 BCN
boats, Joeys and Tugs.
At the centre of the English waterway network
is an even tighter knot of canals, built largely to carry coal
from the mines to the manufacturing industries of Birmingham and
the Black Country, whose appetite for fuel was voracious
throughout the canal age.
These canals, the Birmingham Canal
Navigations, developed a style of craft all of their own, slab
sided open boats with a straight stem and stern, strongly built
but with a minimum of fancy frills. They were double ended so
that the rudder could be hung on either end to avoid the need to
turn them around and, although they were certainly 'narrow
boats' in the strict measurement sense, they were treated very
differently to the graceful long distance cabin boats with their
lace curtains, painted castles and house proud crews. |
 |
| In this area the boatman and his mate would
deliver a loaded boat to the factory wharf, immediately transfer
the rudder and all their essential boating tools on to an empty
boat and set off back to the colliery to reload. There was not,
therefore, any personal involvement with any one boat. Distances
were relatively short and most journeys would be completed in a
day (although they were very long days…) so the crews would
generally arrange to spend most nights back at home, in a house.
If there were cabins on these boats they were small and sparsely
furnished and not designed to be lived in, although the boatmen
would spend a night or two on board when necessary. These 'day
boats' or 'joey-boats' as they were rather disdainfully called,
were fantastically important to the canal industry of the
Midlands, and it is a sad fact that only a tiny proportion of
the thousands that were still at work in the 1950s now exist at
all. Of those only one single wooden joey boat is afloat in
anything like carrying condition, the Birchills in the Black
Country Museum in Dudley. |
 |
|
Top - Joey boat Birchills at
the Black Country Museum, Dudley,
one of the last to be built and the only wooden survivor of a
class of thousands. |
 |
|
Above Right - Iron day boats
loaded with coal at Dudley in 1999 following a historic
recreation
on film of a typical Black Country canal trip, with one tug
pulling three loaded boats to the wharf. |
|
Right - Canal power
personified, a small boat with a massive engine and
propeller capable of dragging a hundred ton payload in a train
of boats behind it. |
| As elsewhere, the horse was the prime motive
power for most of the joey boats' history, and a few animals
were working until the end of regular coal carrying in the
1960s. However, because a very large proportion of the BCN was
built on two main levels, separated by just three locks, it was
far more practical and economic to pull trains of boats with
tugs here than elsewhere on the system. When reliable diesel
engines became available in the twentieth century many small
canal tugs were built especially for this traffic, powerful
enough to pull three or four loaded boats into Wolverhampton and
Birmingham, or a whole chain of empty ones back to the pits. |
| This development helped to keep the
canals competitive against other forms of transport until
industry generally changed from coal to other forms of fuel.
Many, perhaps even most of those tugs are still to be seen all
over the canal system for although heavily ballasted to keep
their big propellers deep in the water, they have proved to be
perfect pleasure boats for the committed canal enthusiast.
In fact they now provide the model for many of
the newest private holiday boats that seek to emulate the subtle
grace of these chunky old workboats.
Right: A clutch of restored
but privately owned tugs gathered for the bi-annual gathering of
working boats at the Black Country Museum, Dudley. |
 |
|
