The Golden Age of Canals

ENGINE THRUMMING

This is the story of how a small band of committed enthusiasts

saved one of Britain's greatest achievements -

its network of canals...

..a network that had been built by hand

in the years after 1760.

Canals had been the life-blood of the early Industrial Revolution,

in a golden age that lasted until the end of the 19th century.

During the 20th century they declined,

and after World War II, many became threatened with closure.

But a campaign begun in the 1940s by just a few people

grew into a spirited movement

that fought and ultimately won the campaign

to save the network.

Some of those campaigners filmed their exploits.

Their home movies show how they worked,

sometimes with bare hands, to help rescue the inland waterways

and deliver the canals into a second golden age.

Barry Argent's got canals in his blood.

And one behind his house.

Morning, Barry!

You want to take over?

This morning he's on a boat with his mate Geoff.

He can't use his own.

It's in two halves at the bottom of his garden.

'The amount of work I've done on this, it's phenomenal.

'Virtually I've rebuilt the boat.'

I got the chance of obviously buying one myself.

Well, I hadn't got the chance,

because I hadn't got two pennies to rub together.

I borrowed money from here, there and everywhere and bought a boat,

and that was when I learned to weld.

'And I put a cabin on it, put the engine in it,

'took the engine out, put another engine in it...

'I just love doing it. I could work in here all night long

'and not think nowt on it, but I don't,

'because of the neighbours.'

'Many a time the wife's coming out to tell me,

'"It's time to go to bed, Barry,"

'you know, because time means nothing to me

'when I'm enjoying myself, and that's it.'

Right!

Barry comes from a long tradition of boating families.

His father and mother worked on the canals before the war.

Coming out the church now.

That's my mam there, just coming out.

That's my dad.

It's quite unusual to see my dad in these films, actually.

Obviously he got somebody else to shoot this,

because normally he's taking the film.

I don't even know why he got into films.

He lived, slept, eat, drank everything canals and boats.

What he didn't know weren't worth knowing.

Barry's parents were part of tradition

that stretched back to the middle of the 19th century.

Britain's first significant canal, the Bridgewater Canal,

was built to take coal from Lancashire into Manchester.

It was opened in 1761.

Then, in a frenzy of building,

canals spread across the country.

By the middle of the 1830s,

a network linking all of Britain's major industrial towns and cities

had been largely completed.

Fed by rivers or reservoirs,

canals became the life-blood of the Industrial Revolution.

I don't think the Industrial Revolution could have happened without canals.

I think one of the key things the canals did

was actually make a route into a city,

and if you think of a city that is running purely on horsepower,

where everything is horse and cart, and how little a horse can carry...

But when the canals were built,

you'd get one horse bringing 25 or 50 tons in at a go.

Suddenly the whole Industrial Revolution could take off.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

more than 50,000 people worked on the boats,

carrying more than 36 million tons each year.

In 1930, Barry Argent's father began working

for one of the canal carrying companies,

Fellows, Morton & Clayton.

Fellows, Morton & Clayton were one of the largest canal carrying companies of their time.

They actually carried virtually everything.

Typically they carried a lot of tea for Typhoo for Birmingham,

they carried tomato puree for HP Sauce,

and they brought finished goods back.

They actually carried a lot of foodstuffs.

They carried even things like ice for Boots.

So, I mean, you name it, they carried it, really.

Like I say, they used to work the boats together.

They worked for Fellows, Morton & Clayton's.

Their week's work, they used to run from Langley Mill

down to Wembley with coal,

unload at Wembley, come back to Langley Mill,

load again and go back to Watford Gap,

and that was their week's work,

and, er, my dad says it were bloody hard work.

Barry's parents were typical.

Many wives lived and worked alongside their husbands,

and home was the tiny cabin at the back of the boat.

All canal boats needed two people to work them.

In the early days there were horse-drawn boats.

You needed somebody to drive the horse

and somebody to steer the boat. When canals were profitable,

that's fine. A man - usually a man - would be captain of the boat,

and he'd employ a crew. It could be a lad or a couple of blokes.

