The War Years
Just after the Great War the canals started to suffer a serious decline when many of the boatmen lost their lives in that terrible conflict
The canals were the poor relation of the railways and the roads…..a member of the transport family fallen on evil days, which somehow managed to scratch some sort of living together in a mysterious way. At any rate that was the position before 1939… And something desperately needed to be done for the canals to stop them becoming abandoned ….There were empty canals, disused canals, canals silted up and choked by weeds, canals whose banks and tunnels have fallen in and which have reverted back to nature and canals that were simply kids playgrounds
Their time of prosperity was between the middle of the 18th century and the building of the first railways and only a few of these waterways were able to stand the railways' competition. These few were not always the long canals, occasionally the short ones in the Black Country, or even a mile or two of some longer canal otherwise idle had been paying propositions.
When the situation was looked at in 1941, the Ministry of War Transport was advised that about 500 miles of canal would have to be written off as unworkable, and that all war efforts must be concentrated on the very substantial 2,000 miles of navigable water which remained.
If you looked at a map of the canals in the British Isles, you would see that, apart from the three canals in Scotland….the system fell into four parts. Those corresponded to the four great estuaries, the Thames, the Humber, the Mersey and the Severn. The canals work inland from these starting places, relieving and feeding the docks and, after long unbroken runs, broke into small branches in the Midlands and in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The first thing to remember about them is that they should be compared with the roads rather than the railways, for where a railway owned the track and sidings, and operated the vehicles that run there, the waterways were owned by the canal companies, and with three exceptions, these companies do not supply the craft which floated on them.
The companies existed, in theory, by the tolls they collected from the barge and boat owners, in practice; these tolls were but a small portion of their income. The income came from a number of other sources, e.g. from warehousing, property, investments, etc. A large number of factories were built beside the canals, and one form of canal revenue was the sale of water to the factories for condensing purposes. The companies who owned the craft were numerous and very different from each other.
Gas companies, firms of millers, quarry owners, brick makers, etc., may own fleets of boats. Or there may be companies which existed by carrying freight. In some areas, in the Warwickshire mining district, there were many "little men" with family-owned boats, who worked the short-distance runs from the mines to the Midland factories.
An important distinction must be made between a barge and a boat. A barge is a vessel of some fourteen-foot beam, which normally works in flowing water such as rivers or estuaries. Many miles of static, inland waters were too narrow for them. The barge which operates in living, tidal water, which goes out on to the estuaries, often picking up goods straight from the ships, is a vessel which requires a special skill in navigation; and this barge can carry large loads. But what most of us call barges are not barges at all, but narrow boats of some seven foot beam (the width) which often work in pairs and carry some 25 to 30 tons each.
I have always called the crafts on the canal. barges (which I always will) which was usually drawn by a horse on the towpath. When they get to the tunnel the barge may have to be poled or legged through. But horses are not used nowadays. The boat with its phutting engine is the commoner sight; and although there are no tides to reckon with, Back in the old days even in stretches that seem dead straight and without complication, the men would go to their tillers and pull the procession (if they were towing) over to one side as they approach the locks. There was an art in keeping the line of boats straight as it entered the narrow gates, an art which saved it from buckling, swinging broad-side on across the water and blocking the channel, or suddenly bending and colliding with a procession passing in the opposite direction.
Although the capacity of the canals were severely limited, they still carried twelve million tons of cargo every year. What was the cargo? Half of it is coal, coke and other fuel. In Birmingham they carried 100,000 tons of coal a month;
The railways who owned some of the canals carried nearly 30,000 tons of coal a month by water. Four hundred and fifty thousand tons of coal were carried every month by the boats and the barges. The other cargoes are, of course, the simple bulk cargoes, like tar and oil…tar was important…granite, gravel, grain and many other foodstuffs for home consumption, steel and cement for our industries, and every month over 400,000 tons of these were carried from the ports and the depots to the storage places and the factories. The important relief which the canals gave to the enormous wartime pressure on the railways was obvious.
In a generation, the population of boatmen has become very small. Think of the life on the boats. The hours were long…a 12-hour day was inevitable…the men frequently have to load and unload their own boats at wharves without cranes, for which they receive extra pay. To hump 50 tons of coal on to the wharf after a 12-hour day was not an attractive prospect. Living conditions were primitive. Wages were on the low side. It is also true that during these long hours a man may not be working hard; he may merely be standing at the tiller. But the life was lonely; the industry had been largely recruited from those born and bred on the boats; and the younger generation saw that if they wanted the amenities, the higher wages, the entertainments of modern life, and better opportunities for education for themselves and their children, the best thing they could do was to leave the water.
The earnings on a pair of boats average £7 a week. This looked well, if the whole of that £7 a week was going into one family; but not all boats by any means were one-family boats. Usually each pair of boats had a captain, a mate and a boy, which means when the money was divided up that the captain gets£3.10.0 perweek, the mate £2.10.0 and the boy £1
The labour problem was a very hard nut to crack. There has been an ingenious suggestion that women should take up the boatman's trade….a woman standing at the tiller with her baby in her arms was of course one of the picturesque sights of the canals..and two ladies did indeed made a success of carrying grain from the Severn to Worcester, doing regular trips. They didn’t do all the loading and unloading, of course, but they work the locks themselves, which was pretty hard work. So there was a plan to train women for this kind of canal work, which those two ladies began as amateurs and turned into their trade.
The war was hard on all transport workers in the matter of food. And the boatman had very similar difficulties to those of the railwaymen and lorry drivers; rather more serious difficulties, for the drivers on road and rail have had only themselves to feed; but the boatmen have frequently to provide for their families. It was one thing to lean over the canal bridge in some pretty and out-of-the-way country town, listening to the tap of the boat engines as the boats arrive in the evenings; quite another to come into that place hungry, with traveller's food cards, and to be told by the shopkeepers that they can supply their registered customers only.. The remedy, as on the roads and the railway hostels, was the canteen and many of these had to be established.
The canals did not suffer much in the “Blitz” as the railways did, they had suffered far less even than the roads. But there had been "incidents". A bomb could topple a building into the water in the city, or burst a bank and cause flooding; but this was nothing compared to the nightly struggle on the roads, streets and junctions. What the war had done for the canals was to arrest their decline, and to give the Government and the industry a stimulus to reorganise them from top to bottom. When one saw those people on the boats, the water gypsies who from generation to generation had built up a curious, tenacious life of their own, one realises they too were part of the transport's battle. As they chugged along on their eight-day journey from London to the Mersey, or their fortnight's round voyage to Birmingham and the collieries of the Black Country, the battle had indeed overtaken them. That trade, which looked so leisurely, took on its share of the back-breaking jobs of the war….and bought about the revival of the canal for a few more years……..but when the war was over the downward spiral began again and by 1945 the total tonnage carried on the canals was 10 million
Which was a big drop to the 30 million tons it carried at the turn of the century
Women on the canal
Photo 1 Loading Grain... Photo 2 Pushing off
Photo 3 Narrow Boats lined up for loading
Photo 4 Coal Barges in the River Severn
