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Fat boats on the North Oxford


Dr Bob

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I enjoy boating on modern boats but also boating on old working boats. There are different challenges involved in moving these but I'm yet to find somewhere I'm not able to navigate. There are tough bits and the occasional bit of infrastructure that doesn't work quite how it should but that is part of the enjoyment for me finding a way to keep going.

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13 minutes ago, frangar said:

Thankfully there are those of us who won’t run away and are prepared to stay and fight for what we enjoy.

 

 

I'd be interested in how you can do that. How can C&RT raise the money to do what is needed ?

I'd be happy to come back on the cut if I knew that the locks worked, there won't be breaches and/or breakdowns every month and we don't drag along the bottom.

 

 

 

13 minutes ago, frangar said:

.................  national trust property. 

 

The NT raise money, have paying members, charging for access and they can run a business.

I'd be happy for the NT to replace C&RT, but it would 'cost' us boaters.

 

It wouldn't be the 'free & easy' system that you know, but it would retain the heritage aspect.

 

The NT income streams :

 

The Trust has an annual income of over £630 million, largely from membership subscriptions, donations and legacies, investments, entrance fees to properties, and profits from its shops and restaurants.

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25 minutes ago, frangar said:

Thankfully there are those of us who won’t run away and are prepared to stay and fight for what we enjoy. If people followed your path we’d have lost the cut in the 60’s...not to mention any form of industrial heritage or national trust property. 

I'm all in favour of that. But I'm 71 and one more major boating expense (or illness) will see me off the cut, and I'm pessimistic enough about it to then go and do other things rather than waste the little time left to me on a lost cause.

But I'd be very glad to be proved wrong, and, as you say, an apparently lost cause was rescued before. So how do you suggest the fight to keep it proceeds? What, practically, can be done?

25 minutes ago, frangar said:

 

 

Edited by Arthur Marshall
Idiot tablet posted it twice.
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5 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

 

I'd be interested in how you can do that. How can C&RT raise the money to do what is needed ?

I'd be happy to come back on the cut if I knew that the locks worked, there won't be breaches and/or breakdowns every month and we don't drag along the bottom.

 

 

 

 

The NT raise money, have paying members, charging for access and they can run a business.

I'd be happy for the NT to replace C&RT, but it would 'cost' us boaters.

 

It wouldn't be the 'free & easy' system that you know, but it would retain the heritage aspect.

 

The NT income streams :

 

The Trust has an annual income of over £630 million, largely from membership subscriptions, donations and legacies, investments, entrance fees to properties, and profits from its shops and restaurants.

But a lot of the NT assets have doors or walls around them which enable them to charge for entry so unless CRT return to the days of locked off towpaths that can't raise funds in the same way.

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3 minutes ago, Rob-M said:

But a lot of the NT assets have doors or walls around them which enable them to charge for entry so unless CRT return to the days of locked off towpaths that can't raise funds in the same way.

How do the finance the Wey?  I think they were pleased to get shot of the Stratford

Edited by ditchcrawler
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20 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

The NT raise money, have paying members, charging for access and they can run a business.

I'd be happy for the NT to replace C&RT, but it would 'cost' us boaters.

 

It wouldn't be the 'free & easy' system that you know, but it would retain the heritage aspect.

 

The NT income streams :

 

The Trust has an annual income of over £630 million, largely from membership subscriptions, donations and legacies, investments, entrance fees to properties, and profits from its shops and restaurants.

I would be happy with a NT type organisation.  Members do get a little bit of input by being able to vote at the AGM.  A lot of their properties you either pay or are member if you want to enter.   Personally I would like this to apply to towpaths but I doubt it would be possible or popular.

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43 minutes ago, Rob-M said:

But a lot of the NT assets have doors or walls around them which enable them to charge for entry so unless CRT return to the days of locked off towpaths that can't raise funds in the same way.

 

 

 

I was recently reading a Sustrans document but unfortunately didn't keep a screen shot of it.

 

Whilst not easy to enforce - Sustrans have told C&RT they even tho' they are funding a lot of tow-path upgrades they have no problem with C&RT introducing a bike licence system.

There is one potential income stream.

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I think that most fail to realise that CRT could make substantial inroads into its maintenance backlog. After all, it has over £1 billion in assets which it could deploy (up from £460m transferred to it in 2012). There is nothing in its grant agreement with Defra which would prevent more than £500m being spent over the remainder of the agreement period.

The problem that CRT has is for years it has been misleading both government and public by producing figures showing that it is both improving the state of its waterways and is providing ever increasing public benefit.

