Читать книгу Our Great Canal Journeys: A Lifetime of Memories on Britain's Most Beautiful Waterways - Timothy West - Страница 10

WHEN I WAS ABOUT FIFTEEN I went to stay with some friends in Bristol, and we saw in the local paper that a public meeting of the Kennet & Avon Canal Society (not a Trust in those days) was to be held beside a disused lock in the centre of Bath. We didn’t know anything about it, but we had a free afternoon and thought it might be fun, so we went.

There was quite a crowd there, including the Bishop of Bath and Wells and the MP Chuter Ede. There were a number of young men holding placards saying ‘SAVE THE K&A’, and someone told us that this important canal, built by John Rennie and opened in 1810, had been gradually run down over the years until it was useless and derelict; and a lot of people thought it was time to do something about restoring and reopening it.

There was an opposition group, headed by a successful-looking farmer in a very nice tweed suit, who, in order to give himself extra height over the assembled company, had chosen to climb onto the upper gate of the abandoned lock and speak from there. Were the canal reopened, he complained, its path would lie across valuable land, which he could put to good use. He went on about this for rather a long time, and people were getting bored, so one of the young supporters had equipped himself with a barge pole, and with the end of it began to nudge the farmer’s legs towards the far end of the gate.

Everyone had stopped listening to him by this time; instead we were fascinated by what seemed likely to happen next. There was no water in the abandoned lock, but it was full of mud. Surely, for his own sake and that of his lovely suit, it would be good to shut up and edge his way back onto firm land? But no. He went on talking, kicked out at the offending pole, lost his footing – and, yes, into the mud he went, and the Bristol Evening Post got the photograph.

That enjoyable afternoon prompted in me the first stirrings of interest in the subject of canals. I think it’s always very easy to maintain you were born at the wrong time for things: too early, and you won’t ever understand computers; too late, and you’ll have missed out on black-and-white films. But, if canals happen to be your interest, well, then, you’ve been born at exactly the right time: there are still a few working-boat people around providing a direct link to the Industrial Revolution, while, at the same time, you can see a future opening up with more and more instances of canal restoration.

Each one of this country’s canals will have its own history, determined by lots of things: the contour of the land, the cost of construction, the skill and imagination of its engineers and the level of demand for its freight transport. For centuries, canals were so much preferable to the cart tracks that served as roads; but then, later, the railways came along and provided fierce competition, frequently buying up the canal in order to let it perish through lack of maintenance. By the mid-1960s, commercial traffic on the waterways was virtually at an end, and boats were being sold as scrap.

Putting our canal network back into use is indeed a fairly recent idea. In 1946, the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) was formed by two men, Robert Aickman and Tom Rolt, to bring the situation to the notice of a wider public.

Robert Aickman (left) travels from Birmingham to the lower reaches of the Severn on the new floating headquarters of the Severn Wildfowl Trust.

© PA Archive

I never knew Aickman, but I did briefly say hello to Tom Rolt one wet afternoon beside the track of the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway in Merionethshire (he was campaigning to save that, too, and famously succeeded). A professional engineer, but also a writer of distinction, he had acquired an old horse-drawn barge, installed an engine and converted it to living accommodation. He recorded his maiden voyage up the Oxford Canal from Banbury in the book Narrow Boat, which motivated a growing public determination to save what was still navigable of our canal system for use as a leisure resource.

Tom Rolt, apart from canals and light railways, took an interest in old road vehicles and racing cars, as well as pretty well everything emanating from the Industrial Revolution. He was keen to preserve things, but only if they worked. It was not enough for a thing to be beautiful, he said – it had also to be efficient. I admire that.

Tom died in 1974, but I was privileged to know Sonia, his widow, who during the war had joined the women volunteers who kept the canal boats running between London and the Midlands, carrying coal in one direction and essential engine parts in the other. Steering two heavily laden narrowboats, one with a motor towing the other – the ‘butty’ – was an arduous and often dangerous occupation, but she continued at it after the war was over, and her concern with chronicling past canal life, in photographs and written testimony, continued right up until her death a few years ago.

While the IWA’s determination to preserve our national heritage met with success in some individual cases, it was up against a government policy to abandon totally half the existing waterways, drain the land and make it available for building. It was quite a long time before public concern, mainly through their MPs, was able to curb the destruction, and gradually to persuade the authorities that our canals were in fact an environmental asset. Eventually, the campaign led to three thousand miles of waterway being once again available to boaters, walkers and cyclists, with all sorts of fringe benefits to those living on or near a canal.

1944: A full cargo of coal is transported by barge along the uncongested Regent’s Canal during war-time, when all methods of transport were employed. © Getty

I, for one, am very thankful for it – and, reader, if you’ve ever been so fortunate as to find yourself with the time to glide gently along one of these beautiful waterways, drinking it all in, I suspect you are, too.