Like most twenty-somethings, I spent the first portion of my adulthood searching for my place in the world, a nook where I would feel safe but challenged, where I would find balance. I found this increasingly difficult, for the first part because I wasn’t yet even sure who I was, and for the second part because I am a millennial in London. It is no great secret that London is becoming harder to live in, both socially and financially. I first moved to London in 2018 to do my degree, and was instantly sold the dream of endless opportunity, and felt like it was undoubtedly the place I needed to be. It turns out, as a freelance creative, London is the place I have to be to get any work in.

I grew up in a small seaside town in South Devon, where people know each other and you see the same faces out and about and there is a sense of belonging even when I just go back to visit. I believe that we need familiar faces around us because we see ourselves reflected back in other people, this is important to have a sense of who you are and how you fit in. I was always a bit of an oddball growing up, I wore stripy tights and pink patent Doc Martens, and I saw my difference reflected back to me in how people interacted with me. I didn’t really have a strong sense of self at that time, but this experience was important because it compelled me to follow my difference until I found a niche. So I did, I coasted around house shares and communal living situations, trying things on to see what fit. I think the whole time I have been in search of the small town community minded experience, but in one of the biggest cities in Europe.

I believe that London used to function as a mass of smaller communities, but in more recent years people have become atomised and alienated, particularly younger generations. I think the rise of smart phones and internet culture, working more hours for less money, and constant new builds and rising rent has left the city feeling oppressive and impersonal. This is my personal experience, and I know that a lot of people feel the same. It is sad to see how profit hungry industry has ravaged the country I grew up in, and this feeling of hopelessness and fatigue is hard to breach when climate change is more tangible and threatening, and the cost of living is ever increasing, while big conglomerates rake in more profit than ever. I think these feelings are the antithesis of belonging and community, and feed into alienation. These ideas set the backdrop against which I started thinking about buying a boat with my partner.

Ours seems to be a common story among young people moving onto boats in London, certainly the group of friends we have gained through this lifestyle all seem to have similar values and experiences. One common theme is definitely the rising cost of living and ever increasing rent, although this is a contentious topic among boaters, so perhaps for another article another time. Another is the idea of self sufficiency, this is at the core of my own values, and at a time where we are so reliant on being plugged into the grid, moving not only off grid, but constantly travelling, seems like an escape from what feels bleak and hopeless. Closeness to nature is also something that comes up time after time, among blocks of flats and high rise buildings, little pockets of greenery and nature can feel grounding.

My demographic is one that is practical, motivated and attempting to escape the system in one way or another, but perhaps most importantly, we are community minded and take initiative to form meaningful connections with others. As I mentioned previously, I spent a long time feeling very alienated. The opposite of this for me is a sense of connectedness with a community, which is something I really struggled to find in London, until we got the boat. Something changed pretty much immediately, our neighbours talked to us, we started to see the same faces up and down the canal, people are so willing to help each other out in times of need. We have people round for coffee, we go for walks, share tools and exchange food, clothes, plants. This willingness to give to others is something I have not come across before, it is refreshing and makes me feel valued and able to contribute. We have our own space, and we are independent in that way, but share a unity. I think this balance between independence, our own space and integration with the community has been key to finding stability.

Of course we haven’t got on with everyone we have met, we have come across our fair share of a****holes, and maybe some people thought we were the a****holes, and it is important to acknowledge that. This community is in no way perfect, we are all human, and where there are humans, there is chaos and mess, that is just life. For me community doesn’t just mean friends, it means building solidarity across difference. Friendships provide a sounding board for our beliefs and values, which is one of many reasons they are important, but without a wider community we can become trapped in an echo chamber of people who think just like us. I find it important to be connected to people beyond our friendships because this is how our beliefs and values are challenged or consolidated, and we search for common ground. As boaters we have common ground and experiences to build upon, but also are a massively diverse group of people from all sorts of backgrounds, which can be frustrating and mind opening in equal measures. Building solidarity across difference is the only way that we will get ourselves out of this mess we are in globally. Joining the NBTA has definitely confirmed this belief, it is challenging and rewarding to organise such a geographically and socially diverse group of people to campaign together towards a common goal, but it is the only way to make any real changes.

Humans are social animals, we are designed to live in villages or communities, and therefore the world we live in can feel overwhelming and authoritarian, and lacking in the human connection we are hardwired to need. Choosing to live this lifestyle has offered me ownership of my life, a connection to nature, but what I have found most nourishing has been the interconnectedness I feel for the first time. I have found this to be an antidote to the detachment I felt unable to shake for years.

