moggyjo

Have just got a email from Catherine, saying that WW are getting a David Blagrove to do the Obit for Jack. I don't know how he will gather any info but what I do know is that Rose will not talk to anyone that she does not know about their life in the past, as she has done so in the past, only to find that everything she had said, had been changed. I introduced Catherine and Mark to Jack & Rose some years ago and they get on very well, and the main thing is, whenever they print anything on them, they show it to Rose to make sure that everything is true and that they have not added anything. Aparantly a guy went round to Roses house the other day, started asking about their life on the boats and she told them to go away Wendy

If I have time tomorrow, I will go and ask Rose what she knows, I seem to remember her saying she didn't like the boat, something about it being difficult getting on and off.

In their early married life, Jack and Rose lived and worked on Kent and the butty boat Forget-Me-Not, delivering coal from collieries in Warwickshire to the canal wharf at Juxon Street in Jericho, Oxford, Also a friend of mine Lizzie used to own Aster in the mid 80' I think the last place she had Aster was at Sandbach. Her previous boat Whispering Grass, got itself in the Waterways magazines, when she sold it to a guy who got it low loaded onto the Norfolk Broads. Later date wanted to get it back onto the system but due to cost of low loading he decided to take it along the coast line. She got trashed. The article said that there were piano keys strewn all over the beach. (Lizzie had a piano put in when she had the boat stretched in the early 80') Wendy

Meet Robin Evans 2008 British Waterways Chief Executive Robin Evans will be on the road this summer meeting customers around the waterways network There are two separate sessions arranged in each of BW's operating areas. All customers are very welcome to attend and ask questions on matters that are important to them One topic that will be covered is BW's trial tender method of pricing and allocating moorings. Information about this will be available at the meeting including copies of the public consultation paper Please contact the local organiser, shown below, for more information and to let them know which meeting you would like to attend Unit Date Venues Time Local Organiser North West Thurs 5 June Dukinfield Town Hall , King Street , Dukinfield, Tameside , SK16 4LA 09.30 to 11.00 Denise Bradshaw 01942 405793 North West Thurs 5 June The Orwell, 4 Wigan Pier, Wallgate, Wigan, Lancashire , WN3 4EU 18.00 to 19.30 Denise Bradshaw 01942 405793 South West Fri 13 June National Waterways Museum , Gloucester Docks, Llanthony Warehouse, The Docks, Gloucester GL1 2EH 08.30 to 10.00 Karen Morphet 01452 318008 South West Fri 13 June The Bear Hotel, Market Place, Devizes, Wiltshire SN10 1HS 17.30 to 19.00 Karen Morphet 01452 318008 East Midlands Wed 9 July Nottingham Sailing Club, Adbolton Lane, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 5AS 08.30 to 10.00 Tracey Parkin 01636 675731 East Midlands Wed 9 July The Elms Hotel, London Road , Retford, Nottinghamshire DN22 7DX 17.30 to 19.00 Tracey Parkin 01636 675731 London Fri 18 July Lea Valley Village Youth Hostel, Cheshunt , Herts EN8 08.30 to 10.00 Harriet Henniker-Major 0207 985 7205 London Fri 18 July London Canal Museum , 12-13 New Wharf Road , London N1 9RT 17.30 to 19.00 Harriet Henniker-Major 0207 985 7205 West Midlands Tues 22 July Hatton Meeting Rooms, Canal Lane , Hatton, Warwick , CV35 7JL 08.30 to 10.00 Carol Collinge 01827 252031 West Midlands Tues 22 July Chasewater Innovation Centre, Chasewater Country Park , Pool Road , Brownhills, Staffordshire WS8 7NL 17.30 to 19.00 Carol Collinge 01827 252031 Wales & Border Counties Thurs 24 July Rudyard Lake Visitor Centre, Leek, Staffordshire ST13 8XB 10.30 to 12.00 Veronica Gordon 01606 723802 Wales & Border Counties Thurs 24 July Doddington Lodge, Doddington Road , Whitchurch SY13 1EN 17.30 to 19.00 Veronica Gordon 01606 723802 Yorkshire Tues 29 July The Pastures Lodge & Hotel, Pastures Road , Mexborough , S64 0JJ 09.00 to 10.30 Linzi O'Neill 0113 281 6861 Yorkshire Tues 29 July East Riddlesden Hall, Bradford Road , Keighley, West Yorkshire , BD20 5EL 17.30 to 19.00 Linzi O'Neill 0113 281 6861 South East Thurs 31 July The Boat Inn, Stoke Bruerne, Nr Towcester, Northamptonshire , NN12 7SB 8.30 to 10.00 Chris Stanley 01908 302552 South East Thurs 31 July The Mill House Banbury, North Newington Road, North Newington , Banbury, Oxfordshire , OX15 6AA 17.30 to 19.00 Chris Stanley 01908 302552 Scotland Wed 6 August The Maple Court Hotel , 12 Ness Walk, Inverness , IV3 5SQ 17.30 to 19.00 Frances Mimnagh 0141 354 7534 Scotland Thurs 7 August Best Western Park Hotel, Camelon Road , Falkirk, Stirlingshire , FK1 5RY 08.30 to 10.00 Frances Mimnagh 0141 354 7534 Jonathan Bryant . 14 May 2008

