NARROW BOAT “Narrow Boat” NARROW BOAT L. T. C. ROLT ILLUSTRATED BY D. J. WATKINS-PITCHFORD WITH A i<''R:\V'.KD BY H. J. MASSINGHAM EYRE Sc spornswooDE LONDON Dedicated to the Vanishing Company of ‘ Number Ones ’ First Published November t044 Reprinted January 10 4 fit This book is produced in complete vopi/i>rmify with the authorized economy standards and is printed in Great Sritain for Fyrc Spottiswiunii* i^Publisfwrsy^ JJmited^ 15 Bedford Street, London, W,C, 2 CONTENTS PART 1 CHAP. )PA(*.K I. INTRODUCTION TO THE CANALS 11 II. TO BANBURY CROSS 17 III. THE BOATBUILDERS 21 IV. FITITNO OUT 27 V. THE BEOBLE OB THE BOATS 32 VI. BELLS AND BEER 38 VII. FOUR HOUSI'S 42 VIII. THE UBBER AVON 45 PART 2 IX. BANBURY TO BRAUNSTON 53 X. THE GRAND UNION CANAL 63 XI. THE ‘LEICRSTER CUT’ 68 XH. INTERLUDIi AT MARKET HARBOROUGII 76 xni. lhcbster 79 XIV. COSSINOTON AND BARROW-ON-SOAR 84 XV. THE BELLFOUNDERS 87 XVI. DOWN TO THE TRENT 90 XVII. SINGING SHARDLOW AND STORM AT FINDERN 95 XVin. THE BRLWf.RS 100 XIX. HORNmOIX>W TO HAYWOOD 103 XX. YOCKERTON HALL 112 XXL TRENTHAM AND THE roTTBRIES 115 XXll. INDUSTRIAL LANIXSCAPE 121 XXIU. HARHCASTLE TUNNEIJI 126 XXIV. THE VALE ROYAL 130 XXV. CHURCH MLNSHULl. 133 vi CONTENTS PART 3 CHAP. XXVI. NANTWICH rA<.r 138 XXVII. INTO SHROPSHIRE 145 XXVIII. ‘ DIRTY FAIR ’ 149 XXIX. CHESWARDINE WHARF 152 XXX. NORBURY, NEWPORT AND ‘ CUT END ’ 157 XXXI. ‘ THE STOUR CUT ’ 162 xxxn. LICHFIELD AND THE COVENTRY CANAL 169 xxxm. THE OXFORD CANAL AGAIN 177 xxxtv. FROST 183 XXXV, SPRING AT HAMPTON GAY 189 CONCLUSION 193 CABIN PLAN OF ‘ CRESSY * 196 APPENDIX 197 GLOSSARY 201 INDEX OF PLACES MENTIONED 209 » FOREWORD BY H. J. MASSINGHAM I RiiCEiVhD the manuscript of this book before I knew the author personally and before it had been accepted by a publisher. It had been going the weary round of the publishing houses like countless hungry tramps before it. And what optical derangement, I should like to know, has befallen those publishers who refused it that they could not see a prince among books underneath the rags of its begging mission? For consider its qualifications. It is the record of a voyage along 400 miles of the intricate canal-system of the Midlands, and this alone entitles it to special consideration as the survey of a countryside of uncharted home-waters less familiar than the Solomon Islands. With the exception of a pleasant volume by Temple Thurston {The Flower of Gloster) and the purely technical Bradshaw's Guide to the Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales, by R. dc Sails, this source of rural literature is quite untapped. Moreover, these canals arc falling so rapidly into disuse, partly by underhanded sabotage and partly as an extreme example of rural dereliction as a whole, that a merely geographical account of them alone would have filled up an important gap in our knowledge of our own country. Mr. Rolt brings to his task a complex equipment that goes far beyond the bare essential of knowing his job. Before he bought the “Cressy”, an old horse-drawn barge, and made a permanent home of it for himself and his wife, he had been making himself acquainted with the traditional civilization of the boatmen for a period of ten years. Add to this his further cxjicrionce among the network of half-abandoned waterways within the inverted triangle of Derby and Middlewieh as the two points of its base and Oxford as the apex. To this he brings a profound historic, tc^pographical and general interest not only in the canals themselves but in the vestiges of the rural culture directly or indirectly connected with them beside their banks. He is thus offering to the reader a some- thing unique in the rich modern literature of our native country- side. Two further points. Mr. Rolt is by profession an engineer. As any reader will see for himself, this advantage has given him peculiar faeilllicK in intimately describing the structuml meanings FOREWORD viii not only of the canal-system itself and of the crafts associated witir it, but of such manufacturing regions as the Potteries through which he passed. When he bought “Cressy”, he refitted it himself in the boat-building yard at Banbury, and this has been of the utmost service to him (and so will be to his readers) in interpreJhig the innermost details of boat-craftsmanship. As 1 have myself eaten meals in the fore-cabin of the “Cressy”, slept in the state-room and examined all the fittings and the gipsy-like decorations that are an integral part of the almost lost culture of the boatmen, I can personally testify to his mastery of the theme he presents to us in this book. Lastly, he possesses the first and last qnr.liik-ation of the author: he knows how to write. Consiilering that this is the first book he has written, I was myself agreeably surprised, when I first read the manuscript, at the depth of his sympathies, the