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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Enslavement - History

When I was young and starting out in my working life, I was amused by a cartoon poster on the staff room wall depicting a group of disgruntled workers, with one of them shouting, “They can’t sack us, slaves have to be sold!” It was harmless and was meant in good humour at the time, but it wouldn’t be acceptable now.
 

Recently, a statue of merchant Edward Colston was toppled and pushed into Bristol Harbour during the George Floyd protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. Colston was a figure of controversy for a number of years, concerning his involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. He is one of many British merchant / slave traders and there are things to learn about all of them, good and bad. Colston’s statue was removed from the harbour and will take a place in a Bristol museum with his full details. Perhaps that would be the way forward with other controversial figures.  Every city and town in the United Kingdom has area names and street names that can be traced back to a potential slave trade origin. It would be wrong to rename them. Morally, history cannot be changed, rewritten or hidden, as in Orwell’s ‘1984’. We learn from history and move on.

Across Morecambe Bay, on Sunderland Point, lies Sambo’s Grave, a place I have visited many times.
Sunderland Point was an 18^th century port serving Lancaster and surrounding areas with cotton, sugar and slave ships from the Caribbean. Sambo is thought to be a young slave belonging to a ship’s captain.  He took ill and died at Sunderland Point, and as a non-Christian, was buried in unconsecrated ground.
 

From Wikipedia – ‘Some sixty years after the death, a retired head master from Lancaster Boys’ Grammar School, Mr James Watson, heard the story and raised money from summer visitors to the area for a memorial to be placed on the unmarked grave. Watson, who was the brother of prominent Lancaster slave trader, William Watson, also wrote the epitaph that now marks the grave,

 Slavery is still out there, hard to spot, but it exists in different forms, some of it close to home. County line drug runners, under-age prostitution, sweat shop factory workers. Vulnerable people from here and abroad promised a better life. Modern slavery.

Sonnet to William Wilberforce

 Thy country, Wilberforce, with just disdain,

     Hears thee, by cruel men and impious, call'd

     Fanatic, for thy zeal to loose th' enthrall'd

     From exile, public sale, and slav'ry's chain.

     Friend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd,

     Fear not lest labour such as thine be vain!

     Thou hast achiev'd a part; hast gain'd the ear

     Of Britain's senate to thy glorious cause;

     Hope smiles, joy springs, and tho' cold caution pause

     And weave delay, the better hour is near,

     That shall remunerate thy toils severe

     By peace for Afric, fenc'd with British laws.

     Enjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love

     From all the just on earth, and all the blest above!

                                                  By William Cowper

   Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Happy Anniversary!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (exclamation marks just for Vicky)

I'm going to jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton,

Jump down, turn around, pick a bale a day...

Yes folks, this week sees the second anniversary for the Dead Good Blog, and according to tradition that means COTTON. Though tradition states that these anniversary gift should be exclusive to marking the length of time two people, and remembering that this tradition dates back to the Roman times, made up of a man and a woman have been married.

I'm not the greatest one for tradition so I say they can be used to mark the passing of another year for anybody, and that people of the same sex can marry.

So this week we should be buying the Dead Good Bloggers gifts of Cotton. This could be t-shirts, plantations or Dot. However, in the United States things have been updated, there is a more modern, some may say relevant list. This new list includes gift like Clock, Silverware and Electrical Appliances.

This would mean that this year is the China Anniversary. Which in turn would mean more useful or wanted gifts. Taking this school of thought even further why not sell the Anniversary rights to businesses. So for the next 5 years, 10 years of marriage would be the i-Pad Anniversary or 4 years down would be the Amazon Kindle Anniversary.

This would certainly go some way to ensuring people are not disappointed by the gift their spouse has purchased to show they actually remembered.

So happy Anniversary Bloggers and Poets, here's to many more years.

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