But when things got really tight,

and particularly, we think, in the 1840s

when railway competition became much more extreme,

rates were cut. Canals were no longer so profitable.

And it made sense, with a little cabin on the back,

for the man to take his wife along.

And, of course, men, women, cabins...soon children,

and a whole population is developing.

This was how Joe Hollingshead lived as a child,

on a working boat on the Birmingham Canal Navigation.

In a little cabin like that,

my dad had three of us. It was very cramped.

When we got a load in the boat, like that boat's left up there,

if you've got a load of flour on or a load of sugar on,

we used to make our bed in there, and it used to be lovely.

They used to take it in turns, Mam and Dad, sleeping on the boat

while they was travelling along. They worked day and night.

Sometimes they never even stopped the engine,

cos soon as they got there...

And that's when they used to send us to school.

Many a time we went in school at Birmingham.

They used to tell us we got to go to school.

We was only in an hour, and back out again.

So we learnt nothing in that hour.

My mother used to do all the cooking and all the baking,

and the apple pies was beautiful, and the bread pudding.

But I don't know how she done it, cos it was very hard work

in a little place like that, and got to do the washing.

There was no washing machines. It's all got to be done by hand.

So it was a very hard job for her.

But this world of Joe and Barry's parents

was slowly disappearing.

During the 1930s,

canals faced stiff competition from the roads.

As trade declined,

the numbers of working boat families fell steadily,

and many of the canals themselves were left neglected.

Then in 1938

an engineer, Tom Rolt, bought a converted working narrowboat.

He and his wife spent 18 months travelling on Cressy

through the inland waterways in the Midlands.

The lives of the working boat people that he witnessed

became the spark that ignited a 30-year campaign

to rescue Britain's ailing canals.

He did think something major had been lost,

and he saw, he felt he saw, when he saw people on narrowboats,

Midlands narrowboats in particular, that he was seeing something

of a previous civilisation,

cultures that had survived through the Industrial Revolution.

Tom Rolt spent the early years of the war

writing an account of his time on the canals.

Narrow Boat was published in 1944.

It captured the imagination of thousands,

including a writer, Robert Aickman.

An impetuous man by nature,

Aickman was concerned that the narrow canals

could disappear altogether.

He raced up from London to meet Tom Rolt

at Tardebigge on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.

They really liked each other a lot,

and agreed it would be a very good thing

to form some sort of campaigning body

to fight for the revival of the canals.

The Inland Waterways Association was launched in February 1946,

with the head office in Robert Aickman's London flat.

They had little money, but needed an assistant.

I had left my first husband,

and I didn't approve of women, healthy women, taking money off men

because they didn't want to live with them any more,

so I didn't have any money.

And I had to start earning some. I had a half-written novel.

I had no idea whether anybody would publish it.

So I did all kinds of jobs. I did modelling for Vogue,

I did a certain amount of broadcasting.

I'd done it all through the war, continuity announcing and things.

And Robert and Ray offered me this job for £2.10 a week.

I went three mornings a week - three days, really -

and I worked very hard for my money.

War and neglect had left Britain's canal network in a poor state.

The campaigners had two goals -

to stop the government closing canals

and to persuade it to spend money

to restore those that were being left to die.

One of the chief ways in which the Inland Waterways Association

saw that it could campaign for the improvement of the canals

was by demonstrating that you could actually go along them in a boat.

Many of them, of course, very run down at this time,

virtually derelict, but nevertheless they were still supposed to be open

for navigation. It was required statutorily

that boats should be allowed to go along them.

Aickman chose one of the most run-down canals in the country

to illustrate just how dilapidated the system had become.

In the summer of 1948, he invited Tom Rolt to join him

on an expedition to the Huddersfield Canal.

Rolt brought along his wife, Angela,

Aickman his secretary, Jane.

She apparently was an extremely attractive woman in those days,

outstandingly beautiful.

Robert Aickman said of her that, "When Jane walks in the room,

"the whole world seems to come to a halt."

And it did for him, certainly.

He obviously fell very much under her spell.

