Category: history

Is the Wardle Canal the shortest in the country?

This week we have been travelling up the Trent & Mersey to Middlewich and then across to join the Shropshire Union at Barbridge. It has been a lovely week, with more sunshine than showers, lots of wild flowers on the towpaths, and a good mixture of industrial history (there were lots of salt mines in the area) and open countryside. As part of the journey we went through what is claimed to be the shortest canal in the UK – the Wardle Canal.

The Wardle Canal

The Wardle Canal was opened in in the early nineteenth century by the Trent & Mersey Canal Company, connecting the T&M to the Middlewich branch of the Shropshire Union. Its sole purpose was so that the T&M could claim full ownership of the junction, and could charge tolls for using it.

It is just 154 feet long from the bridge at the junction, to the bottom of Wardle Lock, and there is a commemorative sign on the bridge claiming it as the shortest canal. But is it?

There are three problems with the claim. It is not 154 feet long, there are shorter competitors, and it is not a canal anyway!

In my view the length should include Wardle Lock, because that was built at the same time, giving a total length of more like 330 feet, according to the Trent & Mersey Society

There are other similar examples of short stretches of water joining canals for the purpose of raising tolls. For instance the Peak Forest is joined to the Ashton by a short aqueduct over the River Tame, that was built by the Ashton company.

I think the biggest challenge to the claim is that it is not really a canal. To be a canal it needed to be authorised by parliament, and built by a private canal company. Stretches off that canal, built by the same company, are called branches. For instance what we call the Middlewich, where we are now, is actually the Middlewich branch of the Shropshire Union. Similarly, the Caldon Canal, which we visited a couple of weeks ago is really the Caldon branch of the Trent & Mersey. So this should be the Wardle branch of the Trent & Mersey.

But…

Mandy says I am frequently unnecessarily pedantic. The bridge at the junction is dated 1829 and clearly calls this “Wardle Canal”. And many boaters for many generations have enjoyed the story of the shortest canal in the UK. So OK, maybe it is.

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Is the Caldon Canal the most beautiful?

In last week’s blog I pondered whether we should take Narrowboat Thuis along the Caldon to Froghall, along the Macclesfield and Peak Forest to Whaley Bridge or up the Trent & Mersey to Middlewich. Our answer was to try to do all three. This week we have been cruising the Caldon, and it is one of the quietist and most beautiful canals we have visited.

We left the Trent & Mersey in Stoke at Etruria. This is where Josia Wedgewood had his china factory and it has much industrial history. When we passed through there was a canal festival going on, so the canal was lined with historical boats and maybe a thousand gongoozlers (people who like to watch boats).

The first few miles of the Caldon are notorious and you are advised not to moor if you don’t want to meet dodgy characters. So it was no surprise when the boat suddenly stalled with a duvet wrapped around the propellor. Fortunately I have recently purchased a bread knife to keep in the engine bay for things like this and after a few minutes I had cut myself free.

A few miles later, the character of the canal changed completely. Surrounded by trees and plants it meanders through Staffordshire. We cruised up the Leek Branch first and moored for a couple of days by a lake. It was very peaceful except when the cows decided to visit.

Then back to the mainline and through the Churnett valley to Froghall. At times the canal is only wide enough for one, but not many boats come down here so it was fine. There is a tunnel at the end of the navigation but it is too low for NB Thuis so we turned around.

The strangest thing for me about this lovely canal is that it was not always this way. It was built for heavy industry and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it would have been filthy with effluent from lime and flint kilns, coal mines and colour mills, feeding the factories of Stoke on Trent and further afield. We are currently moored next to a Flint Mill museum, which is absolutely fascinating. Who knew that fine china was made with more ground flint than clay. I did not even realise that bone china is actually made with 50% cattle bones.

So is the Caldon the most beautiful canal? I’ll let you know when we have been back on the Peak Forest!

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Is Nuneaton the saddest town in the UK?

