The 9 year old me looking a little shifty...

Going back to the summer of 1965, when I was just nine years old, it was time for our second waterways holiday on a boat hired from T. W. Allen and sons of Molesey.   This time it had been decided, in discussions that I was not privy to, that my maternal grandmother would come with us.

A bigger boat was needed so we plumped for a wooden one that T. W. Allen had christened River Rose. The boat dated back to the mid to late fifties and was typical low to midrange fare.

We had a chemical toilet (not for the faint hearted) and sinks that were converted (due to a change in regulations) so that they no longer discharged into the river. This conversion was in the form of a bucket under the plughole with the pipe to the external discharge simply chopped short!

After a very short time Dad had decided that the thing was both underpowered and ungainly but we were happy to go, crab fashion, as Mum put it, along at just below the 7 knot speed limit, tying up at Runnymede for our first night.   When it rained, we discovered that it leaked rather copiously and, worse than that, when dad pumped the bilges, he discovered that the leaks were not wholly confined to the superstructure.   We weren’t sinking though, so we pushed on.   We were going to enjoy ourselves even if it killed us!

River Rose with the canopy down

It was the second day afloat that a vantage point on the back-cabin top became something of an issue with my elder brother claiming ownership because he found it first.   John’s extra two years in the world were something of a major factor to the nine-year-old me but I still protested the claim - getting the threat of a foot in the face if I tried climbing the short ladder from the cockpit to the vantage point.

Mum eventually intervened in the territorial battle before it turned into open warfare with the proclamation that we had an hour each or we were both banned.   With the issue settled, John and I more or less lost interest and disappeared into the front cabin to make paper cut-outs and play board games.   For the most part we got on fairly well and I remember us decorating the boat with the collection of chopped up scrap paper for Mum and Dad’s 12^th wedding anniversary.   There were even two snakes made (by me) out of string as part of the decorations with a caption “Bromrikong and Sallikong wish you a happy anniversary.”

The midpoint and destination of Thames holidays was always Lechlade (though some people would do a turnaround at Oxford and it was at Osney lock that we discovered the reason for the leaky superstructure.

“They turned that around pretty quick,” the jovial lock keeper said.

It transpired that the cockpit cover was too low for the famous Osney bridge and had to be lowered, a simple process that the keeper was happy to demonstrate.   Shame that the previous hirers ignored his advice and help, saying that they would sort it.   They did this by heading at the centre of the bridge at whatever speed the craft could muster, smashing the windscreen and various other bits of the cockpit canopy to bits.   End of their holiday!   In less than a week, Allen’s had fixed it all up and dispatched us to enjoy our holiday, leaks and all.   Again, the Lock keeper was more than helpful, handing dad half a tin of old varnish and telling him to plaster it on from the outside around anywhere that leaked.

“I’ll tell old man Allen, so you won’t lose any deposit,” he smiled as we headed on (canopy down) to the bridge.

Mum John and me fishing for tiddlers at Lechlade

A couple more days and in brilliant weather, we tied up at the meadow below Halfpenny Bridge in Lechlade.

I still have a soft spot for the place, though I haven’t been there for over 30 years.

The meadow was massive, with plenty of space for John, me and some of the other holidaying kids to run around and play football or whatever other games we concocted.  This was that stuff that a childhood summer was made from with blue skies and seemingly endless blisteringly hot weather.   Then I was not so cynical as to be aware that it would eventually end in a thunderstorm and yet more leaks.

Something that was not subject to the weather was the treat that was dinner at the café that bore the name of A. Smith, run by two very kind old gentlemen.   The food was basic good cooking and the atmosphere was the genuine version of timeless.

A Smith Lechlade

I had been looking forward to going there again for the whole year and was not disappointed when we sat down for our meal.   Part of this eagerness to revisit the place was the conundrum of the framed print of a seemingly random group of letters.

“YCWCYTFTB” it said, and I was determined to find out what it meant… So I asked one of the kindly gentlemen.

“Your curiosity will cost you thruppence for the blind,” he chuckled.

I’d been had!   But his delivery of the words made me laugh so much that I willingly coughed up half the price of a “Matchbox” toy car for the local blind charity.

Two memories of the holiday stuck so much that, when I wrote my second book, “Here we Go!” I included a visit to the café by my two heroes (Jim and Amanda) at a pivotal point in their relationship.   I changed its location and menu a little, but if you remember A. Smith, you will spot the origin of the café instantly.   River Rose also appears, in somewhat altered form as the basis “Clearwater Sky.”

Interestingly, whilst A. Smith’s café is long gone, I am pretty sure that the “River Rose” has survived in private ownership.   ©2019 Michael Nye.   www.michaelnyewriter.com

The little village of Crick is these days best known for the annual Crick Boat Show, thousands of pounds worth of canal related paraphernalia is showcased in an attempt to get visitors to mortgage a kidney and buy some of it. The show is, these days, all about the modern boat, and while the visitors may comment on how picturesque the location is, rarely does the history of it cross their minds.

A casual walk down the towpath from the show-ground will lead you to the mighty tunnel portal, where if you stand on the water’s edge and face the tunnel, you will find a small, worn brick inscribed with a date.

On that date, with great pomp and circumstance, a boat loaded with the great and good was legged through, the tunnel declared officially open and everyone clapped themselves on the back for completing such a momentous task.

Of course, the people in the boat that day hadn't lifted more than a pen in actually getting the tunnel built, and most history books that a visitor to the boat show can pick up, only speak of those fancy suited gentlemen.