quality of his insight and the maturity of his style. The mystery remains : what on earth was a publisher doing, turn- ing down a book like this? Mr. Rolt has a purpose in it further than that of introducing his readers to the placid v\ateru a\ s i>f the Midlands and the serene and individual lives of the watermen. The culture of the canals is a distinctive section (if the English tradition. Though it was the latest to flower out of what seemed an inex- haustible fertility, it has handed on the great inheritance in a more compact form than it would be easy to find elsewhere. It is perishing from the brutal impact of modern industfiaU.sm a.s all our traditions are perishing or so threatened. It has been Mr. Rolfs object to show that something much more than an out- moded method of transport is going with it, namely a way of life and its creative qualities that did literally make the linglaml of the spirit. Nothing but a mere mechanism is being substituted for it. The spirit is irnmortal and cannot altogether die. But it can be diverted from its normal and particular channels of e\pi\ ssii>ii, that is to say from “the good life”, into a mock-modc of being that is destructive and catastrophic because it is unnatural to it. To regard Mr. Rolfs book as nostalgic is, therefore, wholly to misinterpret it. He is pleading for something that Is part of the soul of England. September, 1944. “ I shall desire and I shall find The best of my desires ; The Autumn road, the mellow wind That soothes the darkening shires, And laughter, and inn-firOvS. “ White mist about the black hedgerows. The slumbering Midland plain. The silence where the clover grows. And the dead leaves in the lane. Certainly, these remain.” RlIPKRr BROOKE. Grateful acknowledgements are due to Messrs. Sidgwick and Jackson for permission to quote the above stanzas from a poem by Rupert Brooke ; and to Messrs, Methuen and the Executors of the late Sir Arthur Quiller-C ouch for part of the latter^s poem “ Upon Eckington Bridge AMMdef/uld Canal a 1 jt ^PiBswfi^^2«t/iori 'Mttalm. aSri^Tr _ «rfe 4 , wmmm wmmjamt rnmumTi RuW ;:;;^friw Sear \l\:rrinv J JiCeasiniifttii j ^‘mi/cim/c nr"" tlTiJfiittOTwC fica^ton VeUt i ^(WMJW j » Kiiiriimrhi\'- l\ j*> I '^/ny»«’ 4 r .mrniKv Xi ^tEWKES BUWJ ^Yl^itrufji i^\tfU»i \ / ^mms ISf^^ i«!!W PART I Chapter / INTRODUCTION TO THE CANALS Most people know no more of the canals than they do of the old green roads which the pack-horse trains once travelled. Of all the authors who have written of llicir journc>in«s about England, only Mr. Temple Thurston chose to travel by water, and his delightful book ‘The I'lower of Gloster’, published nearly thirty years ago, stands on the one small shelf in my library which is sufficient to contain all that has been written about the canals. For they have lapsed into the neglected obscurity which overhx^k the turnpikes when the railway deposed the stage-coach and ruined the great po-sting-lutuscs along Watling Street and the North Road. Now the motor-car has brought the road into its own again, but the canals have withdrawn still farther into the shado\v.s. Knowledge of them is confined to the narrow huinp-backcd bridges which trap the incautious motorist, or to an occasional i.'Hmp.se from the train of a ribbon of still water winding through the meadows to some unknown destination. I was equally ignorant myself until, ten years ago, a relative of mine pureliased *(.'rcsNy’, an old horse-drawn barge, installed an engine, and converted her into a ‘pleasure boat’. I was fortunate enough to be a member of the crew on her maiden voyage, and 11 NARROW BOAT 12 there and then acquired a passion for canal travel which has in- creased with the passing of years. It seemed to me to fulfil in the fullest sense the meaning of travel as opposed to a mere blind hurrying from place to place, and I felt certain that there could be no better way of approaching what is left to us of that older England of tradition which is fast disappearing. To step down from some busy thoroughfare on to flic quiet tow-path of a canal, even in the heart of a town, is to step backward a hundred years or more and to see things in a different, and per- haps more balanced perspective. The rush of traffic on the road above seems to become the purposeless scurryinj* of an over- turned anthill beside the unruffled calm of the water, which even the slow passage of the boats does not disturb. Because they have been outpaced and forgotten in the licadlong flight of modern progress, many old traditions and customs survive on the canals. Their people are still a highly individual cotmiuinify who have so far escaped the levelling influence of standardised urban thought and education. They rarely marry ‘off the land’, for they have a strong clannish pride, and the boatman’s roving life allows him little time for