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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Shipwreck - Desert Islands

 

 

 

Sometimes, when life throws too many challenges all at once, and this has been one such week, I think how perfect and peaceful it would be if I lived on an island with a small colony of like-minded people.

It started in my childhood, of course, and probably down to the TV series ‘Gilligan’s Island’, an American comedy in the 1960s. A group of people had gone on a short boat trip which somehow drifted off-course into a storm and they got shipwrecked on to an island. I loved it. They built shelters, made use of whatever they salvaged from the vessel and became self-sufficient. They constantly missed out on opportunities to be rescued. Any humour in there went right over my young head. I just wanted to sleep in a home-made hammock under a canopy of intertwined leafy branches, eat their food and drink out of coconut shells.

Around this time I saw ‘The Blue Lagoon’, the original 1949 film, and it had the same appeal. Shipwrecked on to a South Pacific desert island with everything they needed to survive, the main characters were two children, a boy and a girl, and a sailor who drank himself to death. The children grew up and had a child of their own before eventually leaving the island.  I failed to enjoy the 1980s remake.

‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier is a favourite book read over and over again and the film seen many times. The first time I read the book I was stunned by the revelations that followed the shipwreck and couldn’t read it fast enough, I was so eager to find out if everything would be alright in the end.

 

Famous Fylde Coast shipwrecks include the MS Riverdance which ran aground in 2008. It was not possible to refloat her and she was broken up on the shore, not far from the remains of the Abana. The Abana is visible at very low tide.

 

And Nelson’s HMS Foudroyant. I found this poem, previously unknown to me.
 

H.M.S. Foudroyant

 

[Being an humble address to Her Majesty's Naval advisers, who sold Nelson's old flagship to the Germans for a thousand pounds.]

            WHO says the Nation's purse is lean,
            Who fears for claim or bond or debt,
            When all the glories that have been
            Are scheduled as a cash asset?
            If times are bleak and trade is slack,
            If coal and cotton fail at last,
            We've something left to barter yet--
            Our glorious past.
            
            There's many a crypt in which lies hid
            The dust of statesman or of king;
            There's Shakespeare's home to raise a bid,
            And Milton's house its price would bring.
            What for the sword that Cromwell drew?
            What for Prince Edward's coat of mail?
            What for our Saxon Alfred's tomb?
            They're all for sale!
            
            And stone and marble may be sold
            Which serve no present daily need;
            There's Edward's Windsor, labelled old,
            And Wolsey's palace, guaranteed.
            St. Clement Danes and fifty fanes,
            The Tower and the Temple grounds;
            How much for these? Just price them, please,
            In British pounds.
            
            You hucksters, have you still to learn,
            The things which money will not buy?
            Can you not read that, cold and stern
            As we may be, there still does lie
            Deep in our hearts a hungry love
            For what concerns our island story?
            We sell our work -- perchance our lives,
            But not our glory.
            
            Go barter to the knacker's yard
            The steed that has outlived its time!
            Send hungry to the pauper ward
            The man who served you in his prime!
            But when you touch the Nation's store,
            Be broad your mind and tight your grip.
            Take heed! And bring us back once more
            Our Nelson's ship.
            
            And if no mooring can be found
            In all our harbours near or far,
            Then tow the old three-decker round
            To where the deep-sea soundings are;
            There, with her pennon flying clear,
            And with her ensign lashed peak high,
            Sink her a thousand fathoms sheer.
            There let her lie!

                                      by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

(1859 - 1930/Male/English)    For Christo, who would have been on my A list for my island colony. It was always a pleasure to be in his company or have a Facebook chat. A fine gentleman who will be much missed. God bless you.

R.I.P.

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x 

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