16-Hour Working Days Gave Way To Pleasure Trips (16 December 1977)

When I lived at Water Eaton shortly after the war there was the sound of motor traffic on the roads and of rail traffic on the main line.  But behind all that, for all the day and a good part of the night there was the steady chug-chug of diesel engines driving boats on the Grand Union Canal.

At that time the canal was still a useful form of freight transport.  Certainly there were a good many boats on the local reaches.  This was evident in the hard winter of 1946-47, when over 30 boats were frozen-up at Fenny alone.

Incidentally, “boats” and not “barges” is the proper word for the long narrow craft on the canal, despite the “Barge” inns along it, as at Woolstone.  And the men who worked them rightly called themselves boatmen, not bargees.  A proper barge would be too wide for a canal and locks such as these.  The unpowered craft of similar dimensions which they towed were also called butty-boats, not butty-barges.

Sometime in 1948 I talked with two men, each of whom had charge of a pair of boats.  They were called “captains.”  One, Caleb Lane, had lived on boats for over 30 years and now his wife and two children were with him.

“You get used to life afloat,” he told me, “and there is more room in these cabins than you would think.

“We cover 40 or 50 miles a day – but a day for a canal man means 15 or 16 hours’ travelling.  Right now I am on my way from Coventry to Watford and it will take about three days.

“There is extra pay for quicker delivery, but a captain’s basic pay is only just over £5 a week and out of that he has to provide his own crew to steer the butty-boat, which is usually his wife.

“Nowadays nearly all the boats are operated by the big companies, as a pair of boats now costs about £1,000.  We were much better off 20 or more years ago, when a man could run his own boats.”

This view was shared by the other captain, Sidney McDonald.  His wife and two children were all born on the boats and he himself had lived on them for over 20 years, but now he longed for a life ashore.

“Boating is played out – finished,” he said, “but like everybody else we can’t get a house ashore.  The war brought new people into the trade – trainees who learned to know the canals and those of us who regularly work on the boats – but most of them have now gone back to shore jobs.  Just a few have stayed on.”

At that time canal traffic had already been declining for about 100 years, apart from a few spurts like that caused by the war.  When the local canal was opened in 1805 neither railways nor motor roads had been thought of and the inland waterways were the best and quickest means of transporting goods – especially heavy goods.  For instance, the sections of the old iron bridge at Newport Pagnell which was built in 1810 were brought from Sheffield by river, sea and canal to Linford, where they were off-loaded onto wagons within just those few miles of their destination.

Originally the canal was called the Grand Junction Canal.  For 20 or 30 years previously water-borne traffic between London and the rapidly-growing town of Birmingham had gone by way of the Thames to Oxford and thence by the Oxford Canal to Birmingham.  This was a very roundabout route and all could see that a direct route would be quicker and more profitable, if the engineering problems could be overcome.  So this new canal was designed to be cut from London to Braunston, in Northants, where it would make junction with the Oxford Canal.  In the event it all happened much as planned.

A canal was often referred to as a “navigation.”  There were no mechanical excavators in those days, of course, and the toilers who handcut the whole thing came to be known as “navigators.”  This was the origin of the word “navvy,” a term still applied to that type of workman in general.  It was also responsible for various “Navigation” inns, like the one that used to exist at Fenny and is now called the “Bridge.”

After the canal was opened, enterprising people constructed wharves at places like Water Eaton, Fenny and Simpson.   Coal, slates and other materials thus arrived in the district at much cheaper prices than before and even influenced the style of local house-building.

The wharfingers profited substantially and built cottages near the wharves for their men.  But the biggest profit was made by the Marquess of Buckingham.  He had put most into the scheme – in terms of money – and what he got out of it enabled him to live in much greater style at Stowe.

Right from the start until well into this century the only power for the boats was literally horse-power, and occasionally man-power if something happened to the horse or horses.  A horse could pull many tons without great effort once its boat was “under-way” (which means “in top gear” in motoring terms).  Consequently, if a horse stopped unnecessarily, it took some getting up speed again(sic).

This sometimes happened along the back of some property at Bradwell.  A horse and the man leading it would be trudging along the towpath quite happily when a voice called out “Whoah, Emma, Whoah!” whereupon the horse stopped in its tracks and its furious leader cried “I’ll kill that ruddy parrot yet!”  For indeed, it was a parrot hanging in its cage that did the calling.

Nowadays the canal is used for pleasure cruising.  Former narrow-boats have been converted to carry big parties of trippers to places like the Three Locks at Soulbury.  But there is nothing very new about this.  Before and after the turn of the century there were various spots where rowing boats could be hired for private Sunday outings on the canal.  And there are people who can remember as children going on large Sunday school trips on long boats towed by a horse to pleasure grounds like one that used to exist beside the canal at Fenny.  May it long continue.