Working boats – reliving the romance of the last days of commercial traffic on Britain’s canals
Tim Coghlan discovered by chance this important but little-known book – one of the very few first-hand accounts of the twilight of canal carrying. He is now working on having it republished.
AS SOMETHING of a canal bookworm, with five full shelves of them, collected over the years at rallies and the like, I thought I knew all there was to know about what has been written on them. But in life there are always surprises.
About two or three times a year we get involved in major clearings-out of the contents of narrowboats that come on brokerage with us at Braunston Marina – after the owners have removed what few possessions they want to keep. The staff know that I want to have any canal books, photographs and the like, before a decision is made as to what to do with the rest.
In this way, I was presented last October with a copy of Working Narrowboats by Roger Alsop and Graham Dodkins, published by David & Charles in 1988. If I had ever seen the book before, it had never registered with me; I just could not understand why. It was all about so many of the things I knew about so well; there were those last coal runs from the Midlands to London, where I had later come to know a number of the former working boatmen involved – I had even employed two for several years.
There was the decline and fall of Leslie Morton’s Willow Wren fleet, the last tragedy acted out in part in our Lower Reservoir. And finally a brilliant account of Roger Alsop’s re-enactment in 1985 of his last run 20 years earlier in 1965 – reusing his old boats and carrying coal – which I later sort of echoed in the series of Jam ’Ole Runs I organised starting 10 years later, and involving a number of former working boatmen.
But it was when I turned to page 47 that I was hit for six. Here was a photograph I had never seen before. It was of Leslie Morton, the great Willow Wren gaffer. Short and stout, and in a smart suit, he is seen in the hatchway of the motor Ascot at Bulls Bridge, Southall, in 1965.
Before that I had only known of two surviving photographs of the man, but never on a boat. The reason for this was because in 2003, I helped canal author David Blagrove put together the photographs for his third and improved edition of his Canal History of Braunston. He had only known of one, a group photograph taken after the legendary Sister Mary of Stoke Bruerne had appeared on Eamonn Andrews’ TV programme, This Is Your Life, and Leslie Morton was one of the interviewees.
My searches only produced one more – a head and shoulders taken of the man by the young professional photographer Hugh McKnight in the 1960s. Leslie Morton was giving the after dinner speech at an IWA dinner somewhere on the Kennet & Avon, and looking exhausted from his endeavours to save the Willow Wren fleet of working narrowboats. David opted again for the This Is Your Life photograph which he had used in the two previous editions.
The mystery thickens. David is listed in the acknowledgments page of Working Boats. So if he was involved in putting that book together, had he in fact never seen it in final form – and with it made a note of that important photograph of Leslie Morton? Also David said emphatically in Bread Upon The Water that he never saw Leslie Morton on a boat.
In 1962, as he was working down the Braunston Lock Flight for the first time on the Enterprise, Leslie Morton came out of the Nelson Inn to help him with the lock – still carrying a glass of beer, with his pipe firmly fixed in his mouth. David wrote: “This was the only time I ever saw him physically touch the canal for which he did so much.”
It was time to widen the scope of my enquiries – as Inspector Morse would say. Were the two authors of Working Boats still alive? I rang Val Roberts, editor of the Historic Narrow Boat Owners Club’s excellent newsletter. Roger Alsop certainly was alive, she told me, and still quite active on the waterways, but she had never encountered Graham Dodkins.
She suggested I rang Nick Hill to see if he could help. Nick, who is a regular attendee at our Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rallies, put me in touch with Roger – and there followed a touch of the Doctor Livingstone I presume.
Roger now lives with his wife ‘on the bank’ – as the working boatmen would say – in a house in Hemel Hempstead, and he keeps his modern 70ft narrowboat Comet II on the canal nearby. He is now aged 76, and has been involved with the canals ever since he left home aged 17 to captain a pair of hotel boats.
Today he is still an active Boat Safety Scheme examiner. As for Graham Dodkins, he now sadly had dementia and was in a home in the Hertford area, and very much out of it all.
Roger had met Graham in the early 1980s when both were boating at the top end of the Lea & Stort. Graham was a librarian with The Times newspaper, and was also writing articles on the waterways. He told Roger that he had always wanted to write a book about them, and Roger’s working days on the canals, including his 12 trips with Willow Wren between 1964 and 1965, would be just the thing.
It would be the classic ghostwritten biography, where Graham’s journalist training gave him the ability to capture the very essence of his subject. Here was Roger reflecting on his canal carrying years: “Making a living on it was the priority for the handful of us who came ‘off the land’ in the Sixties; that, and to be taken seriously by the boatmen. We had to earn their respect.”
Then Graham had a brainwave – why not do a re-enactment run, 20 years on, of Roger’s last run, using the same pair of boats – the motor Comet and the butty Barnes – and carrying coal? That last run had been from the North Warwickshire coalfields down to Croxley Mill near Rickmansworth. Both the mine and Croxley Mill were now closed.
So instead they decided to load from a lorry at Sutton Stop and unload at Brentford. Finding the boats was easier. Comet was owned by boat builder Ian Kemp, who had once carried for Stroudwater Carriers, and agreed to come with his boat, and his wife as crew. Barnes was still an unconverted butty, and this was borrowed, to be steered by Roger. And then, not revealed in the book, is that Roger’s modern boat Comet II was to follow behind, with modern shower and cooking facilities, and Roger’s wife preparing meals.
Graham was on board to observe and take notes, and the great canal photographer Harry Arnold was out and about to snap it all for posterity. It all made for an extraordinarily well-documented time capsule of the canals in 1985 – well written by Graham and brilliantly photographed by Harry, 28 of whose photographs appear in the book, sometimes filling a whole page.
So, I asked Roger, why was the book so little known? It had been published by the distinguished David & Charles, who had published numerous canal publications, and had plenty of experience in promoting them. Roger had no real answer. He could not recall the print run size but he himself had sold 250 copies.
Following publication, there had been talk of a second edition, but by then the publishing house had been bought by Readers Digest, who weren’t interested. In recent times Roger has been buying them in when they turned up on eBay, which is why there are so few of them out there. Couldn’t something now be done, I wondered?
By looking at their website, I saw that David & Charles were still in existence, and emailed them about having the book reprinted.
Almost by return, I received an encouraging reply from James in their support team: “We completed a management buy-out of the David & Charles’ business in July of last year. One of our goals is to resurrect many, if not the majority, of the books published through the years, a significant number of which are about the inland waterways. New technologies in digital print and print-on-demand make this more viable.
“Where we do have some challenges is in the access to files for older books, or if necessary the costs attached to scanning books to create something we can print from. Right now, we have over 3000 books from the company’s history in archive storage – a run rate that averages out at around 50 books per year since 1961. This is a roundabout way of saying that I hope we will get to the point where this title is available again, but right now I can’t commit to what timeframe this will be on.”
I offered sponsorship from Braunston Marina if it would bring Working Boats to the front of the queue, which is now being considered. I told James it would be great to have that book reprinted while some of the protagonists were still alive – particularly Roger Alsop and Ian Kemp. Signed copies at our Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rally, with Comet and Barnes in the parade of boats might boost sales considerably.