The season of Family Gatherings is upon us and as the clock ticks closer to Christmas, many people will find themselves among relatives who they don’t see all that often. And sometimes with good reason; a few sherries in and old Aunty Martha starts trotting out the family stories, “Back when I was a child, my grandfather used to tell me we came off the barges…”

But this is actually a very good time to start researching your family history and sorting out whether Aunty Martha is on to something or talking a load of baubles. With Black Friday adverts still ringing in your ears, you might find yourself clicking buy-it-now on a bargain genealogy subscription and a few clicks later you’re astonished to find that your ancestor does indeed appear to be a boatman. But now what?

Boaters are notoriously difficult to track, so here's a few tips and tricks to help you navigate the murky waters of canal genealogy.

Start with the basics:

1) Talk to people
Still got some older folk in the family? Go ask them for details. Them, their parents, their siblings, their spouse, their in-laws, their grandparents, their cousins, everyone they can recall. Get names, birthdays, places, weddings, occupations, deaths and (this one can be vital so don’t skip it) nicknames. Write it all down, and consider this your shoe-box full of clues, a clue-box if you will.

2) Check for old paperwork.
In a perfect world, you’re looking for Birth, Marriage or Death certificates. These are goldmines of information, as they’ll give you names, dates, places and occupations. They’ll also tell you whether or not your ancestor was literate, and in some cases can give you a specific boat name, which will open up another line of research.
But other papers can be helpful too; newspaper clippings, insurance papers, even receipts can point you in the right direction.

3) Check for bibles.
This one is a rare occurrence in boating families, who were often illiterate, but you may find that a family bible has a section in it wherein the owner has noted down names and dates. Sometimes they’re highly specific; the writer of my family’s bible made a point of noting down times and places as well.

Once you’ve got your basic clue-box, put together a rough family tree. You may find it helpful to have a hard copy that you can carry around with you and scribble notes on, as well as making one online. The main genealogy sites have tree inbuilt, which then allows their own technology to suggest relevant information. This leads me to my first word of caution:
Don’t trust the internet!

Don’t get me wrong, the algorithms these sites use to trawl through records and find potentially useful records is very clever, but it is not foolproof. Always check what it’s telling you before you accept it.

‘Ancestry’ in particular will try to link your family tree to other members trees based on matching information, which is fine if that tree owner has got it right. However, I’ve seen trees where people have clicked “accept-hint” on everything and ended up with an ancestor whose first child was born when they were 6, who was buried in 6 different cemeteries and whose mother had died before they were born. Very messy.

So you’ve got your basic family tree and your boating ancestor is Frederick James Bloggs of Braunston, Northamptonshire, but you can’t find him online. Now what?

1) Think laterally
What diminutives come from the name? Start with the obvious, look for Fred instead of Frederick. Adjust the spelling- Blogs or Blogges for example. Sometimes the extra letter is all that’s needed. Then move to the middle name if there’s still no hits; try James or Jim Bloggs.
This is where the nicknames come in, did granny mention a Great Uncle Jemmy?
Especially the further back you go, the more likely you are to come across boaters using by-names. I once spent weeks trawling through records searching for a chap everyone recorded as Harry, but it turned out his name was actually William; he’d gained the name Harry as a young man because he harried the ladies!

2) Sound it out
When faced with an odd name, be it place or person, try saying it out loud to see what else it could sound like.
Always remember that many boaters wouldn’t have been able to read and write, so rarely would they be able to correct any miss-spellings a clerk may have made in their name; for example a vicar recorded William Stirrup, while William himself spelt his name Strup
By the same token, the writer may not be familiar with the dialect the boater is speaking and have gotten it completely wrong – Hardings Wood becomes Arden Wood, Saint Helens becomes Senelen.

3) Follow the waterways
If your elusive ancestor is a boater, there’s a good chance they’re on the move. Follow the canals where you last found them and widen the search.
When you’re searching the censuses particularly, don’t be too alarmed if your ancestor has been missed entirely- their inclusion relies solely on whether their boat was close enough for the census recorder for the area to get to, and whether both the recorder and the boater wanted to speak to one another.

Some censuses and certificates note the name of the boat your ancestor worked on and even the company name, and this will open up a whole new field of study. Post 1877, you may be able to find your ancestor and their boat in a Canal Boat Register. These are absolute goldmines of information, telling you what the boat was carrying, how many people she carried, her cargo, her master and her owner. Toll books too will flesh out the work (although be suspicious to a degree, many records were falsified!)

Unfortunately, these records are not digitised as a rule and you’ll have to either go to the archives where they’re held or get the archivist to pull the details up for you. Many of these records are held at Ellesmere Port, but some council archives still hold their own registers.

Narrowboat Magazine is a canal-history specific ‘zine with a vast back catalogue of articles covering many companies and canals, as well as waterways subjects (including genealogy), so you may find more tidbits through there.

The newspaper archives can be a source of information too, but keep a level head if you find a juicy story - journalists haven’t changed much over the years – and always be certain that the subject is your ancestor before you get too excited; one lady was extremely disappointed to realise that the subject of a scandalous article wasn’t actually her ancestor, they just shared the same name. Alas, she had already told all her family, which in turn sowed discord among older relatives!

Social media will also be your friend; there are a number of very good groups on Facebook with immensely knowledgeable members willing to help point a newcomer (and sometimes a cousin, for many boat families were inter-related) in the right direction. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, even if it’s just for reading old writing. As a rule, historians love a challenge and will invariably grab new ones with both hands.

So there you have it, a rough guide to researching your boating ancestors. And that just leaves me to wish you all a very merry Christmas!

I have spent the last few months frantically scrabbling around researching and recording the YouTube videos for Heatherfield Heritage’s contribution to the annual Heritage Open Day’s event, (shameless plea, go online and watch them so I haven’t gone grey for nothing) and the theme this year was “routes, networks & connections.”

Sticking to home territory, I explored Preston Brook wharf’s links and connections - the Wharf Wide Web - but the caveat I had to work with was to keep it mostly family-friendly. This, you can probably already guess, was a struggle for me and thus the topic of today’s scribble; I have to tell someone some of the grisly details.

The canal arrived at Preston Brook around 1770. At the same time, the village’s new owner, Thomas Brock, was beginning an extensive plan of modernisation and expansion to match. Brock and his family were all solicitors, and at least 3 of his close family were working directly for the Duke of Bridgewater so Brock knew exactly what was coming and how to capitalise on it.
The local area now had an influx of fit men with heavy machinery and it had a dirty, great, water-filled building site slashed across the countryside.

Inevitably, the first casual casualty came quickly. 26 year old Thomas Potts was heading back to his home on the outskirts of Norton near the Keckwick Brook when he, presumably, fell in the water and didn’t manage to climb out. I say presumably because the parish register only states “Kill’d in the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal.” The phraseology is curious, as the clerk is usually more specific in saying ‘drowned’. Could there be a more sinister story behind it?

A few months later, a Preston Brook man is buried and the clerk notes he drowned. Closer inspection of the registers suggests that this was a labourer who’d moved to Preston Brook with the work. Accidents were a common occurrence, and it appears that either fatal occurrences lost their fascination or the bishop put his foot down as the clerk stopped noting such things. However, it’s almost certain that the two labouring brothers interred on the same day a few months after that were killed during an accident of the tunnel construction.

The tunnel managed to go 16 years before it claimed a boater, and even sadder than the simple loss of life was the fact he remains unidentified to this day. What had probably happened was his body had been dropped off at the wharf and the boat carried on after collecting a replacement crew. Wharf men organised transport to the churchyard and when the clerk came to record the man’s name, it was realised that no one knew it and the boat was too far gone to find out, if her crew even knew it in the first place, as at that time it was very common for a man to be known only by his by-name such as “Black Jemmy” rather than the one he was baptised with.

Another boatman drowned the following year, this one named William Hurstfield. This young man was known by someone in the area, for the clerk was able to note that the deceased was 26 years old.

It wasn’t just drowning that occurred at Preston Brook. One of Thomas Brock’s most calculated constructions was that of the Red Lion Inn, completed in 1776. There was already an inn up the hill, the Royal Oak, but by all accounts that one was more of a multi-use farm, and it was, of course, up a hill.

Brock’s new inn was close to the shiny new canal, directly on the side of the A56 and was purpose built. The Royal Oak never stood a chance of competing.

Brock was Chester’s legal-beagle and so not only did he have quasi-insider knowledge of the canal plans through his family, he also knew what the local civic area were planning. He would have been well aware that there were serious efforts to get the Warrington to Chester road made into a turnpike so as to make it less wheel destroying, thereby allowing the fancy new mail coaches to pass through and hopefully stop some of the highway robbery.

It would take a further 10 years before the road was actually turnpiked, and by that point Brock was dead, and the Red Lion was actively used by the local highway, thieves and vagabonds on their way about business.

Indeed, the big stables at the Red Lion were regularly full of boat horses, and more than once also held stolen horses in their ‘sick bay’, with an apocryphal tale being that one stolen horse was discovered after it was sold to a boatman whose own horse had dropped dead, and this new one took a look (fell in the canal) on the way to Runcorn, and came out of the water a different colour.