One of the joys of cruising on a Narrowboat is spending time in the places we visit. For instance on this trip I had a fascinating day uncovering the history of Banbury, and a wonderful afternoon immersing myself in the delights of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

So on Wednesday when we were moored near Nuneaton, I hopped on a bus to find out more about the town. I asked the lady sat next to me on the bus what I should see and she laughed. Others around us quickly joined in, and told me that there is nothing to see in Nuneaton anymore, except a statue of George Eliot in the town centre.

Nuneaton used to be a thriving market town. Situated near Coventry and Birmingham, and with good canal, train and road links, it was one of the largest towns in Warwickshire. Originally based around ribbon weaving and coal mining, it was also famous for hat making and leather work (especially shoes). The town centre was largely destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, and was completely redeveloped in the 1960s, with an inner ring road, shopping mall and department stores.

And it has pretty much all gone. The factories and mills have closed. The department stores have gone bust. The beautiful mall is full of boarded up shops. The market is a shell of what it once was. Such a sad town.

But the people I met were friendly and positive. I found a great café for breakfast, and all the locals wanted to talk to me about life on a boat. So, possibly the saddest town but not the saddest people. Good luck to them.

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Is family tree research too intrusive?

Tuesday was a windy, rainy day – not a day to move the Narrowboat. So we moored up in Banbury and I decided to go on an adventure. As part of my family tree research, I have been looking into my great uncle Francis Chase Green-Price. He was a fascinating man, who joined the British Army in the First World War, and then moved to India, as part of the British Empire, eventually reaching the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. This much I knew, but his military records are not online. They are kept in a vault of the British Library. And my adventure was to hop on a train to London to see them.

For many soldiers, records consist of a couple of notes, but for Frank, there was a large folder of around a hundred pages. I spent a very happy afternoon going through all of them and trying to recreate his military life. About thirty years, including both world wars, and working in Britain, India, China, Egypt and Sudan.

Much of the material was factual, such as lists of units he worked in. There was also a very interesting folder of correspondence about his retirement. It was 1946, his role had become redundant and India was about to become independent. The army had recognised this and ordered him to retire. But as with all big organisations there are rules, and paper pushers across India were trying to enforce the rule that he was a few months too young to retire. Eventually common sense prevailed and he returned to the UK.

The folder that was most interesting was a complete set of his annual performance reviews. I could follow his progression through the years and see his strengths and weaknesses. I also learnt a new word. Apparently he was a good “Shikar”, which means he hunted big game in his spare time.

Reading it also made me feel a little awkward. In some HR files somewhere are probably my performance reviews across the years. I am not sure I would want some geeky future family member reading them.

I do enjoy family tree research, and when I am looking at someone from many generations ago, I do not feel any guilt imagining what they were like. But Frank’s son is still alive and am I being too intrusive looking at papers like these, even if they are publicly available to any researcher?

Fortunately most of what I found was positive. Frank appears to have been a quiet, caring officer, who was loved by his soldiers, whether British or Indian. This certainly resonated with me, because when I was working I also had Indian and UK teams.

Sorry Great Uncle Frank for looking through your personal personnel files. But I think you had an interesting life, and you are remembered.

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How do I find pictures of ancestors?

Most of us take thousands of photos each year with our phones. It is a long way from when I was growing up and I had a very old camera that only took black and white film. Each photograph was carefully chosen and then I had to wait till the film was used up before taking it to a chemist and waiting a couple of weeks to find out if any of the pictures had come out, or if they were out of focus or had my finger in front of the lens.

I have mentioned before that I like to study family history, and one of the challenges I have found is old photographs. My cousin Pat and I have lots of old pictures of family but most of them have no names and we struggle to work out who they are. The best we can do is to try to look for matches. For instance, I think that this photograph is my great great aunt Elizabeth Capener.

But Pat has this photo about 30 years later. Is it the same person?

For a long time I have worried that the massive photo collections we now have will be even harder to collate once we are gone. Photos are no longer special to us so although they have many meta tags on things like place and time, they don’t know who the people are.