I think HG Wells is quite right about men.

It doesn't matter what a man looks like, as long as he can talk.

And he was very good at talking.

The group couldn't have chosen a more difficult waterway.

The Huddersfield Canal had not been used since 1939.

With most of its locks out of action,

it was almost un-navigable.

Aickman hired a cruiser, Ailsa Craig, for the adventure.

The journey in Ailsa Craig

had many ups and downs, I have to say.

Our plan was to go across the Pennines

in the Huddersfield Narrow Canal,

which had 72 locks in 19 miles, I think.

Rather a lot of them.

It was a real struggle, there's no question.

This wasn't a picnic at all,

going out on a nice leisure-boating holiday.

And after they had struggled through the locks,

they confronted the entrance to the Standedge Tunnel.

At more than three miles,

it was once the longest canal tunnel in the world.

No pleasure boat had been through it since 1939.

The party was cruising into the unknown.

It was a real struggle getting through.

Um, completely dark, of course.

No lighting at all.

Several times the boat got stuck.

The railway line ran alongside it.

That meant that when you were in the tunnel,

every now and then an express roared through,

and the tunnel was full of smoke,

and that was...you know, it didn't clear very quickly.

Various times when they were completely stuck,

Tom Rolt went crawling along the roof

and tore off bits of the side of the boat

in order to ease its passage through.

On other occasions, put the engine full steam ahead

and simply charged and managed to crash through.

It was a really hazardous journey, and it took about five hours

instead of what should have been just over an hour

to pass through in the normal way.

But they did finally make it.

We were the last people to go through it for a very long time -

until very recently, really.

So I enjoyed that enormously.

While Jane and Robert Aickman enjoyed the adventure,

Tom Rolt thought it had been reckless.

The escapade saw the beginnings of a rift between the two men -

a rift that became irreparable when the two fell out

over Rolt's idea for a national rally of boats.

The rally was planned for August 1950,

here in Market Harborough.

Yes. This would have been the view we saw when we first arrived here.

Coming in through the narrows to a basin

that was absolutely packed with boats.

There was only just room to turn our full-length boat round.

We went back to the first available slot we could tie into,

which was, um, almost half a mile out of the town,

and more boats came after us,

so that there was this long line of boats along the towpath.

And the other thing that amazed us was the crowds of people

all through the day. It was almost impossible

to try and get in a hurry along the towpath,

because it was solid people.

It really created a stir in the town.

All seemed to be going well.

But the planning for it had exposed the increasing tensions

between Rolt and Aickman.

Well, he wasn't like anybody else.

Er, he was very clever,

very neurotic -

paranoid, really,

very manipulative...

He got his own way one way or another

pretty well all the time,

and, of course, wanted to be the centre of the scene, and Tom,

who I don't think particularly wanted to be the centre,

but he wanted to be a partner,

and they didn't agree on methods.

They argued bitterly about the purpose of the rally.

Tom felt that it should be about the boats and the canal,

and Robert felt this was a chance to demonstrate, if you like,

that the canal was part of a centre

where a different sort of cultural life -

very elitist, by the way.

This was not some sort of idea of a plebeian, popular culture

for one moment. It was a chance to create something,

recreate something he thought was disappearing, really,

in what they saw as a rather gaunt, flat, state-dominated post-war era.

Aickman wanted a festival.

He'd planned performances, film shows and even a pageant -

not at all what Rolt had envisaged.

Tom protested about the Market Harborough rally

because, he said, "You've taken up my idea," in effect,

and Robert wrote to say, "I don't think you should come at all."

But Rolt went anyway, as did 50,000 visitors.

The event took place over several days,

um, and on almost every day,

they were running public trips.

The grand finale was a parade of the boats,

led by this slipper launch

with the carnival queen and a few dignitaries on board.

The festival was a huge success.

It showed there was a public appetite for canals.

But it also exposed fundamental differences

between Tom Rolt, who was interested mainly in working boats,

and Robert Aickman, who wanted to save every mile of canal.

Aickman won the day.

In 1952, Tom Rolt was expelled from the IWA.

