A glance through any specialist magazine or newspaper offers the casual reader a glimpse into another world. I recommend The Towpath Trader to anyone who might be contemplating a life on the waterways. Here one can find advertisements for cosy cabin stoves for sale, chandlery deals, advice on courses for 'Nervous Novices' (Cheshire Cat Training), and where to find a heavy 'Industrial Inverted MIG' for under £900. I picked up The Towpath Trader on a recent visit to the London Canal Museum, situated behind King's Cross Station in North London, where there is an extraordinary confluence of canals, railways, and traffic-bound roads, threading between nineteenth-century terraces and modern, glassy, high-rise structures.
The museum building was originally owned by Carlo Gatti, the ice-cream magnate, who, at the end of the nineteenth century used it for the storage of large chunks of ice, which were brought by boat from Norway to England, unloaded in Limehouse and transported from there to the Regent's Canal.
The great age of canals began in the eighteenth century when the Bridgewater Canal was created, so that coal could be transported directly from the mines to Manchester. Other schemes followed that connected canals to the rivers Trent, Mersey, Severn and Thames.
The creation of the canal system made Britain into a better articulated 'body', with the waterways serving as veins and arteries. For a few decades, before the coming of the railways, the transport of the future seemed to be the canal. By 1805, the 100-mile-long Grand Junction Canal had been completed and terminated at Paddington. It was then decided that, rather than digging through the West End, a great arc was to be excavated to the east, entering the Thames at Limehouse. The Grand Union Canal was finished in 1929, and was an amalgam of several existing canals, some dating back to the eighteenth century. The canals were nationalised in 1947.
At one time it was reckoned that over 40,000 people in England were living on boats, on canals and rivers and even fifty years ago, large volumes of freight were still being transported by canal boats.
The life of a canal boatman was grindingly hard. As recently as the 1960s horses were often used to tow the boats and crews might still have to negotiate loaded boats through narrow tunnels with their feet (a manoeuvre known as 'legging'.) Gradually, the mechanisms that operated the bridges and weirs, and the locks and basins, became more sophisticated, so that most bridges could be raised to allow loaded barges to pass under. Today, canal arms are operated by hydraulics, or they can 'split and swivel' open.
Canal boat people had a colourful language of their own. A glossary of the terms they used includes: 'Grist': the ground bones of animals; 'Navvies': workmen (abbreviated from Navigators); 'Pawl': a mechanical device that allows a gear or ratchet to rotate in one direction only; 'Scumble': a painting technique used to apply an even colour to a poor piece of wood. And then, of course, there are the expressions 'would not touch it with a bargepole' and 'barging' through or into something, referring to the way a barge travelled through a tunnel. At my school we would frequently ask someone to 'budge up' to make room on a bench. Finally, to the Bard of Stratford on Avon himself, The Taming of the Shrew contains the line: 'I'll not budge an inch,' and Cleopatra was given a magnificent barge of her own: 'The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne...' The children of canal workers received little or no education. Though few canal children had learned to read or write in the early twentieth century, they had travelled longer distances and to more places than the average child and they were usually found to be physically fit and well-fed. They were capable of very hard work from an early age.
Canal boatmen were rightly proud of the public service they provided for their country. With a pun on the Latin aqua meaning 'water', the motto for the Grand Junction Canal was: aeque pauperibus prodest, lucupletibus aeque ['it equally benefits both poor and rich']. (Horace, Epistles, Book 1, epistle 1, line 25.)
P.S. Today homeless people are sleeping rough by the canal in London. – Ed.