Four Men In Another Boat

Buoyed up by the success of our trip on The Broads the year before (see Four Men In A Boat), we (that is to say, Gerry Baker, Paul Calvert, Keith Markham and I) booked a holiday in 1986 on a narrowboat on The Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal. After the previous year when we had taken too much food, we decided not to bother this time round and rely on eating out; this proved a bit hit and miss.

We set off for Stourport in Worcestershire where we would pick up our narrowboat and stopped en route at The Badgers Sett in Hagley where I had what was possibly the hottest chilli I have ever eaten. Half way through I had to get liquid reinforcements to put out the fire in my mouth! At Stourport we picked up our narrowboat. Compared with the previous year's cruiser on The Broads this vessel was shall we say, basic and had obviously seen better days. Under one of the bunks we found a piece of ominous graffiti, which unfortunately proved rather prophetic.

Stourport Basin

A number of things were different about this holiday compared with The Broads. Firstly the weather. It rained; it rained a lot. In fact it rained most days. Then there were the locks. The Broads has no locks, the Staffs and Worcester Canal has somewhere in the region of thirty, including The Bratch, a three lock staircase. 

The Bratch. Photo: BBC

Remarkably we managed to negotiate these, and other locks quite successfully, although this was the first time any of us had steered something with a tiller, which as anyone knows is weirdly counter-intuitive at first. No one fell in, no one dropped a lock key into the canal and we singularly failed to flood our boat; we ran aground on a sandbank once but that's one of the reasons you have boathooks! The approach to the lock at Kinver was, however the scene of a near disaster. We were chugging along quite happily at the speed of an arthritic sloth one grey summer's morning and as was our custom, I was at the bow with a lock key, ready to jump off and prepare the lock. Paul was driving. As we approached the lock I turned and shouted, "Slow down!" as we appeared to be nearing a vulnerable looking cabin cruiser at a speed that, although relatively slow, could have caused significant damage in the event of a collision. "I can't," yelled back a rather stricken looking Mr Calvert. There was a collision with the canal towpath and we struck the cabin cruiser a glancing, but fortunately damage free, blow and came to a somewhat ungainly halt. As you probably know, the only way to stop a boat (apart from hitting something) is to throw it into reverse. It transpired that the gearbox had packed up, hence no reverse gear, hence no orthodox method of stopping. We were stuck at Kinver for some days while an engineer was despatched from the boatyard to effect repairs. It could have been worse, at least there were pubs and shops, there are some locks in the middle of nowhere it would have been awful to have been stranded at.

The lock at Kinver. Photo: Roger Kidd

Another difference about the canal was the lack of bollards to moor our boat. Instead we had to rely on mooring stakes, which are usually fairly effective, but what with the amount of rain we had had making the ground soggy and soft together with our inexperience in mooring a narrowboat, it's fair to say that we had some "issues." One afternoon, having returned from a pub lunch, we all had a bit of a snooze. Sometime later I woke up and looked out of the window. That's odd, I thought, I don't remember those bushes being that close when we moored. I'm sure you are way ahead of me, because sure enough when I emerged on deck I found that one rope had come away and we were now at right angles to the towpath! It was not the only time it happened. On another occasion we were actually having lunch when someone came into the pub and enquired if anyone had a barge matching a certain description because it was adrift. We laughed, "That happened to us the other day," confident it was not us as the colours did not match our boat. A vague nagging doubt had us leave the pub early and sure enough it was our boat. The man who had described it was presumably colour blind.

Food was, as I said earlier, a bit hit or miss. The Broads were well stocked with pubs, many of which did a nice variety of food, sufficient to satisfy even the most discerning eater. On the canal the pubs were fewer and further between and almost universally believed that chips were the only way to serve a potato. After a few days I was heartily sick of chips. We went into a pub for lunch and the first question I asked was, "Do you do potatoes any way other than chips?" They did roast potatoes, a chip's cousin perhaps, but sufficiently different; I was most grateful. Paul Calvert's thousand yard stare was turned on us to full effect on the Sunday lunchtime when we discovered that our chosen hostelry did not serve food on the Sabbath. With grumbling tummies and limited options we eked out a meal from a tin of ham and some odds and ends we had on board; a gourmet feast it was not.

Somewhere near Dudley we moored up and took a taxi into town to The Black Country Museum, which was well worth a visit, and Dudley Zoo which wasn't, and where we saw the world's most depressed looking polar bear. At one point we went through Wolverhampton; shortly afterwards we turned back and headed for Stourport, but not without stopping in Kidderminster, which we did not see at its best. By design rather than accident we had arrived in Kiddie on the day that Kidderminster Harriers played Walsall in a pre-season friendly, so there was no doubting that Keith and I would spend the evening at Aggborough, which we did. Walsall won 1-0 if memory serves me correctly (which increasingly these days it does not).

You will have noticed a shortage of photos from our canal trip. Someone did take a camera because there are a few pictures, but as Gerry remarked recently, " it was long before the days of smartphones of course (not even the days of smart people from what I can remember...and I include us in that!)"

Keith, in a rare photo from our trip. Obviously it didn't rain all the time!

I'll leave the last words to Paul, who recalls the conversation with the yard owner when we returned the boat to the yard in Stourport a fortnight after we had left, a lot damper, a fair bit heavier (thanks to the consumption of much beer and many chips) and a lot lighter of wallet.

 "I'll never forget the shock on the boat owners face when we took it back and only had to pay for one gallon of diesel", remembers Paul.
"Did you top it up before bringing back?"he asked.
"No" we replied.
"But you had it for two weeks lads" he said, "where did you get to then?"
We told him a place.
"But that's only ten miles away and you had the boat for two weeks!" he exclaimed in shock at how little we had covered.
"True, but there's an awful lot of pubs on the way there and back" was our response."

Despite the weather, the breakdowns, the fairly basic accommodation (did I mention that water came in when it rained?) and the unremitting diet of chips, it was still a fun holiday. The next year, though we decided to forsake England and boats and the variable weather and booked a holiday to Majorca, but that is another story!