courtship. Moreover, few girls not bom in a boat cabin can stand the hard conditions of cramficd quarters and exposure to all weathers. On still .summer days this peaceful gliding through the green heart of the country may seem idyllic, but it is a different tale to stand for hours at the tiller or work a boat through endless locks when cold winter rains come sheeting down, or when a bitter north-easter numbs the fingers, ruffles the water into little breaking waves and makes locksidcs treacherous with ice. Few boatmen can either read or write, and, like many country folk, they often appear surly and taciturn to strangers from the towns. But beneath this natural reserve there shines a bright in- telligence whose great charm lies in the fact that it has not been acquired from Council schools and newspapers, but is in part traditional and in part evolved during many .slow jourucying,s wiilj only heron and plover for company. Their inborn gipsy iosc ..f colour and polished metal finds expression in the gaily painted cabms of their boats and in the wealth of glittering bras.s orna- ments which adorn them. These gay, vividly contrasting cohnns have become as naturally a part of the canal scene as tlic brig!»t pli^ge of the kmgfisher, because they are the product of an artistic mstinct which is entirely unselfconscious. INTRODUCTION TO THE CANALS 13 The canals have their own inns and their own shops, and because they follow their own independent, tortuous routes about England, often seeming purposely to avoid towns, the places whose names are household words to the boatman mean nothing to the lands- man. And what attractive names they arc! Cowroast, last of the fifty-seven locks by which the Grand Union Canal climbs out of London over the Chiltern ridge; Stoke Brucrne, a canal village by the southern portal of Blisworth Tunnel in Northamptonshire; Great Haywood in Staffordshire, where the canal from the Severn meets the Grand Trunk waterway from east to west. Cowroast is only a cottage by a lock, and the other two arc quiet villages, yet their names arc as significant to the boatman as arc those of Crewe or Swindon to the niilwayman. As one would expect, such an exclusive community possesses a traditional language of its own. For instance, there is no ‘port’ or ‘starboard’ on the canal, the boat captain calling to the ‘stccrer’, ‘Hold in!’ (/.<»., towards the towing path) or ‘Hold out!’ The canal itself is invariably referred to as the ‘cut’, owing to its artificial character as distinct from the natural channel of a river, while ‘Cressy’, the craft which gave me my first experience of canal travel, was not, in correct parlance, a barge at all, but a ‘narrow boat’, built to pass the locks of ‘narrow cuts’. To become still more technical, she was a ‘Shroppie fly-boat’, which, being interpreted, means that she was built by the Shropsliire Union Canal Ccmipany, and worked for them ‘fly’— that is, she travelled night and day, using relays of horses, like the old fliers of the roads. For this reason she was .‘iliglilly finer build than the slower craft, being intended for lighter and more perishable cargoes. When the Shropshire Union Company ceased carrying with their own boats, ‘Cressy’ was sold to a miller at Maesbury on the Welsh Canal, for whom she carried coal until she changed hands once more and was converted. For ten years I kept track of her vagrant wanderings about England, for I had made a resolve that one day I would acquire, if not ‘Cressy’ herself, then a boat like her, and use her not merely as a holiday craft, but as a pt'rmancnl home. 1 felt exmvineed that it would be possible to live both comfortably and ecommiieally in the space available. During this long period of waiting I snatched a few all-too- brief trips aboard her, walked many miles along canal towing-paths, and spent long winter evenings planning the arrangements of a 14 NARROW BOAT floating home down to the smallest detail. A large-soak' map of the canal system hung on the wall of my bedroom, and I would lie abed planning imaginary journeys, I had also acquired a second-hand copy of a book which is indispensable to any canal traveller, ‘Bradshaw's Guide to the Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales’, by the late Mr. Rodolph de SaUs. This may sound dry reading, but I pored over it by the hour. Perhaps it was the names which appoarot! in the distance tables which fascinated me most and made the pages live. Sheepwash Staunch, Maids Moreton Mill and W'dlnlotlo; Honeystreet, Rushey Lock, Freewarrens and Stoke Bardolph; Foxhangers, Sexton’s Lode, OfTord D’Arcy and Witliybcd Green— these names had for me the power of poetry to conjure beauty in my imagin ation. Others stirred me no less by their oddity : Bumble- hole Bridge, Popes Comer and Nip Square; Plucks Gutter, Stew- poney Wharf and Blunder