One Saturday, in early summer of 1964 (or so), I was riding my bicycle around the country lanes with a friend when we passed over the canal in the village of Wheaton Aston, and rode down the bumpy dirt road to the wharf. A fat man was working away with the bilge pump on a boat that I had seen once before, near home. He looked tired. My friend and I stood looking at him for a while before I finally found the courage to ask, “can I help?” To my surprise, the fat man looked pleased and put me to work on the bilge pump. My friend was handed a mop and invited to go up on the cabin roof.
We soon found out that the fat man was called Ted Smout, and he was an important person – he owned several boats that he rented out for vacations. The main site, and his home, was in the picturesque Welsh town of Llangollen and he rented the wharf and associated warehouse in Wheaton Aston so that his customers could make a one-way journey, The boat being pumped, the “Pennine Navigator” had spent the previous week unused in Wheaton Aston, and had suffered the twin indignities of being covered in bird poop and sinking. This wasn't as bad as it sounds because the water was shallow enough that it hadn’t reached anything it could damage, and my friend had drawn bird-poop duty on the roof.
This was the start of something. Although my friend made off that day as soon as he decently could, I spent summer Saturdays for the next seven years working for Mr. Smout, and loved every minute of it.
The company was Welsh Canal Holiday Craft, and Mr. Smout turned out to be one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. He'd never held a job, always working for himself. With a workshop and auto dealership in the nearby town of Newport (selling Hillmans before they became part of the Rootes Group, later absorbed by Chrysler) he had tired of the automobile business and become interested in the canal. He'd bought a boat called Elizabeth, a converted military bridge pontoon (very popular at the time), but definitely superior in quality to most such conversions. After using it himself for a while, he decided to sell the auto business and rent out boats on the canal. Although very common now, it was virtually unheard-of in the 1950's when he started. He told me it was a good way to make a small fortune, provided you started out with a large one.
Over the time I knew him, he owned these boats:
So, there they were. More like a private collection than a commercial inventory. Almost every boat was different, with three different engine types (and an American Atomic Four waiting in the Wheaton Aston warehouse). Mostly wood, and all of construction more suited to a carefully used private cruiser than the hard life of a hire boat. By modern standards the accommodation was primitive: Hand pumped cold water, hot water from the kettle. Limited lighting from the single battery. No TV. No radio. Propane cabin heaters available for rent (but it was easier just to light the oven and leave the door open). No shower (not that you would want one without hot water). But I have to say that they seemed very comfortable to me, and I loved every one of them
And then there were the toilets… Some of the boats (Pennine Navigator, Elizabeth, Dawdler and Mary Ann) had a decidedly low-tech device that looked suspiciously like a large bucket with a seat on it. In fact, that’s exactly what it was; albeit with a hinged lid to cover it. One of the first duties that I took over was the emptying of these devices, which was simplified considerably by the brook running nearby through a culvert under the canal. Sensibilities and standards were very different in those days. But what happened if it needed emptying during the vacation? We had that covered. The equipment for every boat that had one of these Elsan toilets included a workmanlike shovel, and the instructions to dispose of contents in a responsible and aesthetically pleasing manner (i.e. after dark).
The other boats had a device common on the canals at that time: A sea toilet that flushed water from the canal through the device and back to the canal. Couldn’t be much simpler. Nobody gave it much thought, but nobody swam in the canal, either. I think these were all top-notch Baby Blake toilets. It’s sometimes said (they’re still in production) that you could flush a sleeping bag down one of these, but I can vouch for the fact that they do get blocked (another of my duties). In fact, I was happy to thoroughly spoil the breakfast of three friends with one of these Baby Blakes.
Mr. Smout had one full-time employee: Karl, who lived in a small cottage beside Mr. Smout’s dry dock at the end of the great Pontcysyllte aqueduct. He looked after the Llangollen base and the horse-drawn boats also owned by Mr. Smout for short day trips. Karl seemed very old and important to me, and I was completely astonished when I visited Llangollen during a trip to Britain some 35 years after the time I'm recalling here and met him again. Not only was he still working for the company that had taken over Mr. Smout's horse-drawn business, but he seemed not much older than me!
