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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Sailing - All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor

‘The big ships sail on the Alley Alley O, the Alley Alley O…’

That nursery rhyme always takes me back to the film version of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. The first time I watched it, I was supposed to be in bed. My mother had shooed me off to my room once, on the grounds that it was on too late and not suitable for my eleven year old self. She went back downstairs to our pub and I sneaked back to the living room doorway to watch the film with one ear listening out for her possible return. I was spellbound by Jo and her sailor boyfriend, Jimmy. Whatever it was that my mother thought I shouldn’t see went way over my head. And we used to live near Salford.

My father took up sailing in his retirement. He had a small cabin cruiser on the Lancaster Canal and after a couple of years he upgraded to a larger, better built vessel. It was like a ship inside, all highly polished and varnished dark oak with brass fittings, like a miniature galleon.  He won awards for the best maintained wooden boat. Most summer weekends were spent sailing with my step-mother and in good weather they often took longer trips. They went to boat rallies and joined the Lancaster Canal Boat Club. I attended a couple of dinner dances. Events always ended with everyone singing along loudly to Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’, with arms waving. It could get emotional. Dad enjoyed his years with his boat and the club. He climbed the ranks to President of the LCBC, a post he held at the time of his death.  I only visited them on the boat very occasionally. I became queasy after another boat once sailed by and gently rocked us a tiny bit. Clearly, I’m not a sailor.

My husband was a proper sailor.  He left home to study at Nautical College in Hull then sailed with the Merchant Navy to faraway places. He loved his life and would have continued but physical injury put an end to his career. Eventually, it was back to college to train for something else, then in the future, he met me. Every cloud…

Together, we have taken a few short boat trips, Dover to Calais, the south coast of Jersey, Tenby to Caldey Island and St Helier to St Malo. Mostly, I have been fine. The St Malo to St Helier return trip was bad for me. Last year we island-hopped the Outer Hebrides travelling on ferries and we didn’t have any problems. This year we’re doing something similar, but the ferry trip is about four hours. I hope I can cope. I’m sure the destination will be worth it.

My father loved his boat and sailing on the Lancaster Canal, but he visited other waterways as well. He spent holidays on the Norfolk Broads, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, the Caledonian Canal and other places in other boats. Sailing became his ‘thing’, but despite growing his sea-legs, a trip on the Fleetwood ferry to the Isle of Man made him sea-sick, something that gave us, his family, great amusement.

 

Two special men, both sailors.

I have watched A Taste of Honey many times, sang the song and cried.

 

I found this John Masefield poem.

 

Sea Fever

 

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.

 

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

 

I must go down to the sea again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover

And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

 

 

John Masefield, 1878-1967

 

 

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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