Lock; Old Man’s Footbriilgc and Guthram Gout; Baitsbite Sluice, Dog-in-a-Doublct, Twentypence Ferry and Totterdown. What a wealth of history and legend spoke here and clamoured to be explored! Honeystreet and Waluhnlc had all the languorous scents and sounds of summer in them, while surely foxes barked in the dark coverts of Foxhangers under the harvest moon. Did fishermen flock to Baitsbite Sluice? Who was Guthram, and did they brew strong ale at TotfenlovMi? I was resolved to find out. Meanwhile each year brought tidings of declining canal traflic, of once-thriving waterways becoming choked with weals and nuul and, worse still, of some closed forever. Maesbury Mill closed down, and the little boatyard at Frankton on the Welsh Marches, where ‘Cressy’ was converted, soon followed. It was a significant comment on the times that the boat-builder went to work as a carpenter at a nearby aerodrome on what, a year or two before, had been open fields. Nejrt came the news of a ‘burst’. Part of the canal b;ink blew out on the western section of the Welsh Canal just lu-iow if,s innciit>ii with the arm that runs north to Llangollen over I'cllord’s I'u a? aqueducts at Ohirk and Pont-Cysyllte. It was not a seri<»us matter, for canal lengthmen have since told me that it would have taken only a few days* work to restore the canal to navigable condition, but this was not to be. For the Railway Company it was a wel- come pretext to abandon a liability, and so thirty-five miles of canal up the lovely valley of the Severn between the Long Mynd INTRODUCTION TO THE CANALS 15 and the Mountains of Montgomery as far as Newton was left to fall to ruin. One horse-boat, trading to Welshpool with coal, was caught on the wrong side of the breach, and there, presumably, she will lie until her gay paintwork is weathered away and her timbers rot, for there is no way out. In a few years the Welsh Canal will doubtless become no more than a dry ditch, like the old Wilts and Berks Canal or the water- way connecting the Thames with the Severn, which look as though they had lain idle for a century, although there arc boat- men still living who have worked over them. There is something indescribably forlorn about these abandoned waterways; like old ruined houses or silent mills, they are haunted by the bygone life and toil which has left its deathless, eloquent mark upon them. Just as in old houses the worn stone steps arc the memorial of many vanished feet, so on the canals it is the grooves worn by the lowing-Hncs in the rotting wooden lockbeams or the crumbling brickwork of bridges that bring the past to life. Most beautiful and most tragic of all is the old Thames and Severn Canal, climbing up the Golden Valley between great hills that wear their beechwoods like a mane. At the summit at Sapper- ton it pierces the spine of the Cotswold scarp by a tunnel two and a quarter miles in length, and thereafter winds across the open wolds to join the young Thames at Inglcslnim above Lechlade. At Daneway, a tiny village clinging to the steep slope by the western portal of the tunnel, there is an old inn of Cotswold stone where they still remember the boats. The wide windows under their carved drip-stones have seen them moored in what is now a grassy hollow, and they have watched the smoke of cabin fires soar up- ward on still evenings against the dark background of the hanging beechwoods. The ‘Flower of Gloster’ was one of the last boats to travel from the Severn to the Thames by this route, and I shall never cca.se t o envy M r. Temple Thurston his good fortune. Perhaps it is because I have a particular regard for the Cotswold country that I regret most the passing of this, the only r«)lswold omal. These wateiways were gone, but how many more would fall to ruin before I got my boat? I knew of two that were in danger : the Kennct and Avon Canal from Reading, which crosses the Wiltshire downs to Bath, and the Stratford-on-Avon Canal, which joins the Avon ai Stratford by way of I.owson Ford and Preston Bagot in Arden. If I did not take to the water soon, these, and perhaps many more, might be lost to me. 16 NARROW BOAT Then I was lucky enough to meet a companion who found the prospect of a roving life on a canal boat equally attractive. What were the alternatives? An unsettled c.sistciKv in some urban flat, or the uneasy isolation of a country cottage menaced by the ever- present threats of new aerodromes, by-pass roads or ‘desirable' Wding sites. These prospects did not please us, and we resolved to find a suitable boat and get married the following year. I knew that ‘Cressy’ had been laid up for some time past at a boatyard on the Oxford Canal at Banburj’, so I went over and saw her. Her cabin-work stood in need of repair and she badly wanted repainting, but her hull was still sound, so I took the plunge and bougk her. She had