Everyone had stopped listening to him by this time; instead we were fascinated by what seemed likely to happen next. There was no water in the abandoned lock, but it was full of mud. Surely, for his own sake and that of his lovely suit, it would be good to shut up and edge his way back onto firm land? But no. He went on talking, kicked out at the offending pole, lost his footing – and, yes, into the mud he went, and the Bristol Evening Post got the photograph.
That enjoyable afternoon prompted in me the first stirrings of interest in the subject of canals. I think it’s always very easy to maintain you were born at the wrong time for things: too early, and you won’t ever understand computers; too late, and you’ll have missed out on black-and-white films. But, if canals happen to be your interest, well, then, you’ve been born at exactly the right time: there are still a few working-boat people around providing a direct link to the Industrial Revolution, while, at the same time, you can see a future opening up with more and more instances of canal restoration.
Each one of this country’s canals will have its own history, determined by lots of things: the contour of the land, the cost of construction, the skill and imagination of its engineers and the level of demand for its freight transport. For centuries, canals were so much preferable to the cart tracks that served as roads; but then, later, the railways came along and provided fierce competition, frequently buying up the canal in order to let it perish through lack of maintenance. By the mid-1960s, commercial traffic on the waterways was virtually at an end, and boats were being sold as scrap.
Putting our canal network back into use is indeed a fairly recent idea. In 1946, the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) was formed by two men, Robert Aickman and Tom Rolt, to bring the situation to the notice of a wider public.
Robert Aickman (left) travels from Birmingham to the lower reaches of the Severn on the new floating headquarters of the Severn Wildfowl Trust.
© PA Archive
I never knew Aickman, but I did briefly say hello to Tom Rolt one wet afternoon beside the track of the narrow-gauge Talyllyn Railway in Merionethshire (he was campaigning to save that, too, and famously succeeded). A professional engineer, but also a writer of distinction, he had acquired an old horse-drawn barge, installed an engine and converted it to living accommodation. He recorded his maiden voyage up the Oxford Canal from Banbury in the book Narrow Boat, which motivated a growing public determination to save what was still navigable of our canal system for use as a leisure resource.
Tom Rolt, apart from canals and light railways, took an interest in old road vehicles and racing cars, as well as pretty well everything emanating from the Industrial Revolution. He was keen to preserve things, but only if they worked. It was not enough for a thing to be beautiful, he said – it had also to be efficient. I admire that.
Tom died in 1974, but I was privileged to know Sonia, his widow, who during the war had joined the women volunteers who kept the canal boats running between London and the Midlands, carrying coal in one direction and essential engine parts in the other. Steering two heavily laden narrowboats, one with a motor towing the other – the ‘butty’ – was an arduous and often dangerous occupation, but she continued at it after the war was over, and her concern with chronicling past canal life, in photographs and written testimony, continued right up until her death a few years ago.
While the IWA’s determination to preserve our national heritage met with success in some individual cases, it was up against a government policy to abandon totally half the existing waterways, drain the land and make it available for building. It was quite a long time before public concern, mainly through their MPs, was able to curb the destruction, and gradually to persuade the authorities that our canals were in fact an environmental asset. Eventually, the campaign led to three thousand miles of waterway being once again available to boaters, walkers and cyclists, with all sorts of fringe benefits to those living on or near a canal.
1944: A full cargo of coal is transported by barge along the uncongested Regent’s Canal during war-time, when all methods of transport were employed. © Getty
I, for one, am very thankful for it – and, reader, if you’ve ever been so fortunate as to find yourself with the time to glide gently along one of these beautiful waterways, drinking it all in, I suspect you are, too.
IN THE MIDST OF THINGS, two young actors met in a gloomy church hall in Pimlico, in order to rehearse a romantic television drama about the eighteenth-century Earl of Sandwich. It was a terrible play, but it was work, and in those early years television plays of any sort were thin on the ground.
As I was playing only a small part, I knew there’d be a lot of waiting around, so I had brought along the Times crossword. Across the room I saw that the attractive, rather soberly dressed young woman playing the Bishop of Lichfield’s daughter had decided to do exactly the same thing. Her name was Prunella Scales. We began to sit together when we weren’t needed, and jointly attack the crossword.
Two weeks passed like this, and then it was the recording day. We all turned up at the BBC Lime Grove Studios, put on our wigs and costumes and waited to be called to the set. Time passed. We were told that, unfortunately, we had hit the middle of an electricians’ strike, and until this was settled there could of course be no possibility of recording the play. The negotiations went on until it was now clear that we’d run out of time, and the director called us together and told us that we could all go home. It had been found impractical to reschedule the programme, so we all made noises of mostly spurious disappointment and got out of costume. I turned to Pru and suggested we might go to the pictures.
So we got a bus to the Odeon Marble Arch and saw The Grass is Greener, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
I don’t think we were aware of the aptitude of the title. I was just coming to the end of an unsuccessful seven-year marriage, and my wife Jacqueline and I had finally agreed that we’d be better off apart, and free to explore other possible relationships.
However, when the film was over, all that happened was that Pru and I said goodbye, swapped addresses, and hoped very much we’d work together sometime. Pru went back to the Chelsea flat she shared with three other girls, and I returned to our family house in Wimbledon.
Some weeks later I got a postcard from her, saying that the BBC had resurrected that awful play and that she had reluctantly agreed to be in it again. Pru said she was sorry to find I wasn’t there. I wrote back to explain that I was now engaged on something else. She said she missed me. I said I missed her too.
We began writing to each other fairly regularly. We’ve both always preferred the letter to the telephone, and, now that we were engaged in two different touring productions, we got into a rhythm of entertaining each other weekly with news about what the town was like,