After the success of Market Harborough,

membership of the association grew quickly.

But the 1950s were difficult years.

Canals were seen as essentially working waterways,

and working traffic was falling sharply.

The IWA policy, "Save every mile",

was rejected by the government body that owned most canals.

The remit of the British Transport Commission

was about transport. It was nothing to do with amenities,

nothing to do with developing tourism,

except in very minor ways, so as far as they were concerned,

rather like Beeching later on,

if it didn't have a long-term future, you got rid of it.

But getting rid of a canal was difficult.

They had been set up by individual Acts of Parliament.

So when the British Transport Commission tried to abandon one,

campaigners would descend on it in a mass-protest cruise,

and insist on their legal right of navigation.

It led to a decade of conflict.

Tom Chaplin remembers how he got involved in his teens.

Back in the mid-'60s, a friend of mine was editor of the IWA bulletin.

And I remember one time I was with him and he said,

"We've just heard the Leeds and Liverpool might be under threat."

So the next weekend we jumped in his little Hillman Husky with a tent,

and we camped on the moors overnight,

and we went and looked at the Leeds and Liverpool

and took lots of photos and wrote up about it.

And the following summer, they held a rally there.

Boats came from north, south, east and west,

and that was publicity, showed British Waterways

that people wanted it, and it was a way of changing public opinion.

Because what is difficult to remember now

is that, if you said to somebody in the '50s or the '60s,

"I'm going on a canal holiday," they'd say, "A stinking ditch?"

"Dead dogs?" That's how they looked at it.

And a lot of people wanted local canals shut

because they felt it was somewhere where the kids drowned.

These protest cruises went on through the 1950s,

until matters came to a head in 1962.

A national protest rally was planned in Stourbridge.

Don Grey was there.

Well, in the late '50s, the traffic had ceased.

At least that's the commercial traffic.

Looking towards Stourbridge,

this was largely overgrown.

You couldn't get any further.

The whole place just looked a mess.

Further along the canal, perhaps half a mile from here,

you could walk across the canal.

It was literally completely silted up,

which was why the national rally organisers

decided to have the event here,

and force the issue for keeping it open to navigation.

The only way they could hold the protest rally

was by dredging the canal, but the British Transport Commission refused permission,

and threatened to prosecute anyone who even touched the water.

Neither side was prepared to back down.

The person who really got most heavily involved

was from the Midlands branch of the Inland Waterways Association,

and that was David Hutchings.

David Hutchings went out and took action.

There was direct action. And he was very keen on publicity,

and also very keen on doing something

which we'd associate with the '60s,

which actually was about really breaking the law

when you know you're on the right side.

You couldn't get up this canal because it was full of silt,

and David Hutchings hired a little drag line,

and he put the drag line on the towpath,

and he scooped up enough mud so the boats could get to Stourbridge,

the Stourbridge Arm. And he was told he wasn't meant to,

and he just did it. HE LAUGHS

And a hundred or so boats turned up at Stourbridge.

The atmosphere here was electric.

David had taken on Goliath and won.

We'd achieved national press. All the London dailies

were carrying this on the front pages,

and people came to see what it was all about.

We thought it was an absolutely wonderful weekend.

The 1962 victory at Stourbridge duly took its place

in the roll-call of the IWA successes.

But one of the long-term aims - bringing back working traffic -

wasn't so successful.

Put the ignition on. That's the ignition key there.

Put it on "heat" for about ten seconds.

-Right.

-That yellow light will come on.

-BEEPING

-And you can turn the engine over.

ENGINE ROARS

-And then it'll click back to the ignition...

-Right.

..position. And then you're ready to go.

Right! OK.

And the steering, if you push the tiller bar this way...

That's a familiar one,

but I haven't stood on the back of a boat for a long time, actually.

As I recall, it was the same summer that Elvis died.

Joseph Boughey's returning to the place he came first

with his parents in the early 1960s.

Well, it's a long time ago.

Obviously very, very nervous. I wasn't very mechanically minded.

I'm not now. And I can see I'm holding on to this thing,

thinking, "What am I supposed to do?"