I, however, prefer the grubbier story of the tunnel, the one full of blood, sweat, tears and a lot of sex.

We'll bypass the boring paper-trail and begin our story in 1810. The village was a busy little place, sat comfortably on a trade route between Oxford and Leicester, and the travellers it tempted supported a selection of forges and inns. The village was still hanging onto its cottage crafts in the weavers, spinners, shoemakers and saddlers, and it was forward thinking enough to have a couple of day schools, an apothecary and  a doctor. It of course had the usual butchers and bakers, and obviously a good selection of farmers and a lot of labourers.

There were masons at the stone pits and at least 2 brickyards quietly churning out building materials, and in 1810 it is our brickyards that open up our story by signing up to produce 2 million bricks for the princely sum of 1 & ½ farthings per brick, or 32 shillings per thousand.

Within a year, the busy little village was bustling more than usual. There doesn't appear to be a full list of who was employed, so it is impossible to say how many men were professional canal builders and how many were local labourers ready for a change of career, but we know that 350 men were employed and were making rapid progress.

There was a minor blip late in 1811 when the labourers had nearly finished a deep cutting at one end of the new tunnel, when someone with a theodolite and some sense, dug test bores for said tunnel and found it dangerously unsuitable.

A few frantic meetings later, and a new site was chosen on the other side of the village and work restarted with all haste.

Haste is perhaps the operative word here. The new site had less shifting sand, but it did have streams. By late 1813, the tunnel itself was well past the halfway mark, but at least one man had died at shaft 10 (stories differ as to whether he fell down it or whether something fell down it and landed on him), and a few others suffered “some maiming” from roof falls. This was on top of the usual range of accidents, with at least one man being run over by a full wheelbarrow that slipped back on him; humorous this might sound at first, remember that these were timber monstrosities shod with iron and loaded as heavily as possible.

You may have noticed that so far, I have carefully avoided using that dreadful term: “navvies.” We must remember that there had been no real concept of tunnel building prior to the canals arriving. If you were digging tunnels you were generally a miner, and it is this logic that accounts for our first glimpse of the real men behind the tunnel each being recorded in the parish register as “miner.”

Meet William Morse, his wife Mary, and their baby son, John.

We don't know where our miners lived; if we take the sister site at Husbands Bosworth as a guide, we can assume that somewhere near to the site would have been a couple of long wooden dormitory huts capable of housing a couple of hundred men. They were being quite well paid (contrary to the mental image one might get when one thinks of the canal builders), so it is likely that some of the men, perhaps the married ones, would have rented rooms in the village.

They certainly would have descended on the village after the day was done in search of sustenance, and it is likely that it was during one of these sorties into the village that Hugh Nail first spotted Ann Blakemore.

Hugh seems to have been born on the outskirts of Liverpool and joined the canal gangs aged around 14, then made his way around the country, digging as he went. We can speculate that he arrives on the scene fairly early in the proceedings, as by the time he goes to the Rector in January of 1813 asking for the banns to be called, he's considered “of the parish.”

Hugh and Ann leave the church hand in hand watched by Ann's family and, chief among Hugh's fellow miners, his best friend Joseph Wilson.

Perhaps it was this romance that introduced Joseph to Ann's sister Sarah. Indeed, perhaps it's in an advanced state of alcoholic refreshment following the wedding that Joseph and Sarah became more intimately acquainted.

The following year, Hugh, Ann, Joseph and Sarah make their way back to the church where the resigned Rector baptised William and Mary respectively.

It may surprise you to learn that Sarah and Joseph stay together and produce a son the following year.

Sex before marriage didn't carry quite the same badge of shame for people of the regency era, especially the “country folk” who were frankly far more understanding of the mechanics and didn't bat an eyelid at a woman walking up the aisle with a big belly. Illegitimate children were frowned upon but once they'd arrived no one really bothered about them provided they were cared for without posing an expense on the parish.

In fact, Crick appears more tolerant than most as the Rector doesn't bat an eyelid when George Crowder and James Schofield leave the tunnel for a walk out with Esther and Sarah Vaus and produce babies John and James, or when William Harrison downs his shovel to dally with Hannah Gent and produces another baby John.

Indeed, the only time we see anything that could be taken as disapproval is when the Rector notes in 1811: Nov 12^th. I privately baptised Mary, daughter of James and Ann Morris. The father (a brickmaker) having absconded and the mother with the infant being about to undertake a long journey.

Perhaps James had been overwhelmed by the amount of bricks the new tunnel had demanded.

We can't avoid the potential that some sex work was taking place at this time, but there is no evidence to suggest that the babies were the receipt from a miner’s night-out.

Considering how many men were working on the tunnel and the reputation that they gain later in the Victorian period, it is refreshing to see that out of 16 children baptised, only 4 are born fully out of wedlock, and a fifth whose parents had the banns called, but they don't appear to actually manage to get up the aisle. Percentage wise, the miners are veritable gentlemen against the rest of the village.

There are many more stories of these forgotten men waiting to be uncovered, and I hope to find the rest of their names for a start.

It seems likely that it's thanks to these men that Crick gained the story that it had a treacle mine, but I like the fact better - that these men mined for a canal and found it.

Tunnel Miner Rollcall:

William Morse, Mark Flint, George Crowder, Edward Corby, James Cope, William Cox, Richard Hodges, John Betty, Joseph Wilson, Hugh Nail, William Harrison, John Jones, James Schofield, George Hillyard