Canals - Boatmen, Old and New

Working on my family tree by searching online ancestry sites is something I’ve been doing for a long time. I enjoy dipping in and out and finding new information. Sometimes it can be hard to stay on task when something grabs my attention and takes me along a different path. I wish my dad had lived long enough for me to share my findings with him, or better still, discover them for himself. He would have been fascinated and would have learnt a lot from the World Wide Web. He had a computer which he used for writing letters when hand-writing was too uncomfortable. He could print them and post them. There was no internet and mobile phones were just starting to turn up, like bricks with a pull up aerial. How sad that his untimely death denied him so much. He had started to build his family tree with the help of a niece during one of his visits to the USA. Twenty years or so after his passing, I was able to take things further back.

My dad was actively involved with the Lancaster Canal Boat Club. He bought his first boat sometime in the early ‘70s. It was a small cabin cruiser. This growing hobby soon found him to be the proud owner of a larger boat, another cabin cruiser and a wooden one, which reminded me of a galleon inside. Being made of wood, it needed lots of care to keep maintained, and lots of time to do it, which he had plenty of. With the boat club, he was on the committee for the campaigning of re-opening the Northern Reaches – the stretch of canal between Tewitfield and Kendal – where the canal had narrowed a great deal and become too shallow to allow a boat through. I think this was due to a lack of dredging. When he died, he was treasurer and President of the boat club. I’d been to a boat rally once, and a couple of dinner dances, but I’m no sailor, not even slowly on a canal, and his boating hobby belonged to a part of his life that wasn’t mine. However, I wish he’d known this.

Going back generations in our family, 1840s and 1850s, there were many boatmen, working the canals as carriers transporting all sorts of goods, mainly coal haulage, cotton and wool. They lived on their barges or flat boats, having a very meagre existence, working hard in all seasons. What I learnt, though very interesting, was also heart-breaking to me, and made me wonder if my dad’s fondness for the canals in all their glory, was some inherited thing. If so, it bypassed me. Dad had enjoyed lots of different canal holidays. His favourite was the trip on the Caledonian. If only he had known that his ancestors had carried goods up and down the Grand Union Canal before he was sailing on it. Sadly, he knew none of it.

My Haiku,

They travelled canals,
Boatmen of my ancestry,
Hard work in haulage.

Coal, cotton and wool
Carried across the country
For meagre payment.

Generations passed.
My dad loved his boats,
Two cabin cruisers.

Lancaster canal
His chosen sanctuary
For peace and quiet.

He stuck his oar in
With the Inland Waterways,
“Re-open the North!”

PMW 2023

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Marmoreal - Legacy of Love

When the time came to choose a new gas fire and surround for the front room, I knew exactly what I wanted; small, white-ish marble with narrow hearth and mantle piece. It had to be marble, not the composite, marmoreal looking stuff that looks like plastic pretending to be brown onyx. It was going to replace a massive, tiled thing with a sunburst design. Hairline cracks in the hearth were stained black from years of having a coal fire – before our time, but we might wish for it this coming winter – and it stretched too far towards the middle of what is quite a small room. A very efficient, old-fashioned gas fire looked like it didn’t belong, but it really blasted the heat out, excellent when needed and served us well. Replacing it wasn’t a financial priority, however, being a beneficiary in the Will of a departed aunt raised the opportunity. I was very happy to find my preferred fireplace and ‘living gas fire’ which still look great in our lounge twenty-odd years later. Thanks again, Auntie.

Auntie’s passing, very sad as it is with a close relative, left me and my sister with added complications in dealing with her estate. My sister took charge of most of it. It was emotional for both of us and I was carrying the added burden of guilt. I’d always had a lovely relationship with Auntie. Things changed as she got older and I was raising my own family. I didn’t completely fall out with her, it was more of a frustrating situation that I didn’t know how to handle.  She would phone me, to tell me off and shout at me for no valid reason. She lived alone in another town a good hour’s drive away, too far to just pop in, another contentious issue.  I had two small children, doing my best for everyone who needed me, including Auntie, but for her, nothing was good enough and I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. If I had, I might have realised that she probably had a form of dementia and needed the right care that I might have been able to find for her. She died before her behaviour made any sense to me.