Another of Brock’s constructions was a windmill, in the field directly behind the wharf, and there was a quiet rumour that it was used as a hide for highwaymen and/or stolen goods, with things being hidden in sacks of flour and sent off by boat. There’s no evidence to confirm or deny this, nor the tale I found that some of the barrels of “brandy” being sent along the canal bound for Liverpool also contained pickled corpses for the anatomy tables.

Anatomists were a terrifying reality back then, and one packet boat arrived at the wharf with two young men and a suspiciously heavy box. They managed to heave the box off the boat and eventually persuaded the reluctant coachman to allow them tickets to Chester. They’d only gone 8 miles down the road when a fellow passenger made a hole in the box and screamed like a banshee because there was a coffin in it. The two young men were arrested and it later transpired the occupant of the coffin was the 15 year old sister of one of the men, who’d died in Manchester and they were trying to get her home to Hawarden. They, and the coffin, were released to carry on their journey.

The packet boats were heavily used, with a calculated passenger figure of around 33,000 people in 1800. The boats, though intended to carry 80 and 120 passengers respectively, were often grossly overloaded, and this could lead to serious problems if one passenger just happened to be ill. In 1849, Margaret Nixon was sick with cholera but got on the packet boat in Manchester to go to Liverpool. The newspaper described how the “deceased complained of being very sick, vomited violently, and her bowels were relaxed”, only an hour after leaving Manchester.

A doctor travelling on board advised the helpless captain to get the boat to Runcorn, presumably because that was where there was a quasi-cholera hospital, as fast as possible. Around Preston Brook it seems she was transferred into a narrowboat and another doctor was retrieved, who treated her as best he could as the boat hastened to Runcorn.

Unfortunately, the word had clearly spread that cholera was on board and it took two hours before someone would let them bring the patient ashore. She was eventually taken off the boat but died shortly afterwards, leaving the captain of the passenger boat to be accused of “impropriety” and of hastening the death of the woman in allowing her to be removed. He also, of course, had to scrub his boat from stem to stern with carbolic soap.

The train station was regularly drenched in blood, with people getting mown down as they endeavoured to cross the lines. The newspapers tended to alternate between gory detail (“his teeth having been found on the engine on arrival at Crewe”) and coy euphemism (“His clothes in great disorder and rucked up,”) and when the Bridgewater cashier Mr Halliwell became a casualty in 1848, the Liverpool Mercury plumped to go for the middle road and describe the injuries, but politely, in deference to the high regard in which he had been held.

Where boatmen made mistakes, the papers had no such qualms. Eli Pollard was poling his boat along the wharf when his foot slipped and his head was flattened, or possibly removed entirely, between the moving boat and one moored up on the wharf, while John Wilkinson fell asleep on the sidebed as his boat was coming through the tunnel and his clothes caught fire from the range. He was still on fire by the time the train of boats came out of the tunnel and they finally managed to put him out, by which time there was no saving him.

The newspapers all agreed that it was Shocking, Horrible and great for selling copy.

Animal cruelty was common and therefore less interesting as far as the newspapers were concerned, but some cases were recorded.

The Speed brothers took a boat from Preston Brook to Manchester and beat their horse so hard it died a few hours after arriving. The magistrate fined them the equivalent of 10 days wages, plus costs, and made a point of telling the Bridgewater Trustees they needed to keep a better watch on the conduct of their employees.

A couple of decades later, a long suffering horse finally snapped and actively attacked its owner as they made their way to the tunnel. The boatman suffered broken ribs, lacerations and the loss of 3 fingers, while the horse was allegedly put down for being dangerous.

It wasn’t all death and destruction though. Both the Red Lion and the light-fingered boaters were distributing liberal amounts of alcohol to the population with predictable consequences, and the village constable was regularly called out to attend for drunk and disorderly people. A set of Irish labourers, well lubricated, were walking back up the hill late one night and started a bout of fisticuffs for unknown reasons. One participant rolled down the hill and into the wharf while another carried on the argument with a tree.

A couple of “women of loose character” found themselves being sentenced to hard labour for “disorderly conduct”, and another was found passed-out in a hedge near Daresbury with her 3 year old grandson crying nearby.

Some drunkenness was less distressing; a boatman was charged for refusing to stop singing a dirty song, and even when he was being arrested continued singing because he wanted to get “to the good bit”. History doesn’t relate what the song was, but we can presume it was fairly filthy or he was an especially bad singer, given the noise and music that surrounded the canals at the best of times!

An occupational hazard of spending too much time rummaging through old newspapers is that you become somewhat de-sensitised to the macabre as, such is the nature of journalism, it’s the grim and the grisly that sells the most papers.

This time of year is miserable enough without me talking about death and destruction, so instead I’ve pulled a selection of the more amusing incidents that have occurred over the years on the water.

‘Amusing’ is of course a subjective word, and I don’t think the Wolverhampton policemen in 1906 were laughing when they were sent to arrest a chicken thief, tricked into climbing into a boat's cabin and locked in by their helpful informants.

We can presume that the boat, being unlocked, must have been a day boat, and we can also presume that she had a small stove on board that was probably lit, because the “jokers,” as the newspaper described them, poured a bucket of water down the chimney before pushing her out into the middle of the canal for good measure.

How long the policemen were stuck in the little cabin for we don’t know, but it was long enough for the merry pranksters to go to the pub and imbibe enough alcohol to think it was a good idea to tell everyone what they’d done, and eventually someone had the presence of mind to go and tell a different copper, who rescued his colleagues.

You’ll perhaps be unsurprised to hear that the police quite regularly participated in ‘amusing incidents’ that tickled the fancy of the newspapers and while it’s true that the boaters as a whole didn’t trust or respect their authority, neither did much of the rest of the population either. In 1878, the Manchester Evening News reported with ill-disguised glee of a policeman getting “belaboured…with great vigour” by a boatwoman and her children.

Emma Carter was steering a boat being pulled by a horse with collar sores on its shoulders, and she threw stones at it to try and make it go on. A policeman stopped her and took the horse away under the relatively new Cruelty to Animals Act and tried to make her come with him to the police station. She refused, arguing the boat needed to get ahead and took up the tow herself. The policeman came back with reinforcements so she jumped on and pushed the boat into the canal, forcing the policemen to grab what appears to have been a small coracle type of boat so they could get to her.

The newspaper delightedly added the that the little boat was half full of water so the policeman took off his shoes and socks before getting in.

The brave officers made it to the boat, where Emma picked up the cabin shaft and tried to fend them off while getting increasingly belligerent. The men managed to board the boat, at which point she and all the children “seized thick sticks” and started whacking them. The boat had drifted close enough to the bank during this so when Emma had her stick taken from her and she desperately grabbed the bread knife instead, someone managed to take it from her before things turned ugly. It perhaps says a lot about the hidden details of this incident however that Emma was only fined rather than being properly arrested.

Violence wasn’t the only think that caused LOLZ; thinly camouflaged under a veneer of indignance, nudity was a hot topic. The Bridgewater canal served as both a transport route and the worlds biggest bathtub, and residents of Stockton Heath were subjected to the sight of men and boys in the canal “without proper bathing costumes” so often that they made a protest in 1913, demanding that the canal company enforce the ‘no bathing’ signs. The newspaper feigned horror as it described how the bathers didn’t bother with swimming costumes or even with towels, instead dying off by “racing up and down the canal bank naked”. History doesn’t relate how the bathers and the boats interacted, although given the nude condition of the bathers one would presume ‘carefully’, lest an irate boatwoman decided to take aim with a mopstick.

Nudity and sporting daring-do came together in one gem of a tale in 1909 when a telegram for Manchester United Football Grounds came through with only 15 minutes for the messenger to deliver it. Faced with an impossible task, he told his tale of woe to a fellow messenger who volunteered to strip off and swim the message across the canal with the telegram tied to his head like a hat, which he duly did. For some reason, quite probably to do with heroics, the original messenger also decided to strip off and go with the telegram across the water, and the bemused site manager was met with two nude boys dripping water in the foyer, proudly delivering the telegram with one minute to spare.

Staying in the sporting realms, the newspapers chuckled away to themselves in 1935 when two rider-less racehorses failed to make canal turn at Aintree and ended up going straight into the canal. Aureate Earth and Top Toi refused to come into the towpath and swam on for nearly half a mile before finally being brought to a stop at the next swing bridge. This wasn’t the first time a horse had made an error at canal turn, with Command trying to jump the canal 1919 and Holoscope doing the same in 1905. Laplander did things a little differently in 1902 however, making canal turn well enough before going off the course, up the slope and jumping straight into the canal, apparently to his own surprise as he swam to the towpath and awaited rescue.

It wasn’t just horses in the canal that the newspapers picked up on; in 1936 the local papers reported incredulously that a dog had been witnessed committing suicide in the Manchester Ship Canal at the aptly named No Mans Land, which led to a couple of papers publishing editorials on the concept.

