Pluto

Built under licence? This is a Yorkshire firm you're talking about! They wouldn't go spending money just like that, especially for what is really an inferior design to theirs. Widdops produced a wide range of engines, most of which would have been to big for canal boats. The schooner Result, at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, has a five IIRC cylinder one. If anyone is interested, I can provide copies of two 1930s Widdop catalogues, 32 and 24 page A5 for £4-00 if you PM me.

One of the best books describing work in the Bristol Channel is The Last of the Sailing Coasters by Edmund Eglinton, published 1982, ISBN 011290336. He worked on trows, including one operated for the Weston, Cleveland & Portishead Railway whose wharf was only reachable on certain tides.

I would have thought the warehouse would make an excellent conversion to at restaurant of some sort, where boats passing would be looked on as a benefit. There are too many canalside housing developments where, once people have moved in to the houses, they start to complain about boats and mooring. And why do people like canals, if not for the wealth of heritage structures along them, with more rural sections in between built up areas. If you don't complain and raise your worries about the number of new buildings being erected, canals could end up as linear housing developments.

Not quite right, as on the L&LC many rings used to have a short metal bar attached freely to the ring. You only had to pass the doubled up loop of a rope through the ring and then pass the loop over the bar, and attach the other unfastened end of the rope as normal to your boat. The system is almost as easy as using a bollard as it does away with the need to pass a long length of rope through the eye. Unfortunately, not many have survived and few people realise what they are.

Conor If you go to my web pages, http://www.mikeclarke.myzen.co.uk/canals.htm there is some background material on the development of canals. With regard to railway competition, it was canals built during the Canal Mania of the 1790s which tended to be those which were bought out and declined in the mid-nineteenth century. The earlier waterways were generally much more successful and were able to compete with railways. The L&LC were giving such good service that the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway were laying staff off at Burnley because the canal had taken their trade. I don't have much on the Stroudwater, but the following notes were made from the Gentleman's Magazine, which occasionally had articles of canal interest. April 1760, pp167-168 Improvements and savings in inland navigation exemplified on the River Stroud, in the County of Gloucester. Machine invented by Bridge of Tewkesbury, description of crane for moving containers, 6-8 or more per boat, between similar boats on sections of canal above and below mills. Reported b Joseph Tucker of Gloucester. June 1760, pp263-265 Comments by Ferd. Stratford on the Dean of Gloucester’s remarks on the above method of navigation. As to leakage of lock gates when the workmanship is well executed, the lock gates will hardly leak a hogshead in twenty four hours. Good water-tight locks are frequent in the French artificial navigations, as are also those executed in Holland, etc. ‘Tis a pity that in England, we have examples of so many ill constructed locks, subject to great leakage, probably the advocates of the new scheme have only seen those leaky locks.

Probably because of the time he spent at Accrington Grammar School.

If you go to Burscough, you can still go to the Boatmen's Mission Chapel which is now on New Lane. It's the last boatmen's mission still in use as a place of worship.

According to a canal boat builder I know, apprenticed at a wooden boat building yard in the 1940s, a barge has to have a moulded breadth of more than fourteen feet, anything under is a boat.

Because they were illegal. There are/were byelaws which controlled the type of shaft used on most canals as anything with too sharp an end could damage the clay puddle. IIRC, the end has/had to have at least a six inch diameter end. A forked end would be fine on a natural waterway, but could cause leaks on one that was man-made.

The Leeds & Liverpool Canal Society will be taking the heritage short boat Kennet, as we have done for the last couple of years. We are usually moored on Springs Branch, with the boat and displays in the hold open to the public each day. Come along and join the society and the Friends of Kennet who look after the boat. We also intend taking the boat to Blackburn in June to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the opening of the canal from Clayton to Blackburn, and to the Leeds Waterway Festival in July.

Landing craft certainly used the canal in 1942, with LCM 905 travelling westward in October and LCM 291 travelling eastward in November. They caused considerable upset as they seemed to create 12 to 15 inches of wash which closed Nelson Power Station, flooded Hodsons boatyard, and broke mooring lines elsewhere in East Lancs. The naval officer undertaking the trial thought that each boat needed an officer, four crew and two mechanics - but then East Lancashire and West Yorkshire were unmarked territory to the navy.

It could have been reported in Waterways, the BW house magazine. They have full sets inn the archives at Gloucester and Ellesmere Port.

I have a copy of this one which shows Suttons WARRIOR in front of the slips at Mayors new dockyard at Tarleton. It is probably late 1930s or later as the yard originally only had the lefthand slip, the righthand one being added some time after the yard was moved from the tidal Douglas c1930. Warrior was L&LC steamer No 43, and sold to Suttons around 1921 when the L&LC stopped carrying. She was sold back to the company in 1946 for use as a bank boat. The brick building extreme left was originally a railway office when the site was used for transhipping goods between rail and water. There was a third end-on slip on the right which used a steam powered deck winch which was worked by compressed air. I think it has only recently been removed.

