 The
secret heart of all the arts of the narrow boat world was the
tiny boat cabin. It was secret because it was such a private
space, the personal home and possessions of the boating family,
but it was the heart because it shaped and controlled the
working lives of the boat people, and the folk art of the canal
is the result of that historic lifestyle.
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| When the midland
canals failed to attract investment for expansion in the
mid-nineteenth century, when first faced with serious
competition from the railways, they effectively sentenced all
future boatmen to working the old fashioned size of narrow boat
for evermore, boats narrow enough to pass through the seven foot
wide locks of the old canals. This in turn meant the tiny cabin
at the stern could never be bigger than it ever had been either,
a sort of historic gauge for two centuries of working life.
Coping with living in that tiny space was the biggest single
influence on the boating family's taste in decorative art.
The basics of a bearable human existence are
simply some food, drink and warmth, but in a British winter that
means a fire and somewhere dry to sleep. Comfort in these basic
terms is a bed, a chair, a table, a stove to boil the kettle and
cook food on, and delight is space enough to share these things
with a lover. By ingenuity and evolution the narrow boat living
cabin came to satisfy all these demands and more, in a space
little bigger than a packing case, rarely more than ten foot
long and barely high enough to stand up in. |
Bunk seats are built in as storage boxes, the bed folds up into
a cupboard, another cupboard folds down to become a table and a
coal fired stove or cooking range in the corner keeps it as warm
as a bake oven. Every available bit of space is utilized, the
very complexity of it all tricking the mind into believing it
must be bigger than its measurements, just to get everything in.
Add a family, and curtains, saucepans, clothes and ornaments and
the result is a truly extraordinary living space by any
criteria, a situation with the potential to be wonderfully rich
and complex or appallingly squalid. It was both of these things
at different times to different people. |
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The
artistic taste of the boat people, as with so much else on the
canal, was largely formulated in Victorian England, a
land of frills and furbelows and the fashion for conspicuous
respectability expressed in decorative quantity rather than
quality - ornate profusion more than graceful simplicity. This
intricacy was the key to making life in a tiny box cabin
bearable, and possibly the secret of that life's survival into
the mid twentieth century. It started back in the boatyard,
because when the built-in cabin furniture was constructed each
cupboard door was made with recessed centre panels and every
area of wood work was framed with decorative wooden mouldings.
Then everything was painted and grained to look like figured oak
or feathered mahogany, and the mouldings picked out in colour
like bright picture frames. Painted roses and castles were added
to the walls and doors, and the floor and coal box were painted
with diamonds, hearts and circles. Already the new living space
had a dark, slightly mysterious richness even before the boatman
and his wife moved in. They brought flowered curtains with lace
edges, deep pelmets of white crocheted lace hanging from every
shelf, brass doorknobs, oil lamp, towel rails and ornaments
galore, all kept brightly polished, and a traditional rag rug
laid on the floor. The coal stove was cleaned and polished with
black lead, and the boat woman's pride and joy, her collection
of pierced edge china plates with their printed flowers and
'present from Blackpool' messages were hung all over the walls,
tied together for safety with coloured ribbons and neat bows.
All is delicacy and fragility, a miniaturised stage set for a
domestic life that cannot occupy more space than the cabin
allows, a cabin that cannot be wider than the boat or take up
any space that will stop the boat earning its living carrying
cargo. It was an extraordinary display of determination
overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. |
 The
creation and maintenance of that domestic beauty, despite
the pressures of unremitting boatwork, grubby children, dirty
cargoes and clumsy boatmen was the major art form of the women
of the narrow canals. An obvious, even ostentatious display of
cleanliness was a major part of their self expression,
statements made through scrubbed white woodwork and glittering
brasswork to be read and understood by her peers and partner, a
regimented collage of the domestic traditions of her trade.
|
 Many
were accomplished needlewomen too, in the normal housewifely
tradition of the times, but a number developed great skill
making complex lace crochet work to
decorate their cabins, turning them into an art form of their
own.
There is a strange poetic perversity in the
fact that the boatwoman's hobby should be delicate white
lacework to hang on boats whose regular cargo was often bulk
coal. |
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