CASE STUDY A boat family
When Annie Bickerton and Arthur Atkins married in 1939 at Nantwich, both originally came from boat families.
Arthur was born on board the Celtic at Ellesmere Port, in 1917, the youngest of William and Isabella Alice Atkins’ eight children. Isabella was the daughter of a beer-seller and grew up in Stoke- on-Trent. In 1895, she married gas stoker William, who was the son of a boatman.
As a child, Arthur Atkins lived on the boat Dee. School admission registers show his education was intermittent; in 1924, Arthur is noted as “gone to live on the boats” for several months.
William Atkins died when Arthur was just 15 and Isabella ran a fish and chip shop and sold homemade ‘nettle pop’ to support herself. When Arthur left home he struggled to gain employment and slept rough before finding work on the boats.
Arthur and Annie’s daughter Phyllis was born on the Leam at Ellesmere Port in 1940. A week later, the family continued transporting oil from Stanlow. The journals of health inspections at Napton Junction reveal that the family also worked on boats carrying tar and gas-water to and from Midlands distilleries.
Annie won prizes for having the cleanest boats in the Clayton fleet, while Arthur was awarded the Royal Humane Society certificate for saving a child’s life in 1943. Yet the family gave up life on the boats and moved to a house at Ellesmere Port in 1945, so the children could attend school regularly. Perhaps Arthur wished to give them a more stable upbringing than his own.