Nothing to do with BW, Its Thrupp CC and surely with all the money they have they could afford a mower with a grass box on it. Your lucky up your end of the oxford. They don't actually do any hedge cutting on our part of the moorings as we have our own gardens and do all our own maintenance but further up the moorings and the rest of the tow path, they leave thawns etc all over the path, not nice for dog walkers and cyclists. When BWB used to have more staff on line they were brilliant and would clear all cuttings into little piles and burn them.

If you are ever in this area, you could come and meet Rose, she loves to talk about their boating days. Wendy The Obituary was not written by a professional but by a aquantance of Jack and Rose and I think Catherine did a JOLLY GOOD JOB.

Waterways World will only post his Obituary, as long as it is not sent to any other magazines I don't think that the others are so fussy. Which would you choose to get an Obituare printed in? Wendy

Obituary: JACK SKINNER, canal boatman, 1919–2008 John Thomas (Jack) Skinner was born on 19 August 1919 into the close-knit community of boatpeople who earned their living transporting freight along the canals of the south Midlands. From a cottage in the canalside village of Braunston in Northamptonshire, Jack was taken on board his parents’ boat at the age of three weeks and spent the rest of his life on or by the water. From his parents (John William Skinner and Ada, née Monk), Jack could trace his boating ancestry back more than 200 years. The Monk dynasty was founded by Thomas Monk of Dudley, one of the first canal carriers and boat builders (after whom the traditional narrowboats were named ‘monkey boats’). At least three generations of Skinners before Jack – his father John, grandfather Abel (based in Fisher Row, Oxford), and great-grandfather Samuel – had plied their trade on the Oxford Canal. His uncle and aunt, Joe and Rose Skinner, ran the last mule-drawn narrowboat (Friendship) on the Oxford Canal; but when, in 1946, Jack married Rose Hone (herself a member of a long-established canal family), the young couple began their married life on a boat fitted with a Bolinder engine. In their early married life, Jack and Rose lived and worked on Kent and the butty boat Forget-Me-Not, delivering coal from collieries in Warwickshire to the canal wharf at Juxon Street in Jericho, Oxford, and the power station by the Thames in Osney. Barlow’s, the carrying company, paid them 3/9d per ton, which amounted to about £6 for a full load. The round trip took two weeks, and they were not paid for the week in which they returned empty. According to Jack, ‘It was a hard life. We used to work 16 or 17 hours a day, seven days a week, every day except Christmas Day. Many’s the time we set off before dawn and finished in the dark.’ Their first child was born in the winter of 1947, and they went on to raise three more children on the boat. Rose later recalled ‘You needed eyes in the back of your head’, but from the age of eight the children were trusted to steer the boats and helped their parents in many other ways. Although coal was their staple cargo, the Skinners carried everything from timber to corned beef. During World War II Jack even transported a top-priority consignment of nitroglycerine, which he and his mate delivered through 153 locks up the Grand Union Canal from Brentford to Birmingham. (‘We did it in 63 hours, without stopping – kept going through the night, with a paraffin lamp on the front of the boat. There was enough in one of those bottles to blow up Birnigum with! That put years on me that did!’) By the mid-1950s the Oxford Canal, which had been losing trade to the road haulage business since the war, was silting up for lack of regular dredging. There was talk of closing it, and public opposition was voiced at a protest meeting held in Oxford Town Hall on 3 June 1955, chaired by the poet John Betjeman. By this time Jack and Rose, on Redshank and Greenshank, were working for Willow Wren, a small independent carrying company. Jack recalled the epic journey that he and Rose undertook to prove that the canal was still navigable: ‘We put our heads together and decided the best way to save the canal was to prove that it could still carry traffic. So we brought 50 tons of coal from Nuneaton to Juxon’s wharf for Morrell’s Brewery. We did all right till we got to Dolly’s Hut [The Anchor Inn at Aristotle Lane]. The water there was very shallow, because the kids had thrown rubbish into it. We had to bowhaul the butty through [drag it along with a rope from the towpath], but we did it!’ In 1963 the Skinners moved to a cottage on the canal bank in Kidlington, and Jack got a job with the British Waterways Board, maintaining locks. In 1967 he helped to save the Oxford Canal from closure a second time. Treasury officials had recommended closing it down and filling it in, arguing that it was no longer commercially viable. Jack was asked to take Barbara Castle, the Minister of Transport, on a fact-finding trip from Thrupp to Lower Heyford. He took the precaution of going out the night before and getting the co-operation of the lock keepers en route, to ensure that there would be enough water in the pounds to give the impression that there was more water in the near-derelict canal than there actually was. ‘She never knew the difference – and it done the trick’, he recalled with pride many years later. Mrs Castle decided to save the canal, ultimately securing enough subsidy to keep open 1,400 miles of commercially non-viable canals for pleasure cruising. Everyone who now enjoys fishing in the Oxford Canal, or cruising on it, or walking along the towpath should remember with gratitude Jack Skinner and the trick that he played on the Minister of Transport. Jack died on 28 April 2008 at the age of 88. At his funeral service, tribute was paid to ‘the dapper man in the trilby hat, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of all things concerning canals … a man not afraid of hard work … a man not to be trifled with, who would do anything for his family’. He is survived by his wife Rose and their four children. Catherine Robinson 12 May 2008 (authorised by Mrs Rose Skinner) © Catherine Robinson 2008 12 Hayfield Road, Oxford, OX2 6TT catherine.m.robinson@homecall.co.uk

