Exploring Rolt's Landscapes (eBook)

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EIGHTY YEARS OF NARROW BOAT

L.T.C. Rolt’s reputation rests partly on his role in post-war waterways revival, the preservation of narrow-gauge railways and forms of historic conservation. The former began eighty years ago with the publication of his first book, Narrow Boat. This book proved to be extremely influential: the waterways historian Charles Hadfield, who was never one to exaggerate, attributed to it the post-war revival of Britain’s inland waterways that fostered his own involvement: ‘little of it, except maybe one or two canal histories, would have happened had Narrow Boat not been written. The time, the need and the man came together to produce the book.’1

The ‘time’ and ‘need’, which indicate and explain why the book was influential, will be discussed later. My initial focus here is on Rolt’s reasons for writing a book that would be commended in 1979 by a Newcomen Society contributor as ‘of no great importance in itself but […] the first work of a writer who I believe to have been one of the two major influences in changing public indifference to industrial history’.2 It outlines some of the influences that brought this book into being, not least some of his experiences of transport, engineering and landscape up to the 1930s.

Later chapters will consider its surprising consequences for the post-war revival of waterways. However, Narrow Boat seems an unlikely candidate for a book that would unintentionally inspire a movement to revive historic canals and river navigations.

Such a book might be expected to extol the virtues of boating for pleasure, providing some practical guidance upon the selection and navigation of boats, and the routes and facilities available. It would portray the virtues of scenery and of waterside ‘heritage’, dressed up perhaps as ‘olde England’, set within a romanticised historical outline. The book would discuss the possible revival of freight transport and the potential to transform transport routes into linear leisure assets. It would consider and develop explanations as to how this potential for transport and holiday boating had not been realised in the early twentieth century. Practical measures would be advocated to secure inland waterways’ retention for leisure and amenity, along with the encouragement of trade and perhaps enlargements to develop new traffics.

Narrow Boat, which comprises an account of a long journey in 1939–40 on Rolt’s narrow boat Cressy, provides none of these features beyond minor details of the boat’s conversion in an appendix. The book did not set out to do so; others would grasp possibilities that Tom Rolt did not anticipate, although he would add comments for the second edition of 1947. To explain the form of the book, it may be helpful to consider the author’s development and perspectives, which will be highlighted further in Chapter 3.

Encounters with Transport and Landscape

Rolt’s childhood in border locations placed him very much on the fringe of middle-class society and very much on the edge of the national railway and road systems. The only urban area that the young Tom Rolt knew well was the small cathedral city of Chester, where he was born and which he continued to visit into later childhood. In early adulthood, he lived for some time in the Potteries but, despite being both repelled and fascinated by their landscapes, did not explore their history in detail.

Rolt would not feel that steam railways (especially over narrow-gauge lines), or indeed early motor cars, presented any intrusive threats to rural landscapes, and he would view canal engineering as harmonious with nature.3 Yet he did perceive a transition from what appeared to be timeless rural landscapes through the changes of the Industrial Revolution into a modern era with potentially adverse impacts of industry, transport and engineering upon landscape and society. That historians could unpick and challenge many assumptions behind this perceived transition (many rural landscapes, for instance, were not timeless but the product of Victorian agricultural depression, rendering these an uncertain heritage) does not invalidate its force as one inspiration for Narrow Boat.

Rolt’s career as a premium engineering apprentice brought him into contact with two more influences that would be reflected in Narrow Boat. One was the interest in practical craft, which began in 1926 with his first apprenticeship with agricultural engineers near Evesham and continued into the 1930s; he learned both practical skills and a respect for craft, especially craftsmen. Although he called himself an engineer, he was not a civil engineer in today’s sense. John Bate, a long-standing Talyllyn Railway volunteer, who was its chief engineer until 1994, much later stressed that ‘while Tom Rolt was the only member of the early Committee with practical locomotive experience, he had served his apprenticeship as a working fitter. It is evident from his autobiographies that he never undertook any theoretical study or engineering design work.’4 This perhaps led him to admire craftsmen who could follow established procedures skilfully and sometimes improvise solutions, but would not be expected to take an overview and design whole processes.

His practical abilities enabled him to both work on the conversion of the boat for Narrow Boat, from a holiday boat to a home, and to appreciate the practical work that underlay historical construction and engineering. Like his uncle, Kyrle Willans, who secured his apprenticeships, he was attracted by craft skills, rather than the scientific abstractions and bureaucratic elements of professional engineering knowledge and practice – and not by any accompanying financial rewards or social position.

The second influence was derived from his first encounter with the Potteries, which he explored between 1928 and 1930 while he worked for Kerr Stuart, inter alia, builders of narrow-gauge locomotives. The contrast between industrial landscapes and ‘the green England that I had known as a child’5 fostered an interest in the Industrial Revolution and how it had changed the nature of work, places and landscapes. He would be less interested in detailed factual history than the role of practical people like engineers, alongside the apparent spiritual losses and degradation of craft that industrialism had brought and continued to bring.

There was little appreciation of the social and economic relations involved, bringing pressure to abandon industrial crafts. Although he soon appreciated the influence of transport development on the Potteries, canals received no special attention, even though both his lodgings and workplace were located by canals. His life there accounts for the extensive coverage of Potteries industries in Narrow Boat, while his sympathetic account of Potteries workers contrasts with the more cursory dismissals of other industrial areas and their populations.

Waterways, Willans and Motoring

Tom Rolt’s first real encounter with canals came with the same narrow boat, Cressy, which he would later own. Kyrle Willans had purchased this former Shropshire Union carrying vessel, one of the last this company had built, in 1917. Willans had it motorised and converted to a holiday boat for eight at Frankton, on the Welsh line of the Shropshire Union Canal.6 He had planned to establish a small pleasure-hire fleet, a venture then unknown outside the various hire firms on the Broads and the Thames.

After Willans moved to the Potteries, Rolt helped him to move Cressy from Ellesmere to Barlaston in March 1930, and during that journey came to feel that the boat:

… did not intrude upon the landscape; she became a part of it like the canal itself. As I realised this, my consuming interest in engineering and my feeling for the natural world, which, since I had come to Stoke-on-Trent had begun disturbingly to conflict with each other, were suddenly reconciled and before we had covered many miles I had fallen head-over-heels in love with canals.7

While Rolt took part in a further trip to Blisworth in Northamptonshire in August, soon afterwards Willans sold the boat.

This reconciliation of conflicting concerns was reinforced by some of his reading, such as Smiles’ Lives of the Engineers, from which Narrow Boat would quote extensively. He was also influenced by the popular rural writer, Harold John Massingham, whom he would get to know well in the 1940s; this will be discussed in Chapter 3. He began to see the 1920s as a passing golden age of motoring, involving very limited traffic over well-surfaced roads, threatened by the development of mass-produced vehicles, freight and passenger-traffic growth and congestion.

He helped to found the Vintage Sports-Car Club (VSCC) in 1934, to support and celebrate earlier vehicles and their owners. After he became part-owner of the Phoenix Green Garage on the busy A30 in Hampshire in 1935, his experience of the surrounding area led him to see 1930s roads as a dystopia that increasingly outweighed his admiration for craft-built vehicles owned by practical enthusiasts. That the growth in road-borne freight would severely affect the canals (and railways) he admired was not yet too clear, and neither was the influence of motoring and public passenger transport upon the countryside and leisure.

Rolt wrote later: ‘Although my interest in railway and steam locomotives dwindled almost to vanishing point during the years I...