The Narrow Boat Britain Afloat

The waterways of Britain are a wonderful world of their own.

From the earliest times, we've sailed, rowed,

paddled and steamed along them.

Whether travelling, trading,

hunting, racing or just having a good time, we've made a boat

that's perfect for the job.

I'm Mary-Ann Ochota.

I like nothing better than getting out on the water.

Boats fascinate me - their design, their engineering,

and what they tell us about the people of Britain.

The narrow boat was the HGV of the 18th century.

It helped power our great Industrial Revolution.

And it shaped the lives of those who earned their living from the canals.

The history of Britain's boats is our history.

This is Britain Afloat.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

Ah, life in the slow lane.

Isn't the canal looking absolutely gorgeous?

It was actually a narrow boat that started my love of boats and water.

It was my tenth birthday, it was a surprise trip,

and I still remember the thrill. Nowadays, loads of us love canals

and playing about on narrow boats, for day trips, for holidays - some

people even choose to live here.

You can even have a narrow boat like Dolly Blue made to order.

-Glynis, hello.

-Hello.

-Mary-Ann.

-Hello, Mary-Ann.

-What a gorgeous boat.

-How long have you had her?

-Oh, we've had her about 18 months now.

-Are you enjoying it?

-We absolutely love it, thank you, yes.

-Can I have a look inside?

-Of course you can.

Oh, that would be lovely, thank you.

Wow, look at this - granite work surfaces,

there's a wine cellar in the floor, the LED lights are controlled

by a mobile phone app. This is like a really posh

apartment, but narrower.

And its narrowness is no accident.

To find out why, I'm cruising the Trent and Mersey Canal at

the heart of our inland waterways. It was built in the 18th century.

The Industrial Revolution was gearing up and a speedy

transport system was needed. An ambitious engineer

called James Brindley came up with a solution.

It's 1766, and he started building this -

the Trent and Mersey Canal, which stretches 93 miles

through the Midlands and the north-west. But just to find enough

water to fill this canal would be a challenge in itself.

Brindley didn't just have to deal with a limited water supply, he

also had to face the challenge of getting boats up and down hills,

and keep construction costs down.

This was his ingenious solution.

A narrow lock, which would be cheap to build and use

as little water as possible. Now all he needed was a boat

-narrow enough to squeeze through.

-Mary-Ann, welcome to Fradley.

-Hello, Nigel.

-Nice to meet you.

Nigel Crowe, from the Canal and River Trust, is meeting me at

Fradley Junction in Staffordshire.

-So he's got these teeny, tiny narrow canals.

-Yes.

-Where does he get the boats from?

-Well, the idea for a narrow

boat seems to be based on the starvationer.

-Starvationer?

-Yes, they're called starvationers

because of the skeletal appearance, and these interesting

kind of ribs along the inside of the boat there.

And these boats were very special boats, and they were

designed to work in the Duke of Bridgewater's mines,

on the Bridgewater Canal, which James Brindley had a hand

-in designing and building.

-So skeletal underground boats are

actually the inspiration for the canal system that we've got today?

Well, that's what we think, for the narrow canals in particular,

and the famous narrow boat that was designed snugly to fit

the locks that Brindley dimensioned at 72 foot long

and about seven foot wide.

James Brindley never saw this epic

project completed, or the economic success of the Trent and Mersey

Canal. He died in 1777, before this canal was finished,

but it's his vision of a narrow boat

in a narrow canal that has shaped our country's waterways.

See you later.

Narrow boats are lovely for a gentle cruise, but for the 19th-century

boat people, things were far from pretty.

Whole families lived

and worked aboard. Leicestershire author

Wendy Freer has researched what life was like for them.

We're aboard a historic narrow boat on the Grand Union Canal,

which links London to the industrial Midlands.

Wendy, the Grand Union Canal looks absolutely gorgeous,

and it's really idyllic on a day like today, but I'm

guessing, in history, it wasn't quite like this?

