It wasn't just the canals themselves that were decrepit, most of the boats would have been totally unacceptable by today's standards. There was an old converted lifeboat, Redwing, that a school friend looked after for an absentee owner. Redwing had once been lapstrake-built of wood, but it's hard to tell what was keeping the water out by the time that I knew it. Sometimes I would help with the daily pumping that kept it above water, after priming the rusty old semi-rotary pump. Redwing was driven on occasion by an old Austin Seven engine that had been somewhat perfunctorily marinised. The original gearbox was still there, and Redwing remains the only boat I've seen with four forward gears, one reverse and a clutch. I thought that Redwing was great! At the beginning of each winter Redwing would be grounded on the mud in shallow water and allowed to rest there for the winter. One year, the ice came early and Redwing was stuck in deep (around 3 feet) water. Something had to be done. So my friend and I set out to break a path through the ice for the hundred yards or so to the welcoming mud. After the first few yards it became obvious that this wasn't going to be easy, so I came up with a Sure Fire Plan for making it easy. We walked the short distance to the next lock upstream and let through enough water to raise the level a couple of inches (something else that I suspect would be frowned upon now); the idea was that the rising water would break the ice from underneath. Well... It sort of worked. The water had, indeed risen, but it seemed to have found its way around the ice and we now had the pleasure of breaking ice with a half-inch of ice water on top of it. Instead of just being tired we finished the job tired, wet, cold and miserable.
An unexpected change in the weather melted the ice two days later.
(If you're wondering why we didn't let the water out again, I have to admit that I wonder the same thing myself.)
Redwing wasn't unique, or even unusual. Problems at that time were much more likely to involve staying afloat than the quality of the stereo sound or the efficiency of the air conditioning. And the only test that an engine had to pass was that it should actually start. Almost every boat was unusual or interesting, and it would be rare to mistake one for another.
After a while, I began to work on Saturdays for a hire boat company in a nearby village which brought me into contact with more people. At the IWA National Rally at Marple in 1996 (where I volunteered to work in the office) we were excited to have a grand total of 212 boats registered. Things were a lot simpler and less crowded on the canals in those days. While on that trip to the Marple rally, I was lucky enough to meet, and spend time with, Joe Skinner, last of the "Number Ones" -- owner-operators. He seemed a nice old man.
I may have seen the last commercial traffic on that canal when three lightly loaded working narrowboats passed through Penkridge one sunny day, with a family working the pair and a lone young man following shortly afterwards on a single motor. I didn't learn the story behind them, being too shy to approach "real" boaters. But there were plenty of other people to meet and talk with as the boats came through. I got to know an Automobile Association patrolman who would eat his lunch at the lock, and later got a fine crop of blisters helping him to clean up an old Clayton Tar tanker that he had bought. The last I saw of his boat, the Gifford, it was in the waterways museum at Ellesmere Port and looked very much neater than when I had worked on it. Then there were two pairs of hotel boats that would pass through a couple of times a year. I saw Mabel and Forget me Not at Nantwich Basin, still working years later when I visited England in 1989, but I suspect that Jupiter and Saturn proved unmaintainable not long after I knew them.
Most of my boating was done by begging rides on other people's boats, but we scraped together enough to rent several times: The Moorhen from Ernest Thomas in Gailey, and Swallow from the same place the next year. Then there was Rosena Jane from Welsh Canal Holiday Craft, but by then I was working for that company and soon began to borrow or ferry their boats.
There were other trips, too. I enjoyed all of them but it got a little strange sometimes. There was Reg, who offered me a berth on his boat for a two-week journey from Birmingham, via the Staffs & Worcs Canal Society rally, back to his home base on the River Wey. This was probably the most interesting trip I made on the canals, through Birmingham, down the Grand Union to Brentford, up the River Thames and the River Wey. The boat was one of the earliest attempts at a modern copy of a narrowboat, and I shared the replica boatman's cabin with a retired River Wey bargeman who had worked for Stevens & Sons on the last barge traffic from the Pool of London up the Thames and the Wey to Cox's mill. This commercial activity was already a memory by then, and I was lucky to hear about it. Reg affected a blue blazer with brass buttons and a regimental badge. When he remembered, he would also use an upper-class accent (being one of only two people I've met who pronounced "off" as "orf"), but the accent slipped when he was tired or hurried. He was an interesting and engaging host, though, and the trip was immensely enjoyable.
The boat was unusual in a number of respects: It was the first time that I saw what has now become the dominant type of canal boat, purpose-built of steel, clean, new (and a breathtakingly ugly bow, in plan view). It was also the first time that I saw a sound system more complex than a radio on a boat. Reg had only two musical interests: One was anything recorded on a large metal disk whose perforations defined music to be played on a sort of musical box that was intended to be set up in a pub (or similar) and play music when a penny was put in the slot. The other was LP recordings of fairground organs. I clearly remember sitting aboard listening to the sound of fairground organ music playing at high volume and looking at Hampton Court Palace, in front of whose front door we were tied up.
The last I heard of Reg, he was in prison for fraud.