Nothing was straightforward. Auntie had been living in a council owned bungalow suited to her needs, which had to be emptied within days, even before her funeral. She still owned a property which had to be sold, but some connected finances needed to be cleared before it could go on the market. Bless my sister, I didn’t have the brain to cope. She kept her head straight through it all. Eventually, and it was ages, everything was signed, sealed and delivered. Job done. I’ve kept all of Auntie’s photos and special things. Her archive of family papers sent me on a genealogy journey that I continue to dip in and out of. And, somewhere on this journey I discovered that she didn’t hate me, she loved me as she always had but she was confused and not herself. With some of the monetary inheritance, we bought a beautiful marble fireplace, the perfect size for our lounge.

I don’t do much grave visiting. I carry memories of my departed loved ones in my head and in my heart, all special people, my family. They are so much more than names carved on tombstones or on the marmoreal kerb-like structure surrounding one of our graves.

I found this poem, which reminded me so much of my late mother until the last line, which clearly refers to a lost love. Read it through my eyes and ignore the last bit.

Your Name

When I can dare at last to speak your name
It shall not be with hushed and reverent speech
As if your spirit were beyond the reach
Of homely merry things, kind jest or game.
Death shall not hide you in some jewelled shrine
Nor set you in marmoreal pomp apart,
You who still share the ingle of my heart,
Participant in every thought of mine.

Your name, when I can dare to speak it, dear,
Shall still be linked with laughter and with joy.
No solemn panegyrist shall destroy
My image of you, gay, familiar
As in old happy days,—lest I discover
Too late I’ve won a saint but lost a lover.

Winifred M Letts 1882 - 1972

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Black As Night

Aha! Not, as might have been expected from the title, a blog about our current somewhat gloomy  Covid predicament, or the darkest hour being just before the dawn - that might come next week when the theme is 'social distancing'. No siree. This one is all about  coal  as it happens.

Now I don't know about you, but I hardly think of coal anymore, except as a contributor to the global warming crisis. Gone are the days when domestic homes had coal bunkers or sculleries, coal scuttles or coal fires in living-rooms. Modern central heating systems rendered them pretty much redundant. However, coal is still the world's favourite fossil fuel (for better or for worse) and the beauty of writing a blog to a set theme is that every once in a while one is impelled to do a bit of digging!

Fossil literally means: found buried, dug up. Coal - a sedimentary rock formed of sunken and compressed vegetation - has been known about for thousands of years. It was used as a material to make carvings out of by the Chinese and as a source of heating by the Greeks and Romans. However, the large-scale mining and burning of coal for energy is what has powered the transformation of life on earth from agrarian to industrial societies in the last two hundred years (and the generation of electricity for the last hundred and forty); so whatever we think about coal it has to be acknowledged that without its use we wouldn't have made the phenomenal advances we have. It should also be remembered that for three-quarters of the last two centuries, the damage to the environment that rapidly escalating use of coal was inflicting went largely unrecognised or misconstrued. Coal fires, though dirty, were warming (obviously) and attractive and cosy to sit around. Our houses and factories needed light and power. Who might have imagined we were wrecking our fragile ecosphere in the process?

For the last few decades we've been vey wise to that latter fact. Coal is basically carbon and burning it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  And although countries in western Europe have been scaling back on their use of the stuff, globally the mining and burning of coal is still increasing year on year. Here's a neat visual map of the world on coal-fire - and below it, some telling statistics.

Coal and where it's burning

The biggest coal reserves are located in the following countries: USA 27% (that's a quarter of the world's deposits), Russia 17%, China 14%, India 10%, Australia 9%, South Africa 5%, Ukraine 4%, Kazakhstan 4%... and the rest of the world another 10%.