Ship canals seemed to produce excellent material for incredulity; 1892 the local paper reported on the inquest of a man who’d died after being tipped out of his pony cart, after the pony had been spooked by a group of men in the nearby meadow yelling and trying to recapture an escaped pig that had been obtained by said men with the concept of making the animal swim for a mile in the Chichester Ship Canal. No one appeared to know exactly why anyone thought this was a great idea, and history doesn’t relate as to whether the pig was ever made to complete its swim.

A recent foray into the wilds of the city took us into the Manchester Museum where, hidden slightly at the back of room full of other deceased creatures in various states of undress, is a horse skull. There is a neon sign high above the glass case that says “Old Billy” but with the exhibit being just a few feet from the wall, the lights are often missed and people walk by, not connecting the skull with the painting or the slightly monosyllabic information board on the opposite wall.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the skull unless you are a horsey person, in which case you may well notice the remaining teeth are more than a little geriatric. This is because the owner of those teeth was 62 years old when he died in 1822, an age that has never been matched even with today's advances in veterinary science.

What’s this got to do with waterways, I hear you ask. Well Billy belonged to the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company.

Our story begins in 1762, at Wilgrave Farm in Warrington. The farm sat in a loop of the River Mersey and the horses grazed in fields that overlooked the boats manfully trying to navigate up the river. The Mersey and Irwell Navigation at that time was undergoing a bit of a crisis, having been happily running something of a transport monopoly until Francis Egerton popped up with his brass-balls and started building the Bridgewater canal, spooking the company into finally addressing some of the serious navigational issues.

The navigation was populated by broad-beamed, flat bottomed barges that could carry about 35 tonnes if there was enough water, but in the summer especially, there was a distinct lack of water and their masters would be forced to reduce the cargo to about 15. Even then, boats could find themselves getting stuck on the shallows and having to be flushed off by dint of the closest lock being opened and everyone crossing their fingers.

These boats were broad, bluff vessels with a single mast and sail that allowed them to deal with the estuary, and when they couldn’t use their sail they were initially pulled by gangs of men. There was a shift in this, however, and when Billy was foaled in 1760 it was mentioned in the Act of Parliament for the Bridgewater canal that horses were a motive power.

There is some room for debate as to whether Billy was born at Wilgrave farm or whether he’d been bought as a youngster with the intention of breaking him in, but it is most probable that Billy was foaled at Wilgrave farm itself. He may well have been intended as a carriage horse; the contemporary accounts noted he had a look about him of the Arabian horse and as his ears were cropped - a revolting fashion for the time and an act you’d typically carry out on a horse before it was big enough to, quite rightly, kick your face in when you took a knife to his ears.

Billy was a powerful, stocky youngster standing at around 14.2 hands high. He was about 2 years old in 1762 when he was handed to teenage horseman Henry Harrison, who began the process of training him “for the plough.”

Perhaps because of the training methods of the time (or perhaps as a response to having his ears cropped, his tail docked and quite probably also getting his gonads done for good measure in an age with no anaesthetic) Billy grew up with a vicious streak and a tendency to bite and kick. This is not an ideal trait for a plough horse and quite possibly why he was quickly sold on, probably straight to the Mersey & Irwell Company.

Despite what a quick Google search might tell you, a contemporary account written in the horse’s old age tells us that Billy spent the next 30 years as a gin horse before going on to pull boats. This isn’t surprising - a gin horse would be hitched to a draw bar that rotated round a vertical axle, creating motive power for machines, and smaller, compact horses were preferable simply because they would fit to the gin better. The Mersey & Irwell company themselves would have had gins everywhere for anything from powering winches to pumps. There were gin powered corn mills and saw mills, and portable gins that could be loaded into a cart and dragged off to where it was needed, perhaps meaning that Billy might have been coming out with a team to help free off loaded boats caught on shallows.

According to the account, Billy began pulling boats quite late in his career. We can speculate that this could have been something to do with his temper, which didn’t mellow until he reached advanced old age, and pulling a boat would have kept the driver at a fairly safe distance from lashing feet, nor would anyone have looked twice at a boathorse being thrashed.

At some point, someone in the company realised exactly how long Billy had been on their books for and it dawned on them that they might actually have something a bit special on their hands. In 1819 Billy was pensioned off with none other than Henry Harrison once more assigned to his care, and he moved the Latchford stables of William Earle, one of the directors of the company, finally allowed to mooch about on his own terms.

In the summer warmth, Billy trotted and galloped stiffly with youngsters more than 60 years his junior and in the winter he stayed in his stable, rugged and fed soft linseed mash. His attitude, although mellowed by the years, did not improve all that much and legend says that he was supposed to come out for the coronation parade in Manchester in 1821, but refused point blank to leave the comfort of his stable.

Perhaps realising that time was running out for the curmudgeonly old horse, William Earle commissioned the famous sporting artist Charles Towne to come out for him. Towne, in the company of a vet named Lucas and a man named Johnson who appears to have been a reporter of some kind, met the horse on the 11th July 1822 and everyone was suitably impressed by the old stalwart.

The painting shows a gaunt animal with a thoughtful face. The lack of ears makes him look worried, and although his hips jut through his skin, you can still see the powerful build that made him such a success in his career.

Billy died that winter, either on the 27th November or the 11th December, quite possibly finally succumbing to malnutrition as his worn teeth would have made it difficult for him to take much good from hay and it was long before the veteran feeds of today.

Not unexpectedly perhaps for the time, he was taxidermied, although for some reason it took 2 years before someone decided to do something with the remains and gave them to the new Manchester Society of Natural History in 1824.

For some reason, Billy was displayed in the nude, with his skeleton out on display while his skin was “under the stairs” in a box.

Billy’s remains were moved into the newly built Manchester Museum around 1888, but exactly what of the remains made the move is questionable. Certainly his skull made it, and became an exhibit, but the rest of his skeleton appears to have gone missing, along with most of his skin. I say “most” because bizarrely the skin of his head was restuffed and ended up travelling 160 miles south to Bedford, where it apparently still remains today.

Despite his mortal remains having a slightly ignominious fate, he is still an important part of Warrington’s heritage life, with the local museum holding a special event on the 200th anniversary of his death and his story being immortalised in a charming illustrated children’s book last year.

I would guess that pretty much everyone is familiar with the battle of Waterloo in 1815, if only as a name synonymous with something this country practically made a sport of in the past - fighting the French.

This battle was the culmination of more than 22 years of on-off fighting, and although all of it had taken place overseas, the ramifications on the home front had been (and would remain) significant; more specifically for our interests, it directly affected the canals and some of it played out here on the wharf at Preston Brook.

The story starts some 30 years before the great bloodbath of Waterloo, in 1780 with the birth of a baby boy named John Pennington.

The Pennington family were fairly typical and reasonably well off; Thomas was farming while his wife, Jane, produced a child every couple of years. The building of the canal and the wharf had improved the local economy and they seem to have had the foresight to realise that the canal was going to be a steady employer for a respectable man, and so made sure their sons had a decent education.

This was a turbulent time for the country, with Britain at war with both America and France, and the country was starting to feel the pinch of funding constant warfare overseas and with the rapidly changing landscape as the industrial revolution started to pick up. We don’t yet know for certain what happened, but in around 1786 Thomas lost his land. Although the local records now record him simply as a labourer, we can be almost certain that it is him that is the ‘Peninton’ working on the wharf as an early porter.

John was apprenticed (possibly to his uncle in nearby Bartington) and learned the trade of smithing, while his brother William went on to be a farm hand, and Thomas went to be a book keeper.

What happens next we may never know the real answer behind. We can conjecture that he was friends with Joseph Bennett, another Preston Brook boy whose father had worked with John’s both on the land and at the wharf (indeed John’s sister Mary had been baptised on the same day as Joseph’s brother William), and Joseph, who had joined up in a few years earlier, had told him how great it was in the army. Or perhaps John got caught out with the King’s shilling at the bottom of a beer mug. Whatever the trigger, on the 27^th March 1809, John joined the British army at Manchester and joined the ranks of men in the 16^th Light Dragoons, a cavalry regiment.

John was a grown man when he joined the army, but Thomas Cookson was a lad of about 18 when he joined the same regiment. As can be seen in Jane Austen’s books; soldiers at this time, with their their smart uniforms and air of adventure about them, had a great deal of sex appeal. Work was becoming a little thin on the ground for unskilled labourers, and food was in short supply too. Thomas, a poor labourer’s son from Frodsham, probably didn’t need much persuading to join the army.

We don’t know for certain how much they knew of each other, but we know that at the Battle of Waterloo itself Private John Pennington was in the Centre Squadron, F Troop under the command of Captain King, and Private Thomas Cookson was in the Left Squadron, A Troop, under Captain Tomkinson.

The gory details of the battle of Waterloo are easily available online for those who wish to be put off their dinner, so I won’t go into them here. For our story here, what is important is that our players came out the other side of it alive, and with all their appendages mostly intact.

Joseph Bennett was forcibly discharged in February 1819 when his regiment disbanded and no one else would take him as he was ‘lame’ on his left foot after it had been crushed. His next move appears to have been to come back to the area and take up as a boatman. We have a description of him: 5’5, with light brown hair, grey eyes, a round face, a ‘sallow’ complexion and a noticeable limp.

