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Victorian Iron Butties


Anvil_1896

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Hi all, I'm brand new to this so hope I'm doing it right. We've just bought a narrowboat that is from 1896, at least thats when the two (hand-roller) iron sterns were put together for it to transport coal around Birmingham somewhere. I'm really keen to get some more information about our boat and learn her 123 year old history! Any suggestions for places/sources of this sort of info? Thanks in advance!

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14 minutes ago, Anvil_1896 said:

Hi all, I'm brand new to this so hope I'm doing it right. We've just bought a narrowboat that is from 1896, at least thats when the two (hand-roller) iron sterns were put together for it to transport coal around Birmingham somewhere. I'm really keen to get some more information about our boat and learn her 123 year old history! Any suggestions for places/sources of this sort of info? Thanks in advance!

Confusingly there are two converted B.C.N. day boats now named ANVIL, one being a 60' with a welded steel counter stern and index number 47120 and the other being a little shorter but retaining is original pointed stern and index number 53599 - so which is your ANVIL (I suspect the latter) :captain:

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If it is the one with the dark green wooden cabin top with the ponty stern, it has spent the last few years down here on the eastern end of the K&A as a CCing liveaboard.  

 

Disappeared from here two or three months ago, put up for sale, so I gather from the towpath telegraph. 

 

 

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9 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

If it is the one with the dark green wooden cabin top with the ponty stern, it has spent the last few years down here on the eastern end of the K&A as a CCing liveaboard.  

 

Disappeared from here two or three months ago, put up for sale, so I gather from the towpath telegraph. 

This is the ANVIL I am suspecting the OP has, partly based upon it being advertised for sale on Apollo Duck 29 August 2019 which included a build date of 1896. I first recorded seeing this ANVIL on 22 September 2002 near Bradford on Avon :captain:

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Being pedantic, by the way, it is not a "butty".  A butty is an unpowered narrow boat designed to work as a pair with a powered one.  Your boat of course pre-dates the powered boats, so it was a horse boat, not a "butty", and it is doubtful it ever worked as a true butty.

 

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On 07/11/2019 at 10:44, pete harrison said:

This is the ANVIL I am suspecting the OP has, partly based upon it being advertised for sale on Apollo Duck 29 August 2019 which included a build date of 1896. I first recorded seeing this ANVIL on 22 September 2002 near Bradford on Avon :captain:

Was that the boat moored near my boat at Sheepwash, when I first met you Pete?

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8 hours ago, David Schweizer said:

Was that the boat moored near my boat at Sheepwash, when I first met you Pete?

No. The boat I saw tied by you was the stern of an F.M.C. Ltd. motor with an iron B.C.N. day boat as a fore end, named AQUARIUS. I saw ANVIL between Bradford on Avon and Hilperton a month later :captain:

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12 hours ago, alan_fincher said:

Being pedantic, by the way, it is not a "butty".  A butty is an unpowered narrow boat designed to work as a pair with a powered one.  Your boat of course pre-dates the powered boats, so it was a horse boat, not a "butty", and it is doubtful it ever worked as a true butty.

 

Thanks alan_fincher, I think we've jumped in the deep end a bit by getting this boat. It's definitely useful to know the correct terms. Is it just a horse boat then? What would you call it now?

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12 minutes ago, Anvil_1896 said:

Thanks alan_fincher, I think we've jumped in the deep end a bit by getting this boat. It's definitely useful to know the correct terms. Is it just a horse boat then? What would you call it now?

Converted horse boat...
Converted BCN boat...

Converted day boat... ???

Possibly adding "motorised".

Anything really that reflects what it is ....  Just not "butty".

 

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10 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

"Motorised butty"....

 

 

You're just being awkward aren't you Mike...  ??

 

Anvil_1896, ignore Mike he likes to make mischief! ? whether motorised or not, your boat is NOT a butty! 

Edited by magpie patrick
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2 hours ago, magpie patrick said:

You're just being awkward aren't you Mike...  ??

 

Anvil_1896, ignore Mike he likes to make mischief! ? whether motorised or not, your boat is NOT a butty! 

Haha thanks magpie patrick! It's good to know either way. Back to the history though, is it fairly common for people to know/be able to find out the history of their boats? I was wondering whether any canal museums might have information worth looking through. 

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4 minutes ago, Anvil_1896 said:

Haha thanks magpie patrick! It's good to know either way. Back to the history though, is it fairly common for people to know/be able to find out the history of their boats? I was wondering whether any canal museums might have information worth looking through. 

The poster of #9 probably knows more about the history of any individual boat than all the museums combined.  However, he is rather shy! ?

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17 hours ago, alan_fincher said:

Being pedantic, by the way, it is not a "butty".  A butty is an unpowered narrow boat designed to work as a pair with a powered one.  Your boat of course pre-dates the powered boats, so it was a horse boat, not a "butty", and it is doubtful it ever worked as a true butty.