The biggest users of coal are: China 50% (that's half the world's consumption), India 11%, USA 9%, Russia 3%, Germany 3%, Japan 2%, Brazil 2%... and another hundred countries accounting for the remaining 20% (with the UK twenty-first on the list at 0.5%).

I find all of those to be interesting and staggering statistics which help to explain both the rise of China and India as economic super-powers and the reason why the USA, Russia, China, India and Australia are so slow to step up to the climate change agenda.

However, just imagine if we had not gone down the route of mining and burning coal for heat, steam power and electricity: "a night so black the stars looked like scattered sugar crystals", to steal a magnificent image from Ishmael Reed's satirical anti-slavery novel, Flight To Canada. There might have been no Illuminati (see below*) to brighten up the jewel of the north.

Blackpool's illuminations began in a small but spectacular way in September 1879 when just eight carbon arc lamps bathed a section of the Promenade in light - artificial sunshine as it was dubbed. Blackpool was the first place in the country to boast such a feature. This was well over a year before Thomas Edison patented the electric light bulb. People flocked from all over the north of England to marvel at the sight, for up until that point most lighting was gas-powered or candle, neither of which could match the brilliance day-for-night of Blackpool's electric lamps.

In 1912, the Royal Family made its first visit to Blackpool. Princess Louise opened a new stretch of the Promenade (named Princess Parade in her honour). Festoons of garland lamps illuminated the new section of the Promenade with 10,000 light bulbs. From that point onwards the Blackpool illuminations grew in size, splendour and renown, the only dark periods being the enforced black-out during two world wars.

Nowadays, Blackpool blazes brightly along a six-mile stretch of promenade from Starr Gate in the south to Bispham in the north, every night from August to November during the sixty-six days of the annual Illuminations season, and people come from all over the country (and the world) to tour the lights. The current illuminations feature well over one million bulbs - all powered by electricity, which for most of the 20th century was generated, of course, from burning coal.

a section of Blackpool's famous lights

One can but hope the illuminations will return in August (and every year after), in as splendid a fashion as they were BC (before Coronavirus); and even better still if their electricity can be derived from renewable non-fossil sources in future - what an innovative showcase that would make of the town...

*The reference to the Illuminati above and in my latest poem is in tribute to a large brown road sign that stands at the Blackpool end of the M55 motorway. It is supposed to read Illuminations (with a lane indicator to filter the left-hand line of traffic off towards north shore) but the right-most panel was missing and so for years it just read Illuminati (a source of joy to fans of secret societies).

I've attempted this week some poetry about anthracite, the hardest and purest of coals (on a scale from peat through lignite and bitumen up to graphite). It's name I'm pleased to say derives, somewhat tautologically, from the Greek ἀνθρακίτης (anthrakites) - literally 'coal-like'. See what you think of the coal poem, though I add the usual caveat that it is a work-in-progress and may metamorphose further.

Anthracite
Anthracite, black as night, you
former forest or swamp growth
from a steamier age,
slumped with captured carbon
and the occasional fierce beast
in your decaying clutches, down
below the surface of a shifting sea,
to repose dehydrating,
compressed by an over-layering
through dusty eons and eras -
Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic -
getting baked from sedimentary
to low-grade metamorphic
before ascending as the earth convulsed
in swapping submarine for superstrate.

Illuminati, we sought you out,
mined you, admired you
with your sub-metallic lustre,
fired up your calorific potential
to drive our blockbuster expansion
as top industrial nations.
Ignorati, we failed to realise
until this latter stage
the true reversal of fortunes
we were engaged in:
accidentally oxidising
back into our fragile ecosphere
in two short torrid centuries
all that carbon you had stored
well hid for some millions of years.

Anthracite, black as night, you
dark mirror to our greenhouse state.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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