  There
are moments in anyone’s life that turn out to be turning points. It probably
wasn’t immediately apparent, not a sudden revelation, but more like a seed
just waiting its time (or a splinter waiting to hurt) perhaps for years and
years. Then suddenly, with hindsight, you look back and recognise that
significant moment for what it was, an awakening or recognition of a certain
attitude or set of values that actually shaped much of the life that
followed. Canals and canal boats have turned out to be a constant theme in
my own, particularly the historic and traditional side of things, but my
Sussex upbringing kept me entirely ignorant of canals proper until I was
into my twenties.
 But
in my early teens I used to be messing about in sailing boats and rowing
dinghies a lot in Shoreham Harbour, particularly in an area of sandbanks and
muddy creeks just inside the harbour entrance, all long since built over
with bijou bungalows. At high spring tides one could scull or pole the
dinghy impossibly far into the creeks, floating magically into the middle of
a marshy field of weeds, slipping along on a few inches of water with the
leaves brushing either side of the boat. Sound familiar?
 Then
suddenly one day I went down at low tide and there was a barge sat high and
dry on the sandbank with a couple of men with shovels filling it with the
sand it was sat on. Now this was truly a revelation, a boat that had
mysteriously arrived from I-knew-not-where, taking the beautiful
‘silversand’ that nobody seemed to want and then just as magically stealing
silently away on the next tide. Now this did have it all for me—boats,
romance and mystery, like something out of a Famous Five book, combined with
the heavyweight reality of earning a living, floating tons of sand
effortlessly away into the unknown reaches of the upper river. It seemed
sensible and satisfying then and it still seems sound to me today, half a
century later. I have a clear picture of the moment in my mind, the angle
the barge sat on the sand, its anchor and chain stretched out in the sun.
That memory still stirs my soul, and with hindsight I can see it as one of
my own important turning points, even though in truth it lay forgotten in
the back of my mind for many years afterwards.
Upper images, derelict barges at Shoreham
Harbour, below abandoned Joey boats on the BCN and Birchills at the Black
Country Museum.
 Sometimes
it is not so much one particular moment in time as one picture of a
situation that was refined and reinforced over a period of time that is
significant. I’m thinking here of the Joey boats of the midland
coalfields—not any one individual boat but the mass of them, the lines of
sunken boats that used to lay along the offside of the Hednesford Arm of the
Wyrly and Essington Canal, waiting for the traffic that never came back. My
first experience of these soldiers of the industrial revolution was in 1963,
a fleeting glance from the Grove Colliery bridge near Norton Canes, a mass
of black hulls sunk two abreast in the reeds and stretching away as far as
the eye could see apparently. Although I had personally been drawn to the
canals by this time by the romance of the ‘roses and castles’ on the long
distance narrow boats, I was instantly in no doubt that these clumsy
straight stemmed coal boats were also the real thing, the proper reality of
canal transport. As things turned out it was my fate to spend a hot summer
and a cold winter living alongside these boats, sunk originally to keep them
watertight and ready for work, but by then, several years later, decaying
fast.
 They
were shabby and faded, sun bleached above the water, filled with green slime
and weeds below, but they were still dignified, humble and patient, waiting
for a resurgence of coal traffic that never happened. Oakum hung out of the
drying seams between the planks, rusting chains tied them together at the
middle beams, and cabin doors, if they had any, gaped open, hanging on one
hinge. There were no romantic landscapes or swags of painted roses here—in
fact most of these joey boats had no cabins at all, but still their solid
utilitarian grace hit my soul somewhere, and the faded cracked colours on
the bow and stern still appealed to my artistic taste. Bottle greens were
faded to chalky blue-green, red bleached to dusky pink and bright blue to
slate grey, and the simple circles, crescents and single diamonds still
hinted at a secret symbolic past waiting to be explored. This was industrial
history and craftsmanship and continuity and art and tradition all rolled
into one, and I loved it. And there were hundreds of them.
 I
was fresh up from the south with a newly minted enthusiasm for canals and
canal boats. With no previous knowledge to guide me I youthfully supposed
that as so many old boats seemed to have survived from time immemorial here,
then obviously they always would. No need to make notes or study them or
make a fuss—there were hundreds of them. How could anything so common, so
ubiquitous, so essential and so obviously historical disappear? There were
hundreds of them. Today there is just the ‘Birchills’ at the Black Country
Museum in serious need of repair, and a wreck of a Stewarts and Lloyds tube
boat at Ellesmere Port whose chance of restoration or even survival is slim.
Do we care? Is there anything that we can realistically afford to do? Or is
it all just going to remain a significant memory for a few people, and die
with them? |
