Category: Waterscape

I sailed from Bristol with a witch’s hag-cough,
Spitting phlegm on the ropes and rigging
All through the Atlantic’s winter storms;
The River Hudson brought no relief,
Just fog and headaches as we made our way upstream.

Our trade went well with the tribesmen,
Stroud Scarlet cloth, their prize,
Beaver pelts and bearskins, ours.

Stroud Scarlet gave scant shelter
From our colds, catarrh and shivering agues;
Their death-rattle was our invitation
To praise God’s Will, with fences, palisades,
And the cultivation of funeral virgin wastes,
As we advanced inland with Protestant virtue.

A London Wave on the Regent’s Canal

William Blake might have written of Paddington:
“They groan’d aloud on London Stone
They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook’,
But this was in the days of the journey from Newgate:
‘Welcome to the Hanging Match next Collar Day … the Paddington Fair…
Watch them Dance the Paddington Frisk when our friends shall Go West…’
In short, these are Hogarthian streets, rather than a Regent’s Canal.

And this was in the days before the railways:
My Paddington train was delayed,
So I passed the time, walking past the old branch line bay,
To the platform end,
To listen to a blackbird
Herald the winter morn,
And watch the mists
Folding the hills around Stroud –
Fog hanging in the valley –
The patient passengers huddled on the platform,
Lamp-lit like a sketch from Boz
Or like a poem from Thomas Hardy.

Fog shrouded the canals, turnpikes and rivers of southern England,
As we made our Brunel way through
Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Middlesex
(The Thames lost to sight and mists),
And so to William Cobbett’s Great Wen,
And Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu,
Moored at Paddington Basin,
For scrambled eggs,
And a visitor from Bengal rather than one from Porlock.

We chugged through Dickensian Bleak House fog,
Past barges, selling coal and kindling and books,
Through Little Venice, via the Grand Union,
Then along the Regent’s Canal,
Through tunnels and locks, under bridges,
Past gas holders, railway stations, warehouses,
Churches and festive barges and the homeless,
Sleeping rough in tents on a cold, damp canal bank,
Past Regent’s Park and Camden and King’s Cross,
With the companionship of the crew of the Bengal Tiger:
Comradeship and collectivism through the locks,
Sharing the windlass, the ropes and the gates,
Waiting our turns outside Islington Tunnel,
Until we passed through its arched London brick
And under London’s dripping waters,
The half circle of London light
Bringing a new mooring,
And a farewell from us all,
Josh and Alice and me on Xanadu,
To the passing Bengal Tiger,
A London wave,
On the Regent’s Canal,
In a right regular London particular.

Addendum:
There was one more unexpected lock to navigate – ‘The Lost Lock’. Josh dropped Alice’s bike lock into the canal, but needless to say, he has attached a powerful magnet to the end of a pole, to cope with such eventualities; and so the lock was retrieved.

Navigation’s become such a trade,
That thousands who ne’er saw the ocean,
When projects are artfully laid,
Trip away at each favourite motion;
In person to fondly attend,
What jockey should not mount its pony,
And ride to the very Land’s end,
Where the object is the making of money.

Some people cried up Hampton Gay,
As prospects the greatest possessing,
The Grand Junction, ‘tis clear, bears the sway,
And the mania still is increasing;
At Ell’smere, don’t think I’m in jest,
Regardless of lodging or weather,
Of land navigators at least,
Full a thousand gathered together.

To mortals who share common sense,
‘Tis clear from this strong Canal Fever,
Whatever divines may advance,
Mankind are as sordid as ever;
Content e’en with those can’t be had,
Who riches immense have been savin’,
For spite of philosophy’s aid,
The mind is continually craving.

From projects, no doubt, some there are
Who et themselves into a hobble;
The Glo’ster at present bids fair,
But the Bristol turned out a mere bubble;
The winners much artifice use,
The losers without affectation,
But the working class always will lose
In matters of deep speculation.

My name it is Alice White, I’d have you all to know
I went and left my father’s farm, a long, long, time ago
My mother called me a silly lass, she said I’d rue the day
That I followed on the heels of the navives.

My first man it was Dandy Jack, he was a handsome buck,
And we travelled throughout England as we trudged from canal to cut,
We lived in shanty houses, had lodgers and children three
As I worked to fill the needs of the navvies.

When Dandy Jack was killed, beneath a fall of stone,
I wept and cursed the day, that ever I was born,
But the children needed feeding and many men looked at me,
So I jumped the brush to stay with the navvies.

Time came I was deserted, when my children numbered five,
And I had to take another man, just to keep us all alive,
And now I’ve had so many men, they call me Alice Free,
As I’ve lived my life away with the navvies.

And now I’m getting old, and grey before my time,
With the work and the childbearing, as we trudged from canal to line,
I often think of my poor Dandy Jack, lying cold within his grave,
He’s the only one I loved of the navvies.