As it is an agreed intention to eradicate or reduce government grant at the end of the current period, a growing non-operational asset portfolio which generates yearly income simply demonstrates to Defra that government does not need to support CRT in the longer term.

With regard to the National Trust, I am sure that it would only take on the waterways subject to an appropriate funding package - either a substantial additional dowry or long term guaranteed grant in aid (or a combination of the two).

That will not happen.

Edited by Allan(nb Albert)
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1 hour ago, frangar said:

Thankfully there are those of us who won’t run away and are prepared to stay and fight for what we enjoy. If people followed your path we’d have lost the cut in the 60’s...not to mention any form of industrial heritage or national trust property. 

Yes we should stay and fight but we aren't winning are we. There needs to be a radical change as the current path is a slippery slope. Maybe Arthur has a point, maybe the NT option would be better who knows. One thing that is certain CaRT are a complete let-down for boaters but a wonderfully successful organisation for cyclists, walkers, developers and sign makers.

 

Edited by Midnight
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2 hours ago, Arthur Marshall said:

Of course it is, it's why I love boating. But it is also cheap and convenient housing, and very probably always was. It's different things to different people, and if it isn't taken out of the museum, it will be just walkers and fishermen left - as was the case with the canal where I grew up. I never knew the things had real boats on them.

It doesn't matter that a few hundred of us love the heritage aspect, nobody else does, certainly not taxpayers, certainly not finance ministers, and certainly not the hundreds who chuck old mattresses and shopping trolleys in. And once diesel engines are banned, there go your hobby working boats.

Not that it matters much, sadly, it's probably past saving already, really. Compare major crises with twenty years ago and it's soon going to simply be unaffordable.

My understanding of the history is that originally the boatmen lived with their families on land and mainly made short day trips with some just bunking down in a small space for longer journeys. When the railways started to make an economic impact the income for boatmen was reduced with a consequential problem over 'paying the rent' and this 'forced' them to take the whole family and live aboard. They also adopted the style of many people in the early stages of the industrial revolution in which whole families were a business -hence the weavers cottages, as an example. The family-on-board lifestyle that is now so romanticised was not at the time seen in that light. Indeed there were various charities, secular and church based, formed to help meet needs of boat people especially in respect of the education of the children. Home schooling was no more popular or effective then than now.

 

Incidentally, in the time when the ability of every family member to contribute to 'the business' it is said that men sought a wife on the basis of the strength of her arm and that there was no room for the luxury of marrying for love! That was for the rich folk. In any case, it was only people with property that went to the bother, and expense, of a proper marriage together with a certificate. 

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I wasn't thinking of the boatmen and their families, living on. I was suggesting that old boats of any sort would probably always have been used as housing by those with no other option, tucked away offside or in backwaters or basins. I have no idea if this was the case - would be interesting to know if any research has been done. There's probably a PhD thesis somewhere or other...

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1 hour ago, Mike Todd said:

My understanding of the history is that originally the boatmen lived with their families on land and mainly made short day trips with some just bunking down in a small space for longer journeys. When the railways started to make an economic impact the income for boatmen was reduced with a consequential problem over 'paying the rent' and this 'forced' them to take the whole family and live aboard. They also adopted the style of many people in the early stages of the industrial revolution in which whole families were a business -hence the weavers cottages, as an example. The family-on-board lifestyle that is now so romanticised was not at the time seen in that light. Indeed there were various charities, secular and church based, formed to help meet needs of boat people especially in respect of the education of the children. Home schooling was no more popular or effective then than now.

 

Incidentally, in the time when the ability of every family member to contribute to 'the business' it is said that men sought a wife on the basis of the strength of her arm and that there was no room for the luxury of marrying for love! That was for the rich folk. In any case, it was only people with property that went to the bother, and expense, of a proper marriage together with a certificate. 

 

Sorry, this statement is not entirely accurate.

I have copies of boaters wedding certificates dating from 1784.

Other dates 1816; 1840; 1869; 1900; 1932; 1937; 1950 et sec.

This is just one family Mrs T and myself have traced going back to 1660.

 

Boaters knew how to have a wedding, most of them did. There was probably no honeymoon as we know it.

Married today, back to work the day after. I have a small selection of boater's wedding photo's in my private collection.

 

You will have to take my word for the above as I am not prepared to put copies of these certificates or photo's on a public forum.

 

It wasn't only paying the rent, the railways undercut the cost of moving cargo and boaters had to cut their costs to compete and could no longer afford property on the bank. Many No 1's also had to sell their boats to the bigger companies to survive.

 

Edited by Ray T
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5 hours ago, Arthur Marshall said:

The sensible approach, should anyone really want the system to survive, would be to dump the whole "heritage" concept and treat it purely as a modern leisure facility, with a minor purpose of affordable housing.