been fitted out as a holiday craft to accommodate a party of eight, and my biggest job would be to convert her interior into comfortable pcrnianenl qiiaitcrs for a crew of two. An engineer by profession, 1 knew not the first thing about carpentry, but I determined to tackle this job myself, not only to ease the strain on my slender rest>urccs, but to obtain that added satisfaction which only one’s own handiwork can give. Thus it came about that ten years of waiting and planning came to an end one April day when I loaded my old car with luggage, blankets and provisions and headed for Banbury. At last I was the captain of the ‘Cressy’, and I could hardly believe my good fortune. The Boatyard, Banbury Chapter II TO BANBURY CROSS It was a sunny, boisterous day, and my road lay over the northern Cotswolds. Most motorists choose the tarmac highway which scorns the villages and cuts straight across the bare uplands through Stow-on-the-WoId and Chipping Norton. This is the route indi- cated by those motoring maps which depict the face of England covered by a network of thick red lines as ugly as the roads them- selves. They are a useful diagram of roads to be avoided, but that is all. My guide has always been the inch-to-thc-mile Ordnance Survey Map, which is a mine of information about the country, and the unfailing philosopher and friend of the true Iravollcr. The route I had chosen took me straight and steeply on to the hills above Winchcombe by way of Sudeley, and from their lof^ summit the old town appeared as a small cluster of smoke- shrouded grey roofs sheltering under the great shoulders of Lang- ley and Cleeve Common. This brought me to the old hill road to Campden, which follows the majestic, wave-like lift and fall of the Wolds by Lyncs Barn and Stumps Cross. It was the turn of the year, and although the wind which swept across these great up- lands had not yet lost its winter keenness, the sun shone with a brave new warmth. Buds, though unbroken, had already softened the starkness of trees and hedgerows, so that as I dropped down into Canipdcn they gave to the view across the Vale of the Red Horse that particular misty quality which is so characteristic of early spring. There is a great charm about the broken country between Camp- » 17 NARROW BOAT 18 den and Banbury. The lias of the Warwickshire Plain thrusts a deep bay between the northernmost outposts of Cotswold and the Edge Hills, where the limestone appears once more, but of that more ochreous hue which is due to the presence of iron. The little towns and villages along the road faithfully reflect the swift transi- tion from one geological district to another because they arc old, and therefore true to local tradition and environment. Thus the grey houses of Campden, with their roofs of stone slats from the hill quars, are as much a part of the Cotswolds as the hills them- selves, while Shipston-on-Stour, seven miles on, is built of that rose-red brick which is so much in harmony with the softer land- scape of the vale. The villages of Upper and Lower Brailcs, though under the shadow of the hills, are also of brick, but journey a little farther and the thatched cottages of SwalclilTe, Tadmarton and Broughton are all built of the tawny Edge Hill limestone. After such a journey the outskirts of Banbury were a sorry sight, for the sturdy stone heart of this old market town by the Chcrwell is besieged on all sides by semi-detached monstrosities who,se growth has recently received fresh impetus from new industrial expansion. Doubtless it is for this reason that Banbury ha.s re- ceived scant treatment from such authors as have visited her in search of the ‘picturesque’, for as long ago as 1911 one wrote: ‘There is little of the old aspect of Banbury left now*. Yet the worth and the character of places cannot always be accurately judged by first impressions. The beautiful ‘show village’, on deeper investigation, often turns out to be as lifelm as a stuffed bird in a museum, the cottages week-end dormitories for jaded business men, and the great barns riding-schools or Road Houses. ‘All for the eye’, as an old Gloucestershire farmer I know once said of them, ‘and nothen for the belly’. On the other haml, t»nviis and villages which have a more workaday appearance often con- ceal, beneath an exterior that may seem positively drab, a char- acter and charm which are no less than the old vigorous life of the place. This was what I discovered in Banbury during my thn» months stay. Had I only stayed as many weeks 1 might j^ve missed it. The Oxford Canal is typically secretive in its passage through the town, and, although there is a large wharf which handles a sub- stantial trade in coal, a stranger would have difficulty in finding any trace of it. Even some of the inhabitants of Banbury seem to be unaware of its existence, as I discovered