I downloaded IOS 26 on my iPhone this week, and it is full of the latest AI tools. It can turn any photograph into a 3D image. It can create panoramas by merging photos. And it has the security of really good facial recognition. So the technology for matching faces is out there. But without being a professional developer I have not found an app that does it for me. Is there one?

Either way, such tools are coming, and I think that family historians will have an easier time in future. Or maybe we will simply be redundant when a bot just does all the work for us.

Anyway, are these photos Elizabeth? What do you think?

EDIT I have just used ChatGPT and it has done an incredible job matching the photos, pointing out things like the left eyelids being slightly droopy and the deep set eyes with identical spacing. They are likely to be the same person. Hello great great aunt Elizabeth!

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Can you have a community when houses are miles apart?

We felt very lucky this week to be invited to join the local people at a bonfire night celebration.

North Uist is a sparsely populated island, and the cottage we are staying in is in one of the remotest areas – Balranald. It has a church, a few houses, quite a few cows and a bird sanctuary. In the summer it has a campsite that looks as if it would be pretty busy but at this time of year that is closed and there is no one here.

That suits us very well. Whether on Narrowboat Thuis, or at home, we are comfortable with our own company and have had a very relaxing time here. The nearest proper village is Bhaigh (Bayhead) which is four miles away. It has about 40 houses and a shop. It also has the High School for North Uist, and every day about twenty minibuses carry the children to school from all around the island.

On bonfire night they bring together the local community to eat burgers, drink Irn Bru and watch fireworks. It was a great night. Not the most impressive display I have ever seen but still a very good one, complemented by the bonfire, the full moon, and the reflections in the sea. But what really made it was a couple of hundred people from toddlers to ancients gathered to enjoy it together.

The Hebridean accent is probably the softest of all the Scottish areas and I could hear it in the excitement of the little ones, the bickering of the teens, and the conversations between farmers and other locals. They had all arrived in their pickup trucks from miles around to be together.

One thing that did amuse me was hearing a father telling his child how good it was to celebrate the foiling of a Catholic plot, five hundred years later. Until the five mile causeway was built between the islands in 1960, there was very little mixing between Catholic South Uist and Protestant North Uist. I guess some views remain pretty embedded.

It was a lovely evening and it was good to be able to join such a distant but close community. Thank you.

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Why does the Coventry Canal have a gap in the middle?

We are travelling towards Oxford on Narrowboat Thuis. That means navigating the Trent & Mersey, The Coventry, the North Oxford and finally the South Oxford Canals. It will take us about three weeks. There is one complication in this route. The Coventry Canal starts at Fradley Junction and travels down to Coventry city centre. But there is a gap of a few miles in the middle.

The good news is that this gap is filled by a chunk of the Birminghams and Fazeley Canal. Why?

In a week in which the HS2 train scheme overran yet again, it is reminder that in history nothing changes. In 1768, at the height of canal building mania, a group of rich entrepreneurs got together to build the Coventry Canal, with the aim of connecting Coventry to the Bedworth coal fields and then the Trent & Mersey Canal at Fradley junction, joining Coventry to the North of England. They employed the greatest canal engineer of the time, James Brindley, who had previously planned the Bridgewater, the Chester, the Trent & Mersey and the Staffordshire & Worcester. Everyone was very optimistic.

At first, everything went well and in just a year they were bringing cheap coal from Bedworth to Coventry. But then the money began to run out and by 1771 they had sacked Brindley and gone bust. Eventually more money was found but it took till 1790 to extend the canal to Fazeley, where by that time the Birmingham and Fazeley canal had been built, connecting Birmingham to the Trent & Mersey at Whittington Brook.

Around the same time the Oxford Canal was completed, connecting the Coventry to Oxford and hence London on the Thames. This was immensely successful and at last the shareholders began to make money, big money. They wanted to realise their original plans, and were able to buy the stretch from Whittington Brook to Fradley from the Trent & Mersey. But the Birmingham and Fazeley refused to sell.

So there we are today, with the Coventry Canal split in the middle.

I love canal history. Our life today was enabled by a small number of entrepreneurs who lost or gained fortunes. And by thousands of poorly paid navvies, cutting the navigations with picks and shovels.

