Barging around

[VicS]

Is this going to be an interesting series, or just entertainment for the great unwashed?

http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/556290/John-Sergeant-Barging-round-Britain

 

[Poignard]

I don't know but I'll give it foive (minutes, that is).

Peter West, the actor, and his wife (Sybil Fawlty) did a TV series about canals that was enjoyable (in my opinion).

 

[Birdseye]

Easy to answer. Just look at the hat he is wearing - its not exactly the sort of titfer that someone would wear for doing anything practical. So I reckon the series will be all arty farty like the "actor drives barge round britain" one was, and will really irritate by being dumbed down.

 

[dylanwinter]

they will also add some races against time

will droopy lips get to the lock before the sun sets/supermarket closes/the canal drains

 

[sailorman]

You have seen to many episodes of Great Ships

 

[alan_d]

Peter West, the actor, and his wife (Sybil Fawlty) did a TV series about canals that was enjoyable (in my opinion).

It is Timothy West who is married to Prunella Scales (Sybil Fawlty etc.) and who did the series Water World for Central TV, 2000-2008.

 

[Bru]

Nowt wrong with his titfer, one of my mates on the cut always wore a straw boater. The trilby was a favourite too and the bowler was not unknown although I preferred and was known by my trademark fedora some years before some bloke called Pratchet became famous for wearing one (oh and writing books I suppose)

The humble flat cap was the headgear of choice on the steamer of course and it was the default head protection when sartorial elegance gave way to practical necessity

In those days you wouldn't have caught me in a baseball cap for love nor money but I'm sorry to confess that I routinely wear one these days (worse still it's usually got Musto on it too. It is very practical though)

 

[Poignard]

It is Timothy West who is married to Prunella Scales (Sybil Fawlty etc.) and who did the series Water World for Central TV, 2000-2008.

Got it. Thanks.

 

[BrianH]

As a correspondent who travelled the world I'm surprised he could make such a comment as that below ... How does the narrow and neglected UK canal network compare to the Dutch, Belgian and French canal systems? I know of the admirable restoration work of many enthusiasts, but "the best in the world"? Perhaps just some jingoistic advertising fluff for Express readers.

“We’re living through a hard period and at such times we Brits like to go back to the big moments in our history when we really were the best in the world. There is an element of, ‘Come on, let’s count our blessings’ – and one of our blessings is that we have the best canal network in the world,” he says.​

 

[Poignard]

(...)
The humble flat cap was the headgear of choice on the steamer of course
(...)

Sounds interesting. You'd better explain (with photos, please)

 

[Heckler]

Got it. Thanks.

Hohum!
S

 

[macd]

Is this going to be an interesting series, or just entertainment for the great unwashed?

Possibly neither, possibly one or t'other, possibly both.
As a scientist I trust you'll be satisfied by such an accurate answer, even if it gets us nowhere

 

[mjcoon]

Originally Posted by Erbas
image: http://www.ybw.com/forums/images/buttons/viewpost-right.png
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(...)
The humble flat cap was the headgear of choice on the steamer of course
(...)

Sounds interesting. You'd better explain (with photos, please)

Since I managed to read that quote as "cat flap" (Spoonerism, I suppose), it seemed even more baffling!

Mike.

 

[jordanbasset]

It is Timothy West who is married to Prunella Scales (Sybil Fawlty etc.) and who did the series Water World for Central TV, 2000-2008.

They also did a series in 2014 on a canal boat
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/...-Canal-Journeys-episode-one-More4-review.html

 

[bigwow]

As a correspondent who travelled the world I'm surprised he could make such a comment as that below ... How does the narrow and neglected UK canal network compare to the Dutch, Belgian and French canal systems? I know of the admirable restoration work of many enthusiasts, but "the best in the world"? Perhaps just some jingoistic advertising fluff for Express readers.

“We’re living through a hard period and at such times we Brits like to go back to the big moments in our history when we really were the best in the world. There is an element of, ‘Come on, let’s count our blessings’ – and one of our blessings is that we have the best canal network in the world,” he says.​

He can only read what's in the script! it is only telly:encouragement:

 

[dom]

I don't know but I'll give it foive (minutes, that is).

Peter West, the actor, and his wife (Sybil Fawlty) did a TV series about canals that was enjoyable (in my opinion).

Agreed, a pretty limp first few minutes then it blossomed into a candid and charming human story.

 

[macd]

They also did a series in 2014 on a canal boat

There's a trailer running on one channel or another at present. In it, Timothy West describes canal barging as "a contact sport". Can't see the mild-mannered Mr Sergeant going for that, but you never know.

 

[Bru]

There's a trailer running on one channel or another at present. In it, Timothy West describes canal barging as "a contact sport". Can't see the mild-mannered Mr Sergeant going for that, but you never know.

It is indeed a contact sport, fenders are optional!

A a modern leisure resource, the UK narrow canal network actually has no real rival abroad so from a specific and narrow perspective can justifiably be described as the best (leisure canal system) in the world. It's not that neglected these days either although it could be better maintained. It's a hell of a lot better than it was thirty odd years ago when the bottom was too near the top (narrowboater speak for "it's too shallow"), lock gates often took two or three people to shift and leaked like sieves anyway and paddle gear was so stiff that we used to carry extra long windlasses to gain the leverage to shift the worst ones. Even so, my brother once bent a forged steel windlass like a banana trying to shift a paddle on the Buckby flight. The towpath used to be overgrown, facilities were few and far between and to be honest if it had stayed like that we'd probably still be on the cut! BUt then we're a bunch of daft beggars who like a challenge

Sounds interesting. You'd better explain (with photos, please)

Okayyy, you may regret this but here goes ...