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.

“You look like you’ve just sat in a pool of duck poo,” Jim broke the silence as the pair sat in the cockpit of what must have been the smallest working boat on the canal system.
“I can’t quite get round what I’m thinking Jim, but well, it’s almost like we’re sort of part of the boat, like she owns us almost. You rescue her, and somehow she drags me aboard, like she has a bit of a hold on us. Does that make any sense?” Amanda said.
“No, but nothing much does. It was there, and I guess I felt a bit like she needed help. I mean, it would be firewood by now if...”
“Oh! Jim! Don’t say that,” Amanda had tears forming as she spoke.
“Sorry, but that may have been the case only it wasn’t,” Jim replied quickly. “So we’re here. That’s where we are so far.”

Again, Amanda’s reply was checked by her thoughts. How could she suddenly have felt such a strong emotion for something that was no more than an assemblage of plywood and copper rivets.

Eventually she answered. “It is, and thanks,” she smiled warmly. “I guess we need to think of practical things too though. I mean we’ll need some shopping, and there’s another package to drop off at the maintenance yard.”
“Yes, that one was a bit strange,” Jim half frowned. “I was told that the guys there are cool about what we’re doing. You know like old Lou was when we first came on the canals.”
“Yes,” Amanda smiled at the memory of the man they’d met within hours of turning off the river only a few weeks previously. “Lou may work for the board but he’s no way a part of it.”

The waterways festival they’d just attended, although part of the project, had been a welcome break, but they were on the canal system to travel and to prove it was possible to run a working boat. Despite her diminutive size, Mayfly, at just fifteen foot six inches long, was that boat. The gesture, however futile it seemed, had to be made and the goods they carried had to be delivered on time. The package, containing a casting of some kind, was pretty heavy. Unlike their original consignment of watches there was no good place to secrete it, so it sat just behind the centre thwart in an ideal place for both Jim and Amanda to repeatedly stub their toes on the thing. They’d teamed up for part of the run north with the theatre company who had also been at the festival. Because of the shared journey, their progress was much quicker and they’d arrived at the the maintenance yard with more than half a day to spare, which was convenient as they needed supplies.

“I was told you two were a pretty slick operation,” Harry, from the yard said as they came alongside the wharf. “Like the old fly boats.”
“Shorter, and no horse, but thanks,” Amanda smiled.
“Same thing though,” Harry continued, handing the lines to her as she disembarked. “Anyone with a brain can see you two ain’t playing at it. You said you’d be here and here you are. And the way you’re tying up shows you know what you’re doing.”
“Something I learned as a Girl Guide,” Amanda smiled. “We’ve got a cast iron thingy for you,” she added, feeling a little embarrassed at not knowing quite what the item was.
“Just when we wanted it too,” Harry smiled through generous stubble. “I’ll get a couple of the lads to lift it for you.”
“We’re fine,” Amanda insisted, feeling that even if she didn’t know its purpose, she, despite her size, was capable of helping to manhandle the thing onto the wharf edge.
Jim looked across at her and, seeing the determination in her expression, decided not to say anything. In a little over five minutes they had got the casting onto a trolley for it to be wheeled off for whatever purpose it was to serve.
“It’s about lunchtime,” Harry said. “We were going over to the pub for a bite and a pint. If you’d like to join us.”

With the agreement made, it was less than ten minutes before Jim and Amanda set off along the road with their new friends.
“Always seems a bit off going to a pub that served the opposition,” Harry said, pointing to the nearby railway station. “But it’s a good place all the same.”

Shortly after arriving, Jim and Amanda were each presented with a Ploughman’s lunch and a pint of bitter.
“Are you sure that’s OK?” Amanda said, feeling that Harry and his friends probably knew hers and Jim’s age via the gossip network of the canal system.
“Boaters drink beer,” Keith, Harry’s workmate, said firmly. “And you don’t mess with tradition. They didn’t crown the Queen with a bobble hat now did they.”

There probably was some logic to the argument but Amanda was too hungry and thirsty for analysis. More than that, she was happy to just be accepted as part of what was going on. She’d arrived with her crew mate on a working boat so she was a boater in Keith and Harry’s eyes.
“I may be a posh kid with a plummy accent,” she thought. “But, well, what.” she couldn’t help smiling.

