Tales From the Tillerman: A Life-Long Love Affair With Britain's Waterways by Steve Haywood

Author:Steve Haywood [Haywood, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Europe, Great Britain, Sports & Recreation, Water Sports, Boating, Transportation, Ships & Shipbuilding, General, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9781472977014
Google: i2EsEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-09-02T23:53:31.761263+00:00

11

Cruising back to the past

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of waterways. Born in the canal town of Loughborough in Leicestershire, for most of my adolescence I lived in a small village called Rothley on the River Soar, where as a kid my mates and I were always up to some sort of mischief. Messing about on canals for as long as I have, I’ve seen the system evolve through different stages of its history. In 1962, after a century and more of decline, responsibility for it was transferred to the British Waterways Board (BWB). I can’t say I was aware of the change, and if I was it made no impression on me. At that time in my life, if it wasn’t pretty and didn’t wear a skirt, not much did. However, for campaigners in the early post-war years who’d fought to keep canals open, the development was a glimmer of hope in an otherwise barren landscape. Sadly, any expectations that this transfer of responsibility might signify a new canal age were dashed after The Big Freeze the following year, when those few remaining canal folk who were still living on their boats and managing to eke out a precarious living by sporadic commercial carrying were frozen in by the ice for months on end.

I remember The Big Freeze clearly as anyone who lived through it does. It began in December when an anticyclone formed over Scandinavia, drawing cold air south from the Russian steppes. Before the year was out there were 20ft (6m)-high snowdrifts covering parts of Wales and the South West. Over the next few months, temperatures plummeted and canals and rivers froze in some of the coldest conditions ever recorded in the UK. Afterwards, BWB decided that there was no future in a transport system so vulnerable to weather conditions and got out of the canal haulage business completely, a move that effectively signalled the end of 200 years of carrying on British canals. This dealt the boatmen and their families a double blow. First, they were told they’d lost their jobs. Then they were told they’d lost their homes, too. BWB owned their boats, you see. They wanted them back.

I remember that winter of 1962/63 for different, less consequential reasons, because for a brief and glorious moment Leicester City Football Club, the team I’d supported since I was a kid, were in serious danger of winning the FA Cup and League double, the first time they’d won anything in their entire history. Of course, being Leicester, they blew it at the final hurdle, losing all but one of their last nine league games and getting torn apart by Manchester United in the FA Cup Final at Wembley, where I stood on the terraces in tears. That season, I avidly followed the ‘Ice Kings’, as they were dubbed by the press, barely missing a match. Somehow, by first covering the pitch with straw, making it like a farmyard barn, and then enveloping it

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