John Pennington stayed with the regiment for another 17 years after the battle, until he was forcibly discharged due to a rather unpleasant inguinal hernia. His movements are difficult to track but it seems he comes back and spends some time with his brother before vanishing off the radar.

Thomas Cookson was the first one to leave the army, and he too comes back to Cheshire a changed man. How he meets her we don’t yet know, but he meets Mary Millington, a canal labourer’s daughter in Moore. Mary is a woman with something of a past herself, with a teenaged son born out of wedlock, but they marry and move to Frodsham just in time for the birth of the first of their 2 sons.

Frodsham didn’t suit the family all that well and, perhaps thanks to a few words in the right place from his former comrade, Thomas gets a job at the wharf as a porter.

The wharf at Preston Brook was a busy, hard working place but, probably due to the large proportion of the workforce being firm Methodists, disabilities were worked around.

Thomas’s hearing grew progressively worse as the years went by until he was almost completely deaf, but he was a competent lip reader so the wharf just kept him where no one could sneak up on him. Even as a frail man of nearly 80 they found him light work to do, coiling ropes and sweeping floors. Interestingly, in 1871 he has Thomas Bennett and his family lodging in his house. It’s not for certain yet but it’s quite plausible that this is the nephew of Joseph Bennett.

With this small selection of veterans sat in such a busy corner of the waterways, it’s no stretch of the imagination to suggest that it was here our final character in the story emerges.

John Hopwood was baptised at about a week old in Wrenbury, appropriately enough on April 1^st, and, like many boaters, he’s rather illusive as far as paperwork is concerned. Before 1857, the only probably glimpse we have of him is when he gets accused of stealing someone’s trousers in 1839.

We know that he was an intermittent boater working between London and Manchester on the fly boats, with regular stops off at Preston Brook. In 1857 he was a widower with a 5 year old daughter. Somehow, he catches the eye of a young lady nearly 20 years his junior and that’s when it seems that the stories start.

It probably started innocently enough by John telling his new sweetheart he had been a soldier, rather than a trouser thief, but in 1861 Hopwood was working for the Shropshire Union co on “General Havelock” and was insisting to everyone he was a decade older then he actually was so he could back up his claim that he wasn’t just a soldier, but he was also a Waterloo veteran.

A decade later and he’s now on “Pacific”, and moored up at Grindley Brook. His daughter from his first marriage, Elizabeth, had married James Wildey the previous year (the Wildey family would later go on to be written about by ‘Questor’ for the Wolverhampton Express and Star) and it was around then that Hopwood started insisting that he had beaten Deaf Burke, the bare knuckle boxer, and that was how he’d got his broken nose.

In 1881 he’s master of “Dudley” and he’s now telling everyone he was born in Bengal and he’d also spent a few years travelling around with the circus before he came to the boats.

Something happens in the next few years that makes the Shropshire Union Co ask him to give their boat back, and by 1891 his youngest son is working in the Ifton colliery at St Martins to support him and his parents. This son, also called John, must have been having a hard time putting up with his father’s tall tales, not least of all with the none-existent army pension, and on one occasion went out, got blind drunk, refused to leave the pub and ended up being arrested and fined 10 shillings.

Unfortunately for Hopwood, his son died that year and left him with only his wife to support them by doing washing. She then died in 1895, and Hopwood took himself off to the workhouse and carried on embellishing his life story.

Hopwood died in 1900 having convinced everyone, including himself, that he was 101. There were doubters though, with one man noting that it was “people like (Hopwood) that convinced the world of the bargee’s habitual condition of lying”!

The simple fact that of all people who pop up in my research, 99% of them are dead means I can find myself surrounded by a monosyllabic trail of funeral notes and burial records. The weather as I type this is far too lovely to write about death and destruction, so today we’re looking at weddings.

In today’s world there is a somewhat bizarre concept of ‘jumping over a mopstick’ for a boater getting married, which appears to be a corruption of the idea of jumping over a broomstick to solidify a union that wouldn’t be recognised by the church. This was indeed a real custom among the Romany peoples (as well as within the enslaved peoples), but ‘broomstick marriages’ were not legal and were viewed with scorn by the vast majority of the population, boaters included.

So how did a boater ‘tie the knot’? The answer is actually a little dull; he tied it in the church, like
everyone else.

While they weren’t, as a rule, particularly religious, the idea of getting married in anywhere other than a church was simply dismissed out of hand. Even as late as 1934, a registry office wedding was derided as a poor choice. “They don’t go to church, except to be married, as a rule. But you will never hear of one being married in a registry office, nor of a woman going on another trip after confinement until she has been churched” described one old boater to a journalist for the Express and Star.

Boaters rarely married people not off the canal, in much the same way that miners tended to stay within their communities; it is very hard for an outsider to understand and assimilate into a way of life so alien to them. There were also the practicalities of meeting a potential mate; boaters didn’t really get the chance to meet anyone other than other boaters.

Courtship was conducted mostly on the move, with the young couple having a shy conversation as their boats passed and perhaps going for a little walk together if their boats were at the same wharf at the same time, staying within viewing distance of the young lady’s family of course. Messages and signs could be left for each other on lock beams, scrawled using the grease from the paddle gear. In later years, when bicycles made their way to the boats, a young man might cycle for miles back along the towpath at the end of the working day just to spend half an hour in his young lady’s company.

When the couple were ready for marrying, the young man would approach the company and ask if there was a boat he could have for his own. This was no different to a couple ‘on the bank’ having to organise their own first home, and in fact it was far quicker. Sometimes he might have to wait for a little before a boat was available, but he didn’t need to buy his boat and there was nothing to spend on furniture as the cabin would already be fitted out; all the couple needed was their clothes, some bedding and some crockery.

The process of the wedding was much the same as it was for anyone else when it came to the legal side. As described in 1934, “When the daughter of a boatman agrees to marry the son of another boatman, the two put up Banns at churches at both ends of the canal on which they work. When the two boats meet at the same terminus wharf, the wedding takes place, and it is always attended by a large and picturesque gathering of boat people. The couple have already secured a boat for themselves, and their honeymoon is to a journey to Chester and Ellesmere Port carrying perishable goods.”​

The “picturesque” gathering the journalist describes would invariably be based around a pub. There might be a few boaters playing music and as last orders got called at the bar at around 10pm, a few water cans might be filled up with beer to allow the merriment to continue outside.

Invariably, the majority of the wedding party, happy couple included, would be away as usual the following morning. The newly-weds would often be sent to their boat with ribald comments harking back to the ‘bedding ceremony’ of years gone by, with one young man being handed a small cigar by another man: “for affer my lad, for affer” he winked.

Of course what I’ve described here is what you could call the romantic matches, young love. There were far more pragmatic second marriages, where widows and widowers would “make a match” of convenience rather than romance. Either gender of spouse could find themselves bereaved and left with a pair of boats to work and just a few kiddies as crew, and it made far more sense to marry someone in a similar situation.

One man took pragmatism to new levels in 1895 when he called in at the Nantwich workhouse and asked if they could recommend any of the women inmates as a potential bride. Born around 1825, Samuel Walker appears to have been working for the Shropshire Union Company, and just 6 months prior to mooring “Berlin” up at Nantwich to go window-shopping for a wife, he’d been at Market Drayton burying his last. The women of the workhouse don’t appear to have been too disconcerted by the prospect of taking up with a boater, and some 50 were brought forward and 45 year old Sarah Shone duly captured the questionable prize.

Perhaps unsurprisingly; Sarah very quickly lost interest in working a horseboat with her husband and ran off, allegedly taking up with a blind fiddle player in Manchester. Despite Samuel’s willingness to take back his errant wife, he never saw her again. He must have found someone to work his boat with him though, as he appears to eventually die at Ellesmere Port in 1901.

To many of the uninitiated, the canals offer a bucolic, romantic way of life that could easily be part of “the darling buds of may”, but in truth there is a brutal edge to it and there are some topics in the canal world that are almost guaranteed to cause verbal (and occasionally physical) fisticuffs, and today reader we’re going to don our tin hat and enter the trenches of roses and castles.

The most often asked question is “Where did they come from?” A question in itself that is rather wrong, as the implication is that the style we see today has been the same since the Duke of Bridgewater said “Hey I think I’ve got a great idea”.

There is a lot of popularity behind the idea, largely thanks to Rolt’s writing, that the Romany folk came to the water very early on and brought their art with them, but there is scant evidence of them joining the canals at all and in practice the painting theory doesn’t work simply by dint of the fact that there is artistic evidence of rose and castle type paintwork on boats that predates the development of the painted ‘vardo’ that everyone thinks of.

The earliest imagery we have dates to 1820, and a painting by an unknown artist. It is only just visible, but it appears the picture panel on the cabin side bears flowers. The next one is 1838 and also has a floral picture panel.