No, and of course the main thing is you had to do

it all the year round. This woman here has got

a very small child - she's actually holding it

in her arms - but traditionally a child as young as that would be

sitting on the roof, strapped, probably to the chimney,

to stop it from falling in.

The stove's hot, there's hot water on it, so it was dangerous to leave

-children unattended in the boat.

-It's easy to think of canal boats

as a place to have a leisurely holiday, but it's hard

-graft, isn't it?

-All the time, yeah.

This book, Our Canal Population, was written in 1875,

and in it there's a description of a boat that was on the

Ashby Canal in Leicestershire, and it says -

"In the cabin, of which there were only 202 feet of cubic space,

"were living a man, wife and six children."

Cramped living conditions made life tough.

Brindley's narrow locks may have been a marvel of engineering,

but inside the narrow boat, space was at a premium, and boat people

were forced to be just as clever.

The door of this cupboard

comes down to form your dining room table.

That's absolutely genius. What sort of food were they eating?

Well, any sort of fairly cheap meat cuts that they could get

hold of in local shops. They'd also do the odd

-bit of poaching.

-Mmm.

-That's...mmm.

-It's lovely.

-Really tasty.

Meals had to be simple, and stew was a staple dish.

And the thing about stews is, the longer it's

simmering away, the better it gets, and you can keep adding to it.

You could keep it going for a few days.

So we've got dinner sorted. How on earth do people

-sleep in this space?

-Well, I've got a few helpers who can

-come along and demonstrate that.

-OK, bring on the family!

-OK.

Hello, welcome to our tiny home. So am I getting in

-bed with you, Wendy?

-Yes.

Mum and Dad would be in the bed here.

Neesha gets to be on the side bed - she's the lucky one.

-What we do with these two?

-Well, bad luck, kids,

because you're on the floor.

All right, there we go, Wendy, sorted.

Let's get the Barry White on! SHE LAUGHS

I mean, this is just ridiculously cramped,

and we've only got five people in the cabin.

They could have been trying to find space for perhaps nine people.

It just goes to show how tough life was and how tight

they were on space.

Boat people made these small spaces

home, and it became customary to decorate cabins with frilly lace,

rag rugs, and china plates tied together for safety.

The narrow boat was the Victorian home in miniature, but boat people

had their own style, too. The decor of choice

was roses and castles painted on the doors and walls.

No-one knows why these were so popular, but they look

similar to the elaborately painted gypsy caravans of the day.

In the early days, there was another member of the narrow boat workforce

that was essential to its success.

By the time Queen Victoria took

the throne in 1837, there were a few fragmented railways operated

by steam power, but on the canals, horses still pulled the boats.

A horse towing a narrow boat on the canal could pull perhaps

15-30 tons of cargo - that's so much more than the same

horse could possibly be able to pull in a cart, on the road.

This was a transport revolution.

Sue Day runs the Horseboating Society.

She travels all over the country with her horse, Bonnie, to show

people how they worked.

Today we're on the narrow-locked Peak Forest Canal.

Just under 15 miles long,

it runs from Greater Manchester into rural Derbyshire.

So, Sue, how did you get into horseboating?

Bonnie, in the year 2000, came up here, through Marple,

with this very boat, Maria, and she pulled the boat

all the way to London. And as a result of this big, big,

big, big journey, we set up the Horseboating Society,

and our main aim is to preserve and promote horseboating, and so,

yes, that big journey is the biggest one we've ever done,

but it was Bonnie here with the boat Maria,

-and we came through Marple.

-Wow! HORSE PUFFS

Maria is thought to be the oldest working wooden narrow boat

still in operation. Constructed in 1854, she would have

travelled this route many times, carrying cargo

for the Buxton Lime Company.

Today we're taking her over the Marple Aqueduct,

the highest in England.

Sue, how did horseboating get started on

-Britain's canals?

-Well, before horses were on canals,

they were on the rivers. Going right back, even the Romans

used perhaps mules on a few canals, but the difficulty with the rivers

was that you had currents. The big change was building

a really good towing path for the horse to work on.