I hadn't been allowed to be at the tiller,

and Father, I can see, is holding on, really.

"If you start messing it up, I'm there.

"I'm there to pick it all up if things start to go wrong."

There's a lot in that shot.

When he came here as a child in 1963,

his father filmed a moment that captured the changing character

of the canal network.

As it happened, he managed to film something

which was a piece of history.

While he was here, a working boat came by.

At the time, actually, there were quite a lot of boats on this canal,

but it's the only one that he filmed in detail.

But it is a different world.

There, standing on the back of the boat, with his expensive camera,

is my father, a fairly well off professional,

and there on the boat is somebody

who had been born on a boat,

who would have expected to spend most of their life on a boat,

and at that time, living in on boats -

not actually people using narrowboats,

living in on boats as part of your lifestyle -

was coming to an end.

But just as that life was drawing to a close,

a new way of using the waterways was replacing it.

-It is a long time since we were down here.

-It is.

-When do you reckon it was? '60s?

-September '61,

that we brought them over across and made the film.

Harry Arnold and his long-time friend Eddie Frangleton

are retracing a journey on the canal to Llangollen.

When they came here half a century ago,

they were pioneers, taking part in a new,

and in those days highly unusual holiday -

a boat-hostel holiday.

Eddie thought it so unusual, he brought his film camera with him.

'Of all the trips, I think it was probably the icing on the cake.'

I just tried to convey to other people

the sense of comradeship and togetherness,

and the whole atmosphere which surrounded the canals.

I know I let Harry on odd occasion film,

doing a little bit Alfred Hitchcock appearance on my film.

Well, the whole ethos of the company

was that the boat itself would be horse-drawn,

perpetuate the old ways.

Nothing to do with diesel engines.

The first hotel boats really started on the canals

just after the war. People who had been trying to carry cargo

on their own, for their own company as it were,

decided they just couldn't make a living at it.

There wasn't enough money to be made and there still isn't,

carrying on the canals.

But they were enthusiasts, so they wanted to be on the boats

and carry on the canals. So they decided if they couldn't carry cargo

they'd carry people. And that was a very strange idea to do,

because people weren't allowed on the canals.

It wasn't a place where the public could be.

It was like walking along a railway nowadays. You don't do it.

So they were offering them these holidays in a strange environment,

an adventure-type holiday, and people lapped it up.

The make of the hostel boat, in crew terms,

it had a skipper and an assistant, who was generally a student,

and a cook, and it ran exactly as a youth hostel did,

only afloat, and you helped with the peeling of the potatoes

and washing up and so on, and you got a very cheap holiday.

And because they were heading for Llangollen,

they got to see perhaps the most impressive piece of architecture

on the whole network -

the aqueduct at Pontcysyllte.

They weren't disappointed.

The aqueduct is one of the seven wonders of the world,

right, of the canal world,

and so one of my ambitions was to cross this aqueduct.

And it didn't let us down.

It was absolutely staggering.

I was totally unprepared for the fact that, on the off side,

there was no railing. It was a sheer drop down.

I thought it was magical.

People loved it because it was a holiday you couldn't get anywhere else.

It was totally new to them. People did come in large numbers.

They could fill as many boats as people could get.

For a few years, this new generation of pleasure boaters

shared the canals with working boats.

They were able to catch a glimpse of the culture that was disappearing.

And many wanted to capture part of that culture for themselves.

'Part of the attraction of canal boating,

'definitely an important part of the attraction,

'was the traditional painting and the Roses and Castles.'

It's a tradition that Tony Lewery is keen to maintain.

Well, I suppose my whole approach to canal-boat painting

has been to do it as well as I can,

but within the...within the tradition as I understand it,

within the tradition of the old work that I've seen,

and try not to let it get carried away with modern...

-HE CHUCKLES

-..alterations or improvements.

I do think it's an important survivor.

It's believed the tradition began when women came onto the canals in the 1840s.

Artisan painters decorated boats and cabin interiors elaborately,

and the distinctive style became known as Roses and Castles.