A historical note here, to cover an aspect of the Llangollen Canal that may not be universally known. One of the best-known landmarks on the British canal system is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. At 1007 feet long, and 220 feet above the River Dee the aqueduct is remarkable for its slender cast iron trough, and for the fact that it need never have been built. The plan was that the main line of the canal was to cross the Dee valley on the aqueduct and continue on a direct line towards Chester. A navigable water feeder was built along the North side of the valley until the River Dee rose to meet it just above the town of Llangollen at Horseshoe Falls (actually, a large weir). The trouble is that the main line never continued more than a hundred yards or so, under a rather handsome double-arched bridge, towards Chester. If the feeder had been built on the South side of the valley instead, the aqueduct would have served no purpose and probably been abandoned. But as things were, the magnificent aqueduct, and the entire Llangollen Canal were safe through the worst of budgetary cuts because they made a profit by carrying part of Cheshire’s water supply from Horseshoe Falls to the reservoir at the end of the canal at Hurleston.
Four miles upstream from Pontcysyllte is the town of Llangollen, where Mr. Smout’s home stood beside the canal at the old town wharf, above the railway station (derelict at the time, now reopened as a tourist line). His other business was carrying tourists on horse-drawn open boats from the town as far as Horseshoe Falls. He got a lot of exercise from this because he (or somebody) walked beside the horse all the way, although it never seemed to lose him much weight. I remember him finding it hard to walk one Saturday after wearing new boots for Eisteddfod Week. The warehouse on the wharf became a small museum and is now a cafe.
Anyway… Although I came to know him fairly well, I never knew much about Mr. Smout. He never volunteered information about himself, and I was always reluctant to ask. I know that he was a recent widower when I first met him, and it was a complete surprise two or three years later when I asked him if he wanted his usual chicken bap (a type of bread roll) from the pub at lunch time, and he replied “No, thank you. My wife packed sandwiches for me”. It turned out that he had got married the day before. This was fairly typical. I have an unwarranted idea that he had been an alcoholic. I’ve no idea why, although I never saw him drink alcohol, and he drank milk from an old, and well used, whisky bottle (quite a sight when he was driving).
When he told me, that he was selling his business and retiring I asked him if he thought he would miss it, and he said “I never miss anything. People, places things”. I thought that this was the strangest thing he’d ever told me, but I believe he meant it. He had one of the wryest senses of humor that I’ve known, and a turn of phrase that described things astonishingly well. We always made sure that customers were comfortable with the boats, and would sometimes spend several hours talking with them; something that I enjoyed very much, and I think he did, too.
The work itself wasn’t too hard, and I took on more of it as I got older, until Mr. Smout would miss some Saturdays. Somebody met the returning customers before ten in the morning, the time when they were to leave the boats. We cleaned them, topped up the fuel and propane, checked batteries, maintained engines. Sometimes there would be repairs, but in general people responded well to the boats being given to them in nice condition. Some of what we did would be considered odd by modern standards, like pouring gasoline from old 5-gallon oil cans, but the only thing that gave me pause at the time was Mr. Smout’s habit of checking the propane connection for leaks with a lighted match. I was always really, really careful with the propane connections (I had a strong suspicion that worst-case here would involve the tester being not just history, but also geography and pathology). I used soapy water for that task.
Oddly enough, despite the appallingly unsafe (by modern standards) practices of the time, I only ever heard of one accident when The Lady Helen exploded as a result of somebody smoking while pouring gasoline into a fuel tank. On reflection, it’s hard to call that an accident.
When the new customers arrived, we would show them over their boat and, when they were settled in, talk to them for as long as needed so they would know their way around. This was my favorite part of the day, and I have good memories of relaxed summer afternoons sitting on the boats talking, with the hard work done. And we would walk the half-mile to Wheaton Aston lock and show them how to operate it. Many of the customers returned each year. One group that stands out in my mind was a group of men who always brought a large glass jar of pickled eggs with them. And the group made up of a couple who arrived in a Lotus Elan +2S 130, very elegant, with a large, elegant, Afghan hound in the back seat that raced around when let free; followed a few minutes later by a set of parents who arrived in a Mini with a West Highland Terrier in the back. A study in contrasts and similarities.
