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Horses and Canals 1760 - 1960
Working a horse and boat
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Horse drawn canal
boats, river barges and canal barges of England and the UK - by Tony
Lewery.
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 The
actual work of keeping a loaded boat moving, provided it is in
deep enough water to be properly afloat, is not particularly
hard. It goes on for hour after hour but the effort needed to
keep up the momentum of the boat- simply overcoming the friction
of the water and wind at slow speed - is not great.
Starting the boat off - overcoming the inertia
of thirty to sixty tons of boat and cargo- does need sustained
effort but after half a minute or so of heavy pulling, building
up the speed by an accumulation of energy, the load is underway
and just needs to be kept moving. A sensible boathouses soon
learns the trick of leaning steadily into the collar, keeping
the stretchy cotton towline taut so that the continuous pull
gradually accelerates the boat to full working speed. In
practise starting off a horse boat is rather quicker than with a
motor boat, particularly noticeable when working through flights
of locks.
Horseboats don’t have brakes. Once the weight
of boat and cargo are moving it takes almost the same amount of
effort to stop it again in a hurry, and although horse walking
pace may seem quite slow it becomes frighteningly fast when that
weight is approaching an immovable obstruction like a lock gate,
or another unstoppable boat coming the other way. |
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| The horseboat answers were forethought and
strapping posts. Forethought was built on experience, knowing
the canal and its problems, and knowing where to expect to meet
other boats. In this respect the ‘smacking whip’ was an
essential piece of boating equipment. It had a short handle with
a very long lash, usually home-made by the boatman, plaited up
from an old piece of cotton towline. At the end was a silk
‘thrum’, easily replaceable and available at every canalside
boatman’s shop, and it was this that created the whipcrack as
loud as a gunshot. Usually it was kept on the cabin roof close
to the hand of the steerer and in the quieter days of the past
three sharp cracks with this smacking whip could be heard half a
mile away, ample warning when approaching a blind bridge or a
flight of locks. Forewarned was forearmed, with time to slow
down naturally. ‘Strapping posts’ are
upright posts of wood or iron set firmly in the ground close to
the canalside for the boatman to wrap the ‘strap’ round, and the
strap is simply a good strong piece of rope. As the boat comes
alongside he will pick up the rope attached to the boat and take
one or two turns around the post, and the friction of that rope
on the wood or iron controlled by the tension that the boatman
keeps on the free end can be used to slow and control the boat
very precisely. Each lock used to be furnished with a set of
strapping posts set in positions that allowed the boatman to
control the momentum of his boat with speed and safety but few
now remain to remind us of these old working practises. On many
narrow canals, those with locks only wide enough for one narrow
boat at a time, the top gate of each lock had the outer gatepost
extended upwards to furnish its own built-in strapping post. As
the boat entered the lock the steerer could drop a loop of rope
over the post and simultaneously slow the boat and close the top
gate behind it, a very efficient piece of time saving.
Particularly fine examples of these posts are still to be found
on the Shropshire Union and Worcester and Birmingham canals. |
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Inland
waterways were designed or adapted to accommodate the complete
transport unit- boat, horse, crew and, equally important, the
towline. The towing path was just as important as the
water channel, and in fact in canal parlance the boatman did not
steer to the left or to the right but to the ‘inside’ or
‘outside’- towards the towpath or away from it, depending which
side it was on. Wherever the towpath changed sides the canal
company provided a ‘roving’ bridge for the horse to cross the
canal, most of which were designed so that the animal could walk
over and under without having to unhitch the towline. Towpaths
were kept rigorously clear of all obstructions because anything
that could get tangled with the towline was not just a nuisance
but a potential danger. If the towing rope were to get caught
round a serious obstruction whilst the boat is under way its
momentum would continue to carry it forward whilst the rope
would try and drag the horse backwards, causing panic, a broken
rope or, in the worst case, a horse pulled into the canal. |
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The towline, although only made of cotton,
was quite destructive for it was constantly getting wet and
covered in grit and ashes from the towpath. Pulled hawser tight
between boat and animal its abrasiveness could quickly cause
damage to anything it rubbed against- bridge brickwork, lock
walls or wooden gates. Today the most significant evidence of
centuries of horseboating are the marks left by thousands of
horse lines scarred into the iron guards and rollers that were
fixed to locks and bridges to protect the stonework.
These guards and rollers were of course of
benefit both ways for the wear and friction on the towline
rubbing against a hard metal plate was far less than rubbing
through a groove in brickwork. Even so a horse line would only
last a couple of weeks before the middle was frayed and worn out
and had to be replaced. This left lots of short ends suitable
for tying-up ropes or fender making but, like horse fodder and
stabling, new towlines were a constant necessary expense for the
horse boat captain. |
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