Another time, I was invited to go on vacation with Mr. Blake, the manager of the Ernest Thomas yard at Gailey (I'd helped out there a few times and was at school with his son). We went down the Staffs & Worcester to Stourport, River Severn to Worcester, Worcester & Birmingham to Gas Street Basin in the center of Birmingham, down the Farmer's Bridge locks (where the episode of The Dead Pig took place) and then the Coventry Canal to Great Haywood, where we met the other end of the Staffs & Worcester to return to Gailey. It was quite a long trip for a week, and the weather was about normal for an English summer. It was so normal, in fact, that the sun didn't come out until Mr. Blake took the sunglasses from his raincoat pocket and threw them overboard on the penultimate day.
And then there was the trip from Wheaton Aston to the Marple Rally with Derek and his family. They lived aboard the boat, a rather beaten old wooden narrowboat, so everything was rather comfortable. On this trip I shared the boatman's cabin with a new Lister 3-cylinder diesel. My cabin-mate was so new that it didn't have an electric starter yet, so it was on this trip that I got really good at hand-starting a diesel engine.
Later, Derek bought a house and replaced his aged wooden boat with a new steel one. This was great, because he actually offered to lend it to me! Although new this boat required a flexible frame of mind because he had neglected to fit out the interior. The toilet facilities were a bucket adorned with a seat, next to the engine. The engine itself had spent quite some time in a builders dumper truck (for non-English readers, these are small, low-powered trucks used on site that move a few cubic feet of earth at a time). The engine's two main attributes were that it worked and it had cost a grand total of £1. With this rather nice boat, I cruised what is now known as the Three Counties Ring, although we just called it going up the Trent & Mersey and down the Shropshire Union. I had a wonderful time, except for slicing the end off my thumb at Autherley Junction while trying to empty the bilge with an empty pineapple can (a scar that I carry to this day). The next time I borrowed that boat it was even better, because he lent me the dog as well. A black Scotty dog that I got on with really well.
Eventually, though, Derek sold the boat and bought a much cheaper one, a converted military bridge pontoon powered by an outboard motor. This boat had been around the block a time or two, and its aging hull had been thoroughly renovated by having a thin metal outer hull attached over the (also thin) original plywood hull. I only borrowed this boat once, for a day trip that ended up being more than somewhat crowded (ask a friend or two along, each of them asked a friend or two...) and extremely wet, since the weather was even more normal than usual. As we neared Wolverhampton, I began to become concerned by the amount of water in the bilge, but it was raining, and the bilge was in the space between the old hull and the new, so nothing was done (note use of the past-exonerative tense here). At Autherley Junction we decided to call it a day, and I set off to hitch hike to where the shuttle car had been left that morning. By the strangest of coincidences, the car that stopped was Derek, plus family. So we went to look at the boat before going on to get transport.
Arriving back at Autherley, I was surprised to see a group of people standing around the outboard motor on the bank, and looking at the top of the cabin poking above the surface of the water. I have to hand it to Derek... He just looked at it for a moment and said "No problem, I'm sure you'll get it up again, Giles. Let's go and get your car". Let's just say that I didn't share his confidence. Here's the amazing thing, though. By the time I got back, about forty minutes later, the hard work was over. A wonderful couple on a larger boat had come along, passed chains underneath, and managed to get the boat raised enough to get the hull above water. Two of us leapt aboard with buckets and furiously bailed. Before dark, we had it dry again and were sitting aboard the larger boat getting warm and eating a meal made partially with the contents of our sandwiches. The worrying thing, though, was that no water was coming in -- and it hadn't been raining all that hard. So why had it sunk?
After passing a fitful night back at home, I went the next afternoon to see how things stood, fearful of what I would find. Perfect. No problem. Dry bilge. Everything fine. It was much later, when the boat was taken out of the water for maintenance, that Derek found the answer: The metal outer hull encapsulated the old wooden hull to a height just above the waterline. The normal waterline, that is. A press of people all at one end of the boat had pushed that joint below the water. The joint between the hulls was mostly sealed. Mostly. So water had been able to get into the space between the two hulls. There were some holes cut in the inner hull to allow the bilge pump access to the space to empty it out. They also allowed water into the inner hull. That was the only time that I ever had a canal boat sink.
Time passed, the hire boat company that I worked for went out of business and I drifted away from the canals for a while. But the bug was still there, and eventually I bought my own boat. It was exactly the opposite of what I thought I wanted, but turned out to be perfect for the task. Dunking (or Dun King, if I was feeling pretentious) was a 16 foot long Microplus. A light fiberglass cruiser with an outboard engine. I knew that the engine was a good compromise, because it was too big for the canal and too small for open water. There was a cozy, if small, cabin that was comfortable for two, with a tight-fitting weatherproof enclosure that allowed two more people to sleep comfortably in the cockpit. It even had a hot water system that involved leaning over the transom and putting a container under the engine's cooling water outlet. Better yet, it was small enough to be trailered. Even behind my small Renault.
Most of the multi-day trips with this boat involved the trailer, and in this way I was able to visit distant or isolated waterways. The Lancaster Canal and the Monmouthshire & Brecon come to mind. I'm sure that I would have used the boat a lot more, but I was offered a job in Holland and much to my surprise have never returned to England.