picture WW


There are complications - Jack Roberts, ex. Shropshire Union fly-boat skipper, hands in the towing line to pass a pair of moored narrow boats in the Potteries. - picture WW

(edit) Sorry, this published originally as a title only!

An old ad, an old phone number, and horse-drawn trip boats

An advertisement in the very first issue of Waterways World reads as follows:

SHROPSHIRE UNION CRUISES

TAKE NOTICE THAT A CHEAP, COMMODIOUS AND COMFORTABLE FORM OF GROUP CONVEYANCING, NAMELY

'I O N A'

A HORSE DRAWN BOAT

is plying for hire to groups of gentle folk, at very reasonable rates, as a form of relaxation, and as a subject of absorbing interest to all

Please Apply

SHROPSHIRE UNION CRUISES, NORBURY, STAFFORD   Woodseaves 292

Ridiculously archaic copy, even in 1972. Perhaps they wanted to keep the riff-raff away - they might have frightened the "gentle folk".

Do you see what the telephone number is? Weren't phone numbers simple in the old days? All you had to remember was "Woodseaves" and "292". Easy.

Now, if you wanted to contact Norbury Wharf Limited, and you hadn't written it down, you'd have to memorise 01785284292. Or you'd e-mail them, I suppose.

Norbury Wharf doesn't list horse-drawn boat trips on its website. A quick trawl for horse-drawn boats produced the following:

Llangollen Wharf
Tiverton Canal
Godalming Packetboat Company for trips on the Wey
Kennet Horse Boat Company, Kintbury on the K&A

The Godalming Packetboat Company site was interesting: their boat is Iona, yes, the same boat which Shropshire Union Cruises used.

From their website:

in 1969 - 85 ("Iona") worked as a horse drawn trip boat at Norbury Junction. 1985 was brought down by lorry to the Wey navigation at Godalming to work as a horse drawn trip boat, as she does today.  "IONA" is a full length narrowboat (72ft) 19.5 meters, and we have retained the traditional painting. She is fitted with a tea bar in the shell of the boatman's cabin, and has seating for 48 passengers. There is toilet on board.

Iona was launched in 1935 as Bellerephon, a "star class" Small Woolwich steel composite butty, originally paired with Bootes.

Journey into the 30s

A marvellous series of articles, with photographs taken in 1935 by Cyril Arapoff, began in the first issue of Waterways World, in Spring 1972. The scenes recorded were thus from only 37 years previously - now, of course, they are of 75 years ago and outside most people's memories.


The location is Brentford; the subject is wide boat Golden Spray.

"These boats were built and styled along the lines of a narrow boat, but with a more generous beam for the wide locks of the Grand Union.  Golden Spray is pictured at Brentford after loading 40 tons of grain in 2 cwt sacks from a lighter.  The sacks were swung by crane from the lighter's hold on to its hatch covers and then by men with sack-hooks on to the gunnel.  They were then dropped onto the shoulders of the skipper of the Golden Spray, lying alongside, who carried and positioned them in the hold of his boat - a typical example of the back-breaking loading methods of canal boats."

Two more photographs accompanied the article: in the first the elder girl is "clothing up" after loading.


According to the text the two narrow boats in the background (below) "are Fellows, Morton and Clayton boats: Composite boat Foxton, built 27th July 1900 and registered BIRMINGHAM 1058, and wooden boat Evenlode, built at F.M.C.'s Uxbridge yard in 1922 and registered UXBRIDGE 523."

Waterways World 38 years ago

The first issue of Waterways World was dated Spring 1972 and cost 20p. The first photograph of a narrowboat is on page 9; the "free canal holiday" was to be taken aboard a cruiser; the phrase "narrow boat" didn't appear until page 19 of a 48-page magazine. How times have changed!

Can you identify the front cover photo location? Answer at the bottom.


Another illustration of how we've moved on is the article headed "Womans World" (sic). The editorial earlier in the magazine says "Woman's World gives the female slant [...] starting with a look at women at working parties."


The article starts:

"There were no skirts to be seen at

Ashton on the cold, grey morning

of March 25th, but that doesn't

mean that the women of the canal

fraternity are shrinking violets when

it comes to getting dirty.  They were

there of course, but beneath the

mud it was often difficult to tell the

men from the girls.  Indeed this is

one place where Women's Lib.

comes into its own, and jobs are

allocated regardless of sex - every

woman playing an important role

in this, the biggest ever voluntary

working party to be held on our

inland waterways."

Nowhere does it explain what "Ashtac" stands for. Ashton Camp?* And isn't the font used for the title similar to that used by rock bands such as Yes in the Seventies?

Four issues later (December 1972) "Woman's World" had vanished.

The description of the front cover photo, taken by Harry Arnold, reads: "Looking up (sic) the Northampton Arm of the Grand Union Canal after last year's National Rally of Boats".

*(edit) Ashtac could stand for Ashton Attack, according to Jim of Starcross. Thanks Jim.