 Heritage.
Now there’s a word that’s being conjured with, especially in the name of
waterway interpretation. The dictionary says that heritage is “that which is
inherited, condition of one’s birth; anything transmitted from ancestors or
past ages.” So you can’t pick and choose your own heritage, any more than
you can pick your parents, but you do alter the future by deciding what
there will be for your future heirs to inherit. What’s saved today stands
some chance of surviving, but what’s destroyed is gone. However, we can’t
save everything, so decisions have to be made, some of which will be
mistaken. That’s part of the stressful nature of being human and fallible.”
Hmmm… the canal heritage then-- something of which to be proud, to cherish,
and to pass on to our heirs.The most
interesting canal heritage for me is as much the combination of little
things as the big statements, more lock keeper’s hut than Gloucester docks,
more slipway winch (above) than Anderton Lift. It is the worn groove in ironwork
fitted to a wooden lock gate to preserve the carpentry from the towline of
the horse pulling the boat that was the home of the man who was earning his
living transporting goods important to the manufacturing industries of the
world. Closer to my own speciality-- it is the well painted rose by the boatpainter who decorated the drinking water can to beautify the cabin and
life of the family of the man who was earning his living transporting goods
important to the industry of the world. It is that underlying chain
relationship that seems to me to be critically important to most that is
worth preserving on the waterways, but it is not easy to save that complete
story. But we do need to try and preserve the whole chain in reality, not
just links as exhibits in glass cases, or as theory in books.
 Some
of this philosophical musing has been forced on me and focussed by a
’heritage’ boat-painting job, just completed. The Peak and Potteries
division of British Waterways have an unusual and refreshing attitude to
their fleet of big old working boats, which reflects much credit on the
local management and the personal enthusiasm of many of their employees.
They keep the boats, maintain them, and paint them up smartly in the early
BW blue and yellow as part of their own local heritage policy for the area.
Then they continue to work them hard to earn their living. The public
relations flagships of the fleet are Lindsay and Keppel, one
of the very last motor-and-butty pairs of carrying boats commissioned by
British Waterways in the late 1950s, and these are the boats that we have
been working on in Northwich, on the River Weaver, very close to where they
were built nearly half a century ago. New paintwork and signwriting on the
cabin-sides of Keppel, and a general freshening up of all the other
paintwork has prepared them for a series of public appearances throughout
the North West this summer, and very smart they look too (though I suppose I
shouldn’t say it myself.)
The irony in all this is that the ‘heritage’
colour scheme that we have been working so hard to re-create and preserve
was at the time it was introduced the absolute antithesis of traditional
canal culture. There was an enormous public row in 1949 about this new
dreary nationalised livery, one that reverberated in the letter columns of
The Times for months- “dull conformity smothering the vibrant colourful
lifestyle of the boat folk.” Here was the visible imposition of a desk-bound
bureaucrat’s idea of modernity on a traditional lifestyle, although it was
probably just thoughtless cost-cutting in the name of efficiency, trying to
streamline away all the Victorian frills and furbelows so beloved by the
conservative and insular people of the narrow boats. Now even that argument
is history, and part of our inheritance. Funny stuff, heritage. God save the
King, and long live Cromwell! Oh, come on, make up your mind! |
