Now, I have been fascinated by canals ever since I came across a disused one close to where my grandparents lived in Chellaston.
I would have been no more than 10, and the sight of an overgrown waterway with the lock gates hanging at crazy angles as they rotted away from neglect, set me wondering about the purpose of this stretch water.
Of course, I didn’t think about its history, or its future, after all most 10 year old’s only live in the present, and when I went looking for Shelton Lock just about a decade ago, it had vanished.
It stood by the trolley bus terminus, but after 62 years even the terminus has gone leaving just the New Bridge Inn as a clue to the canal, which is now a footpath.
All of which is an introduction to Narrow Boat, by L.T.C. Rolt, who recorded a series of canal trips in 1939, at a time when the canal network was in decline.
The volume of traffic had been declining for over half a century and with it was the strong possibility that a way of life which had existed for 170 or so years would also go.
In his introduction he wrote, “Most people know no more of the canals than they do of the old green roads which the pack-horse trains once travelled.
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| The canal network around Manchester, 1831 |
Of all the authors who have written of their journeyings about England, only Mr. Temple Thurston chose to travel by water, and his delightful book ‘The Flower of Gloster’, being published nearly thirty years ago, stands on the small shelf in my library which is sufficient to contain all that has been written on canals.
For they have lapsed into the neglected obscurity which overtook the turnpikes when the railway disposed the stage-coach and ruined the great posting house along Watling Street and the North Road. Now the motor-car has brought the road into its own again, but the canals gave withdrawn still further into the shadows.
Knowledge of them is confined to the narrow hump-backed bridges which trap the incautious motorist, or to an occasional glimpse from the train of a ribbon of still water winding through the meadows to some unknown destination”.*
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| The Rochdale Canal, 1979 |
Which is pretty much where I came into the story in 1959, looking over the bridge at Shelton Lock and wondering at that sheet of still green water, almost entirely hidden by reeds broken only by the odd floating bit of debris.
Fifteen years earlier most of canals were still being used, and this was what allowed Mr. Rolt to borrow a relative’s narrow boat and make a series f journeys, which became the book.
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| The Rochdale Canal, 2003 |
But Narrow Boat is not just a catalogue of watery adventures, but a record of the men, women, and children who still worked the canals, and description of their way of life.
There is a detailed glossary at the back, which includes a definition of a barge and how it differs from a narrow boat and much else.
Added to which there are some fine period photographs and a wealth of images by the artist Eric Gaskell, whose chosen method was the lino cut.
So far, I am only on chapter one, but have also ordered up ‘The Flower of Gloster’, which between them will add to my knowledge of the of a time when many people had turned their back on canals.
And I notice that his map includes the Derby Canal which ran through Shelton Lock, which means I might just get a description of the waterway in happier times.
Leaving me just to say that the canal was closed in the 1960s, but there are plans to excavate it.**
Alas while he got as far as Middlewich, the glories of our own canals in Manchester were a narrow boat too far.
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 1979-2003, map of the canal network around Manchester from Bradshaw’s map of 1830, The Inland Navigation of England and Wales, and the extract from Joseph Priestley’s Historical Account of the Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railways, 1830 courtesy of Digital Archives http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/
*Narrow Boat, L.T.C. Rolt, 1944 page 11
**Shelton Lock, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelton_Lock and The Derby Canal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_Canal#:~:text=The%20Derby%20Canal%20ran%2014%20miles%20%2823%20km%29,in%201793%20and%20was%20fully%20completed%20in%201796.
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