Did each family have their own horse,

or were they swapping them in and out like a stagecoach?

No, normally a family would own the one horse, and therefore

they wouldn't be changing. The horse worked extremely hard,

but so did the people. But normally a horse

was grateful to get to a stable, which would be provided sometimes

beside the canal, sometimes at locks, sometimes in pubs.

And the horse would be very grateful for, you know, a bed

for the night and good food, especially in the winter.

Bonnie's been towing boats for almost 20 years.

Maria, the narrow boat, is more than 150 years old.

We are enormously proud and pleased of what we're doing,

keeping the heritage alive.

Lovely as it seems today,

horse power came with some unique dangers for the boat families.

I've got a report here from The Western Daily Press,

September 1887, and at the bottom corner there's a pretty sad story

about a canal boating accident. Apparently a horse was walking along

the canal and its driver whipped it, which made it start up.

It rocked the boat, that started to fill with water.

The wife on the back managed to jump on to the tow path and save herself,

but their baby, who was asleep in the cabin, couldn't be saved

and it was found drowned. It's a really sad story,

but it's on page eight and it takes up about an inch of column space.

Canal boating accidents were pretty common things.

By the middle of the 19th century, change was on its way

for boats and their owners. Steam technology was introduced.

This pump house on the Cromford Canal in Derbyshire

was built in 1849.

Used to pump river water

to keep the canal topped up, steam technology

like this could also be used inside the boats.

Railway locomotives were improving all the time, and canals needed

to speed up deliveries.

However, early narrow boat steamers

had limited success. In fact, canal owners

complained they were too fast and damaged their banks.

And worse was to come. In 1874, on the Regent's Canal,

a spark caused a massive explosion on a steamboat

that was carrying sugar, gunpowder, petroleum and nuts.

EXPLOSION

The crew of the Tilbury, from Loughborough, were killed,

a canal bridge was destroyed, and all the windows

of the surrounding buildings were blown out.

It is in fact thought to have been the biggest explosion to ever happen

in London before the start of World War I.

DRIVING STRINGS MUSIC PLAYS

Nevertheless, if you wanted to be competitive, steam engines seemed

like the way forwards. Fellows, Morton and Clayton,

one of the biggest companies at the time,

began to build and adapt existing horse boats to take

this new technology. There's one that

still survives today. She's called President,

and is being restored at the Black Country Living Museum

in the West Midlands.

Well, I think a lot of people

are surprised when they see President, because if you think

about steamer vehicles, people think about traction engines,

about sort of locomotives, but not necessarily about narrow boats.

Narrow boat steamers were the express delivery

service of their day. Unlike horse boats, they

could operate around the clock, and it led

to a new way of working, with crews on a strict timetable.

It meant they could carry high-value goods - in fact, anything

that was needed in a hurry.

President, because she was

a steamboat, she was also known as a fly boat.

She was basically flying along the canal network and doing

the distance between Birmingham and London at top speed.

It would take 54 hours to get from Birmingham Fazeley Street

to London Limehouse docks. That is very, very quick.

But these new boats weren't perfect. Steamers like President had

a significant drawback, as this beautiful model shows.

They needed a larger crew, and they also had a bulky boiler

and coal store which went here, taking up valuable cargo space.

That means that, in order to make boats like this viable, they had to

be worked incredibly hard, and a boat like President

would probably make about 52 trips from London to Birmingham ever year.

That's 274 miles -

332 locks every journey.

That would take your average pleasure cruiser about

three weeks to do now.

Despite their drawbacks, Fellows,

Morton and Clayton made a success of their steamers and had a fleet

of around 30. While engines were changing,

some parts of the boats stayed the same.

MELLOW PIANO AND STRINGS PLAY

Fenders are like bumpers for boats, and making them from rope requires

a traditional skill passed down by the early narrow boatmen.

Pete Flockhart produces them in a way that hasn't changed

much in over 200 years.

-Wow, this is an Aladdin's Cave, Pete.