The first written description of artwork that can be confidently identified as roses and castles appears in 1858 and gives us the biggest lead:

“The boatman lavishes all his taste; his rude, uncultivated love for the fine arts, upon the external and internal ornaments of his floating home. His chosen colours are red, yellow and blue... the two sides of the cabin...present a couple of landscapes, in which there is a lake, a castle, a sailing boat, and a range of mountains, painted after the style of the great teaboard style of art... the brilliancy of a new two gallon watercan, shipped from a bank-side painters yard.. displayed no fewer than 6 dazzling and fanciful composition landscapes, several gaudy wreaths of flowers, and the name of its proud proprietor...running round the centre upon a background of blinding yellow.”

The crucial information here is the description of it being painted in the manner of a teaboard.

An object that households rich and poor alike had: a teaboard is just a tray intended for carrying the teapot and its accessories, and for the best part of 100 years tea trays were predominantly jappaned.

Developing just prior to the canals, jappaning is western imitation of Asian lacquer-work that started out on eye-wateringly expensive furniture and moved onto smaller household items as it became a craft suitable for young ladies of quality to indulge in. These young ladies also indulged in gilding (putting gold and silver leaf on things) and filigree (twisting wire into intricate shapes), and decoupage (sticking paper decorations to things and lacquering them into submission.)

As with all forms of fashion what the rich had, the poor wanted a piece of; by the time the canals were firmly established in the 1820s there were around 40 companies in the West Midlands mass producing japanned objects on tinplate and papier-mâché, a figure that kept rising right up until the mid 1870’s (when enamelling became trendy instead). The imagery that was most popular with jappaning was poetic landscapes and botanicals, with roses being particularly popular.

Mary Delany is arguably a woman to blame for the craze of flower decoupage, creating a series of remarkably detailed “paper mosaiks” of flowers from tissue paper from 1772 to 1783.

Imitators down the years, especially when mass production became key, were not as skilled. The same imagery was rammed down the consumer's throat on every surface; the advent of ‘transferware’ china allowed patterns to be printed ad infinitum and brought the boom in the ‘Willow patterns’ on pottery that the boats themselves were key in spreading round the country.

The boats themselves would have had it in their cupboards, it was everywhere. Tea could well be brought out in a blue and white tea-set covered in castle scenes and served on a tray like a florists catalogue.

People often overlook the fact that it wasn’t until quite late in the Victorian era that the boaters slipped down the financial ladder, and also that women were on the boats with their menfolk quite early on - in 1819 John Hassell noted there were “generally one or two females generally attending each boat” and in 1824 the Chester Courant noted that the boatman’s “wife is on board” as general knowledge.

Boatmen could be on a continuous cycle of trips for weeks, if not months, on end, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the couple to want to stay together where practicable, and the economic aspect wouldn’t be unwelcome - better to pay your own crew than a stranger after all – so it’s quite probable that art came to the water via the rather boring medium of fashion trickling down the social ladder and first coming into the cabins attached to the household goods of the boatman’s family.

How did we make the leap from fancy lacquer tea tray to painted table cupboards? The real answer is we may never know. Everything was painted and there were painters everywhere, and indeed the same man might be employed painting trinket boxes in the morning and slapping the owners name on the cabin side at dinner.

There is the odd legend of Arthur Atkins, a toll clerk for the Oxford Canal Co who claimed in the Coventry Standard in 1914, the occasion being his retirement, that he had painted the first boater's watercan and that in around 1858 he’d been at Braunston and sold Charles Dickens a boatman’s kettle (a fancy wooden trivet, plain on one side, painted on the other), the great author promptly gifting said piece to the Captain of a boat and wrote an article about it all to the great advantage of Atkins.

 

The story has more holes then a June bride. For a start we can see that painted cans easily predate 1858 and there is simply no record of anything like that happening with Dickens at all. There’s no trace of this article he supposedly wrote and in general his canal contact was fairly limited. It’s also highly convenient that date of the incident matches with the journey I quoted originally, the journey that was published in Charles Dickens’ magazine ‘Household Words’.

It is almost certain that young Arthur Atkins was present when the author of that journey, John Hollingshead, passed through, so it is plausible that it could have been a case of mistaken identity, but our source says the can was “newly shipped from a bankside painter” long before the boat they were travelling on arrived at Braunston.

Intriguingly however, a search through the census shows that Atkins father, also called Arthur, was a painter. At Akins' birth at Bedworth in July 1840 his father is recorded as a baker, but 6 months later in the census he’s a painter. In 1851 he shows up at Braunston as a canal clerk, but this doesn’t suit all that well because in 1861 he’s gone to Birmingham and he’s a painter again. 1871 records him as a “Writer and painter”, which suggests signwriter, 1881 “decorative painter” and 1891 hes still wielding a brush in Birmingham as a “Painter and decorator”.

Given the fluid job descriptions, there’s a distinct possibility that the Arthur Atkins, boatbuilder’s foreman, declared bankrupt in 1869 is this same mysterious painter. Could it be his paintwork his son claimed as his own?

The Coventry Standard notes how Atkins jr was a “regular correspondent” with their writer Spectator, and although many of these have weathered the years quite badly, those that are legible give off a distinct air of someone over egging the pudding. It’s quite plausible that Atkins embellished or completely made up his stories, knowing that there was no way for anyone to verify the details.

The crucial thing to bear in mind when delving into the paintwork is that the vast majority of surviving examples post-date the first world war. The war decimated the male population and left the country with a dire shortage ofyoung men from all the trades, from farriers to painters. A pet research project of mine so far suggests that 65% or more of boatyard painters were lost, and that’s not including the individuals, boatmen or otherwise, who could be classed as ‘hobby painters’.

A cursory glance through museum pieces shows the abrupt change from diverse bouquets and landscapes to the ubiquitous roses and castles, which is most likely a direct result of there being far fewer painters and therefore far fewer styles, attending the same number of clients who now had a far smaller budget as the canals being the slow descent into financial loss.

By the 1930s, the aesthetic preference of the public had changed from the sleek art nouveau to the geometric art deco and more professional painters slipped away. The Grand Union Canal Carrying Co leapt onto the scene in 1930s and demonstrated that by their modern paint scheme – simple two tone blue, plain lettering and even replacing the elegant “mouse ears” on the back cabin with dull rectangles. Grand Unions attitude to paint may even have been a contributing factor in that they could never get enough crew to work their massive fleet, as the boatmen themselveswere not fans of the change and more than ever started to take up their brushes to embellish their boats themselves.

This brings us almost to the modern age. When the trade failed and the pleasure boats started to appear, objects covered in canal painting became trendy souvenirs and both boatmen and painters alike readily filled the market. New painters began to emerge, grabbing on to every opportunity to learn from those masters from “the old days” and patiently working their way along the long slow path to becoming masters in their own right.

Today, the canals are once again flush with painters at every corner and, much like it was in the beginning, there are masters and glorified finger painters, and every level of skill in-between.

Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, and at the end of the day I can only repeat the wisdom of the infamous Ron Hough himself: “The only person that has to like your painting is the person who’s buying it!”

As some people know, I am the owner of 2 ponies. One is a micro heavy horse, the other is an animated sock puppet, and they are currently causing me untold sleepless nights because one of them is very poorly.

I’m very fortunate that we have a good vet and modern medicines, and in the long, dark hours of the night sitting up with the patient, I’ve been thinking how it might of gone if we were back in the “golden age” of the canals.

Remembering of course that a newspaper wont publish a story unless it has a little bite to it, a very quick search of the newspapers using the keyword ‘boathorse’ brings up a plethora of court cases that show the darker side of horse boating, with headlines full of “brutal boatman” causing untold cruelty to animals, but pushing past the genuine cruelty you start to see some of the real veterinary story.

Horses are naturally rear-wheel drive, that is to say that their propulsion comes mostly from their back legs pushing them forward. Boating is collar work: a broad leather collar his goes around his neck and rests on his shoulders, from the collar two traces run down his side to the straight bar - the swingletree - that is coupled to the towline. To start off, he will lean his weight into the collar until the load comes on the traces, and then he’ll use the strength in his back legs to push himself forward into the collar to keep going.

With this in mind, it will be of no surprise to learn that one of the two most common problems a boathorse could suffer from was issues with his shoulders. An ill-fitting collar could rub the skin raw and quickly become an open sore through continued work, and the wrong size of collar could also put pressure against the shoulder joints and injure them.

When the horse was company owned, the boatman would simply swap the animal at the first chance he could. The treatment for those horses would generally be rest and having their collar changed. Where the horse was the only one a boatman had access to, it became more difficult.

That’s not to say a boatman would ignore the problem until the horse fell down, but he couldn’t lay the boats up as long as there was motive power. First of all he’d look at the collar. Sometimes he could ease the problem by pulling the stuffing out of the collar where the injury was, removing the pressure while the horse was working. If it wasn’t an open wound and he was feeling flush, he might just buy a bottle of rubbing lotion to take the pain way; the active ingredient in these was usually opium so it may well have worked.

Foot issues were the other common problem. Aside from the obvious problems of treading on stones or cinders, a horse’s hoof grows continuously and if it’s allowed to grow too long or is trimmed badly, it can force the horse to walk in an unnatural fashion, making him lame. By the same token, a horse who was shod (not all of them were, some boatmen swore that keeping their horses ‘barefoot’ was much better for the horse) could find the shoe come loose, come off completely or even just have it badly fitted, all of which would leave a horse limping on one or more feet.