later when my state- TO BANBURY CROSS 19 ment that I was living on a boat was accepted by local tradesmen as a sally of Munchausen humour. I do not blame them, for I paid several visits to the boatyard where ‘Cressy’ was moored before T became certain of finding my way without error. It lay down an extremely narrow street opening unobtrusively out of a corner of the Market Square. The name ‘Factory Street’ was almost illegible with age, and the best elue to its identity was a sign over a small shop on the corner which proclaimed ‘Tripe, Ox Heels and Neats- foot Oil for Sale’. The street ended at a wooden drawbridge over the canal, to the left of which was the boatyard where ‘Cressy’ lay between two derelict narrow boats. When I had shipped my belongings aboard 1 hurried back into the town to obtain the additional stores I needed before the shops closed: a loaf of bread and a pint of milk ; sausages for supper and bacon for breakfast; paraffin for the lamps and a sack of coke from the gasworks for the saloon stove, since the nights were still cold. On the opposite side of the drawbridge from the boatyard there was a lock, and on the lockside stood a toll office. There all the boats southward bound for Oxford with their cargoes of coal were checked and gauged. At eight o’clock every week-day evening the toll clerk locked the bridge in the closed position and svning a heavy door across the towing path, so that any late-comers had to tic up until the following morning. There can be no mistaking this hour of closing, for they still ring the curfew in Banbury. I heard the measured tolling of the bell very distinctly that evening as I was cooking my first meal in the galley, for the wind had fallen with the going down of the sun, and the air was still and very clear. It struck me as sinplarly appropriate that, on this lane of still water which was like a road that had fallen asleep, it should be this tranquil, ancient voice of the town, and not the roar of traffic, that I should hear. I had selected the most promising of an elderly and rather dubious assortment of Li-Lo mattresses and was making my bed when the creak of tackle and the slow clip-clop of hooves on the towing-path opposite heralded the arrival of a belated horse-boat. I looked out The boatman v/as walking beside bis horse, and when they drew abreast of my window they halted, dim shapes In the darkness. The tow-line fell slack as the boat, low laden in the water, slid into view, and the scarcely perceptible ripples round her bluf bows died as she was checked and drawn into the side. NARROW BOAT 20 Golden lamplight streaming from the open aft doors of the cabin illumined the weather-beaten face of the woman at the tiller, and glinted on her gold earrings. Tliesc were my unknown neighbours on my first night afloat. Though they must have cast away soon after sunrise, they did not disturb me, for I slept soundly, despite the fact that the mattress I had so laboriously blown up deflated overnight, so that I awoke to find myself on the hard boards. Paintino the Can Chapter III THE BOAT BUrLDERS When I awoke, the sunlight, reflected by the breeze*ru{fled water, was weaving patterns of shifting light on the cabin roof, and from without came sounds of manifold activity. There was a clinking of hammer on anvil, the creak and sigh of forge bellows and the clatter of caulking mallets, while a lusty male voice was singing ‘Bonnie Mary’. Presumably this songster was the blacksmith, for occasionally there came a stamping of hooves and the song would be interrupted by shouts of 'Whoa!* or ‘Hold up, will youf I looked out to see two cart-horses outside the door of the smithy, awaiting their turn to be shod, and men at work on the narrow boat in the dry dock. The Banbury Boatyard was a typical example of the small, skilled family business which is having such a bitter struggle for existence in these days when the demand is for quantity and not quality. This demand expects extended credit and cut prices, two conditions which the craftsman cannot fulfil, since he lacks the necessary capital reserve, and is unwilling and unable to compete against the inferior mass-produced article. Old Mr. Toolcy had been a boatman like his father until he went into the boat-building business many yeans ago. He was a 21 22 NARROW BOAT little, bent old man with drooping white moustaches, and a most engaging smile that sent fans of wrinkles spreading from the corners of his remarkably bright eyes. He wore a battered bowler hat whose austere black had mellowed with age to a rusty brown, and the combination was so inseparable that the eye soon grew to accept the ancient headgear as a natural part of the man. He was getting too old for heavy work, and, as he himself admitted, he ‘couldn’t get his breath like he used’. But, like the old blacksmith next