Ronaldo47

One of the two canal boats that a group of us hired back in 1976 had Elsan loos, the other marine-type loos that discharged effluent directy into the canal from below the water line (they were legal then). One of our group, who had his own small yacht, recognised the marine loos as a type that had to be used with hard toilet paper. Apparently soft paper was not recommended as it was liable to interfere with the workings of the mechanism, something the owner was not aware of. Not the sort of thing you will find on the canals today.

Queen's Jubilee week, 1977. Arrived at bottom of Foxton staircase. Found a descending boat stuck in the passing pound as the water level was too low for it to clear the entrance cill of the lower staircase. Foxton was unmanned then, no mobile phones, don't recall seeing a call box. I went to the top of the upper staircase, and opened all the paddles on the way down. When the passing pound level had risen enough for the boat to clear the cill, I went back and closed them all. No problem with water shortage that year, it rained heavily all week.

My large Collins Italian dictionary translates "crescendo" as "crescendo"! Derived from the irregular verb crescere, = to grow. Languages evolve. As a child I remember being confused by some of the expressions in the book "Children of the New Forest" by Captain Marriot. Our school's copies evidently used the unmodernised text of the 1600's original, where an expression such as "Do you go and get a jug of water" was an instruction, not a question.

The state flag of Hawaii has the Union Jack in its top left-hand corner, despite being US state.

This reminds me of my first canal holiday in 1976 when we hired the entire original Black Prince fleet of two boats. One (Rodney I think) had loos that pumped effluent out of the bottom of the hull into the canal. The other (Nelson) had two Elsans. Included in Nelson's equipment was a spade that the owner said was for emergency use! If the elsans got full and there was no sanitary station, we were use the spade to dig a hole in the towpath into which the elsan's contents could be emptied and buried. Well, fill they did, accessible sanitary stations there were none (due to restricted lock opening hours), and one of our crew, who was in the Territorials, decided it was a good opportunity to practice trench digging. The towpath was far too hard to dig, but there was a convenient adjacent field in which he duly disposed of the contents as per the emergency instructions!

Large stretches of the Southern Oxford towpath were certainly conspicuous their absence when I first went there in 1976. When the weather was fine, some members of our party used to like walking along the tow path, when present. We regularly had to stop and pick them up because the towpath had practically vanished. On one occasion the towpath edge gave way when someone was waiting to board, ending up with him sitting down in what might loosely have been described as water (more like green pea soup in appearance due to the drought). Completely different on my last visit a decade or so ago - the part we were on was neatly piled and cleared.

I am glad I found this old thread. I had been looking for a replacement chimney for my late mother's oil lamp for more than a decade with no luck. The Stuga-Cabaña web site had an exact replacement for €9, plus €14.90 P&P. For UK customers, when you place a order on-line, they email you a pro forma invoice for payment by bank transfer or, at a slightly higher cost, PayPal. I don't do on line banking or PayPal, so arranged transfer by SWIFT/IBAN at my local bank branch on18th Aug, and it was delivered, extremely well packed, this morning, 24th Aug. A perfect fit. Lots of interesting info on their web site, such as the fact that their wick widths are still expressed in terms of lines of the inch of the old French (actually Paris) foot (1 line = 1/12 inch).

Interesting. I haven't had problems with lack of tiller response myself, but I do remember it happening to another steerer on a canal holiday in 1976, when the water levels were particularly low due to the drought. It was a sharp left-hand bend and instead of turning, the boat, a 60 footer, went straight on and hit the bank. I haven't needed to open the weed hatch on canal holidays in the past decade, but in the light of exeriences on my first canal holiday in 1976, my minimum tool kit has included: pen-knife on lanyard; pliers; wire cutters; junior hacksaw; roll of gaffer tape. All used at various times, admittedly mostly when traversing built-up areas.

My uncle once lost a rat trap. With this in mind, I fixed a length of light chain (similar to the sort used for sink plugs) to the one I keep in the shed, clipped to the handle of a metal tool chest by a snaphook. The chain makes it easier to retrieve the trap from under the table where it lives. Dead rats' corpses are often accompanied by live fleas, so need to be disposed of with care. I wear gloves and double-bag them in freezer bags for disposal. We only trap one or two a year, but I keep a dish of bait replenished. I used to use grain bait from the local shop, but they stopped supplying this in favour of "new improved" corn-based bait that our rodents won't touch. Had to get grain-based bait on-line.

