Stop rocking the boat!
A SAYING of the 18th century lit-wit Dr Samuel Johnson and much quoted by Churchill was: ‘“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
While our predicament at Braunston Marina was not that bad, in June this year – and despite our best endeavours – we still had little more than that fortnight to go to our historic narrowboat rally in terms of resolving the problem we had been trying to deal with for some years.
It was the large lump of rock that lay only a couple of feet beneath the surface of what we call the Old Oxford Arm and which during Covid had got much worse. That lump would be in the very heart of where the visiting historic narrowboats would be mooring when not parading, unless we somehow sorted it.
At the last rally we held in 2019, the rock had caught a number of these canal leviathans, requiring much muscle and sweat to get them off. One of the boats that got stuck on that rock – in a dramatic style reminiscent of an unsuccessful attempt at the water jump at Badminton Horse Trials – was the Princess Anne.
The boat had only recently enjoyed a magnificent restoration completed by its new owner Sarah Malcolm – and was now the winner of the Best Historic Narrowboat in Show as voted by the boat owners.
In true Princess Anne style, Sarah was not amused. The boat was built by Harland & Wolff in Woolwich in 1935 and first named the Plato. With the birth of Princess Anne in 1950, it was renamed in her honour and has kept the name ever since.
The offending rock seemed to be the last remaining part of the old wharf wall that had collapsed through neglect in the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, after I had acquired the marina, we rebuilt that wall through the use of a coffer dam. In so doing we removed all of that old collapsed wall, bar one section that defied all efforts on our part.
It just wouldn’t move and as it was located immediately above the culvert that drained our dry docks and ran under the arm, we took the view that it was best left alone, as we could live with it.
However in recent times we noticed that the rock seemed to have got closer to the surface, making the draft even less. Maybe it was rotating and with that presumably it was moving, therefore not fixed to the culvert brickwork. The clearance now was a problem even for modern shallowdrafted narrowboats and impossible for the deep-drafted historic ones. It was time to throw everything at it, including the wonders of modern technology.
Underwater survey
We commissioned an underwater camera survey of the rock, which revealed to our astonishment that it was some 2.5m long – we thought it was just a metre or so. Then we employed the services of Midlands waterways specialist Ambion Contractors, with its team headed by David Saunders.
A lot of work had to go into the waterside site preparations before the team had its first go at a lift out, using a conventional JCB, with the intention of breaking up the rock underwater first, before lifting it out. But this ‘rock of ages’ would not break beyond a few token pieces round the edges.
It was time for Ambion Contractors to call in its canal cavalry – a 16-tonne tracked excavator, delivered by low loader. The skilled operator soon proved that the rock could move, which he gingerly showed by dragging it to a position where its sausage shape could be more centrally located in the scoop bucket.
Then, to the astonishment of the onlookers, this Jawsmonster of Braunston Marina was at last gingerly lifted clear of the water, the excavator straining itself to hold it in position in the bucket. Much careful manoeuvring was then needed to reverse the excavator and its estimated five-tonne load well clear of the waterside, where the stone could be unloaded in the car park.
Even now, the rock would not break up and Ambion Contractors had to rush in a special JCB with a breaker to reduce the rock to small lumps, after which it could be taken away for disposal.
But before that, there was something of a mortar postmortem as to why that rock had proved so hard. On close inspection, it proved not to have been a solid rock or large lump of concrete, but in fact nothing more than the remains of a wall built of rough hewn limestone bonded in burnt lime cement – both probably from the ancient quarry on nearby Barby Hill – as the canal builders sourced materials locally wherever possible.
By the time the wharf wall was constructed in the mid to late 1780s, the canal was probably already built, so the wall would have set underwater – the best way for the cement to set extra-hard.
Today, information from more and more ancient newspapers is being put on to the internet, unearthing many fascinating facts.
Diana Monaghan – a retired school teacher and co-owner of the historic narrowboat Madeley, a converted Fellow, Morton & Clayton butty which regularly attends our rallies – had found an astonishing advertisement in a 1788 copy of the Northampton Mercury.
It offered coal for sale at the wharf at Braunston, where the new canal crossed underneath the turnpike road from London to Birmingham. The coal came via the newly opened canal from the Warwickshire coalfields. So the coal wharf was in place then, with the connection opened further south to the Thames at Oxford still two years away on January 1, 1790. That rock must have been made around 1788.
With a lot of running around, the quayside where that rock had been lifted out was made shipshape in the remaining two weeks before the rally. But old habits die hard and I noticed the historic boaters, who had attended our rallies in the past, seemed to give a wide berth to where the rock had been.
As for the Princess Anne, she attended the rally, but was moored safely out on the Grand Union Canal. It would seem that the good lady would now not touch that Old Oxford Arm with a barge pole!