Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rally, June 2023

Here's some canal goodness: last summer's Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rally.

I was at Braunston the day before the rally took place and chatted to the people on board Raymond, who must be the people who made this video.

One of the last commercial cargoes to be carried on the Grand Union Canal was coal from Atherstone to the Kearley & Tonge jam factory at Southall in Middlesex. I was told at Braunston that this run ended in 1969, though the Friends of Raymond website dates the end to 1970.

Whichever is correct, I have a clear memory of Raymond coming through Boxmoor and, in particular, of the important thump thump thump of the diesel engine of Nutfield, the boat that towed her. On a misty day you would hear it long before you saw the boats coming.

Below is a still showing Nutfield and Raymond from the 1967 children's television series Flower of Gloster.

The Pontcysyllte is the world's longest and highest canal aqueduct

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carries canal boats across the River Dee near Llangollen in North Wales. At 336 yards long and 126 feet high, it is the longest and highest navigable canal aqueduct in the world.

I've been across it in a boat, and the lack of any barrier on the side opposite the towpath makes the whole experience feel like sailing across an infinity pool.

This Trekking Exploration video shows us the Aqueduct drained for maintenance. We see the bolts that hold the structure together and the plug that was once pulled to drain the canal into the Dee below.

If you want to see a child actor riding his bike off the aqueduct towpath and into the canal, see my first post on The Flower of Gloster.

Painted Boats: A film set on the canals in wartime

I've just watched the 1945 Ealing film Painted Boats. It's not an Ealing comedy, but it is hardly a drama either as the plot is so weak and the film wants to educate as well as entertain. Yet there is much to enjoy.

Above all you would watch it today for the footage of the canals in wartime. You could frame many of the shots and put them on your wall.

It is very much of its period, or a slightly earlier period, in that the narrator Louis MacNeice wrote some verse specially for the film. The nearest thing to this I can think of is Auden's contribution to some GPO Film Unit productions.

The real weakness of Painted Boats is the way it has asked upper-class actors to play boating families. Some manage better than others and the worst is Robert Griffiths, the romantic lead as far as there is a romance. You can see why he made just three films.

More familiar faces in the cast are Megs Jenkins and Harry Fowler.

With its uneasy combination of drama and education, Painted Boats reminded me to a surprising extent of Flower of Gloster, a children's television serial from the 1960s I once blogged about.

I suspect you have to be a canal enthusiast or a lover of obscure British films to enjoy Painted Boats. I am both, so I enjoyed it very much.

Painted Boars is on the Talking Pictures TV Encore site, but hurry if you want to watch it because it will come down on 7 June.

Working boats on Black Country canals in 1965

Beautiful footage of commercial canal traffic on the Birmingham Canal Navigation in 1965, some of it horse drawn, which features railways and industrial desolation too.

If you enjoy this, look at the canal trip from Berkhamsted to Aylesbury I posted the other day and also at the 1967 television series Flower of Gloster.

The dangers of psychogeography

Recently, I blogged about Iain Sinclair's London Review of Books essay The last London.

I rather like this letter to the LRB in reply:

Like Iain Sinclair, I too walk on the canal path between Victoria Park and Broadway Market, but in many years of doing so I’ve never seen anybody fall into the canal. Sinclair, on the other hand, reports witnessing two such episodes, apparently within a short interval of time. Correlation doesn’t entail causation, but I can’t help asking whether these incidents might be correlated with the presence of a psychogeographer wandering dreamily in search of evocative connections in the middle of the path. 

Giacinto Palmieri
London E2

Watching Flower of Gloster 2

It's time to get the Flower of Gloster to London and her buyer - we left her at Market Drayton in Shropshire.

On the journey to Wolverhampton 10-year-old Mike gets lost, but no one seems to concerned. More worrying is the wrong turn they take down a derelict canal, wasting valuable time.

They arrive at Gas Street Basin, then part of a working canal rather than the tourist destination it is today.

Mike wanders off again and is this time picked up by the authorities and taken to a hostel for the children of families who on the working boats. There he is made to have a bath - probably no bad thing.

Such an establishment did exist in Birmingham. At one time the Fabians were obsessed with getting the children of canal families into institutions.

A page about the Canal Boat Hostel, Wood End Lane, Erdington, says it is "thought to have closed in the 1960s when commercial haulage by canal boats ceased".

Flower of Gloster does seem to have caught the very end of this way of life. A woman gives birth on board a working narrow boat and a canal man's coffin passes on another.

We also see Raymond, a boat I remember seeing carrying coal from the Ashby Canal in Leicestershire down to London into the early 1970s.