These problems were the realm of the farrier. These men should not be confused with blacksmiths; a blacksmith is a smith who works with iron – for example gates or tools - but he may never work with horses, while the farrier is the equivalent of an equine podiatrist, and will know enough blacksmithing to make and fit horseshoes.

Farriers were often considered as good, or better, then vets and farriery books were often full of veterinary advice. By the same token, a vet would be given full tuition in basic farriery (and still is.)

In the 1930’s farriers became a little thin on the ground. A huge amount of the apprentices had been killed in the war, and the rise of the motor car made farriery seem an unstable career option. Getting a farrier full stop started to become difficult, let alone getting a good one, and reports increased of badly shod boathorses being worked while lame. A judge in London reduced the fine of a boatman found working a lame horse because the boatman had been seen to make a marked effort to find a decent farrier and was still working the horse out of necessity rather than active cruelty.

Canal stables, with their vast turnover of occupants from all over the country, could be rife with contagious illnesses, some of which were zoonotic and could spread to the humans as well. Ringworm is an unpleasant example, often known as rain scald, and its treatment was variously sulphur, iodine, turpentine or sometimes a mix of all three.

All working horses were at risk of stomach problems, from eating too fast or not getting enough to balance against their work, and boathorses also had a higher risk of eating things they shouldn’t. A mouthful snatched from the hedgerows of the towpaths and or grazing at the lockside as the boats came through; it was all too easy for a hungry, or greedy, horse to grab a mouthful of a toxic plant.

Colic was the general result. Colic is something of a catch-all description that basically means the horse has stomach ache, and caused by everything from drinking cold water to constipation, as well as being a bonus problem for serious complaints like liver disease. Every horse-keeper would have had his own recipe for a cure. One man’s immediate go-to was a salt-water enema for one end and a dose of liquid paraffin down the other, while another’s was a draught made of 3 parts whiskey, one part laudanum. Both men remarked that these were the same treatments they gave to their children, although the former noted that his wife wouldn’t suffer the same ministrations!

“ ’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes.”
The Cobbler of Preston, by Christopher Bullock

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has just allowed the world to witness the pageantry of a monarch’s funeral in all its traditional splendour, and naturally it got me thinking.

Despite its inevitability, the civilised world of today finds death traumatising and disturbing and uses the technology of modern life to keep its mortality out of thought and mind. This is, really, a completely new phenomenon that our ancestors would not have understood in the slightest.

At the time when the canals began, the majority of people didn’t move much beyond the district they were born in and if they did, they could be hoiked back to their village of origin by the settlement act if they had the audacity to be so poor as to need parish relief. The vast majority of people were also unquestioningly religious in one form or another, with a fairly iron-clad belief of life after death.

Death itself generally took place at home in the company of family, who had usually also been acting as the medical team prior to the event and the cause was usually an illness that gave them and their family time to acclimatise to the approaching decease. Sudden, accidental deaths were not commonplace and, then as now, caused more distress to the people around them; the parish registers would often be annotated by a shocked curate with the event.

To this background, the roving bands of navigators arrived on the scene.

They were tough men. Skilled and well paid, they arrived at quiet villages and caused chaos simply by doing their job. When death came to that community, it was usually brutal and it hit the men hard. At Standedge, a delayed blast instantly killed a man and wounded 3 others; near Sheffield a man was buried alive when a cutting collapsed; at Crick a man was killed falling down a tunnel shaft when a rope snapped.

The cortege that accompanied a man to his grave would surprise the locals, who viewed these strangers with accents from far off counties and with odd names like “Clainhim” with suspicion and the expectation that they were little more than unpredictable animals.

800 men fixed a blue ribbon to their hats and followed 35 year old Joseph Woodhouse in 1815. The latter group each put a half crown into a pot for the wake and then gave his widow the rest, the financial equivalent of about a year’s wages.

300 men with a white ribbon around their arm walked in silence behind the coffin of 22 year old Samuel Marshall on the 8th of March 1826.

For a time, fear of death itself really came secondary to a fear of being body-snatched. Until the Anatomy Act was passed in 1832, there was good money to be made in half-hitching a fresh burial and selling it to the medical schools, and there was a distinct increase in the risk the lower down the social scale you went.

On the 15th December, 1830, 32 year old James Wheeler was fetching a barrow-load of stone from Cowley quarry when he slipped and fell to the bottom. His horrified workmates rushed him to the local infirmary, where he finally died two days later. The newspaper describes how the men now raised the princely sum of £5 for a decent funeral by dint of 100 of them putting a shilling in the pot.

A large gang of them went to collect James on the day of the funeral and were aghast at finding the coffin already nailed shut; not trusting the doctors not to have ‘interfered’ with the body – this being before the 1832 Anatomy Act - they demanded the lid came off so they could check and, faced with a large gang of powerful, irate men, the hospital eventually complied (the navigators fears were unfounded and James’ remains were perfectly fine.)

The funeral procession is what now gained the attention of the local newspapers. 6 men bore the coffin, while 6 women attended to the pall. Six foremen were the chief mourners behind the coffin and then 100 men walked behind, 2 abreast. More navigators and their wives were already at the church.

No one wore mourning clothes but everyone was scrubbed clean and smartly dressed.

When it came to the actual interment, they weren’t taking any chances that someone might body-snatch James and they insisted on filling in the grave themselves, allegedly having brought stones from the quarry itself to make sure he stayed buried.

The funeral practice of the first boaters was, at times, just a vaguely reverential rubbish disposal; in 1791 a boatman drowned legging through Preston Brook tunnel. His body was dropped off at the wharf and it appears the boat carried on her journey having quickly hired a replacement man. No one had any idea who the dead man was and it was the height of summer, forcing the Daresbury vicar to bury him quickly in an unmarked grave and to simply note in the registers “Boatman drowned in the tunnel of Preston [Brook], interred 26th day [of July]”

When death came to a boater, he was usually in his cabin. If the boat wasn’t already laid up, she would carry on her journey to the nearest place that could supply a coffin. The family would usually be the ones to attend the body, but in some places had a “woman that does” who would take this role.

Boaters, just like the navigators, wanted a “decent funeral.” The coffin would be as ornate as could be afforded, and often there would be a quick whip-around of the boats in the vicinity to make sure there was money. Some boaters were part of burial clubs, and in a few cases the company they worked for would foot a funeral bill.

While they would strive to get the body back to the place the deceased most associated as home - Braunston being a famous example - generally, a boater would be taken to the closest canal-side church and interred with little circumstance. The funeral party really depended on where the boat had managed to get to; a quiet village might only have one or two other boats tied up there, while a busy wharf could have dozens. If the person had died by accident, the funeral could be delayed by the attention of the coroner’s inquest which would also affect what other mourners might be able to be present.

When a boat was able to take her dead home, this would entail loading the coffin onto the boat, usually behind the mast, and running ‘on the fly’ with it. This was a practical consideration of multiple fronts- not only was a boat not earning if she was on a ‘dead run’; embalming was not as long-acting as it is today, if it was even done at all. A boat with such a cargo would often be loosed through by other boats at locks, and the infamous ‘towpath telegraph’ would have been at work keeping other boats abreast of who’d died and where they were. This kind of funeral invariably had more mourners at the burial, having given them time to get their own boats to the place.

Boaters' funerals tended to attract little attention from the newspapers due to the sheer speed in which they happened, but in 1923 the boatmen went on strike and around 55 boats came to a halt at Braunston for 3 months, and it gives us a glimpse into their lives.

Three deaths attended the boaters: 62 year old Joseph Green off the boat “Flint,” 12 year old Edward Walker of an unidentified boat and Albert Kendall, a 67 year old retired boatman.

The funeral procession of Joseph Green was photographed showing the impressive cortege, and young Edward’s coffin was photographed being wheeled into the church by his young bearers. A newspaper describes for him “An extremely impressive site was presented as the cortege, numbering probably 100, proceeded from the Castle Inn, where the body had been resting, to the church… Many of the followers carried touching bouquets of wild flowers to place on the coffin.”

Albert, who appears to have been living in a cottage in the village, was noted as getting an equally impressive send-off “..there was a cortege of 135 of the boatmen and women who are at present held up at Braunston...”

When you look at the waterways funerals of the past and compare them to the Queen's funeral just days ago, there’s very little fundamental difference in what’s actually happening. A monarch being flanked by her loyal forces or a navigator being escorted by his comrades, it’s still simply a goodbye.

I have just had a very enjoyable little jaunt down to Gloucester and back collecting a dear little boat named Spindrift for Heatherfield Heritage. The journey sent me travelling down my favourite canal, the Staffs and Worcester, and I thought for this piece I would take you on a little tour of the cut.

This canal is old. Despite being started slightly after its sister, the Trent and Mersey, it was actually completed first and was open through its length in 1772.

