 In
this hard financial autumn our old historic canal boats have had a very
hard month indeed. Their natural rot has been accelerated by the
Waterways Trust museums at Ellesmere Port and Gloucester shutting down
to part –time opening, operating with even fewer staff than they have
been struggling with anyway. But it is just another prop to be knocked
away due to straightened circumstances and yet another change in
management. It has actually been obvious for years that there has never
been enough labour, or enough money to pay outside contractors to
maintain their huge collection of boats in anything like a respectable
condition, let alone restore or improve them.
In recent years all future faith in their future has
been invested in the hope of a major grant from the Heritage Lottery
Fund. However, even applying for such a grant is a long process
involving a huge amount of preparatory research and form filling
designed, quite properly, to ensure that public money will only be spent
on something for the public good. But the process is time consuming and
increasingly a specialist skill in its own right. (For specialist read
costly.) And when the craft and spirit of historic boat restoration is
so far divorced from the office arts of bureaucratic administration they
really all need other translators in the middle as well (i.e. more
discussions and meetings.) It’s like teaching an English gamekeeper
vegetarian cooking, in Chinese.
For the last five years or so, ever since the last
major reshuffle, the curatorial staff have been carrying the baton of
the previous redundant administration, dutifully pursuing a policy
designed by a different director for a different time, but even that
will grind to a halt now. There’s nobody to do it. Mean while the boats
are five years older and five years more rotten and five years more
expensive to restore, and one suspects that even this simple arithmetic
is optimistic for it doesn’t take the compound deterioration into
account. Even the narrow boats are at risk now, especially the wooden
ones. The wide boats have always been at risk but that of course was the
original impetus for setting up the museum in the first place. It was to
preserve examples of the sort of canal boats that were unlikely to
survive as pleasure boats simply because their cruising range was so
limited by their size. Anything that couldn’t access Braunston,
Stratford and Llangollen was less likely to be given the unconditional
love, care and money that any old boat needs to survive in working
condition. Preserving those difficult boats was the challenge that we
took on back in 1970, the one we are floundering in now.
To be fair there has been a large element of
self-delusion about all this, especially in recent years. The early
delusion was that a group of boats gathered together and called a museum
was a safe haven, that the word ‘museum’ would be some sort of
prophylactic protection in itself. If you could achieve that designation
you would surely be offered a degree of respect that could be translated
into some sort of supportive funding from above. This delusion however
was already based on an old fashioned ethic, one that my post war
progressive generation imbibed with our mother’s milk, that museums were
a good thing, secure, educational and essential for the future of a
sensible society. And preferably free. A museum was a solid expression
of culture, and any past culture was a significant part of history, and
history is what the future learns from. Educational and secure, and
worth subsidising -- a very good thing.
But that was an old concept even then, harking back to
the philanthropic impulses of the Victorians. From being a secure
repository of facts and artefacts that old-fashioned definition has now
been undermined and museums have been redefined as part of the leisure
industry. Unfortunately the modern capitalist definition of industry is
one that pays for itself, or even makes a profit…. All values have to be
expressed in monetary terms, a difficult idea when we are talking about
a museum experience. We don’t yet do it with education – we don’t yet
equate one day at play school for a four-year-old as worth ten pounds a
day in taxes in twenty years time. We still accept that an inspired and
stimulated child will become a more fully rounded adult, a positive and
useful addition to our future society. But don’t be complacent—the
accountants are still gnawing away at this optimistic benevolence. These
‘accountants’ are not actually individuals that we can argue with, or
whose faces we can slap – they are an insidious creeping belief system
that we – you and I –have allowed to colonise our minds. In a similar
way most of us have been advised to participate in the greedy society
ethic by investing in a stock market which it suddenly turns out is
based on promises, debts and, at times, downright lies. Many of us may
have harboured doubts in our hearts but when most of the financial
doctors prescribe investment as the only way to safeguard the future
then we allow the self-delusion to predominate, and we go with the flow.
Oh, shucks!
And so too with the boats. For several years the self
delusion has been that the Heritage Lottery would save the museum
collection and we have allowed this delusion to strengthen because there
was no other option offered. If you are only offered one cure for a
potentially fatal disease, however dodgy the success rate – that’s the
one you delude yourself is going to do the business. The alternative is
unthinkable or at least unhelpful. Nobody gets better by thinking they
are going to die. But now we have to think the unthinkable so if you are
interested in historic old boats go and see them soon because they won’t
be there forever. And for the rest of the winter you can only go at
weekends.
©Tony
Lewery,
The Brow,
Ellesmere,
October 31 2008 |
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