“Would it be OK for us to look round the yard?” she asked politely as she ate.
“What’s left of it,” Keith replied “They’ll close it down soon enough, best see it whilst its here. It’s odd for a lass to want to see a mess like that though,” he added, wondering if Amanda was simply trying to be polite.
“You’re probably right,” Amanda smiled, thinking of the starchy school uniform she’d been wearing only days before she’d decided to walk away and embark on the odyssey she was now on. “But I can lift lumps of cast iron,” she added with a smile.

(©2024 Michael Nye www.michaelnyewriter.com)

Your Canal Boat, a Community Interest Company whose mission is to activate underutilised canal side spaces, is organising a floating market with up to 8 boats to trade pop-up style, continuously, for two months across West London this Spring.

With CRT appproval of our final schedule pending, we anticipate space for five more traders beginning with our first market at Uxbridge 1 May.

Boats currently subscribed include 'Molly Anna', our main entertainment and broadcast centre, 'Shorewaters', serving delicious traditional Indian dishes and 'Winnimax', a state of the art recording studio offering demo recordings for performing artists.

With additional providers of food and services, we aim to create a festival-like atmosphere that generates new interest in overlooked locations, culminating in stakeholder engagement sessions that encourage residents to effectively “own” and manage them going forward.

If that sounds like your kind of “trouble”, organisers invite you to get on board.

Plans
The flotilla will rendezvous for the first week of May in Uxbridge before travelling to the Hanwell Hootie - UK´s biggest free music festival, where Molly Anna serves as the official ¨busking boat¨. The ‘’village’ then spends three weeks at two Brentford locations, before travelling back up the Hanwell Flight to the Hayes Festival where they will end two months of trading at Alperton.

What happens thereafter depends on public response and the collective decision of participants.

Jeet Bahal is one of the flotilla´s pioneers, a 70-year old marine engineer who has circumnavigated the globe 7 times, he passionately believes that a canal boat village is as appropriate for London as those he marvelled at in Thailand and Cambodia. Jeet brings his boat Shorewaters, his curry recipes, and deep connections with West London’s Sikh community to help achieve it as a reality.

But what should we call this experiment in perpetual canal boat festivity? A canal boat village that pops up, casts a magical spell and disappears again?
Jeet opined for the name “Brigadoon,” a nod to the Broadway play about a mythical Scottish Highland Village that materializes every 100 years. What better analogy for a floating ‘village’ that relocates, popping up from week to week along the canal?
Brigadoon suggests marvel, mystery and a fleeting presence. In Hollywood’s 1954 version, Gene Kelly is an American who stumbles into Brigadoon and falls in love.
- Does he stay with the woman he loves or should he return to his lived reality of a ‘real world’ in New York?

And will this canal boat village be similarly enchanting? Will people follow along to wherever it moves in accordance with continuous cruising requirements?

Woody Travis Walker believes they will. Woody, a classically trained actor, has sailed on tall ships and run music sessions on the Golden Hinde. He looks forward to hosting a podcast that promotes the project with music, theatre & interviews, or as he describes it, “the poetry of the waterways”.

With the help of the Punjabi Theatre Academy that poetry will likely include a South Asian accent. Recognised as the first thespians to bring the story of the Southall riots to the stage, the Punjabi Theatre Academy will utilise Brigadoon as a platform to solicit immigrant memories of the renovation of Heathrow Airport, from a wartime facility into London´s principal terminal.

Families are encouraged to bring their elders to be interviewed and photographed at public engagement sessions in Uxbridge, Hayes, Hanwell, Brentford, Southall and Alperton. Collected content will be transformed into a Bollywood style production for the following Year 2 village flotilla.

Sir Tony Robinson, England´s most beloved popular historian, has contributed a video encouraging people to get involved and bring the program into the heart of London.

To be a hit in the The Big Smoke, the village needs a coffee service and beverages, and services from massage to haircut to tattoo, are invited to consider joining.

Write admin@yourcanalBoat.com to learn more..

When we decided to move onto a narrow boat, I knew there were over 2000 miles of canals in the English canal system, but I hadn’t taken into consideration the amount of that distance that would be unavigable because of maintenance closures at any one time.

I guess I had visions of us just pootling around choosing where we fancied going next…how wrong I was!

In my ‘old life’, every day was mapped out with a sense of purpose, although I always felt I lived my life like a never ending ‘to do’ list; coming onto the boat was a way of retraining myself to behave differently and be less of a control freak.

I had no idea how challenging it would be to try to change the behavioural habits I’d had for decades, plus how to cope with the constant disruptions to our travelling plans.