The brick-built warehouse on the wharf was something special in its own right. It looked, and felt, as if it had been built at the same time as the canal, and the only key to it was a massive thing, about eight inches long and made of heavy wrought iron. The key lived at Turners Garage, just up the road, so that it would be available for any of us to get in. The interior seemed to have been accumulating clutter since it was built (that is, for a hundred years or so).
The more that I poked around, the more interesting stuff I found. There was a complete folding kayak frame leaning against the wall (no skin, or I would have got it afloat), an unused boat engine that Mr. Smout had got from somewhere and never used (I think now that it was probably an Atomic Four – he described it as being American, and it had four cylinders), a clerk’s desk that looked original and had all sorts of interesting papers in it. A workbench by the window that had a huge vice and a clutter of strange old-fashioned tools. Tobacco tins full of grease for stern tubes, part filled propane cylinders, mysterious odds & ends... The warehouse was an archeologist's domain.
In early 2007 I went back to look at the wharf and was horrified to find that my wonderful warehouse had been converted into a sanitary station.
Over the time that I was involved with the business, the character of it changed greatly. At first, it was almost exclusively small companies run by oddball characters who did it because they enjoyed it. There wasn't a lot of money in the business (unless you started with a lot, and not for long even then) and there really weren't many boats on the water at all. I would stop work and come out to watch if I heard an engine. Many of the boats were somewhat shabby, and often converted from some other purpose. The buildings around the lock at Wheaton Aston were derelict, despite being rather charming. Towards the end, though, we began to see many more boats, especially the now-standard narrowboat style steel cruisers. The nature of the companies involved changed, too, as the fleets became bigger and standardized. It came as no great surprise when Mr. Smout told me that he was retiring. The fleet of boats would be sold to private buyers as they had become completely unsuitable for the hire business.
The last day came, and to my surprise I was alone at Wheaton Aston. It was odd that Mr. Smout hadn't come on this very last day. I saw the last client off, locked the door of the warehouse for the last time and went to call Mr. Smout. Then I found the reason for his not arriving; he had felt unwell, and after seeing off the boats had collapsed with a stroke on the wharf at Llangollen. He survived the stroke and a year or so later, to everybody's surprise, he seemed to have recovered completely. I kept in touch and went to see him every few months in the neat and new little house on the edge of the town. He looked well, but completely out of place in such an ordered environment.
While we had been eating lunch one day, years before, he'd told me "Never make your hobby your work, Giles. It's always a mistake". He may well have been right, but he wasn't good at taking his own advice. As he lost interest in the canal boats, he had become interested in horses. This wasn't unexpected, of course, because he owned a stable of them to pull the open trip boats in Llangollen. After recovering from the stroke, he became bored with a life that was too tidy, and moved to an old farm several miles out of town on the edge of a valley in a place called World's End. The farm had stables, and he bred horses for relaxation.
The house was wonderful. The older parts had stone walls two feet thick, the back of the house was dug into the hillside so the back door was upstairs and the views were stunning. The hill behind the house steepened up into a high cliff, while at the front it fell away to the valley floor. This is the only house that I've seen with a wide floor-to-ceiling picture window in the bathroom, right beside the "throne". From that point you looked out, high above the treetops, and the nearest thing below them was the mountain top of the Horseshoe pass on the far side of the valley. He kept an ancient pair of brass binoculars on a hook beside the throne for looking across the valley.
And then there were the animals. Besides the horses there was a sheepdog and Flock, the sheep. Flock had been a cade lamb, and Mr. & Mrs. Smout had rescued her from certain muttonhood by bringing her up by hand. From a very early age her best friend had been the sheepdog. This turned out to be a problem when she was judged old enough to breed and temporarily put with the other ewes at a nearby farm; not only did she disdain their company, but she insisted on helping the dog that came to move them to the ram.
Then I moved away.
One sunny Madrid afternoon I called home, and found that Mr. Smout was dead.
I'm richer for having known him.