Working on canal boats in World War II

We watched a TV programme about canal boats, which featured Sonia Rolt. She said she came to the canal boats during the war, when women were recruited to work on the boats because of the shortage of crews. Many of the men had been called up. I thought this was interesting, and might have material for a good story, so I did some light research and bought a couple of autobiographical accounts of the working experiences of these women.

One of these is a good read. "Idle Women" by Susan Wolfitt is cheerful, breezy and descriptive. She has a talent for story-telling, and was clearly a good diary keeper when she was at work, so she could raid her diaries for descriptions and even the times her crew got up and the time they "let go" (canal boatmen don't us the same expressions as sailors), what they ate and how many locks they went through, the times they tied up and the times they went to bed in the tiny cabins, and that sort of detail makes for a full account of a lifestyle. She was an unusual woman because she had children at boarding school, which makes me think that she didn't need to work, and the work she took on was very hard and the conditions primitive, for example, how did they manage for a toilet? "Bucket and chuck it". All the boaters used this method and the funny thing is, in the summer the canal was full of swimmers, and when it's very hot and she's bored, Susan goes swimming in the cut herself, trying not to remember what the canal contains! She also saw it through in the winter when the canal was iced up but they had to keep breaking the ice around the boats, and even tried to make headway by smashing up the ice with poles (shafts) as they went, but the cold was too intense and the lock gates were frozen shut. Her hands got chapped and the skin split. This happened to all of the trainees and they all needed to stick at the work to acquire the necessary muscle and stamina to keep working for a full day - a very long day in the summer. Most of them didn't. The ones who did, therefore, are interesting.

The other book, "Troubled Waters" is by Margaret Cornish, and it tells the same story from a slightly different angle, because Margaret had a different trainer and came to the boats after being a teacher. Perhaps because she has had less security in her life, Margaret always seems slightly angry, and is sometimes downright bitter. She starts by being angry that the canal ("the cut) is full of tourists and the days of the working boats is gone; that people don't have the manners to keep out of her private home (she lives on a narrowboat); she is angry that the job she did in the war didn't provide her with a pension, which she would have got if she joined up, but she was a pacifist. But it seems that the war work did provide her with friends, and particularly her trainer Daphne, who is the heroine, if you like, of her story.


Daphne French. Most of the pics taken of the trainees were
for publicity and were posed. This one shows Daphne steering
the motor, with a windlass in front of her for the locks, and
she is towing a loaded barge, or butty, and at the stern of it
there is another woman steering. Three people was an ideal
crew as the work was much harder with two.

You realise, from both accounts, that Kit and Daphne, the trainers, had a hell of a job. They had to live with their trainees in cramped circumstances, and they had to have the skill to get out of all the difficulties that an inexperienced crew could get them into, and all the time give instruction so that the crew did not make so many awful errors. They also did not choose the recruits; some of them were very weak and unsuitable (oddly enough, the younger ones didn't like the work in spite of the freedom), and one of them was quite unhinged and downright dangerous.

We have been on four canal holidays, short trips, and it is a lovely holiday. We have been on the Kennet and Avon and the Oxford Canal, and we have been to Birmingham on the canal. We have never been on the Grand Union, and I felt envious that we have never used the canal for the purpose it was intended. To tie up in Limehouse, wait for your number to be called, be loaded (by crane) with aluminium bars, cover them over with tarps, and set off for Birmingham or Coventry to come back with coal  - that was a trip with a purpose.

Many of the men who had had boats before WWII saw that their days were over pretty much as soon as the war ended, and became lorry drivers; same kind of work in a way.

Article in the Daily Mail