At one end Stourport hunkers down like a grumpy toad. The town basically owes its existence to the canal and was described in glowing terms by Nash in the 18th century "...stood a little alehouse called Stourmouth. Near this Brindley has caused a town to be erected, made a port and dockyards, built a new and elegant bridge, established markets and made it a wonder not only of this county but of the nation at large.." but truthfully it was much like any other town with fighting, drinking and ladies of negotiable affection.

A case in 1832 gives us a little from each category. Charles Hodgkiss, a man of 44 described as “a tall stout built man, of a altogether most repulsive aspect, and having a broken nose” fell out of the pub and started bellowing for “the best man on the severn'' to come and fight him. What transpired after that is open to conjecture, but he found himself on trial for the murder of another boatman, Francis ‘Old Frank’ Wassall. He was accused along with 19 year old William Cooke, who tried to turn King's Evidence and put all the blame on him, but luckily for Hodgkiss, Cooke was useless; at the initial inquest he claimed to be in the arms of one “Mrs Green, who is known as 'the thick legged one'", and then at the trial changed his mind and said he’d seen Hodgkiss beat Wassall and then push him into the water. The judge, quite rightly, dismissed his evidence.

Leaving the basins of Stourport, the canal winds around Mitton under the curious little bridge that gives access to the remains of Mitton chapel and the sprawling cemetery. The site is on its 4th church in the 800 or so years, with the construction of the canal being no small part responsible for the turnover.

You pass next the mighty walls of the railway and the remains of the canal basin that served it. Somewhat innocuously stuffed onto a modern wooden post is a small iron roller, apparently original to the site and used to assist in getting boats out of the basin.

The canal stays within sight of the Stour as it progresses, and in the quiet green surrounds the towpath suddenly rises up on a bridge over a small gap. This is the remains of the somewhat unfortunately named “Pratts Wharf '' and the lock that dropped boats onto the river so they could scoot a mile or so along to Wilden. Wilden had an ironworks from about 1670 and had relied almost solely on the river until the advent of the canals. There was a wharf there almost as soon as the navvies had packed up their bags but the site faded into obscurity until the canal link was built in 1835. Once it was a hive of activity with a lock keeper's house, workshops, and even a boat dock.

We now reach Falling Sands lock. Much like Pratts Wharf, this location too is a quiet shadow of its former self. Up until the 60s, when it was finally knocked down, a 3 bedroomed cottage and appropriate outbuildings stood over the weir (including the lavatory. I trust the reader can work that innovation out without illustrations!), and knowing there is now a building missing makes it far easier to understand how one Charles Wyer made the mistake of getting caught leaving a paddle up in 1869, meaning the water "ran unchecked for 8 minutes." It was the second time he'd done it and he found himself spending fortnight in jail with hard labour. The Staffs and Worcester company were very very keen when it came to taking boatmen to court for wasting water or damaging locks, and lock keepers were their eyes and ears when looking for miscreants. For example, further up the line at Whittington, 2 young men turned a lock despite the keeper telling them they needed to wait until another boat came the other way and were fined 2 shillings, while another man who turned Hyde lock "for spite" was fined 5. You can feel the frustration of the boatmen, who were losing precious time, and the despair of the company, who were fighting a losing battle trying to ignore the railways. (The Staffs and Worcester company were infamous in their abject refusal to deal with railways, even at the cost of profit to their shareholders. They were still trying to pretend railways didn’t exist when they were finally nationalised in 1947)

We now reach Kidderminster, a town of course much famous for its carpets. Today, the canal passes by long bricked-up arms that hint at bustle the waterways of Kidderminster once saw, but really it’s quite difficult to see the past here. Kidderminster was close enough to Birmingham that it dealt with a high proportion of day boats trundling back and forth. Although they’re often dismissed today in favour of the more ‘romantic’ long-distance boat, day boats could earn a lot of money. In 1861 one boat was hired by the New British Iron Company to move timber from Kidderminster to Corngrave, a day's journey of about 20 miles and 30 odd locks, at the agreed price of 7s per tonne, roughly £40 in today's money. She was gauged at Kidderminster as carrying 20 tonnes, but then gauged at the BCN as carrying 13. The boatman wanted 20 tonnes worth of payment, (£7 old money), but the company would only pay for 13 (£4 10s). The boatman took the company to court for the difference, and the poor judge had to sit through a variety of witnesses from each side until eventually someone had the bright idea of actually calculating the weight and realised the boat must have been carrying 14 &½ tonnes. He ordered the company pay the appropriate money to the boatman and suggested the company “do their own mathematics in future.” In today's money, that's about £580 for a long day's work. Obviously there were overheads (tolls, horse care, boat maintenance) but that’s a healthy wage.

Most of the day boats were worked by grown men but occasionally children would be put at the tiller. At the next lock of our trip, Wolverley Court, a dreadful example of this was enacted in 1869 when 11 year old Frederick Millington and his 13 year old brother William brought an empty boat from Stourport on the instruction of their father. Frederick slipped at the head of the lock, was sucked into the paddle-hole he had just opened and killed.

Their father was berated by a disgusted coroner who couldn’t understand why 2 children were sent out with a boat, but a look at the records show that their father, another Frederick, was a boater-cum-coal-merchant with a growing family to support; he needed the help of his two sons to keep food on the table.

Next on the line is Wolverley Lock. Supposedly, the ghost of a man has been seen by the canal bridge, which could perhaps be attributed to when an 83 year old man named Henry Gillet had sat on the bridge and for whatever reason fell backwards, rolled down the bank and straight into the water. On being rescued he allegedly said “I thank you all. The Lord have mercy on my soul and my poor cat.” He was taken home and put to bed, where he drifted into unconsciousness after saying “It is all a dream, but it has come for my end” and never woke up.
Like most canal locks, Wolverley has seen its share of accidents, but one in particular was “noteworthy”. In 1856, a boy sent ahead to get the lock ready and slipped with predictable results. What made it juicy for the newspapers was that, having drained the lock and got the appropriate ropes and ladders (for this is long before the advent of sturdy metal ladders bolted securely into the brickwork), no one would go down to try and find the boy despite there being “several strong men on the the spot.” At length, one Mrs Hancock was passing in her carriage, stopped on the bridge to find out what the commotion was and commanded her butler into the lock to retrieve the corpse.

The lock is kept company by the imaginatively named “Lock inn”, which actually predates the canal by a considerable age, originally being a selection of cottages. Like most canal side pubs, the landlords weren’t averse to trading beer for cargo and so there are numerous stories of boats coming away lighter than they ought and their crews drunker than they should.
Boaters were often quite free with the cargos they were carrying; in 1848 at this lock, a young man recorded only as Boden heaved 1 &½ hundredweight (75kg) of coal off the boat and brazenly asked the lock keeper if he had a wheelbarrow he could borrow. When he and his young companion were arrested, their defence was that there was extra coal on board for their use and it was their right to take it away. The company employing them denied it strenuously and both boatmen were put in jail for a week.

Leaving Wolverley the canal starts to take on a craggy, rocky aspect. At Debdale lock, cut deep into the rock beside it, is a strange little doorway into a hill. Entering it does not take you into Narnia, but into a single room with what appear to be benches cut into the stone on one side and what could be taken as a bed hole the other. Bizarrely, and despite the obvious flaws with the theory, it has gained the legend that it was used as a canal stable. My research, and practical experience, can find no evidence to support the idea of it being used as a stable. I have found evidence of it being used as a shop though, and a brief mention of it being used as accommodation for a lock keeper before the actual lock keepers’ house was complete.

You next pass the former entrance to the Cookley Ironworks. Today the site makes steel wheels, and the story goes that one in eight wheels used in WW2 war effort were made there.
Just 100 yards from the old arm you enter into the tiny tunnel. It’s a grand total of 65 yards long and has its own towpath, which the local boys would dare each to stay on when the boat horses would pass through. This challenge was made all the more risky by the very real possibility of an angry boatman leaping out of the darkness and giving the boys a tanning.

You come back into the sunshine and into leafy spaces as the canal comes through to Whittington. Boatmen were not above a spot of poaching to supplement their diets, and had you stood on Whittington Horse Bridge in 1851, you’d have witnessed what was a surprisingly common accident. 22 year old Isaac Starling was at the tiller of his boat when he spotted a suitably juicy looking morsel, reached down into the cabin, grabbed the barrel of the gun propped up against the side bed and whipped it up, catching the trigger in his haste and, basically, blowing half his face off. At the inquest, his companion and another boatman who appears to have been travelling butty with them, resolutely stuck to the story that Isaac was shooting at rooks and the coroner accepted it, despite knowing what was really going on. There was, after all, no benefit to bringing up poaching when only a boatman was dead instead of a pheasant.

The river Stour winds peacefully beside the canal as we arrive at Kinver, once powering mills for cloth and metal working. The canal's arrival gave Kinver  the trade routes to prosper into the charming village it is today, with an excellent chippy that is as good a reason to stop as any. There are also the infamous rock houses, now cared for by the national trust.

The canal here has been stocked for fishing for many years, and suffered quite badly with people poaching Lord Stamford’s fish whenever they could get away with it. In 1904 the Staffs and Worcester company took a number of men to court for having actively drained the canal down to a foot depth so they could spear fish for eels.

