Pluto

Your wish is my command!

Since Covid, there seems to be more large charities looking for volunteers, and this has made it difficult for smaller charities, who cannot afford to pay mileage or other 'benefits'. The L&LC Society is certainly finding it difficult to find volunteers for helping with our short boat Kennet. This could be because we travel the full length of the canal so have no specific summer mooring. Over winter it is too cold to open up the exhibitions on board. We are looking for volunteers as most of our current ones have been involved for ten years or more, and are now into their mid-70s, so we are looking for volunteers a little younger. If anyone is interested, look at our Kennet page on our website - https://www.leedsandliverpoolcanalsociety.co.uk/friends-of-kennet/ - and there are contact details on the page. It is a good way to find out more about the canal's history, and what it is like to sail on a proper traditional wide boat.

It certainly looks like one.

As there were no takers, this is the Ivel Navigation, Clifton Lock, taken on 27-6-1961 Not a canal but lots of canalboats. The photo was taken by Geoff Wheat in 1966 and was titled simply Hull - but which dock?

You need to be further south, but only a little.

I have bumped this up as it was not easily seen in my previous post

Correct. It is a bit more overgrown now, and the road bridge and rail bridge abutments seem to have disappeared. The change seems to have happened by 1990, when this view in the opposite direction was taken. Here is one from Gordon Biddle's collection, taken in 1961.

Telegraph poles appeared along the L&LC between Liverpool and Leigh after an agreement was made with the UK Electric Telegraph Company. The line continued down the Bridgewater to Manchester. The photo shows one of Appleby's boats heading out of Liverpool, probably with a load of grain.

I promise this is in the UK! The railway bridge abutments in the distance signify one reason this bit of canal was built. I took the photo in 1975.

The firm was originally called Toyoda and made hand looms. They sent one son to England to study textile machine making with Platt Bros of Oldham in the mid-1920s. He developed an automatic loom, and the money made from the patent income allowed them to establish a car factory.

Buy a horse?

The idea of a Volga-Don Canal dates back many years, as seem in the pdf below, translated from an 1841 German book on Russian Canals. The most successful attempt was by the Englishman Captain Perry circa 1700, and he went on to build the first Volga-Baltic canal at Vyshny Volochek. I have an interesting German video looking at the lower Danube, where they interview a couple of men who were in the force labour building the Constanta Canal. A memorial has been erected to the many who died. In Russia, forced labour was used to build the Baltic-White Sea Canal and the (new) Moscow Canal in the 1920s and '30s. Many of those who built the former were sent via the first Gulag, which used a 16th century fortified monastery on the Solovki Island in the White Sea. The monks had already built a canal system on the island, part of which was used for navigation in the 19th century. A British-built steam launch - the hull still survives just - was used for towing rafts of logs. 1841 Stuckenberg Beschreibung, English.pdf

They were used on wide boats and were fitted in the front corners of the hold. They could be placed at an angle, depending upon the cargo. The central mast, known as the ludget on the L&LC, was usually used for holding the boat forward in locks. Cleats were provided on the towpath side of the balance beams for this use.

Concern about trespass on canal property comes up in the minutes of the L&LC Co several times, going back at least to the 1860s. In 1911 there was a mass trespass of 600 people when the Company tried to close the footpath around Foulridge Lower Reservoir. The three 'ring leaders' were prosecuted. I have attached an 1891 notice which from the Bradford Archives includes trespass.

It could be because it was more difficult to build the foundations. Extending the chamber walls could have required inserting piles, while excavating the upper end could have created a solid foundation or the shorter piles to build on would have been cheaper.

I can recommend Cliffe Castle Museum in Keighley. It is an extravagant millowner's house, with displays showing a couple of rooms, plus local industrial history, stuffed birds and animals, local geology etc. The café is excellent.

The Waterways Archive is at Ellesmere Port, https://collections.canalrivertrust.org.uk/home.

This is from 1882-1910 vessels weighed at Castleford. Waterways Archive BW91/7/1/16

Water leakage is not a new problem, with the following dating from a L&LC report on the Rufford line in 1801: Rufford Lock gates both top and bottom are nearly new and also the paddles, but the masonry is leaky, as the water gets into the walls when filled and passes through the backing and round the hollow coins and out at the lock tails. Baldwin Lock gates are nearly new and in good repair except the breast of one gate which was broken by a vessel running violently against it. The masonry work is in leaky and shattered, and part of the ground that backs the locks has been washed away partly by the waster and partly by the water that gets through the lock wall.

A vibrating flat plate is not the way to make a watertight puddle. It needs to be cut up and chopped at the same time as compacting to make a homogeneous layer about 150mm thick, and then built up with similar layers.. However, it does depend upon the quality of the clay, judging by the engineer's reports given during the construction of some canals. Compacting is something modern civil engineering is very poor at, judging by the number of road works which end up after a few months with sunken sections of tarmac.

I would expect wooden lock floors to be used where there was no solid foundation. The method was used across the Low Countries, and in many coastal areas, with the photo showing the reconstruction of one of the locks at Stade, in north Germany. The Yorkshire end of the L&LC has several examples, with River Lock in Leeds being illustrated. Where a lock was to be built on unstable land, a wooden frame was built fitted over a series of wooden piles. The stone or brick lock sides were then built on top of this platform. Any serious ground water was accommodated by culverts to lead the water away. I have just come across a contemporary description of this in the engineering reports for the construction of the Lancaster Canal. Voids behind lock walls can be attributed to ground water, but leakage from the upper canal level is also a problem. To protect against this, canal builders would use either a series of wooden piles or a puddle wall at right angles to the chamber wall, usually from around the quoin. An additional 'modern' problem is that building development around a canal will have altered ground water flows, and these flows will not have been fully recognised. Such things happened when canals were built, such as the drying up of wells in Foulridge when the L&LC was built. One old canal employee told me, 'You have to remember that water has narrow shoulders, it can get in anywhere.'

Alan Holden, who got Roger to build her, took her just about everywhere on the system, including tidal sections, and all with a 10hp single cylinder engine. The prop was right up to the rudder so easy to get at witgout a weed hatch. There was a good run to the propellor, though not as good as on my boat.

They could build something like Anna, which has more useful space than a narrow boat of the same length. Unfortunately, it would cost more to build.

I would agree that it can be difficult to instal windows on a traditional canal wide boat, but the space inside is far more useful than a narrow boat. The traditional cabin fills the bow, while the engine can be right at the back, so there is much more useful living space than on a narrow boat. My short boat had the propellor behind the sternpost, and though that meant you had to be careful steering, particularly in reverse and in locks, it was very easy to clear anything from the propellor. No need for restricted access through a hole on the counter. I would say that traditional wide boats make better conversions than narrow boats, though I don't think much of the wide boats built for canals today.

Yes, it was a very efficient service from the 1870s to the First World War. Around 1880, the Lancs & Yorks Rly were laying staff off in Burnley because the canal had taken part of their traffic.