We’d hoped to get onto the Leeds-Liverpool Canal last year at the end of the summer; we planned to leave the Peak Forest Canal and descend the Marple Flight of locks and head towards Manchester and onto Wigan.

The Wigan Flight of locks are the access point to the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

Not only did the Marple Flight close months ago (and is still closed) but the Wigan Flight closed too; both flights have major structural issues, hence we’ve been kind of hanging around in the north waiting to head towards Skipton….eventually.

We’ve been to the Yorkshire Dales many times with the caravan in the past and always planned to come back on board NB Grace, but it’s taken a lot of patience on my part (Rob is much more laid back than me 😉) not to insist that we abandon the idea and head south.

Wigan was supposed to open last Friday, but CRT then announced it would be this Friday; apparently the flight opens tomorrow at 10am and we’re within a couple of hours of the bottom of the flight.

There are 21 huge double locks to wrestle with, then onwards through Blackburn, Burnley and various towns before heading for the hills.

I often think our lifestyle looks idyllic in so many ways, but it’s not without it’s challenges.

I know, more often than not, that the challenge is within me; can I embrace uncertainty to just go with the flow and accept what is, rather than resist what I don’t want or like?

To be absolutely honest, I’m still very much a work in progress, but being aware of what I struggle with means ‘if I can see it, I don’t always have to be it’ 🙃

By the time you read this it will be spring, with new temperature records set daily and I should be in shorts and t shirt but now I'm not. Indeed, I have worked outside since the age of 15 and this winter has been hardest so far for keeping warm, mainly because it has been so wet, and damp is biggest source of heat loss. Dawn treader (Dt) has been an awful lot warmer since I turned the clock back to paraffin lamps, it's been 5 degrees outside and 20 inside - that’s a respectable lift of 15!  Oddly enough, it’s got rid of the cluster flies and hundreds of spiders I used to suffer from! But it's still been cold sat in the cockpit etc., and this got me thinking...

My great grandfather to the power of 30,  Erik Wolfensohn the Warm ( Viking bloke) managed to sail the north sea as far as Iceland in an open boat in February. Despite what we think, they were no hardier than us; they didn’t have magical anti-freezing powers, so there must be something he knew that time and fashion have erased.

Clothing! Ever since I started sailing at 15, clothing for boaters has been driven by fashion (blame Jan's Boutique on Howard’s way). Today we all wonder around in manmade fibres with some special property – feature plus benefit equals sales with the labels sewn where they can be easily read, and each label raises our social status.  But I am sorry to say none of it has kept me warm or dry. You will have to forgive my sketchy research on this as very little is written down on just what great etc grandad wore, but it would appear to be the following. Linen under trousers – (cotton wasn’t around just yet!) felted woollen socks (easy to do  - just buy large ones and tumble dry them), linen shirt,  then heavy woollen trousers and woollen jumper or top with a tunic and heavy woollen cloak, fur boots and wool around the legs bit like a 1980s keep fit thing. Because wool has an amazing property: it can keep heat in when its wet! Of course add some waterproofing which sheep make naturally, and although you probably smelled beyond today's social acceptance, you could survive what ever the weather threw at you – in fact the more I read about what these people did with wool the more I wonder if that’s how we got our name!

I am writing this snug and warm in sheep skin boots, sheepskin waistcoat, heavy wool socks and a sheepskin hat and thick wool reefer jacket – all my branded expensive gear is now in a local charity shop, help yourselves it's useless!!!

Anyway, on with the show and DT's gas tank is out, and I’ve welded 6 inches to the top to accept the new bottles. I wasn’t going to take it out and did get a quote to weld in situ, but I thought it’s been in there twenty years so better refurbish the whole thing with several coats of rust convertor. Having got this far I have ordered a gas bubble. Slightly expensive and I am in the habit of turning the gas off when I don’t use it, but I think it’s a good safety feature.

I’ve added two carbon monoxide detectors mainly because I was using paraffin lamps and interestingly, they didn’t go off which is unsurprising seeing as they don’t when the gas cooker is on full tilt. I have removed the bubble pack from the windows. The more it can breathe now the better. Indeed a day recently with the widows wide open and a wind blowing through dried it out more than any heater or dehumidifier could ever achieve. Whilst I had no gas and couldn’t use the paloma water heater, I filled it full of kettle descaler – what a difference! I should have done that ages ago! All the gas knobs have had a light smear of gas tap grease ready for new bottles – though I have sort of got used to living on board quite happily and cheaply without gas – it is part of the boat and I now know how to use it sparingly, whereas before I relied on it especially the heater which really burnt it – about 2 kilos in 24hours.