Appropriately for our purpose in collecting Spindrift, a former steam launch, in 1913 the lock witnessed “ A Kinver Recontre. We do not know if the following incident has any connection with the desire on the Part of certain authorities to make more use of the canals and waterscape of England, but on Tuesday the somewhat unusual sight of a fairly large but shallow draught steam launch passing through the Kinver lock was seen. The launch was the "Dora," of Liverpool, and in the course of an interview her engineer said that the boat had started from Liverpool some five weeks ago, and had proceeded across England by canal and river..”

Leaving Kinver we come up to Hyde, once the site of a fat works. In the 1860s fat was quite a valuable commodity, which is why James Dobbin finally snapped and stole a sack with some 23kg of fat in it and sold it on. His customer, a rag and bone man named Thomas Ogan, bartered a lift from a boat passing through Hyde Lock (who wants to walk carrying a sack of fat after all.) Unfortunately for both men, the company quickly noticed the fat was gone and they were arrested and sentenced to jail.

Next up we come to Dunsley Tunnel. It is perhaps a misnomer to call it a tunnel as it’s only 25 yards long, but it has still managed to attract a ghostly reputation of a shadowy woman who vanishes if you get too close. Perhaps she is something to do with 18 year old Ellen Waldron who allegedly went mad and jumped in the canal. She was a “rather stout” young woman standing at a miniscule 4’2", with dark hair and grey eyes. She was described as having “weak intellect” and being “a simple body” and for some reason the newspaper seemed really quite taken with the fact she wore rubber galoshes.

Stewponey is our next stop. A name that has never been satisfactorily explained, although it was drily noted in a diary as being appropriate following an animal cruelty case in 1873 concerning a boathorse that ultimately had to be put down. The wharf here was a busy little transhipment point, and in 1871 you would have seen 18 year old Charles Moss and his little brother Francis, aged only 9, regularly bringing their mother's boat here with day cargo, such as the intriguingly described “artificial manure”.

Stourton junction tempts you to turn right but our journey sent us straight on and to the sharp

left hand bend that puts you onto Devil’s Den.
The Stour runs under a small aqueduct, and just beyond the aqueduct is a tantalising door into the rockface. Apparently behind that door, erected supposedly to ‘protect the bats’, is a small boathouse that was the bargaining chip the Foley family demanded in return for allowing the canal over their land. With a name like Devils Den, you won't be surprised to read that there are a variety of legends surrounding that woodland, all roughly of the same theme.

Gothersley lock is next. It is pretty enough today, though it too has lost its cottage. It is a sad lock though, where in 1915 Thomas Humfries was clearing ice from the lock with a pole when he slipped and fell in. His wife managed to grab his hand but he slipped from her grasp and drowned. Equally sad, in 1856 the lock keeper's daughter was returning home from an errand when a labourer named James Cox brutally assaulted her. She was just 16 years old.

Next along is Rocky lock. This one comes with a spooky reputation, where people have reported being pushed and shoved, along with a general feeling of being watched. As locks on the Staffs and Worcester go it’s a fairly shallow one, and that fact makes the following story all the more curious.
In 1836, William Corker, his wife Ann and her two children, Martha and Elizabeth, were bringing a boat from “Etruria to Bilston” when they got to Rocky Lock. William was driving the horse and Ann was at the tiller, and once the boat was in the lock Ann stepped off to work the lock with her husband.
What happened next is something of a puzzle, for a boat going to Bilston would be going downhill, yet the newspapers report that “..the stern of the boat caught in the lower gates and prevented it from rising and the boat was filling with water. At this moment, the husband who was at the top of the lock called out to his wife to pull up the bottom paddles, whilst he let down the paddles at the upper end to prevent any more water from entering the lock. Instead of attending to his instructions she… jumped into the cabin and the boat instantly sunk. Although assistance was promptly obtained.. It was a full 20 minutes before the bodies could be got out of the water..”
Now, it’s plausible that the reports have simply mixed up the locations; a boat going from Biltson to Etruria would be going uphill and it would also tie in with why the inquest, and burial of the woman and children, took place in Penkridge. But there are question marks in the tale that suggest that maybe, just maybe, something more sinister than an accident took place nearly 200 years ago.

Leaving behind the eerie lock you come past Ashwood basin, a place that could be arguably described as one of the first intermodal freight terminals. Here, the locomotive ‘Agenoria’ held court from 1829 until 1864, when she was basically dismantled and stuffed in a shed. She was rediscovered in 1884 and eventually given to the Science museum. She now lives in York in the National Railway Museum.

Greensforge is our next stop. In 1905, on April Fools day, the canal breached above the lock in a blowout some 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep. A boatman coming down sent his son to set the lock and initially dismissed the boy’s excited report; “Get away wi’ yer. D’ye think I don’t know what day it is?” but found him to be correct. In a feat that I doubt would be matched today despite the technological advances, the Canal Company engineers descended on site and had it open to traffic in a week. Of course there was a small hoard of tetchy boaters either side of the worksite, which may have spurred the work on.

Proportionately speaking, Greensforge Lock it seems to have been one of the most dangerous locks on the canals, with such a cheerful variety of drownings, maimings and general accidents that even the canal company itself was getting puzzled. Some more recent accidents are of course due to active human stupidity; for example in 1970 when a 16 year old boy said to his friends “I bet I can jump the lock” and had to be fished out when he discovered he could not in fact make the distance.

Moving on, the canal takes you up to the little village of Hinksford. There was quite a fuss in 1884 here when a boatman bashed a hare with a cabin shaft and refused to give it to the Earl of Dudley’s gamekeeper, who had witnessed the whole thing. There was apparently a “tussle” over the hare, and presumably the boatman was the winner for he found himself being fined 20 shillings for killing game without a licence.

Hinksford and its neighbour Swindon appear repeatedly in the archives with young women having “criminal conversation” with men they were not married to and perhaps this is something to do with the ‘The Boat Inn’ just along the line below Botterham Staircase. Legend says that the building was originally constructed as a sort of hostel while the canal was being built, and that it quickly became little more than a brothel. When the canal was completed, they extended the building out to add a 12 horse stable and it was turned into a boaters' pub. How long it kept up its sideline, if the story is even true, is unknown, but one man noted in 1876 that you could get “a good dollying” at the Boat. I wouldn’t like to say whether he was referring to laundry or ladies.

The canal now edges back into urban sprawl with Wombourne and winds along under Giggetty and Houndel before depositing you at Bumblehole Lock. This is not THE bumblehole that everyone thinks of when they’re talking about the Black Country; it appears that this Bumblehole is merely an abbreviation of Bumble Hole Meadows.

A few hundred yards down the canal you now reach the bottom of Bratch Locks. (Incidentally, if you are like me and you enjoy taking childish photos with funny street signs, get on the road at Bratch Bridge, turn right and walk down about half a mile. You’ll find the delightful named Billy Bunns Lanes)

The Bratch is a very pretty location but also something of a mystery. It now has 3 locks with a pound about 6ft long between them, and side ponds. It was not originally like this; Brindley set them out as a 3-lock staircase (it has been claimed it was originally a 2-lock) which was open around 1770. Shortly afterwards, perhaps around 1800 when the tollhouse was built, the locks were stripped back and rebuilt into their present form. Allegedly, this involved leaving the top lock alone and moving the middle and bottom locks back about 20ft to allow for the fitting of gates. This theory works quite well when you also look at Bratch lane at the bottom; it has a kink in it that would match the idea of the locks being brought backwards. The remains of the original cills are visible when the ‘new’ locks are drained and as a bonus wave from the past, if you look at the little bridge crossing the stream by the road bridge, you’ll see rope marks - the stone has been reused from copings.

Leaving Bratch you come back into the countryside for a few miles before you reach the urban creep of Wightwick (pronounced Wittick.) Wightwick is home to Wightwick Manor, and if you have any interest in art or gardens, it’s well worth a visit.

Now we arrive at Compton Lock, the first one Brindley built on this canal. It too has lost its keepers’ cottage, from where Mrs Filkin came rushing out in 1865 to yell at Henry Hodson and ended up in what appears to be a slanging match. Hodson, his boat heading downhill, pushed his horse on and forced the gates open when there was apparently nearly 2 feet of water still to go, damaging the gates and quite probably his horse.

To your right you will soon see the junction to the Birmingham Main Line at Aldersley, but we carry on Autherley and the Shropshire Union Canal.

Of all the tales I’ve found around Autherley, my favourite is from 1862 when a boatman named John Vickerstoff was arrested for stealing 5 bushels (somewhere in the region of 135kg) of potatoes from a nearby field. The evidence was imprints of someone kneeling in the soil wearing a pair of corduroy trousers and that the boatman was wearing corduroy trousers, and boot prints that were heading in the direction of the junction. A witness was found who said he’d seen Vickerstoff at the junction and said hello to him, and that he had no potatoes with him. The policeman was absolutely certain that Vickerstoff was guilty but the magistrate was having none of it: “no potatoes, no prosecution.”