We used to "palletise" our stuff for canal holidays using the cardboard fruit and vegetable trays you can get from supermarkets, which stack well. Trays of food could usually simply be slid into cupboards with minimal unpacking. The mouse was in a half-empty tray, so its escape routes were limited! Although we are in a built-up area, our road at home runs between a deep, heavily wooded, railway cutting on one side and school playing fields on the other side, so our shed and garage tend to get regular visits by field mice and the occasional rat: the garden gets visited by the occasional fox and badger. My oddest rodent experience was a young rat, stone dead, several inches from a sprung mouse trap, and with no obvious sgn of injury. I wondered if it had set off the trap and died of shock? I am afraid I am not sentimental about rodents: quite apart from the hygene issue, one of the things they like to chew is electricity cables, so definitely not things you want on board: I wonder if they are attracted to the sweet taste of the plastic insulation? I understand that lead-based pigments still have to be used for colouring plastic cable insulation to ensure flexibilty, and lead compounds are usually sweet to the taste.

More than 20 years ago we must have picked up a field mouse when we moored against a rather overgrown towpath with overhanging vegetation, where we had had to cut away the grass and weeds to get on and off. The first sign was granules of expanded polystyrene on the dinette table where the rodent had evidently started to carve itself a home in the insulation, followed by evidence in the form of a nibbled pack of instant mash, and droppings. I phoned the boatyard to say we had a stowaway and they arranged for us to call at a boatyard on our route to pick up a "little nipper"- type mousetrap. In the event, before we got there I managed to dispatch it with a tin of baked beans when I found it in the larder. It must have been alone as we had no futher problem. The boatyard said it was the first time they had heard of this happening. Our junior school-age kids weren't bothered: they knew how destructive mice can be, and cheddar cheese in a Little Nipper works every time.

I have a full set of Nicholson's first edition guides (the usual guides 1-5 plus the Real Ale guide produced for CAMRA, picked up for 10p in a remaindered book shop), plus several volumes of the subsequent editions. The second edition was truly dire, maps at 2 miles to the inch rather than 2 inches to the mile, with many maps having locks and canal printed out of register. The one I bought motivated me to immediately scour the local bookshops to complete my collection of first edition volumes! The later ones using reproductions of full colour OS maps are all very well, but I find the older black and white line drawing maps clearer and more convenient, as I used to annotate my guides with times and dates of stopping places, as well as correcting errors such as non-marked or non-existent winding holes etc. No problem with black and white maps, less practical with full colour.

Interesting that the book "Modern Rope Seamanship" by Colin Jarman and Bill Beavis, 2nd Edn. 1980, ISBN 0-229-1177-5, describes and illustrates several different ways of whipping natural fibre and synthetic ropes, but makes no mention of back splicing! Back splices are probably not much use on yachts, or other applications where ropes needs to be threaded through the sheaves of pulley blocks, but appropriate for mooring and tow ropes where the ends will be subject to regular handling. A back splice wil not unravel accidentally.

On looking at my Nicolson in more detail (it's actually a 1975 printing of the 1973 edition), the introduction to the Grand Union section gives the Regents Canal max width dimension as 14' 6", Brentford and Paddington to Birmingham Camp Hill top lock as 12' 6", and Market Harborough to Leicester as 10'. However, the 1968 BW map shows the Regents canal and the main line up to Berkhamsted in the same colour. The resolution is inadequate to read what the colours represent, so despite what Nicolson says, possibly the section as far as Berkhamsted was also cleared for 14' 6" vessels rather than 12' 6", and BW's defintion of "broad" means 14' or wider. Conversely, I see that my 1976 Imray canal map, which shows the Grand Union up to Birmingham as "broad", defines "broad" as wider than 7', so possibly my confusion arose from different definitions of what constitutes a broad canal.

When the crew was just me and my wife, my folding bike was very useful at flights. I would cycle along the flight to see if a boat was coming the other way, and if not, open one paddle at several of the locks nearest our boat on the way back to set them so that it would only be necessary to open the gates on arrival.

Thanks for your comment. The furthest South I have ventured is Cosgrove, so I wondered if there had been some blockage at the time. My 1975 edition of Nicholsons guide Vol 1 mentions that there used to be problems with water shortage north of Berkhamsted due to the short 3 mile summit, but its notes about the need for broad beam boats to give BW advance warning of their intention to use the Blisworth and Braunston tunnels so that they could be closed to craft coming the other way, clearly shows that access by broad beam craft was possible and permissable. While I have never seen any on the move, I have seen the occasional one moored up over the years, including one on the Oxford a mile or so South of Napton Junction a decade or so ago.

