 July has seen the completion of the first stage
in the making of another of the series of films about canal life from the
Sight Seen Partnership stable, about ‘clothing-up’ loaded narrow boats this
time. Working with a big team of volunteers from British Waterways’
Midlands-based Working Boats Project we loaded the restored boats Atlas and
Leo with 40 tons of gravel ballast and assorted ironwork, dressed them up to
look as if they were loaded with bags of grain and then filmed the detailed
process of weatherproofing the cargo. Working under the precise advice of
one ex-boatman of exceptional memory we have tried to accurately record the
precise techniques of sidecloths, topcloths, tippet and topstrings in
detail, every fold and every knot. It was very hard work, but fun and
fascinating as well, and involved a huge amount of preparatory work and some
heavy duty lockwork to get all the boats to and from the chosen location at
the Sampson Road warehouse in Birmingham (below left) directly after their public
appearances at the National Waterways Exhibition. Everything went
exceptionally well, thanks to all the volunteers and the total support of
the British Waterways team who underpin the project, with efforts well
beyond the call of duty.
 It
was a surprise to me to discover that the Working Boats Project is
co-ordinated by an archaeologist. When questioned about her motivation for
taking this job on in the first place, with little previous experience of
working narrow boats she simply said that it was just another extension of
the basic role of the archaeologist, discovering and preserving the evidence
of the lives of people of the past. Because they are no longer here, whether
by five thousand years or just five, their voice is only to be heard in the
stuff they have left behind, the hard evidence of their lives having been
lived. But hold on, these boat people aren’t dead—I was talking to some of
them last week… but then again two hundred and fifty years’ worth of them
are, and anyone who can clearly remember the last regular traffics of the
British Waterways fleet have to be in their mid fifties at least, and most
are much older than that. But archaeology? Well, OK, maybe…
 This jolt to my internal understanding of the
meaning of archaeology sent me back to the dictionary…ah, right, here it is:
“the scientific study of human antiquities”, yes that’s more like it. But it
is a very old dictionary and the last thirty years has also seen the rise
and respectful acceptance of industrial archaeology as a valuable
discipline. Mines and Victorian mills and machinery are fine, and of course
our eighteenth century canals, but boats? Quite recent boats, built in the
mid twentieth century? Is this really archaeology? The project officer
prefers the more modern definition—“the study of material culture of the
past” and of course that past need only have finished yesterday.
 Another modern dictionary definition, of
etymology this time, of the origins of the meanings… archaeology as “the
scientific study of ancient people, customs, and life, especially by
unearthing and examining artefacts where written records do not exist
appeared in English in 1837”. Which brings me back to my conversation with
the project co-ordinator again, for she says that her underlying attitude to
the boats is that they need to be regarded as floating listed buildings,
maintained as eloquent evidence of the lives of the people that worked them.
The fact that so many of the boating population were so poorly educated in
the academic sense, “not scholar’d” as they would put it, makes that
evidence even more important, for the boats are indeed ”artefacts where
written records do not exist”. Hmmm, yes, now we’re getting close…
 But there is a big but here. The boats
clearly record something about the boatbuilders’ work and life but the
footprint of the boating population is far more subtle. It was so much more
about the ways of doing things, reacting to the constraints of the tiny
living spaces, the conventions of an insular trade population isolated from
the rest of the community by their job and, increasingly as time went by,
their illiteracy and lack of formal education. Does the basic boat reflect
any of that? No, hardly at all, but it is the absolutely essential backdrop
and framework within which their lives were built, the structure on which
their pride and self esteem was expressed in fancy ropework, ostentatious
cleanliness, polished brass and painted flowers. Luckily most of those
elements are attractively photogenic and are pretty well documented in a
static kind of way, but the day-to-day reality of gritty boat life is far
more difficult to record. So of course it is even more important that we
try, especially whilst we still have that information available to us from
the memories of those that were there.
 Happily the project officer strongly agrees
and sees the boats in her care as far more than mere artefacts. With all the
information still available from all the retired boatpeople avidly collected
and documented the boats are used as working tools to try to record and
celebrate the homes and working lives of the boat population. Hence the
film. Please wish us luck, and look out for the finished result early next
year when the long and boring process of editing a couple of hours of
videotape is distilled into a short piece of, hopefully, interesting and
watchable film. Hopefully too it will offer another note of respect to the
generations of men and women who worked the boats, the real people that
underly our interests, whether through archaeology, social history or folk
art. |