We are so lucky to be able to enjoy the fruit of their labours. And to remember their sacrifices.

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How long is 29 years?

I went to the cinema this week, to see “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning”. It started slowly, but once it got going, wow what an adventure! I have been a fan since the first film in 1996, and this final film brings all the stories together. It seems only yesterday that the franchise began, and now it is all over. The time since 1996 has gone in a flash.

By coincidence I have also this week been listening to podcasts and watching videos about the end of the Second World War. That was a different time; a time for my grandparents, a very long time ago. And yet, when I was born in 1964, that was only 19 years after the war.

So how can 29 years be no time at all and yet 19 years be an age? It must be a bias we all have to our lifetimes. My mid thirties children would probably classify the fall of the Berlin Wall as being part of history. For me it is not long ago. Current teens would probably classify a world without smartphones as being part of history, but for me, I remember my first brick like mobile phone with great affection. It was a Nokia 2140 and I paid for 15 minute of calls every month, with no texts and of course no data. It was the coolest thing in the world.

I love researching family history so I decided to ask my Mum about her own childhood recollections of times that I consider to be history. Interestingly her strongest memories are about family and friends. Yes there was a war on, but that was just background to growing up. It was normal.

She did say that her favourite film was Bambi. That was before even Mission Impossible 1. A very long time ago.

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What is luxury?

Mandy and I spent a couple of nights this week in our favourite hotel – Swinton Park in North Yorkshire, For us this was total luxury.

For a start, the hotel is a castle, owned by the Earl and Countess of Swinton. We were upgraded to a suite, and when not in our room there are multiple reception rooms with open fires and sofas to lounge around. There is even a Billiard Room with a full sized snooker table. There is the formal Samuel’s Restaurant and the more relaxed Terrace, both serving amazing food. On the second night we shared a Cote de Boeuf which was simply perfect.

As well as the hotel, there are extensive grounds with woodland, a deer park and lakes to walk the dogs. And a large Spa has pools, saunas and a steam room, to wash away the troubles of the world. I was even given a personal history tour of the hotel with someone who has been working there for 40 years and knew just about everything about the estate.

We have returned much relaxed and ready for our next adventure. But I wonder if this would be luxury for everyone. The rich and famous must live like this all the time. I wonder if luxury for King Charles is to kick his shoes off and watch Coronation Street with beans and toast on his lap. I wonder if luxury for Bill Gates is a day with no meetings.

I am not sure I would like to live in such opulence all the time, but for a couple of days it was my luxury.

I am a lucky man.

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I hate weed

There are certain jobs on a narrowboat that are not very nice. Pumping out the toilet tank is perhaps the worst. But pulling weed and rubbish from around the prop comes a close second. And this week’s canal from Chester to Ellesmere Port is one of the weediest in the country.

If you drive through the vegetation at normal speed, the propellor turns and pulls the weed around it. This causes the steering to fail, the boat to go much slower, and even the engine to stall. To avoid this, there are techniques we have learnt. Drive at speed up to the patch of weed, and then take it out of gear. The boat hopefully floats through the weed unscathed. Or if you do get some weed, try a hard reverse to “spin” it off again. But if neither of these works, you have to moor up the boat, lift the deck boards, climb into the engine bay, unscrew the weed hatch cover, reach down into the murky cold water and pull the weed off the prop and rudder. Fortunately this week I have only had to do that a few times.

It was worth the effort though, because we were able to moor for two nights in the middle of the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port.

I have written in a previous blog about nights in the museum, but suffice to say it is one of our favourite moorings in the mornings and evenings when no-one is around and we have the place to ourselves. It is also a place full of history, where the Shropshire Union Canal joins the huge Manchester Ship Canal and the River Mersey. In times past it would have been a dirty, noisy dock with hundreds of workers and surrounded by heavy industry. A quiet place today, full of memories.

My son Rob says he loves most of my blogs but not the ones where I complain about something that has annoyed me this week. Sorry Rob but I don’t like weed.

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