Boats and Bradshaws

In my last blog I wrote about the different captains and where they were working. This got me thinking about canals in general.  Being born and bred in Stroud it was years before I realised there were canals other that the local “cut” (Stroudwater Navigation and the Thames Severn Canal which as far as I was concerned ended at the Sapperton tunnel) and the  “big one” being the Sharpness canal. But even then my knowledge only extended as far as other major water arteries such as the Manchester Ship, Leeds and Liverpool canals, and the Shropshire Union.  I didn’t even realise that there were canals in London until my wife and I decided to walk from to Camden Market one day whilst staying in “the smoke”.  In my defence, I just never had a reason to consider them.

Anyway, looking at the captains gave me pause to consider how those that mainly worked the Midlands waterways came to occasionally go to Reading, Oxford and London. Yes, the Severn and the Thames rivers were navigable but how did they get between the two?

Now I can hear the canal aficionados shouting at the screen; “The canal network!”. But being ignorant of such things I turned to the place I thought I might find the answers; Bradshaw’s Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales.

Like many others I have watched the adventures of Michael Portillo as, with a copy of Bradshaw’s in his hand, he has made many and varied journeys around the world following as closely as he could  the seemingly omnipotent information contained within. Now, having acquired the version related to waterways in our country, I understand why he finds the publication so fascinating.

Its relevance here is that it gives just about every detail of every waterway in the country. If you want to get from London to Liverpool or Manchester or Bristol to Birmingham by water or anywhere else to anywhere else, Bradshaw’s tells you what route to take what obstacles might be encountered, who owns and manages the many and various waterways, what locks there are, where they are, what distance they are and what capacity they are. It also tells us of the vessels that use the waterways and all the variants. Frankly I’m surprised that the book doesn’t tell you the names of the individual lock keepers, it’s that comprehensive!

Watercolour by Edith Ferrabee - the last severn trow built

Smart was working several different types of boats and although I have not yet found information to identify each one, we do know that there were trows and we can be reasonably sure that there were also both barges and narrowboats. Bradshaw’s says this: The ordinary type of narrow boat is generally between 70ft and 72ft long with a between 6ft 9in and 7ft 2in beam. They have round bilges and carry between twenty five and thirty tons but some of those used on the Severn and a few other localities have square bilges and can carry up to forty tons.

The information about other barges and their variants is too extensive to list but it also talks about the Severn Trow which it says were about 70ft long with a 17ft beam and they could carry up to 120 tons of cargo on a draught of up to 9ft 6in. This surprised me as we see pictures of trows passing through Stroud (notably the one on display in Room 4 of our own Museum in the Park). How deep was our canal? Refer to listing 100 in the proverbial Bradshaw’s and we find that the Stroudwater has a maximum draught of only 5ft. However, a limited amount of research suggests that during the 1800s there was a variant called an “upstream trow” which was smaller than its “downstream” cousin. Perhaps that’s the answers and Bradshaw’s is not infallible after all. Or maybe, since Bradshaw’s wasn’t published until 1904, the upstream trow was no longer in use. No doubt there will be someone out there who knows the answer to this little conundrum but sadly it is not I.