door, who, although nearly blind, still pottered down to the forge to blow the fire for his son, Mr. Tooley could not leave the scene of his life’s work. It was gratifying indeed to find that his two sons were carrying on their father's craft. Time was when they built the long wooden boats at Tooley's yard, but now, owing to the decline of canal trafiic and the intro* duction of the steel boat, their work was confined to repairs. The average wooden narrow boat requires docking about once every three years, so that this work was spasmodic and, despite the fact that the family were prepared to tackle any job in the way of joinery or wheelwrighting that would tide them over, there were times when the yard fell slack. Because of this, George, the elder son, had been forced to take a job at the new factory on the out- skirts of the town. This is a typical instance of llic wav in which the craftsman is being compelled to forfeit the birthright of his hereditary craft and lose himself in the modern induslrial system, where the skill of hands is subordinate to the rapidity of the machine. Perhaps one day we shall awaken from the spell of the machine and realise how much natural art and skill we have lost in this sorry process. One of the most damaging effects of nK)dcri) mechanised in- dustry is the intensive specialisation it involves. The so-called skiUed operative acquire such a mechanical dexterity by [Haform- ing a single repetition job that ho becomes as helpless as a raw apprentice when confronted with a strange task, or if he is de- prived of his costly jigs and tools. Your true craftsman, on the hand, is infinitely versatile, because he relies primarily upon , j *^® adaptable tools in the world. The Tooley family demonstrated this versatilitv in the way th^ had adapts themselves to meet changing conditions bv ac* quirmg a considerable mechanical skill which was entirely .self- ^ ^’^® supersede the horse on the Oxford Canal they fitted several motors in horse-boats with THE BOAT BUILDERS 23 great success. They installed their own generating plant to light the workshop and charge the boatmen’s wireless batteries. Most remarkable of all, when this engine broke a piston, they did not, as you would suppose, send an urgent order to the manufacturer for a spare, but set to work to make another. This meant making a wooden pattern, core and mould-box, constructing the mould in sand, melting the iron in a crucible over their small open hearth, pouring the mould and turning the casting to size. All this was done as though the task was of every-day occurrence, and the engine has run perfectly ever since. Nevertheless it was their work of repairing and furbishing the wooden boats that most delighted me, for it was no less than the last miraculous survival of a craft centuries old. In the thirteenth- century Saintc-Chapellc, of Pierre dc Montercau, in Paris there is a carving upon a door which represents the builditig of the Ark. Three mediaeval boat-builders are at work ; one is swinging his mallet as he caulks the seams between the timbers, which a second is tarring from a pot with the aid of a long-handled brush ; a third, standing inside the hull, is using the adze. 1 saw these tools used in precisely the same manner at Toolcy’s Yard. The adze has be- come almost extinct among the tools of the country carpenter, who once used it extensively for squaring beams and roof-timbers, but among canal boat-builders this rural bygone still .survives. The seams of the narrow boats are caulked with strands of oakum, and the noise of the mallets which I heard so often was that same sound which must have echoed through die woods by Beaulieu River when they were building the ‘Agamemnon’ and the *Eury- alus’ on the slips at Buckler’s Hard. The tall rudder-post of the canal boat suggests an a.s.socintion even older, for the boatmen call it a ‘ram’s head’, and so recall the carved fighting ships of the Norsemen. On the inside of the hull the timbers are plastered with hot ‘chalico’, a time-honoured mixture of tar, cow-hair and horse- dung. Then a layer of felt or brown paper is applied, and finally the thin vertical oak planks, or ‘shearing’, arc nailed into position. Sometimes the main timbers, or ‘strakes’, at the bow or stern have to be renewed. These have a double curvature to conform to the graceful inward and upward sweep of the hull. A single curve can be obtained the conventional method of steaming, but it was explained to me that if both curves wcic obtained by this method in a piece of straight-grained oak, it would sooner or later crack and split. The craftsman’s solution is to obtain a timber having one 24 NARROW BOAT correct curve already in the grain, so that it need be bent only in one direction. Mr. Tooley must have carried this natural curve in his mind’s eye, for he related how, years ago, he had