 It
still surprises me that the extraordinary decorative paintwork tradition
of the Leeds and Liverpool canal is not better known, not lauded or
loved more profoundly and proudly. Compared to the ‘Roses and Castles’
of the narrow boats it is a tradition as obscure as something from Fiji
or darkest Finland. There are excuses but no good reasons for this
disparity and it is to be hoped that a soon-to-be-published book on the
subject will do something to balance the account. Watch this space for
more details in the spring. I have seen the roughs, and it is going to
be splendid. (Click for details)
Its under-recorded status is partly the fault of the
boats, built to a gauge to suit the rather oddball size of the locks of
this trans-pennine waterway, linking the waterways of the big sailing
barges of the west, the Mersey flats, with those of the east, the Humber
keels. The boats shared an ancestry from both sets of cousins but being
built as strictly inland boats for shallow waters they became a separate
class of canal craft with, over time, a distinctive set of decorative
characteristics too. The classic boat was a small bluff-bowed horse
drawn barge, roughly 60 foot long by 14 foot beam with a broad transom
stern for maximum capacity and stern cabin space. It was on that transom
and the massive rudder that the decorative paintwork flourished most
spectacularly, an explosive mixture of colour and pattern – panelling,
lines, lettering, pictures and, above all, insistent rolling scrollwork.
This regional tradition survived the Second World War surprisingly well
and transferred quite comfortably to the pointed sterned steam and motor
boats as well. But it was at the Liverpool end that the tradition
finally flourished most spectacularly, on the big 70 foot coal boats
running from the Wigan coalfields into the city, and I am still amazed
that these gloriously decorated craft did not have more impact on the
wider canal world.
Some of this present cultural obscurity has to be
blamed on the early canal restoration pioneers, book-inspired and London
based. The key book was Rolt’s Narrow Boat, elegiac and romantic, an
exploration of the countryside and the time worn engineering of the
canal age. His personal discovery was the life and people of the
delicately decorated narrow boats of the Oxford Canal, remnants of the
almost rural life of the canal village. His interest was in old
craftsmanship and attitudes, a conservationist philosophy that appealed
very directly to his war weary readers and followers in the 1940s and
50s. It was not about the blackened reality of contemporary industries,
of the constant stream of coal boats driving relentlessly into Burnley
and Blackburn, Liverpool and Manchester. But this was an area that a
separate tradition of vibrant boat decoration was surviving –thriving
even, and still developing at the time.
The London bias was equally important. It was where
Robert Aikman and the I.W.A. operated, it was where the influential
writers, artists and politicians lived and worked and, even more
critically, it was where the national press was based. Any reporter
could nip down to Paddington and find a few photogenically decorated
narrow boats, or get on a train and visit real boat painters at work at
Braunston or Leighton Buzzard and be back in time for tea. But a trip to
the misty valleys of Lancashire was a different sort on expedition
entirely. They were ‘up North’, a region of coal and satanic mills that
the metropolis found it more comfortable to ignore or perhaps preferred
to forget. Mines and mills were not yet romantic and the roses and
castles of the narrow boats became the iconography of the canal
preservation movement whilst the more localised ‘brightwork’ tradition
of the Leeds and Liverpool was sidelined.
Meanwhile, in common with the rest of the canal
system, traffic was declining and the old wooden boats that carried the
most elaborate versions of this localised tradition were getting worn
out and withdrawn from service. More modern steel motor barges continued
to carry an echo of the tradition into the 1960s but the wooden boats
vanished very quickly. Expensive to maintain and too big to have much of
a cruising range these wonderful boats missed the bonus from the
pleasure boat boom that old narrow boats enjoy and they have become very
rare very fast. Today there are only two wooden survivors, both at the
Waterway Museum at Ellesmere Port, but both in desperate condition,
needing much money and conservation effort to survive. George is
the sole remaining transom sterned Leeds and Liverpool ‘short’ boat and
Scorpio is the only wooden ‘long’ boat left. The photographs
shown alongside were taken some while ago when both boats were younger
and in fairer fettle. Today’s view would be much sadder, alas, but they
still exist and still float. And they still need your help.
©Tony
Lewery,
The Brow,
Ellesmere,
New Year’s Eve 2008 |
Image courtesy Mike Clarke |