Roses are not a big problem in the sense of looking for origins.

Flowers generally are the most commonly used decorative device

on anything you want to sell, any commercial thing.

Castle pictures are a bit different.

I think it makes more sense to think of it as roses and landscapes,

because although a lot of the buildings are quite castle-like,

some of them are really quite domestic as well.

If you think about it just as a decorative, pretty landscape,

that's far more understandable, really.

Here's a... Here's a typical piece of...

..canal-boat art, I mean, really one of the classics.

This is a block that rests on the cabin roof

to support the end of the gangplank,

and faces back down so you see it all day -

a classy piece of work by Frank Nurser,

who was one of the very best known painters from the Midlands.

But it's got all the regular ingredients.

Yes, it's a castle in the sense that it's got round towers,

but it's also got these really quite domestic roofs and highlights.

But more important than that, it is the fact that it is a landscape.

It is a picture of a relaxed, gentle place,

and I think the idea of the landscape

is as of as much importance as being the castle.

'It's sometimes been said that it's the Roses and Castles tradition

'of the narrowboats that saved the canals,

'and I do sometimes wonder. It's such an attractive tradition,

'and it had an enormous impact, really,

'on the new people coming into the canals,

'and without it, I wonder if they would have been so interested,

'if the boats hadn't been so attractive in themselves.'

Whatever the attraction, by the middle of the '60s

there were thousands of people using the waterways...

..though a policy of neglect and disablement

had left many of the canals themselves unusable.

Until now, the campaign had focussed on keeping canals open,

but local societies began to demand the right

to restore derelict canals.

For years they met firm opposition from British Waterways.

But in 1964, here at Stourbridge,

where just two years before there had been a total standoff,

there was now a change of heart,

a result of a local grassroots initiative.

Well, before this started and became a success,

it was a bit like, um, trench warfare.

The enthusiasts would throw verbal brickbats at British Waterways,

who would neatly deflect them,

and this got people, in a way, out of their slip trenches

and onto common ground.

David Tomlinson was a member of the local canal society

that approached British Waterways

and persuaded it to change its attitude

and for the very first time, work alongside volunteers.

The agreement, forged by people on the ground,

was a huge step forward, and would, over the next 30 years,

help transform the network.

When we first started,

we cleared a certain amount of brushwood and scrub, etc, etc,

cleaned out the by-wash channel

so that bricks and rubbish were removed,

and then we started on cleaning out the locks.

Of course the principal obstacle to navigation,

apart from the decrepit lock gates, was the amount of rubbish

that had been deposited in the bottom of the locks,

and we found... I think we found some ammunition from World War II

in lock three, and which we took up to the local police station

for their collection, and we found all sorts of other things -

bicycle wheels and general household rubbish,

oil drums... Anything that could be chucked in

generally seemed to have been chucked in,

apart from we didn't find a body.

We always sort of lived in hope we might find a body,

which would be quite interesting. Well, might be -

you know, "Murder mystery on the Stourbridge Canal",

but that never happened.

David even filmed some of the work of the volunteers

during the three years it took to restore the canal.

That's him laying bricks in a weir.

The process was, I suppose, really,

depending what was on,

because obviously you couldn't film everything,

but I concentrated on the locks,

because the fitting of lock gates was quite interesting to me,

and of course it was a golden opportunity

for the volunteers to do something

that they could go away and feel, "I've really made my mark there."

Not that the volunteers needed much motivation.

I haven't myself met very many people

who said, "I got involved in restoration

so I could take my own personal boat through."

It was caring about some aspect of the environment,

of feeling, "If that is lost, something of me is lost."

And they came from all walks of life.

Lot of people were from professional backgrounds.

Quite a few people I've met came from clerical jobs,

which were pen-pushing, as it were - that's their sort of feeling -

and didn't provide the satisfaction of working with your hands,

almost like a sort of dignity of manual labour.

You're doing something real.

During the day, you're pushing paper round.

At the end of your career, you're not quite sure what you've achieved.

But you can go past that lock and see the brickwork

you helped to set, or something you cleared, something you worked on.

