During the weeks I was working on the boat I became familiar with all the boatmen who traded regularly along the canal. We would exchange greetings as they drifted by on their slow journeyings back and forth between Atherstone and Oxford, and, when they moored for the night by Banbury Stop, they evinced a lively interest in my progress, asking when I hoped to be ready and whither I was bound. There was ' Four-Boat Joe', so called because he and his companions worked between them no less than four horse-boats and always travelled in close company. One of them, the fattest man I have ever seen, habitually sat at the tiller of the hindmost boat, and was never seen ashore.
The mere landsman, sitting in one of these narrow-boat cabins, only 8 ft. long by 7 ft. wide, cannot help but marvel that this is the boatman's home; that within this tiny compass all the manifold needs of a large family are administered, and that it has been a witness of all the comedy, drama and tragedy of many lifetimes.
When the cabin doors are closed the only daylight comes from a small 'bull-eye' in the roof and a lookout forward, only a foot square, which is often obscured when the boat is loaded. Light at night is provided by a large three-cornered paraffin lantern hung in an angle of the wall. Immediately to the left of the doorway is the coal-fired cooking and heating stove, the space around it occupied by saucepans. On the stove-top tea is forever brewing, for the boat people are inveterate tea-drinkers. Their teapots, like their water-cans, are usually of an original and traditional design– a brown salt glaze stoneware ornamented with a band of coloured flowers in relief and a white plaque bearing in blue letters some simple motto such as 'Love at Home'.
Man is usually the conservative of fashion, but curiously enough on the canals the position seems to be reversed, for it is the women who cling more tenaciously to their traditional dress. I have seen many wearing their distinctive dresses and shawls, and even the sun-bonnet is not quite extinct. I had thought that this was another item on the list of old and gracious things which had gone forever until, one warm summer evening when I was working on 'Cressy', an unfamiliar Warwickshire Canal boat passed by. The woman who stood at the tiller might have floated serenely through a century. She had on the typical tight-waisted dress, the full skirt swinging gracefully to her every movement and, to my wonder and delight, she was wearing her black bonnet. Rows of tucks made a dark halo over her head, and from the gathered crown a broad frilled wimple fell wide and low over her shoulders. Her vital, gipsy face and gold earrings could have found no more fitting frame. A little group of women from the cottages on Factory Street stood gossiping by the drawbridge, undistinguished and drab in their cheap, mass-produced clothes. She was poorer than they, yet possessed a grace and dignity that seemed almost regal.
The ubiquitous wireless set has become almost universal in the boat cabins, and is the boatman's only link with the modern world. He cannot read the newspapers, which is small loss to him, and he seldom has time or inclination for the cinema. Like our rural ancestors with their country songs, festivals and dances, he has to provide his own amusement, than which there is no healthier stimulant for talent. As a result many boatmen are self-taught musicians, and I found that nearly every boat on the Oxford Canal carried a melodeon, a concertina or an accordion. Often of a night time I would hear the familiar strains of 'Daisy Bell' or 'Two Lovely Black Eyes' floating over the water from the cabin of a moored boat.
This is an extract from Narrow Boat written by L.T.C. Rolt. First published in 1944, and now reissued with new black-and-white illustrations and a foreword by Jo Bell, Canal Laureate, this book has become a classic on its subject, and may be said to have started a revival of interest in the English waterways. It was on a spring day in 1939 that L.T.C. Rolt first stepped aboard Cressy. This engaging book tells the story of how he and his wife adapted and fitted out the boat as a home, and recreates the journey of some 400 miles that they made along the network of waterways in the Midlands. It recalls the boatmen and their craft, and celebrates the then seemingly timeless nature of the English countryside through which they passed. As Sir Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘it is an elegy of classic restraint unmarred by any trace of sentiment’ for a way of life and a rural landscape that have now all but disappeared.