Was there a reason for the 1968 map seemingly indicating that the Grand Union main line north of Berkhamstead was narrow?

In the 1970's and '80's I worked in State House in London's Holborn, a truly hideous 1960's office block whose only redeeming features were its height and its extensive underground car park. If you ignored the "No Entry" sign on the roof staircase door, you were rewarded with magnificent panoramic views over London and a close-up view of the Met Office's meteorological instruments. It really was an office block of the type mentioned in an episode of "Yes Minister" (the economy drive?) where Jim Hacker asks Humphrey why they don't rent out some of their unoccupied offices that have been standing empty for years, only to be told that, because they did not comply with building regulations, only Civil Servants could legally occupy them. Absolutely based on fact - we only had emergency lighting installed after crown immunity from building regs was abolished. To get to the point, I regret not having photographed the grafito on its foundation stone. After the stuff about "This building was designed and erected by Joe Bloggs & Co." (I forget the names of the culprits), someone had neatly added "and they should be ashamed of themselves."

These two photos from the book "British Railway Carriages of the 20th Century, Volume 1" by David Jenkinson, clearly show the very different ways that the same livery is rendered by Ortho and Pan films. I think that, as well as cost, ortho continued to be widely used in the days when plate cameras were still in widespread use, because ortho films could be developed in a dish "by inspection" by using a red safelight. This allowed over-or under- exposed negatives to be allowed for by providing shorter or longer development times. Pan had to be developed in total darkness, so such compensation was not possible.

Re solid fuel being sold damp, my understanding is that it is done to reduce the possibility of spontaneous combustion by ensuring that it keeps cool in storage. Dad worked at the local gas works when gas was still being made from coal, and the coal stockpile was regularly sprayed with water for that reason: clearly it wasn't done to make it heavier as it was coal they had already bought and were going to use themselves. The same practice was carried out at the local electricity power station in the days when they used to burn coal.

Talking of boat names on the Thames reminds me that my first boating holiday ( Easter 1972) was on a boat hired from Bert Bushnell at Maidenhead. All his boats were called Gay something. Ours was Gay Fantasy No 4....

Here's (part of) one that used to be on the wall of the towpath of the Channelsea River, formerly well-known to those using the railway between West Ham and Bromley (later Bromley-by-Bow) in East London. Taken from a moving District Line train in the mid-1960's. Created in the pre-aerosol era, and originally just "IS SAITCH A DADDY?, it progressively grew with time, adding "WHO DAPHNE?" and I forget the rest. It was the title of a football fan's blog for several years, but under the misremembered title "Is Saitch yer daddy?". I don't know when it was removed, and I haven't come across any other photos of it.

We used to have an ancient 78 record by the music hall performer Harry Champion called "Here comes old Beaver". Apparently it refers to a type of bushy beard that men used to wear in Edwardian days. Several versions on Youtube - one example here: https://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DL1KzedC9SFw&ved=2ahUKEwiMtY6nwZjrAhUNY8AKHdnIC00QwqsBMAF6BAgKEAY&usg=AOvVaw1vbRREmtxTus7Wn7n3fDc-&cshid=1597333328384

Agreed that the meanings of words used by the public can change over time, but my understanding is that what is considered in law is the meaning which existed when legislation was passed. Copyright is legally defined in the current copyrght act and previous acts which can continue to have effect for works created before the current act came into force, and it is their wording that the courts will rely on. The courts have traditionally followed the precise wording of the relevant legislation, even where this leads to a results which defy common sense. There was a patent case a few years ago where a procedural action caused a published document to become legally unpublished, a result that the judge himself said was "bizzare". Last year there was a consultation on the possibility of the government establishing a sort of voluntary licence fee for reproducing orphan works, the money being held in trust by the government for the benefit if the actual owner of the copyright if/when their identity became known. Personally I am sceptical about this: I can envisage that, in practice, few rights owners would be found, and this raises the question of what would happen to the accummulated pot of money. From the time I spent as a civil servant, I got the impression that the Treasury would find a way of getting its hands on unclaimed pots of money, so such a scheme would in practice amount to taxation by the back door. I seem to recall that the copyright act has provisions dealing with supplying copies of documents held by archives and libraries, but it's too hot and sticky to go wading through its labrynthine depths today! Charging a reasonable fee (a copying fee) for providing a copy of a document should not really be described as a copyright fee unless the supplier does owns the copyright in it. 'Nuff said, I suppose not really on topic for this part of the forum.