-Mary-Ann.

Hi, how are you doing?

What a fantastic little place you've got here.

Yeah, it's kind of grown around us, really.

What's this one going to be? Is it for a particular

part of the boat, or can you use them wherever?

Yeah, I mean, basically the pattern I'm using at the moment is called

walling, and I'm walling down over the actual fender.

This will actually be very easy to bend around the bows of boats.

UPBEAT GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS

Pete's using manila fibre. Packed with natural oils, it's

hard-wearing and easy to work with.

I think, with the boat people,

a lot of it really is like folk art, but these methods will have been

used by mariners as well as inland boat people.

How long would a fender like this last for?

The olden days, they were very much a consumable.

So they'd get through one a trip, between Birmingham and London.

Do you know what - you've got a natural affinity with it,

I can see that, so if you give up the day job, there's plenty

of work here for you.

The early years of the 20th century saw big changes

on board the narrow boats.

Britain was now criss-crossed with railways, and motorcars

were a common sight on our roads.

The age of diesel had arrived.

RHYTHMIC THUDDING

Fellows, Morton and Clayton embraced the diesel engine, and they

installed these Bolinder single-cylinder hot bulb engines.

They're rugged, reliable and slow-revving, and create an

unmistakable rhythmic thud that's still loved today.

They provide the same amount of power as their steam

engine counterparts, but they have added benefits.

Canal historian Laurence Hogg knows all about these boats

and their diesel engines.

I'm meeting him on the Coventry Canal at Glascote Boatyard, which

has been here for over 170 years.

So, Laurence, how did these fleets of boats go

-from steam to diesel?

-The change was sort of gradual.

A lot of people think there was a massive fleet of steamboats.

There wasn't.

In and around the country, you had tens of thousands of boats

which were still horse-drawn, mill drawn, and it wasn't

until their owners saw the advantages of the diesel engine that

they then started to take on that method of propulsion for themselves.

The benefits of the diesel engine were obvious.

Compared to a horse, you didn't need to feed it

or put it to bed at night. In comparison to a steam engine,

the diesel saved seven to nine tons of cargo space.

What were the boat people's responses to

-this new technology?

-Well, it was a new-fangled

-technology, and it certainly wasn't a horse.

-SHE CHUCKLES

Some people took to it with open arms, as

people like technology. Other people were somewhat

resistant that it wasn't the traditional way

of going about things.

MELLOW PIANO AND STRINGS PLAY

Gradually, gradually,

-the diesel got its way.

-HE CHUCKLES

While the narrow boats had changed,

the canals remained pretty much the same.

By the end of the 1920s, the British Government had developed

big ideas for the country's canals.

Concerned by a rise in unemployment,

they decided to modernise the system and create plenty of jobs

in the process.

Backed by government grants

and loans, a new business, called the Grand Union Canal Carrying

Company, commissioned a massive order of around 400 new boats.

And on the busy route from London to Birmingham, the Brindley-style

narrow locks were widened, just like our motorways have been.

Wider locks could accommodate bigger boats or two narrow boats

passing side by side, which means double the cargo

could pass through.

All this meant competition for the traditional canal carriers like

Fellows, Morton and Clayton.

We've got here the plans of one of the new boats that was commissioned

in the 1930s. How on earth did

Fellows, Morton and Clayton respond to this huge influx of new boats?

It must have been a terrific shock, to know that you were going to face

186 new pairs of boats, which was much larger

than their own fleet. And these boats were modern -

they had electric lights, they had electric horns,

some were reputed to have had toilets,

which was absolutely, you know, something that was terribly unknown.

But FMC had good-quality boats, they did maintain them very well,

and they were a good competitive player in the game

right until the very end.

And the end was not long in coming.

After the War, the construction of new roads and motorways meant

fierce competition from lorries. The canals were now in terminal

decline, and many working narrow boats were abandoned

and then scrapped.

