Merseyside memories
WITH reference to the article ‘Leaving under lockdown on the Liverpool Link’ (News, Issue 177, July) may I enlighten your readers to my experience in the summer of 1975 on the Stanley Lock flight.
I was transferred to the National Girobank computer site in Bootle and purchased a new-build house adjacent to Pilling Lane, Lydiate – alongside the linear moorings of the Mersey Motor Boat Club. My wife and I and our six-year-old daughter moved over the Pennines from West Yorkshire into half a completed shell of a semi-detached Georgianstyle home (the builder had gone bust and the show house’s internal fittings were ripped out and refitted into our three-bed home – half of a shell).
It was on Friday, December 19, 1974 and when it became dark the lights came on in the narrowboat Lawford – a 48ft Harborough GRP-top ex-hire boat from the Blisworth Tunnel hire fleet. Our concerns were that we had people residing at the bottom of the garden! By mid-morning Saturday, the sliding hatch moved forward and a lady, Dorothy Richards, called out: “Don't panic – come round and meet myself and my husband Jack.”
In order that Jack and Dorothy did not wish to have a bridging loan on an ex-British Waterways cottage and stable block restoration further up the cut, they would be our only neighbours until the early summer. Dorothy was the headmistress of Dovecot and Huyton Primary School in Knotty Ash and Jack was a woodwork master at a remedial school for kids with behavioural problems in Liverpool (every hammer, chisel and sharp tool had to be signed in and out).
Jack was the commodore of the Mersey Motor Boat
Club and he invited us in the summer of 1975 to join the annual campaign cruise striving for the restoration of what has now become the Liverpool Link. I crewed Lawford and became proficient such that I joined the flotilla at the rear upon departing from the Mersey Motor Boat Club.
I was warned by Jack that the last boat through after the lift bridge at Litherland was invariably pelted with all sorts – adjacent to what was a sausage factory! Jack in his capacity as commodore was escorting the Lord Mayor of Liverpool on the lead boat!
All went relatively smoothly and the descent of Stanley locks was completed (this was the limit of navigation). Upon our return our friends and neighbours Rob and Viv on their cabin cruiser shared the lock. As the boats ascended up the lock wall I noticed two boys – aged about nine or 10 – laying flat on their tummies on the lockside paving slabs. As Rob and Viv’s boat gunnel became level with the lip of the lockside, like lightening the lads slid open the sliding window on the boat upon spotting Viv’s handbag and purse on the work top.
In a flash they were scurrying over the bomb site and sheer dereliction – another statistic to add to the appalling crime rate of the city due to strikes and deprivation at the time.
Sadly Jack passed away in 1982 but Dorothy is now aged 101 and lives in Warwickshire. My wife Janet and I attended her 100th birthday in May 2019. Dorothy sold Lawford to me and I was living in Aston Clinton after yet another computer centre move in 1983. I obtained a mooring on the Aylesbury Arm and was given a three-week break by my employers BT to sail Lawford south from Lydiate. (The Blisworth Tunnel was closed so the route was via the Oxford Canal and the Thames to Brentford and up the Grand Union Canal).