 There
was an extraordinary flowering of a new folk art at a time
during the Industrial Revolution when many other old trades and
traditional ways of life were withering away. What on earth was
so special about canals?
|
| The answer is perhaps the people that worked
the canal boats, and their unusual way of life. The building of
a new network of entirely artificial waterways linking the
existing river navigations together created a new trade, a new
class of tradesman, and a peculiar style of inland cargo boat,
the horse-drawn narrow boat with a carrying capacity of about
twenty five tons. This was a huge improvement on the old pack
horse system and the main canals made everyone a good deal of
money in the early days, but at the peak of their prosperity
they were faced very suddenly with the invention of their
greatest rival, the railways. For a few years railways were all
the rage and any new investment money was diverted away from
water to rail. Waterways were not instantly uneconomic, but were
just not so tempting to the fickle investor out for a quick
profit. The result was that although they stayed in business,
they did not expand or develop very radically (except in a few
isolated cases) and the English midland canals of the twentieth
century are still basically the same size as those of the late
eighteenth century. The boats are
therefore no bigger than they used to be, and nor are their
minute living cabins, squashed in at the back where they
wouldn't get in the way of the loads they had to carry. It was
these tiny cabins that shaped and constrained the lifestyle of
the boat people that lived in them, and a significant part of
that resulting lifestyle was their unusual decorative art. It
takes two people to work a horse boat - someone to steer it and
someone to make sure the horse keeps going. When times were good
the canal boat captain would employ a crew to work with him, and
he could still afford to keep his wife and family in a house
ashore, but when the wages dropped the balance altered. It made
economic sense to take his wife along as unpaid crew, and for
them to live on the boat as their only home, and this practice
seemed to grow as the railway competition bit. By 1858 it was
certainly common, and a journalist of the time wrote of the "
.... family barges .... which pass us at every turn" on the
canal between London and Birmingham. |
 |
 The cabins, just nine or ten
foot long and a little over six foot wide, had become homes to
large families, and a complete separate trade population was
afloat on the waterways. They had little social contact with any
other section of society, and with the difficulty of getting any
regular schooling they remained largely illiterate. By the time
they were a generation older they were distinctly different,
itinerants who were almost universally feared and disliked by
the people on the land. It was a life of potential despair.
Their response to this situation seemed to be to
develop an even stronger trade mystique, to brazen out the
common perception with a display to confound their critics.
These 'dirty bargees' turned their boats into models of
ostentatious cleanliness with polished brasswork and woodwork
scrubbed to snowy whiteness, and their squalid little box cabins
were transformed into domestic palaces of lace edged curtains
and china plates. If they could not impress with quantity on
their tiny floating homes they would dazzled with quality, and
every surface was painted, every moulding picked out with strong
colour, and every tin utensil smothered in painted roses and
romantic landscapes. |
| If they were regarded as old-fashioned they
would choose to be out-of-date with style, retaining and
reshaping past fashions into something special for their own
embattled group, the women wearing elaborate pleated sunbonnets
and long white aprons fifty years after working townswomen had
given them up, the men in old style fall front corduroy trousers
and carefully knotted neckscarves.
They
invented a trade uniform for themselves as distinctive as a
shepherd or a parlourmaid. Their whole life became a
proud statement of separateness, of self esteem, a 'traditional'
way of doing things that established them as part of a respected
elite. The result was a fascinating and successful blend of
unsophisticated art and transport history, an amazing mixture
that can still be experienced in the world of the canals today. |
 |
|