The boats in the first two photos probably belong to Suttons, who moored their boats by the swing bridge at Tarleton. Amongst other things, they were the contractors for building and maintaining the training walls on the Ribble in the early 1900s when the Port of Preston was being developed. They used old L&LC boats and old Mersey flats for the trade, bringing stone down from quarries near the canal in the Douglas Valley. On the tidal river, tthe boats were usually towed by a L&LC-type steamer after the canal company gave up carrying in 1921. The lowering mast was used principally for unloading in the estuary from that time, but they must have had sails earlier. The boat on the right may not be one of Suttons, but could be a manure boat or a coal boat. Around 1900 IIRC about 80,000 tons of street sweepings and night soil were brought out of Liverpool annually, down from its maximum tonnage of c150,000 tons around 1880. This traffic survived until the 1950s, the manure being used to improve the agricultural land in West Lancashire. I certainly have one photo of manure being delivered by the swing bridge at Tarleton. I have three or four other photos of Suttons boats which I copied 30 or more years ago. I can't remember where the originals were, and would love to find them as they all show good quality L&LC painting in the West Lancashire style. The ones I have certainly look to be from the same collections as yours. The final photo is of the old Mayor's boatyard at Tarleton. This was on the tidal river about 200 yards below the current lock. It was on the site of the old Douglas Navigation half-tide lock, which was only in use for 20 or 30 years around 1760. There was also a wharf there where coal and other cargoes were transferred between river barges and coastal flats. The lock house and wharf house from Douglas Navigation times, c1750, are still there. The boatyard moved in the early 1930s after the branch railway down to the wharf above Tarleton Lock was closed, the boatyard incorporating a brick railway building and using railway line for the slips. The boat, 127, was originally the EAGLE in the L&LC fleet. Numbers were used from c1904 onwards. I have a similar photo of 260 on the slip at Tarleton, but viewed from the other end. I dated this to c1910 from the old boatyard account book which Harry Leyland had. I copied some of it and will try to did it out. Please can I have good quality scans!

You're on the southern Lancaster Canal which was not built as deep as the L&LC, and always had water shortage problems until supplied by the L&LC from 1816. Its main source of supply was pumping from collieries. Ice could block bywashes and this will restrict the water coming down from the summit as excess water would then flow through overflows into streams passing under the canal rather than down the canal. Usually the level of such overflows is slightly higher than bywashes around locks which allows excess water to feed down the canal rather than run to waste. Water does expand when it freezes, but I think that below -4 it starts to contract. Water is a rather unusual fluid in that respect.

Who were the boat families living there then? I remember Fred. His wife and her parents were also there - I have a recollection of her father almost perpetually leaning on his brush, and was it Joe Hollinshead on Effingham? He had a speech impediment and, as Charlie Atkins would say, liked 'tottages'. The stop lock only had one gate then, bent over at the top by Anderton boats trying to get through when there could be several inches difference in levels. It was at the time of the Bridgewater breach. They did seem to move around between Anderton and Preston Brook from time to time, even if just to charge their batteries. When turning Mendip around, Charlie would insist that I came with him through the tunnel and back - I eventually realised that I was just extra ballast to keep the counter down. He always wanted to hang a lighted candle in a jam jar down one of the airshafts in summer, just to see if it would stop boats going through.

It's actually 93E. I have a similar photo taken in 1980, the location being on Dublin's Ring Canal towards the western end. The CIE had several E boats fitted with caravans for living aboard. I think it's Parderry. I think it is the Agnes. I have a photo of her in Waterloo Dock, Liverpool, in 1975. You're right if it is Snipe. I seem to remember she went back in the water after the aqueduct had been rebuilt for the electrification of the West Coast mainline which was 1971/2. I think she was ready for service that year, so the Bedford van in the background could have been mine, though I don't remember one of that colour. A note added to say that the Hegaro is on Beverley Beck.

Thanks for the link, there is a photo of my old boat before I boat her. I suspect the Manchester and Preston Brook photos are c1968.

Sam Yates, who ended up doing all the detail painting at Whitebirk boatyard in the 1950s/60s, told me earlier this year that he had just spent a few afternoons with an old chap who was once a professional grainer so that he could learn more about the craft. He had previously suggested to me that L&LC cabins were grained more to hide cheap construction methods, such as lack of quality mitre joints. The actual work was well and competently done, but done to a price. He could produce good quality oak and mahogany graining, as that was what was used on the cabins, but was interested to learn about how to reproduce other timber finishes. There was probably a difference between Lancashire and Yorkshire cabins, in that varnished wood survived until comparatively recently in Yorkshire. Varnish also featured on Yorkshire hulls, possibly because it made selling poor quality wood and work more difficult. It is amazing what a bit of putty and paint will cover.

Eyes closed and hands in pockets, just like Hugh.

My friend Charles Berg has just sent me a copy of a CD he has created of all the various types of boat operating on French waterways. It is really excellent. You can get a copy at http://projetbabel.org/fluvial/niouz-29_CDrom_bateaux.htm where they cost 15€, though he might want a little more for postage. The website is also worth looking at as it is, in part, a history of French canals. Charles has been interested in canals for many years, and has produced some excellent, French-style, cartoon books about canal history, particularly the development of locks, as well as more conventional ones, and he has made French canal history more accessible for children - of all ages.

I seem to remember being told that some Clayton boats carried battery radios in the 40s and/or 50s. As soon as they tied up, the shaft would be erected partway along the deck for the aerial wire to be strung over it, the whole family then disappearing into the cabin to listen. The batteries were charged at radio shops at either end of their journey. Charlie Atkins had a portable tv when living on Mendip at Preston Brook. Although I think much tv is puerile, it was interesting to see how it opened up the world to people like Charlie who had difficulty reading, or even just accessing reading material.