It has 2x 15 amp and 2x 20amp fuses in it, the blade ones they had started to melt

No its still a problem, every time I start the engine I have to take the board off and touch 2 parts of alternator with wire, to get the light to go out, bit of a pain but have got used to it now! Chris was great though, coming all this was to have a look for me. The last week or so, with all this nice weather the solar panels have been doing great. My greed TV does not help! Thanks for asking, Wendy

One way to eliminate the fact there is a hole in the hull somewhere is to put some food dye in the water all along the hull, on the outside, (both sides) and see if it comes in. If it doesn't, that will at least put your mind at rest. Wendy

Trouble is I have one of the camping washing machines that you can get a double quilt cover in and don't think that the one that you are on about is big enough? Could you say what sort of amount of washing it can cope with please. Wendy

WHATS HAPPENING for the second time now my spin dryer has blown all 4 fuses in my 600watt inverter. the spinner is only 350w, engine running at the same time and the only other thing I have on at the same time is a dab radio. Took the spinner apart the last time it happened and everything looked fine, ie nice clean connections etc. Anybody got any ideas, its not been used that much but out of guarantee now. Wendy

The trouble with putting things like jam, sugar water etc to kill them, is the fact that it attracts them to it. As far as I know, they are good for pollonating plants. I could not believe that I actually got stung by one this year, in the middle of March I just put some vinegar on the sting and it hardly hurt. I don't believe in killing them though.

One of the boats came past our moorings today, still had grass cuttings all over the side, probably got baked on in the heat.

I was up at Thrupp the other day and noticed some boats on the visitor moorings had loads of grass cuttings, all over the sides of their boats. This happened to me years ago and it was a hell of a job getting the grass off, I don't suppose the boat owners would have been very happy, if they had just had their boat painted. Wonder why TCC don't use mowers that have grass boxes on them.

I can't find this zoom feature you are on about, on my laptop?

Are those prices for a lt ? Does anyone know how much diesel and petrol costs a gallon in the States?

I think you will be very lucky if you can find a mooring like that at that price for a 70ft boat. for example 60ft boat here, towpath mooring and no hookup, costs over £1700pa. Unless you can find a friendly farmer to let you moor on their land, Good Luck Wendy

And nor is Tim & Di.

The new contract and conditions, is probably a way of getting rid of a lot of their mooring wardens.

Years ago a boat arrived on our moorings and we got chatting, as you do, to the guy yhat was on it. A couple of days later I noticed the old bill on the opposite side of the canal, hiding behind bushes etc and then suddenly a whole load of coppers decended on this boat. Got told the boat had been stolen from up north, anyway although one of the coppers said that he had driven a boat before, asked me if I would go up as far as Thrupp lift bridge with them. So off we went, he haden't told me his previous experiance was on a speed boat, he went off like the clappers, I was saying to him, SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN, he said, I know what I'm doing Needles to say we got to Thrupp in minutes.

http://towpathpress.users.btopenworld.com/Mewmories.htm Hope this link works Wendy

Thanks Nick but I seem to remember it being cream and White but it might of been changed since we saw it at Braunston show. Wendy