*My brother and I spent 5 days hitchiking on canal boats from Manchester to Lichfield in September 2012.*
Ordinarily as a hitchhiker one hopes
for as much passing traffic as possible, so that the slim chances of
getting a lift from any one of the staring faces that zoom by are
compensated for by sheer numbers. When hitchhiking on canal boats
there is very little traffic, but the odds of being taken onboard are
extraordinarily good, it seems. In five days hitching from Manchester
to Lichfield down the Macclesfield, Trent & Mersey, and Coventry
canals , my brother and I asked for lifts from seven boats and only
had two refusals.
Mostly we parked ourselves at the front
of the boat, smoking his electric cigarette and chatting about the
new turn his life was taking post university. I saw an otter slip
into the water just ahead of us somewhere around Rugeley as we
chugged along with a retired couple (a sewing machine mechanic and a
hairdresser), and somewhere around Stone the last of the swallows
swooped across our bows and thought about slinging their hooks before
the weather turned. We soon learned to incorporate “we’ll stay
out of your way at the front” into our pitch.
At Bosley locks on the Macclesfield
canal, on the second day of our trip, we were picked up by Brian and
Ann-Marie on the Alton, a 1936 coal barge built at the Harland
and Woolf yard at Woolwich. At one time there were as many as 300 of
these ‘Big Woolwich’ barges, but after the British Transport
Commission discontinued canal freight in the early 1960s almost all
of them were turned into houseboats or pleasure cruisers, or
scrapped. Perhaps only ten remain in their original form, Brian
reckons, with an engine room and a tiny one room living space at the
stern, and the rest of the 70-odd feet of the boat filled up with 30
tons of cargo covered with tarpaulin.
Brian grew up on the Wirral and used to
work as an automotive engineer, making car parts for Toyota, but he
has been in love with canal boats since he took a holiday on his
dad’s mate’s boat one summer when he was fifteen. He’s a stocky
bloke with a big brown beard, wearing a heavy padded neon
construction site jacket engrained with grime. Ann-Marie had a wooly
hat half pulled down on top of blonde hair and a padded check shirt,
and looked tired. We later learnt they had been up since 5.30 that
morning.
The Alton is still a working
boat. Brian and Ann-Marie run the Renaissance Canal Carrying Co.
selling solid fuel, diesel, gas canisters and a few other bits and
bobs along the canals of Cheshire and Staffordshire. Their regular
round, a loop that starts and finishes near Macclesfield, takes about
a fortnight, and they do it about once a month, with rest and
restocking time at their houseboat. They sell to anyone who wants
along the canal, including pubs, boatyards and so on, but most of
their customers are people who live aboard. There are more customers
in summer as there are more boats around, but fuel orders are larger
in winter, so broadly speaking it seems to level out.
Brian’s full of knowledge about
canals. When this or that one was built, how they came to be narrow
unlike the canals and navigations in Europe, who’s the best boat
builder in Staffordshire. He talked about the horse rope marks you
find in bridges, or about the places on the Trent and Mersey around
Stoke where they fitted cast iron covers at the stone corners, and
that even these have been worn by ropes, or where they fitted wooden
rollers, the iron brackets for which can sometimes still be seen. He
talked about canal characters like Caggie Stevens of Birmingham, who
used to collect factory rubbish on his barges, pulled by a horse
right up to the 1990s. We tried to help out as we made our way down
to Kidsgrove, lugging bags of coal or holding ropes to stay alongside
a boat as Ann-Marie pumped it full of diesel. Sometimes we’d pass a
holidaying narrowboat at a set of locks. “Is that a working boat?”
they’d say, full of excitement and a hint of envy, “It’s good
to see there are still working boats.”
That night our kid and I fetched up
camping on waste ground between the West Coast Mainline and the Trent
and Mersey canal, next to G.Park Blue Planet, a warehouse built on
the site of a former colliery by Gazeley, an international developer
of ‘sustainable distribution space.’ The centre has been empty
since it was built with Regional Development Agency money in 2009.
You can’t miss a five second view of it as you whoosh past on the
West Coast Mainline just north of Stoke, a big green thing showing
off a long row of empty lorry docking ports.
In the early evening a few dog walkers
skirted the edges of the boggy ponds nearby and looked over at us
curiously as we heated up water on a camping stove for cous cous and
Tesco tinned curry sauce. Night fell and we went to bed, the lights
of the empty warehouse shining mistily through the tent fabric and
the trains rushing past every ten minutes. The next morning it was
raining and the canal was still sleeping, so we walked through
Burslem, the ‘Mother Town’ of the potteries with its old branch
canal drained and filled in in the 60s, and skirted more of England’s
underside, until we finally got a lift from another retiree in Stoke;
a former IT manager at Rolls Royce.