I think that's a big motivator.

And I think for many people, this was a serious way

of having an awful lot of fun.

After three years of serious fun,

the canal was reopened in May 1967.

The political driving force that enabled it to happen

was Barbara Castle, herself something of a canal enthusiast.

When Barbara Castle was Minister of Transport,

she automatically had the canals in her department.

But she saw them a bit differently.

She saw that they were not just a transport artery.

There was a big future for leisure and tourism,

and because of that, the 1968 Transport Act came into being,

and that divided the canals into those that were for transport,

like the Aire and Calder, the River Weaver and so on,

and the rest of the canals, the smaller canals,

were seen as cruiseways. This new word appeared, cruiseways.

So they were to be developed for leisure and tourism.

Barbara Castle came in at the right time,

at the start of 1966. What made it so important

that SHE was Minister of Transport rather than someone else

was not that she initiated policy

but that at the crucial moment, she said,

"No, we're not having major cutbacks in expenditure on this,"

when the Treasury wanted to basically close the whole system down.

Barbara Castle's 1968 Transport Act gave the canals,

for the first time in more than a century,

a secure future.

Local canal groups became increasingly bold,

and launched ambitious programmes of restoration.

They were encouraged by a growing interest in the environment

and Britain's industrial heritage.

One element of that heritage, the working boat, was almost dead.

In 1970,

Willow Wren, the last remaining narrowboat coal carrier,

ended trading.

But a group of canal enthusiasts in the Midlands

was determined to keep the tradition alive.

'Although canal carrying on a grand scale finished in the early '60s

'and petered off into the 1970s,

'there've always been a crowd of nutters like us

'that have kept old boats alive.'

'We liked to think that we were doing things properly

'and preserving a little bit of the past for the future, I suppose.'

They went about preserving the past by doing it themselves -

carrying cargo.

They were called Midland Canal Transport.

We used to boat together, and we were interested in the same subject,

and we decided, "Well, let's use the name Midland Canal Transport,

"and, er, if we can carry, we'll carry."

And we were reasonably successful.

We all painted our three boats up in the same style,

with nicely lettered cabins, and got the boats in the best of order,

and then went off looking for people who wanted things carrying

from here to there.

And they filmed it all.

It was just a way of recording the odd little method

for getting along that little bit quicker,

or, again, preserving a little bit of history for the future.

Our first traffic was to a group of houses

at Kinver near Kidderminster,

and these three houses had got no road access,

but they'd all got coal-fired central heating,

so they all needed about three tons of coal each.

There was a lot of shovelling to do, a lot of weighing and bagging and humping off,

so it took all three of us, and on a very hot summer's day,

humping 19 tons of coal, it's hard work.

So we were happy to load one of our boats

on a Friday, boat it over the weekend,

and deliver it to these people.

On the way down we used to start bagging up, you see,

get in the boat's bottom with a shovel,

and have the scales on the beam,

and we bagged and weighed, you see, as we went down.

And then take off the boat and put them on the bank,

and from there on it was the customer's responsibility

to do the rest.

And we had a very good party with them.

They would help us get the coal off, and give us tea and cakes,

and a bit of money changed hands. It was a very good arrangement.

And that went on for many years.

When you see the film, it reminds you, 25, 30 years ago,

how much younger we all were.

It brings back, I suppose, some very pleasant memories,

odd little moments when, perhaps, you forget how we toiled,

how we struggled at times.

What drove them, like so many volunteers,

was a passion to keep a tradition alive.

We'd like to think that we did it in a proper manner,

as the way it would have been, the way it had evolved

over the last two centuries, really.

This was our way of using the canals for which they were designed

and keeping the channel clear,

and putting something back into the canal system,

which seemed the right thing for us to do.

I'm afraid Midland Canal Transport suffered from old age, really.

Um, one by one we became...

..slightly unsound. Keith had a back problem,

Bob had an operation and I had an operation,

and we did find other interests, I have to say.

Bob found Morgan cars, I found horses,

Keith had perhaps got a bit too old to jump on and off boats.