And so they reach London, defeating an underhand attempt by Talfryn Thomas to steal their customer at the last minute.

The last episode ends with a triumphal progress down the Thames. The Pool of London still has the cranes that dipped their jibs to honour Churchill's coffin and the Monument was, if only for a few more weeks, one of the most prominent buildings in the City.

Flower of Gloster feels like a fragment of my own childhood - and you can buy it from Network Distributing.

Watching Flower of Gloster 1

"This is children's television before life jackets, health and safety or safeguarding, " I wrote when I first came across the 1967 children's television  series Flower of Gloster.

I didn't know the half of it.

In the first episode a 10-year-old boy rides his bike into the Llangollen Canal as it passes over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. The trough stands 126ft above the River Dee, there is a sheer drop on the opposite side to the towpath and it is scary enough making the crossing in a boat.

If you want to blame anyone for this, it should probably be Bill Grundy. A decade before he encountered the Sex Pistols, he produced and narrated Flower of Gloster.

There are 13 episodes in the series, but I thought a post on each would stretch the attention of my readers as well as the concept of 'fair use' when it comes to the copyright of stills. So here is the first of just two posts on the series.

It stars Richard O'Callaghan, who is still acting today. He is the son of Patricia Hayes and was soon to take the Jim Dale role in a couple of Carry Ons.

His younger brother and sister are played by Liz and Mike Doherty, who appear not to have been established child actors (and are all the better for that), Judging by how happy they are jumping on and off the Flower of Gloster with ropes, they were recruited from a family used to the canals.

When their father is injured in a boatyard accident, O'Callaghan and Liz have to take the Flower to London in a fortnight to secure its sale.

Mike later turns up as a stowaway and along the way they pick up the free-spirited Annette Robertson, who was later to marry John Hurt.

They have rivals who are seeking to sell their boat to the same buyer. The father of that family is played by Talfryn Thomas from Dad's Army.

There is lots of wonderful period canal scenery to enjoy, notably the Anderton Lift. Not everything may be as it seems though: when they first arrive at Audlem locks in Cheshire, the footage we see is clearly of Foxton here in Leicestershire.

You can find a discussion of the locations on the later pages of this thread on the Canalworld forum.

And there is a review in Yorkshire Magazine:

I become nostalgic for a seemingly timeless era of long summers, though the chats with a badger boffin and a passing expert en route to Birmingham are gloriously awkward. I save checking the year of origin until the end of episode one, guessing it’s a mid-1970s show. The fact it’s from 1967 is astonishing ... 

There are many moments of charm: a blond tyke interviewing an eloquent repairman (cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth – the repairman’s, not the kid’s), about how long it will take to repair the narrow boat he’s working on is one. 

Another chat with a seasoned canal veteran is gloriously awkward, his eager interrogator asking him question after question as they walk along a riverbank. 

Talking to strangers does not seem to be a problem here, and the spooky goings on in the woods turn out be the badger boffin playing his tapes of the creatures.

The end of disc 1 finds our heroes at Market Drayton, still a long way from London. I'll let you know how things turn out another day.

Read my second post on Flower of Gloster. You can order the DVDs yourself from Network Distributing.

An episode from Flower of Gloster (1967)

Bad news: The episode I posted has disappeared from Youtube, so I have had to replace it with this trailer.

Good news: I now own the whole series and will blog about it soon,

From the Network Distributing website:

The first Granada Television series to be filmed in colour (though initially transmitted in black and white), this popular children's adventure features a star who is 72 feet long and painted in cheerful shades of red and yellow! 

She is the Flower of Gloster, a converted canal barge which over the course of the series winds her way from Wales, through the inland waterways of England to the Pool of London at Tower Bridge. 

Blending drama with semi-improvised encounters and taking in a wealth of local history, the series offers a fascinating insight into Britain's rich canal boat heritage. 

When their boatyard-owner father is injured in an accident, ten-year-old Michael, his twelve-year-old sister Elizabeth and elder brother Dick decide to deliver a narrow-boat to a buyer on his behalf. 

During their 220-mile trip, they make new friends but also encounter all kinds of danger and difficulties, played out against the changing pattern of the British countryside.

This is children's television before life jackets, health and safety or safeguarding. If the drama isn't all that dramatic, the industrial landscapes make it worth the viewing.

When I was a little boy in the 1960s our family took canal holidays, and in those days it was quite an adventurous thing to do. You get a sense of that here.

Network Distributing are releasing all 13 episodes of Flower of Gloster on DVD and have made this one (no. 7) available on Youtube as a taster.