EVOCATIVE STRINGS AND PIANO PLAY

I've come to the bottom

of the Grand Union Canal just outside London, and I am on a little

bit of a treasure hunt. I have a map and I'm looking

for a canal boat graveyard.

Beneath this water are boats

with names like Trixie and Jill and Daisy and Erica.

In all, 30 narrow boats were sunk deliberately in this pool.

A hole was punched through their hulls.

They were allowed to fill with water and drop to the bottom.

This happened in the late '50s, and there was a bit of a public

outcry, but, to be honest, it was too little, too late,

the deed had already been done. And all you can see now

are the remains sticking up from the waterline, like this.

This is a knee, which was part of the fixings to hold

the hull together. And there's little

bits, just poking up.

But that's all that remains of them.

Mark Pollinger has spent years investigating these lost boats,

and he discovered one in a particularly surprising location.

So, Mark, how on earth did you come across this boat in the middle of

-a woodland?

-Well, many years ago,

when I left school, I started to work on the canal,

and working on the canal, you get to hear about all the legends

of the old boats, and one of them was about the boats

which were sunk in this area. Many years later, I was walking

the dog and came across this boat out of the water,

-which blew us away.

-So, do we know who she is?

We think the boat's name is Mavis. It was a boat built

in the 1930s and used by Thomas Clayton (Paddington),

-and latterly for Marylebone Council.

-It's astonishing, because

you wouldn't know, I mean, obviously the brambles, the nettles have

all grown up, but you get into it and it's massive!

There's still the boat there. It's quite extraordinary,

after all these years.

Mark's found these incredible photos taken back in the 1960s

during a summer drought. They show what lies beneath the water.

-And this one, you can see Fellows, Morton and Clayton.

-Absolutely,

yeah. Both of these boats would be Fellows, Morton and Clayton

narrow boats. This one is a four-cabin. This is the bow of a

boat with a four-cabin. Would have had a larger family living in it,

and the extra accommodation was required.

Mark, what a sad end to such an important piece of our industrial

-history.

-Yeah, it is. It is.

So, it's been so well hidden, but now is the time to

recognise its importance, and we hope that in the future it can be

recognised and in some way preserved or looked after.

While some of these working narrow boats met a sorry end, others

have been brought back from the brink.

Barry Argent's mum was born on a narrow boat, and both his

parents worked for Fellows, Morton and Clayton.

Barry just had to have one of the boats for himself.

My grandad, my grandma, my dad, my mum, all worked for

Fellows, Morton and Clayton,

so I wanted a Fellows, Morton and Clayton boat.

To handle, I think it's a dream. She steers absolutely beautiful.

She can steer backwards just as well as forwards.

It's knowing what you're doing, you know. A lot of boats, no matter

what you do, they won't steer backwards, but this one will.

Fellows, Morton and Clayton's narrow boats were nicknamed "Joshers",

after Joshua Fellows, one of the first company directors.

It's a term that's stuck.

What is it about Joshers that you love so much?

It's the shape of the front end. They've got a double bend in them,

really nice curve, really nice lines.

I just think they go through water really nice,

you know, like a knife through butter.

Barry bought his Josher as a wreck, and has spent countless hours

restoring her from a workshop in his back garden.

Sounds like a real labour of love.

It took me five years. Every single day, I did something to

this boat for five years, except Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

LIVELY MUSIC PLAYS

Narrow boats were so much more then workboats, they were a way of life,

and now they're celebrated in style.

This is Braunston in Northamptonshire.

Back in the day, this was the boat people's spiritual home,

and the village of choice for many baptisms and burials.

Nowadays, hundreds of historic narrow boat enthusiasts make

an annual pilgrimage here, including Barry and his

-narrow boat Perch.

-It's weekends like this,

when all the boats get together and they're looking really nice,

and it shows the public just what it was like.

Can you imagine what the original boat people would have made of this

extraordinary renaissance?

Festivals and rallies like this one go to show the historic narrow boat

certainly has a special place in our hearts.

We really are a nation in love with our canals

and the beautiful boats that were built for them.