So we kept our boats for a while,

but then we realised that things had to change.

It wasn't that we'd had enough,

but I think, you know, you're getting a bit older,

there are other things to do.

Well, that photograph was taken in 1979.

We were all looking rather youthful in those days, weren't we?

But that picture appeared in the local magazine,

and it's a reminder, perhaps, of the happy days

when we were boating and carrying cargo

up and down the Stourbridge Canal.

At the time Tony and his friends were working the Midlands waterways,

another group were planning perhaps the most ambitious restoration campaign to date -

to restore the Huddersfield Canal,

"the impossible restoration".

Trevor Ellis was a member of the canal society at the time.

This was the canal that Robert Aickman and his friends

had just about negotiated in 1948.

To stop pleasure-boaters using it after them,

British Waterways had effectively destroyed it.

For myself, I was a local,

and, you know, ever since I was a child

I'd seen the canal derelict

and, you know, wondered about it

and what it had been like when it was working,

and really wanted to do something about it from that angle.

That's Trevor in red, in a film about the restoration

made by one of the canal-society members.

On the films, I obviously look considerably younger than I do now.

I look certainly a lot less grey.

It was probably the restoration that turned him grey.

It took a lot longer than anyone imagined.

The initial hope was that we would clear the first lock in six weeks,

but with the equipment we had,

that was really not a remote possibility.

It took well over a year in the end.

The locks had been infilled up to the top water level

with quarry debris, and then concreted over -

with reinforced concrete, not just concrete.

We had to break this. You cut all the reinforcing bars

with bolt-cutters

and then move that, slowly work our way down

through something like, er, 14, 15 feet

of quarry debris,

which, using hand tools, was a major undertaking.

They worked on it for more than 20 years.

'The group we had were fairly close-knit.

'We used to have social meetings at the time,

'and we used to get pretty much the same core group

'coming to those as to the working parties.

'We were all good friends, you know, all pulling in the same direction.

'A team, really.'

A restoration project that began in 1974

ended finally with the official opening in 2001.

To go from closure in 1944, no-one interested in navigating it,

no pleasure-boat industry or anything like that -

to go from that to seeing the waterway reopen from end to end

in 2001 was a massive achievement.

Reopening the Huddersfield Canal, "the impossible restoration",

was a significant achievement.

But it was by no means the end of the story.

These days, every weekend, up and down the country,

hundreds of committed volunteers turn out,

just like they've done at countless restoration projects

since the 1960s.

They're bringing many more canals to life.

But there's still a lot to do.

Nowadays, there are more narrowboats than there were in the 19th-century heyday,

and upwards of 200,000 people spend their holiday on a canal...

..figures that were unimaginable

when the campaign to rescue the canals first began.

More than 60 years on from when the canal campaigner Tom Rolt

published Narrow Boat,

Britain's canals are still enjoying a second golden age.

Britain's waterways are one area of the environment

where a great deal is owed to a small number of significant people,

many of whom are completely unknown today.

Today, there are more than 20,000 people living on narrowboats.

Jo and Keith Lodge are working to keep some of them warm in winter.

It's a final twist that would really make Tom Rolt smile.

Once again, a few people are making a living out of working the canals.

'Myself and my husband run the coal boat Hadar.'

Generally we do from the beginning of October

till the 31st of March,

and it's usually about a two-week turnaround.

We supply coal to houses,

and we do the wharfing up at Welford,

and all the boaters that need coal over the winter.

'For me, it's relatively new.

'My husband Keith has been round the water for over 40 years,

'but me, I didn't start till 2000.

'I love it. I absolutely adore doing this job.

'It's great fun. You meet lots of wonderful people.

'But we've all got a common theme - we all love the waterways.'

Jo Lodge embodies the twin forces

that have shaped many people's love of the canals -

a respect for the traditions and skills

that first created a stunning network of inland waterways,

and a passion for a simple life that moves at the pace of a horse.

I just love the whole lifestyle.

We're not in the fast pace of life any more, which is what I enjoy.

And I feel like I've come home. It's like I've come home.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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