The steam narrowboat President and her butty Kildare ...

President and Kildare are a pair of ex-Fellows Morton & Clayton narrowboats. They are maintained and presented in as close to original circa 1900s condition as possible and (at least in theory at any rate*) boated in the traditional way. The crew wear a facsimile of the uniform worn by the company employees on the FMC steam narrowboats

Historically the steam boats operated as single boats and only pulled a butty when one was going in the same direction. The butty's were worked as horse boats, usually by a family, and being hung off the back of a steamer running "fly" (non-stop" between London and Braunston or London and Leicester, as they used to do on a daily basis, meant a lot of hard work for the couple on the butty who were expected to keep up with the four man steamer crew and reputedly received precious little help from them

The boats are owned by and based at the Black Country Museum in Dudley. They are operated and maintained by a volunteer group The Friends of President with whom I was involved for a number of years (The back cabin doors on Kildare are my handiwork with a paintbrush and scumbling comb, as was the paintwork inside the back cabin. May have all been consigned to a skip now as I believe she's finally got a new wooden and more original cabin to replace the steel effort fitted in the sixties when she was a camping boat).

I'm not in this photo by the way, couldn't find one of me on board (it was a lot of years ago now) and all my pics are on 35mm slide in a storage box up in the loft. This photo is courtesy of the FoP website

* A falling out over boating methods ultimately led to my dropping out from the operation of the boats, I felt too many people were just using it as a cheap canal holiday and only paying lip service to the history of the boats. I may have been a little harsh on them but I was quite idealistic about it at the time!

And then there was our own ugly duckling ...

Sorry if the pics are a little on the large side, these were the best I could find without dragging the slide collection out (and I haven't got a slide scanner these days anyway).

Badger was, is, a 1969 Springer and she was almost certainly the first purpose built leisure narrowboat. Her hull was fabricated in Market Harborough by Springer Engineering Ltd., a manufacturer of tanks and pressure vessels and the wooden cabin and interior fit out were carried out by Faulkners of Cosgrove (formerly a famous builder and repairer of working narrowboats on the Grand Union at Leighton Buzzard)

Since moving to Cosgrove in the mid-1960s, Faulkners had established a new line of work, to replace the rapidly declining commercial trade, of taking a traditional wooden horse boat / butty which was basically pointy at both ends, quite literally sawing it in half and then nailing (OK, it was very slightly more sophisticated than that but not much!) a flat transom across the cut on both halves. Thus from one redundant ex-working boat they would create two 36' pleasure boats

The story goes, and my brother and I could find no reason to doubt it, that the first owner of "Badger", upon discovering that the supply of halfway decent wooden butties had dried up, went looking for a steel fabricator who could build a similar hull in steel for him. There is certainly a notable similarity between the hull shape of the early Springer hulls and that of the stern half of a wooden butty. For certain, we know that the seventh Springer built and all the boats thereafter were fitted with steel cabins in the factory at Market Harborough and a former Springer employee, who was an apprentice at the works at the time, is convinced they only built the one boat in 1969 and then there was a gap before they started building more. "Badger" was also the boat featured on all of Springer's advertising in the 1970's which was ironic really considering that she's not truly a Springer but a Springer / Faulkner (Faulkner's went out of business in the early 1970's)

Anyway, back to the tifers ... that's me in my aforementioned trademark Fedora avoiding, as usual, looking at the camera! (I'm not camera shy really, I just look a twonk in photos. OK, I probably look a twonk in real life too but hey ho!!! ). These photos were taken on the Birmingham Canal Navigations (more canals than Venice. More shopping trolley's, vandals and nutters too I suspect) during a 24 hour non-stop boating challenge to cover as much of the Birmingham and Black Country canals as possible. The last shot is us reversing out of a dead end former arm that we've forged our way into to claim the points for getting there

And then I could go on to bore you at length about the fun times we had messing about with the working narrowboats carrying coal to the Thames and so on ...

Again I've had to go and steal this pic from a website somewhere, but it is of Clover and Fazeley*, the pair I briefly captained carrying coal to London and the Thames lock keepers houses. And back to Stoke Bruerne again. It was incredibly hard work. The boating was hard because even by the early 90s the canals were still in a poor state of repair and the work was hard 'cos humping five or six tonnes of coal off a boat, up a lockside, round the back of a lock house and dumping it into the bunkers in the middle of summer (when coal is cheap and the days are hot) was savage amusement. The need to earn a proper living and pay the bills put a stop to it anyway! And the boss and I had a bit of a disagreement, ahem, over his insistence that we should use the Oxford Canal and thus make a round trip of it - the Oxford at that time was woefully shallow and some days we struggled to cover more than ten or twelve miles a day, it often taking getting on for half a day of backbreaking effort to get the pair through a single lock.

* In this fairly recent photo the boats are looking very smart in their original Fellows Morton and Clayton livery. They were a bit more workmanlike back in the late 1980s, / early 90s and in the livery of South Midland Water Transport Ltd. which has been set up by David Blagrove, Malcolm Burge (who owned the boats) and others to keep canal carrying alive

Happy days.

 

[Poignard]

Thanks Erbas. Fascinating stuff.