They call me Rosie Cooper, I doubt you’ve heard the name
I was born in eighteen eighty five, from Inglesham we came
Me father was a boatman, we lived on a narrow boat
And we worked the canals of England, from our own home afloat

Chorus :
Through the cold and rain and the hunger and pain
We worked the Thames and Severn.

Our boats were brightly painted with castles in the sky
And roses all around the door, so sweet it’d make ya cry
Our days were long and hard then as we battled through the gales
Up flights of locks, thro’ tunnels dark, our bodies hard as nails!

When I was only fourteen, cold winter struck us hard
Our boats were frozen to the banks, we could not move a yard
With the water frozen solid, our horses could not grip
We tried in vain the locks to gain but on towpath we did slip

Me Mother took it hardest, with seven mouths to feed
No work meant no cash comin’ in, for food we had to plead!
Cruel farmers they did scorn us and from their land did chase
That winter saw a hundred dead – God take them to a better place!

But now I’ve met me Lechlade lad, he proposed to me last Spring
We’ll be married in the Summer and I’ll wear his golden ring
He’s good man, he’s a strong man and he’s a Number One
So we’ll work hard together, spend our lives forever

On the Thames and Severn Canal.

So many are the carriers whose loads, they have declined.
So many are the boatmen, to starvation are resigned.
The railway takes our livelihood and to compete we must
Accept a cut in wages to still earn an honest crust.

Chorus:
The union is our strength and will be with us to the end.
We’ll not let the comp’ny starve us and our living we’ll defend.

The wage we earn is not enough to live on anyway
And over 6 per cent is how they want to cut our pay.
We have no home, we wear but rags, the truth, to you, I’ll tell;
They’ll not be satisfied until they’ve starved us all as well.

Just five and twenty shillings that is all we earn a week.
For working seven days non-stop, it’s fairness that we seek.
A twelve-hour day without a rest is more than we can take
To earn ourselves a pittance as our bodies, they all ache.

But Gosling, Bevin and Sam Brooks have organised our men
To force the company to stop so they can think again
About six hundred livelihoods all up and down the cut
Who cannot live on nothing but the stale air and the smut.

There’s over fifty boats that are blockaded by the wharf.
Their cargoes we’ve impounded, we will not allow them off.
The Grand Junction and Oxford, both, are fully at a stop.
We shall not let them move and our demands we shall not drop.

So here at Braunston shall we stand until we get our way
And strong we’ll be together and together we shall stay.
Without support from boaters, all, we surely could not cope,
So bravo to the union who have come to give us hope.

Smuggling?

I know there’s little evidence of smuggling in our county,
But let’s imagine there might have been communities,
Where customary right prevailed over the law …
Down there, on the Severn,
Where it meanders along,
Or down there, in those sequestered hamlets,
Running right down to the banks of the river…
Boats mooring up with contraband in the dead of night,
The secretion of the prize in cellars, barns, stables, woodland and tunnels …
Tobacco, tea, brandy, Geneva and wine
Passing along under the blind eye of the gentry …
The gentlemen and gentlewomen of the night …

‘It was all carousing, huzzas and celebration, when the railway came to Stroud. No more unemployment! No more Miles Reports! No more emigration! No more poverty and riots and strikes and wage cuts and short time working! No more unemployment! No more Chartism!

Cheap coal for Stroudwater! We will be masters of the cloth trade once more! Fare thee well, Manchester! Adieu, Bradford!

Well, that’s not how it looks to me down here at Wallbridge, on the Navigation. All that same poppycock was said a generation ago when the canal came to the town. And what’s happened, since? Manchester and its cotton mills; Bradford and its woollen mills? We’ll never overtake them.

Competition and steam are the problem, not the answer. That’s what’s making it hard to put bread on the table.

So, no doubt, the same will happen again in another generation. Something undreamt of will no doubt replace the iron horse and the permanent way. Steam powered automotives on new turnpike roads? Powered balloons?

For as Mr. Shelley said:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

And all I know is that my job and life as a barge hand on this Navigation is on short time. I mean life and existence. Not short time working.

As our own bard of the working woman and man put it:

‘To progress we must all submit,
A sorry plight, I do admit.’

But, now we have the Chartists and the Six Points and the Land Scheme – do you remember Mr. Harris interrupting the Anti Corn Law League meeting in Stroud a couple of years ago, or so: If “any new machinery was introduced which took away the labour of any man, that man should have a percentage allowed to him out of the income of that machinery sufficient to maintain him.”

When the People’s Charter becomes law then mechanisation will be for the benefit of all rather than the few. I hope to see that day.’

Post-script:
In 1850, the author of this piece, Charles Butler, became a grandfather. The daughter was named Emily. Some sixty years later, Temple Thurston wrote in The Flower of Gloster:

‘The whole way upwards from Stroud is deserted now. We met only one barge in the whole journey. An old lady with a capacious barge bonnet was standing humming quietly to herself at the tiller.’

That old woman was Emily.