 

Being really really really pedantic a butty is a narrow boat that works with another narrow boat , motor powered or horse drawn.    Both the Grand Junction and the Oxford canal were worked by one-horse pairs.  Two boats, one hoss.  Each boat buttied the other, so both were butties.

As for having been built as butties, and certainly the GU built butties, but it would be hard to argue that a boat built to work as half of a one horse pair was not also built as a butty.

 

The OP's boat however was not built as a butty!

 

N

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But some boats, built as horse boats before motor boats were about, were later used with motors as butties. And some boats, built as open day boats, were later fitted with proper butty cabins and used in pairs with motors. Perfectly reasonable to call these butties.

And since nobody has yet come up with any more info about the history of the OP's boat, we don't actually know whether it was ever used as the unpowered half of a motor and butty pair.

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20 minutes ago, David Mack said:

And since nobody has yet come up with any more info about the history of the OP's boat, we don't actually know whether it was ever used as the unpowered half of a motor and butty pair.

I would be very prepared to bet substantial money it never has been!

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1 hour ago, David Mack said:

And since nobody has yet come up with any more info about the history of the OP's boat, we don't actually know whether it was ever used as the unpowered half of a motor and butty pair.

So the next step regarding ANVIL's history will be establishing where the date 1896 has come from. As this is a rather specific date can the new owner substantiate this in the form of a B.C.N. gauge plate and gauge number. For the owners benefit this will be a cast iron plate about 12 inches long and about 4 inches deep riveted longditudenally in the fore end or stern end or both of the hull. Cast into the plate(s) will be the letters BCN and below with be a number, and it is this number we need.

 

There were 683 boats gauged by the B.C.N. Company in 1896, and about half of these were re-gaugings of older boats. Of the 683 boats gauged in 1896 65 are described as open iron (cabinless) and no more than 11 are described as cabin iron - with everything else being wooden.

 

I also think it highly unlikely that ANVIL was ever part of a motor / butty pairing, although it is possible that it might have been pulled by a tug as well as a horse / man :captain: 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 09/11/2019 at 16:00, pete harrison said:

So the next step regarding ANVIL's history will be establishing where the date 1896 has come from. As this is a rather specific date can the new owner substantiate this in the form of a B.C.N. gauge plate and gauge number. For the owners benefit this will be a cast iron plate about 12 inches long and about 4 inches deep riveted longditudenally in the fore end or stern end or both of the hull. Cast into the plate(s) will be the letters BCN and below with be a number, and it is this number we need.

 

There were 683 boats gauged by the B.C.N. Company in 1896, and about half of these were re-gaugings of older boats. Of the 683 boats gauged in 1896 65 are described as open iron (cabinless) and no more than 11 are described as cabin iron - with everything else being wooden.

 

I also think it highly unlikely that ANVIL was ever part of a motor / butty pairing, although it is possible that it might have been pulled by a tug as well as a horse / man :captain: 

Thanks for this. I'm going down to the boat this weekend so will have a look from it. Where did you get the information about the BCN productions? Sounds like a really interesting source!

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1 hour ago, Anvil_1896 said:

Thanks for this. I'm going down to the boat this weekend so will have a look from it. Where did you get the information about the BCN productions? Sounds like a really interesting source!

If by 'BCN productions' you mean the details and statistics about boats gauged in 1896 then the original source will be the B.C.N. Company gauge registers. These are paper based ledgers with each containing 200 separate gauge tables - 1 for each boat, and there were about 26000 boats captured within them. Thousands of gauge tables (12371 to be precise) were removed when the B.C.N. Company carried out a review between 1895 and 1906, leaving us with sketchy details pre-1895 but complete from that point onward - and these are what is contained in the B.C.N. Company gauge registers that are available today.

 

As somebody who dabbles in 'historic' boat research I went through the process of constructing a Microsoft Access database of B.C.N. Company gauge registers almost 20 years ago, and it contains fairly comprehensive details for every available table (other Canal Company gauge details have been added since). It is this database that I used to compile the figures above :captain: 

 

edit = remove irrelevant information. 

Edited by pete harrison
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54 minutes ago, pete harrison said:

As somebody who dabbles in 'historic' boat research I went through the process of constructing a Microsoft Access database of B.C.N. Company gauge registers almost 20 years ago, and it contains fairly comprehensive details for every available table (other Canal Company gauge details have been added since). It is this database that I used to compile the figures above :captain: 

 

 

Which is kept down the back of the sofa on post-it notes! ?

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Having spent the last phase of my IT career up to my retirement in 2016 earning a living out of Microsoft Access databases and related programming, I can assert that none of them were kept on post-it notes. A computer was the essential storage medium. I trust that Pete Harrison will preserve his database for posterity, I'm sure he'll be aware that the technology still exists to do so.

 

Three years ago I gave up work so as to have more time to go boating, a decision I've never regretted.

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