Unlist everything, so modern materials and methods could be used for repairs, park all the pointless "working" boats in a museum and accept that its future (if it has one) is for hobby boaters, liveaboard genuinely cruising CCers, the odd managed linear housing estate and fishermen.

I'll just mention I'd personally rather it was maintained properly in its historical state, but as it isn't going to be, there are choices to be made. There is no money, and there's a lot less coming.

I'm not convinced that would save much, if any, money. The last attempt to modernise was hydraulic paddles and they cost way more than heritage gear to install and maintain. It may be that the odd bridge or lock could be demolished and replaced with concrete but that happens more often than you realise anyway. I'll wager that the two locks that got rebuilt at Marple recently probably cost 10% more than if they'd just been replaced with concrete chambers, but you'd still end up with locks only being rebuilt when they fall apart. 

The big normal maintenance cost that is not being met is dredging, and that's got nothing to do with heritage - it's not as if the have to use steam dredgers for it, and the big abnormal cost is breaches, which seem to crop up at an alarming rate - again the repairs do not need to be heritage sensitive. 

Lock gates could possibly be made of steel, which lasts longer, but that was tried before and I don't think heritage was the reason they dropped it 

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1 minute ago, alias said:

 

There's been a bit of a trend in this area for unoccupied listed buildings that block a developer's profitable plans to catch fire and become unrepairable...

Nothing new. The Port, the day before the building was to be listed.

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1 hour ago, Mike Todd said:

Incidentally, in the time when the ability of every family member to contribute to 'the business' it is said that men sought a wife on the basis of the strength of her arm and that there was no room for the luxury of marrying for love!

As Ray says, boatmen were almost always married with a 'sustificate'. You are correct though on the luxury of marrying for love, and if one of the couple died the remaining partner would have to remarry very quickly to keep going. That's the reason that boatmen's family trees are so difficult to compile - the inter-marriage gets so complicated that they can finish up becoming their own grandpa by reason of marrying their granddaughter as in the old country music song.

 

Tam

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33 minutes ago, Ray T said:

 

Sorry, this statement is not entirely accurate.

I have copies of boaters wedding certificates dating from 1784.

Other dates 1816; 1840; 1869; 1900; 1932; 1937; 1950 et sec.

This is just one family Mrs T and myself have traced going back to 1660.

 

Boaters knew how to have a wedding, most of them did. There was probably no honeymoon as we know it.

Married today, back to work the day after. I have a small selection of boater's wedding photo's in my private collection.

 

You will have to take my word for the above as I am not prepared to put copies of these certificates or photo's on a public forum.

 

It wasn't only paying the rent, the railways undercut the cost of moving cargo and boaters had to cut their costs to compete and could no longer afford property on the bank. Many No 1's also had to sell their boats to the bigger companies to survive.

 

The consequence of the 1753 Hardwick Act which first introduced a universal system of registration. This was introduced after several high profile difficult cases where new middle class husbands abandoned their wives for a newer model and denied all responsibility. The certificate was intended to prevent that. (so-called clandestine marriages - not that they were necessarily in secret but that there was no record of them that could be used as evidence in court)

 

This was at the time when the middle class was emerging with people other than the traditional landed gentry managing to accumulate assets beyond that needed for subsistence (hitherto your were usually one or the other). The same development also led to the development of gravestones in churchyards and later in cemeteries. Before that you either could afford a memorial in the church (which as like as not your predecessors funded/built) or you were buried in an unmarked grave. When the ground was fully occupied there was no problem with starting over - eventually raising the ground level quite distinctly. Only when gravestones came in did we get the problem of 'full' churchyards. Also note that although everyone could be buried in a churchyard of their parish, not all families could afford a gravestone. This leads to complications and confusion in the ancestry business as folk discover a burial record and fully expect there to be a gravestone (see FindAGrave where a lot of requests for photos are disappointed) Even in the early 20C not everyone had a marking. I think, but I am not sure, that a so-called 'paupers burial', properly known Public Health Burials, this does not allow for the cost of a memorial - and many cremations are unmarked.

 

The two-class provision also covered marriages - there was a difference between 'married at church' and 'married in church. The latter were more expensive. For a long period most were at church which led to the development of porches on medieval churches, originally without them (it is often obvious that the porch was a late addition). For the most part they are large enough to accommodate the minimum number of people ie five.

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  • 2 months later...
1 hour ago, TheBiscuits said:

Won't that upset the historic narrow boats which are wider than 7 feet?

Trouble what would you say? 7ft 2in? I think 7ft gets the message across and anyone with a historic boat has half a brain and can work it out.

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