A brief history of canals and narrowboats in the East Midlands

We thought it would add a little interest to your stay, to learn a bit about the history of the canals, narrowboats and the area you'd be staying in.

The Trent and Mersey canal is 93.5 miles (150.5km) long. It was the country's first long-distance canal and was referred to as "The Grand Trunk". The plan of the canal connecting the Mersey to the Trent came from canal engineer James Brindley. The first sod was cut in 1766 by Josiah Wedgwood (of Wedgwood Pottery fame) and 11years later the canal was completed. It included more than 70 locks and five tunnels.

The Trent and Mersey Canal us full of interesting features, which reflect its history. These include Harecastle Tunnel, the lengthy lock flight known as 'Heartbreak Hill', and the traditional canal town of Shardlow.

​Shardlow village is a picturesque town and is considered to be Britains most complete surviving example of a canal village. In its heyday it was called 'Rural Rotterdam' and 'Little Liverpool'.

​(Image of the view from the Idle Bridge to the old coach road, courtesy of Shardlow Heritage Centre)

The concept of a "Narrow Boat" approximately 7ft wide by about 70ft long is attributed to James Brindley. Brindley reached an agreement with the proprietors of the Trent and Mersey Canal Company to build the locks on their canal to take boats of that size. The dimensions, which were considerably narrower than craft using the rivers that the canal would link to, were perhaps due to the need to fit the tunnel under Harecastle Hill. This then became the standard size of lick on the rest of the Midlands canals built subsequently.

Initially, the long distance boats typically saw the men work on the boats and their families stay on the land. Each carrying companies typically employed a man to steer the boat and a boy to lead the horse. As time went on, and economic situations changed, particularly with the competition from railways, it became unviable to keep a house on the land with the wages paid to a boatman, and so the long distance boatmen's families moved on to the boats to work as unpaid crew.

​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 dazzle 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. . No one knows for sure why castle scenes are traditionally painted on narrowboats. There is a theory which attributes them to early 19th century porcelain which were often painted with pastoral scenes and ruins. With so many canals around the potteries in Staffordshire it's easy to see how this may have been copied onto the boats.

---

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. Men's shirts like women's blouses were voluminous; a typical man's shirt made by a boat woman took 4 yards of cloth and 1yard of calico lining. The ultimate in shirts was a "Sunday" best embroidered down the front with lozenges matching those on the boatman's cabin. Tyrollean type braces were de rigueur whilst wide leather belts made a good windlass holder. Men's headgear was either a flat cap or a black trilby, and of course women were proud of their bonnets made some 3 yards of material. 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.