It’s my safety certificate this year; I quite like this because I like working from repair manuals. I just go through everything they check and make sure it’s still working, attached etc. CRT and the inspectors are always a good source of info if you are unsure (my new gas locker being a prime example). I think there is too much bending of the rules once they have left and dubious pressure gas portable stoves and heaters creep back on board, because we forgot how our ancestors coped with the cold.

Now if you will excuse me, I am off to plunder Lindisfarne, there being precious little on the Kennet and Avon worth a Viking raid.

We have done a number of walks from Preston Brook to the Stoke area on the Trent and Mersey Canal. Our eventual plan one day is to walk the remainder of the canal from Stoke to Trent Lock/Derwent Lock. The Trent and Mersey Canal is 93 miles long with 76 locks and it connects the rivers Mersey, in the West, and Trent and Derwent, in the East. The canal was built in 1766, engineered by James Brindley and promoted by Josiah Wedgwood for its transportation of pottery in the Stoke area.

Trent and Mersey Canal has a number of interesting features including Anderton Boat Lift and Harecastle Tunnel. This article's focus is on Stone, a market town in Staffordshire, near Stoke and Stafford. The canal runs through the town and once upon a time it was famous for its beer brewing because of the quality of the water. The town had two main breweries, John Joule and Sons (brewed and exported from 1780 until 1974) and Montgomery and Company (brewed from 1889 until 1968) and the canal was used to transport and export the beer.

The Star Inn, a Canalside pub, named after the Star Lock, is an interesting pub to visit. The building is considered one of the oldest in the area and the pub has been licenced since 1819. The building in its time was used for stables and also in its time, a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse. The pub is recommended for its wonderful food, and there are a variety of eating areas as the building retains its original differing floor levels.

I painted two pictures, above, of the Canalside in Stone using gouache paint also as known as opaque watercolour. Using gouache brings out the colour and ambience the Canalside brings for both boaters and walkers.

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.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change¹

Over the Autumn we made our way along the Rochdale Canal from Manchester to Sowerby Bridge. At various places along the canal, we were warned away from stopping, primarily by other boaters, but also by CRT volunteers and once a local security person.

I have read of real attacks on boats and boaters and do not doubt that they happen, but now I wonder how much my personal perception of possible danger was based on reality, or how much it was fed and encouraged by rumour and anxiety. All the negative warnings we were given early on our journey certainly coloured my experience of the south end of the Rochdale but we didn’t actually experience any real trouble. Although the Manchester end of the canal comes across as unloved at times, there are many people who volunteer to keep this canal beautiful.

When we moor, we always try to find a place with other boaters, where the towpath is well used by dog-walkers, runners and others, or is so remote that no one is likely to bother us. The only real nuisance we have ever experienced was on the Macclesfield canal when we had our ropes partially untied by a youth, probably as part of a dare. Ironically, at that time we were moored with others on visitor moorings. It would seem that you can’t plan for everything!

Once on the Rochdale, when waiting for a lock to fill, I stood talking to a passerby. He was bemoaning the state of the canal so I asked him what he would do to change it. How would he engage locals to care for and enjoy their local stretch of canal? Sadly, we didn’t come up with any instant answers during our chat.

In August 2022, the results of a study into the benefits gained from visiting canals and rivers were published. It found ‘positive associations between visits to canals and rivers and mental wellbeing, as well as a positive experience for feelings of safety and social inclusion relative to all other types of environments.’²

It is easy to see this when you experience the most beautiful areas of the canal network, but is it possible to create the same positive association when stretches of the canal have become no-go areas?

How can those areas be reclaimed as places for everyone to enjoy and benefit from? CRT, who supported the above study, believe that it is possible. Their website provides information on the possible economic, environmental and social well-being benefits of waterways.³  Is it something we, as boaters, can play a part in, along with other local stakeholders? Can we see canals and canal communities as part of a real and sustainable answer to wider social issues? It’s an interesting conversation to have.

1. Wayne Dyer, author and speaker.

2. Bergou N et al (2022) The mental health benefits of visiting canals and rivers: An ecological momentary assessment study. PLOS ONE. Available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0271306

3. Canal & River Trust (2020) The values and benefits of waterways. Available at: https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/specialist-teams/planning-and-design/planning-policy/the-values-and-benefits-of-waterways