spotted a suit- able oak tree growing on the outskirts of the town, and when at last he heard that it was to be felled to make way for housing development, he bought it. Now it lay in the yard sawn into timbers ready for use, and I can think of no belter fate that could befall an English oak. When the heavier jobs on the hull have been completed, the boat-builder’s next task is the re-decoration, and 1 was lucky enough to see this work carried out on the boat ‘Florence’, which was on the dock at the time of my arrival. Each member of the family played his especial part. George began in his spare time from the factory; he was the lettering expert, and painted the owner’s name and port of origin in elaborate cream lettering, shaded with blue, on the large vermilion centre panel of the cabin side. Then it was the old man’s turn to embellish his son’s work with little garlands of bright flowers in the four corners and between the lettering. Finally it was left to Herbert, the younger son, to paint his castles on the four small side panels. Apart from striking a line with a chalked string to keep the lettering level, they did no preliminary sketching or spacing out whatever, but worked straii-ht out of their heads with wonderful rapidity and skill. I watched fascinated while Herbert painted the four castles in the space of one afternoon. Dipping fet into one and then another of the small tins of oil paint of his own grinding and mixing, lu* bleiulet,! together the grwn, the blue and the sepia until a typical scene, dear to genCTations of canal folk, suddenly took shape under his hand. Here it would be a castle with a single battlenjcnted turret, rising against a background of rolling blue hills and red sunset ; there a more monastic structure, (win towered, and backed by woods, a stream flowing improbably through an arch in the base of OM tower and spreading into a lake in the foreground. Each panel differed from its neighbour, yet all were true to that (nidi- traal form which appears so strangely foreign in its co.iccpliou. w^o first established this convention of tall stiiccoct! lowers :huI wide-eaved red roofs? Perhaps it was some old wandering* Romanv who exchanged his caravan for a narrow boat whcji ihc canals were young, ^d adorned the walls of his new home with his memonw of fairy-Me castics in the Carpathians. Whatever the ongm, Its influence is still strong, for this was by no means the end THE BOAT BUILDERS 25 of the decorative work. Castles were also painted on the inside of the cabin doors and in the cabin itself, while the ‘ram's head’, the tiller bar and the ‘stands’ and ‘cratches’ which support the gang- planks all had to be picked out with bright geometrical patterns of colour before the boatman's exacting eye was satisfied. When all the work had been and the ‘Florence’ was floated out, her captain stood beside old Mr. Toolcy on the dock side. After an unhurried, critical scnilin}, ‘Well, George,' he said, ‘I reckon she looks well.’ This remark, coming from a boat- man, was high praise, and to ray mind it was certainly well merited. A modern economist would have pointed out quite truthfully that she would have been just as serviceable had she been painted battle- ship grey throughout at a great saving of labour. But because the men of the canals arc not economists, and have a standard of values which is not based upon paper money, the ‘Florence’ bore a coat of many colours, and lay resplendent in the raornijig .sun. Each boat carries two water-cans, one an open ‘dipper’ which, as its name implies, is dipped into the canal and used for a hundred and one domestic uses, from peeling potatoes to washing the cap- tain's wool vest; the other is a tall can with handle, spout and lid, like a mammoth hot-water jug, in which drinking-water is stored. Both are elaborately decorated with flowers, and often carry the owner’s name in white letters on a red clrcumfcivutial band. The boatmen brought these cans to Mr. Tooley when they needed a repaint, for the old man excelled at this work. To behold him, a.s I did, when he sat before the bench in his narrow workshop, the battered bowler firmly planted on the back of his head and a tray of many-coloured paints at his elbow, was to see the pOvSt miracu- lously living in the present. Not a past preserved in a museum or spuriously recreated in an Art and Craft shop, but a vital tradition. Handling his fine camel-hair brushes with wonderful surencss and delicacy, he first of all painted little shaded discs of sepia, ochre and pink on the green ground of the can and surrounded them with at garland of pale green leaves. These were the centres of the roses. When they were dry, the petals, red on sepia, yellow on ochre and white on pink, were superim posed so simply and swiftly that only in the way a mere blob ofpaiai sccmeti suddenly to h!o.ss