#narrowboats

Charlie, Ken, and an unnamed friend spotted!

Oh my goodness thank you so much for this!

"ᵀᴴᴱ ᴮᴼᴬᵀ ᴴᴬᵀᴱˢ ᴹᴱ ᴰᴿᴵⱽᴵᴺᴳ ᴵᵀ ᴵ ᶜᴬᴺ ᵀᴱᴸᴸ"

"Don't talk rubbish, lass, she likes you perfectly well."

Happy new year!

I myself am prone to really bad motion sickness, on cars/buses/trains and (regrettably) ocean-going boats, but did not find that my motion sickness triggered by narrowboats on canals. I personally perceived it as a different kind of motion. Canals are flat, narrowboats only go 4mph, and their flat hulls and long shapes mean that the motion is more hammocky, side-to-side, if that makes sense. If you’re piloting, then by its very nature you’re standing outside in the fresh air (narrowboats have open sterns - every part of their design is absurd) and most of the time on a narrowboat you are not moving. When you are moored up and a moving narrowboat passes yours too fast, it can sometimes chop the water against you and suck the water out from under your hull, which knocks the mugs out of your cupboards, but I don’t remember that setting me off much.

I think that if you’re in the engine room of a moving trad-stern narrowboat it’s more noxious, but also, nobody in their right mind would be in the engine room of a moving trad-stern narrowboat. Go keep the pilot company.

Photo credit: Jonathan Chua.

The Llangollen Canal is the most famous Welsh canal, because of the incredible Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, a feat of engineering that carries narrowboats across a very big valley.

The Llangollen crosses the Wales/England border and the breach occurred in Whitchurch, Shropshire, England.

The boats involved appear to be liveaboards, meaning they’re the homes of the people aboard.

Those left homeless appear to have been quickly housed on other boats at the offers of hire boat companies whose fleets were standing by over Christmas.

I can tell you a bit to start you off!

As many people know, in various nations during WW2, a lot of men were at war, and women filled the labour gap. This was an interesting example of how gender roles adapt to the needs of society, and backlash against this shaped today’s society tremendously.

In the UK, “Land Girls” were young British women from a variety of backgrounds, from aristocrats to city girls, who became farmhands. They were iconic and narratively appealing, and much celebrated today.

On the canals, about 100 random women were deployed to operate diesel-powered narrowboats on the canals. A slow-but-cheap-and-efficient method of moving very heavy cargo around Britain, narrowboats were fairly resilient to other disruption and meant that coal and steel could quietly move around the country. The canals were also slightly fortified, as they would have provided a small defensive break that tanks couldn’t cross in the event of Nazi land invasions. But they occupied a quiet useful place.

The canals were called Inland Waterways at the time, and the women wore IW badges, which led to the nickname of “Idle Women.”

They haven’t received much attention or acclaim. There were only a few of them, and they weren’t as pervasive or culture-changing as Land Girls. Still, it would have been an interesting life.

There is a series of books called “working waterways”, often sold in boatyards, that deals with these stories, and has a book called “idle women.” I’m afraid I haven’t read it, though!

It was the narrowboat Phyllis May. Nothing like her had ever been seen in these waters before, or anywhere else in the US. She was sixty feet long and six foot ten inches wide, grey and crimson and white, with long windows on the waterline. She looked like a sinking railway carriage. Near the stern, fairground letters a foot high – PHYLLIS MAY – T & M DARLINGTON, STONE.

- Narrow Dog to Indian River, in which a narrowboat that has crossed the English Channel is shipped to the USA to doodle around the South

Narrowboats and trains were developed around the same time in the same place for the same purpose, and competed for the same job (hauling cargo - early narrowboats were not for passengers.) narrowboats were ready to go as an easy technology - once you build the canal you can have as many little independent boats as will fit. They were pulled by horses at first, and didn’t look much like train carriages, being more like barges with a tarp over the cargo.

Narrowboats and trains paced each other for a short time, but trains were faster and more effective for passengers, so became ubiquitous. Narrowboats remained effective for slowly (and cheaply) shifting cargo around the inland British Isles.

One of the Peaky Blinders narrowboats, not too historically inaccurate for the 20s… by then they had engines. They were a very very slow way of moving cargo but they were still around in the 1920s because they still got it done.

In WW2, with fuel being rationed, there was a whole contingent of British women piloting cargo around the British Isles. This is a very slow way of doing it, but requires very little fuel to move a heavy load of cargo. Canals are fairly resilient infrastructure and boaters can largely be left to themselves without oversight or engineering. You can see that it was still a very small cabin at the stern with a woodstove for warmth and cooking, which is where the boaters kept their things and slept, and a huge long flat cargo area (the weird empty shell structure in front of the woman.) This would be covered with cargo and a top.

After WW2, the canals went into decline, with nobody maintaining them, and many collapsed. They almost vanished. Some are permanently lost, and a few others could be restored today. Interestingly, in terms of ecosystem and wildlife habitat, despite being artificial, canals are better than no canals.

In the 1970s there was a leisure revival brought around by a few keen people. They pointed out that the UK’s canal networks are good quality, well-connected and fun. It was only a handful of people but they restored the entire thing - locks, ducks and all.

Narrowboats built in the 1970s for leisure purposes went through a redesign. They immediately had the stern built in to make it into living quarters, like a long narrow camper van. This necessarily looks like a train!

Both trains and narrowboats are determined as narrow by the gauge of their infrastructure - trains to their tracks, and narrowboats to their locks.

On the way to a Black Fae event but in the meantime it's #Caturday so here are some #Cats from my last #Canals walk.

📷 #FujiFilm #XT30II