Ladies Of The
Night
My
family’s history on the British canals can
be traced back to the mid 18th century - the time
of the industrial revolution. My forbears
transported coal, clay, pottery and numerous
other commodities along the waterways. Just one
horse could pull a narrowboat stowed with thirty
tons of cargo.
In the heyday
of the canals, lower transportation costs led to
greatly cheaper goods, although canal-folk
received little credit from their disparaging,
land-based neighbours. Competition from the
railways in the nineteenth century, however, and
from road transport in the twentieth, led my
relatives to fear for their livelihoods and those
of future generations.
Then, just
prior to the Second World War, as canal life
appeared to be reaching its end, a saviour
appeared in the guise of Tom Rolt.
My father used
to tell of how he had met Tom and Tom’s new
wife, Angela, at Banbury on 27th July 1939, just
as they were setting-out upon their honeymoon
journey aboard their Shroppie fly-boat, Cressy.
Little did Dad
know that Tom’s publication of Narrow
Boat in 1944, a record of that journey,
would trigger the revival of the inland waterways
for leisure. So much so that, today, there are
more narrowboats on the canals than at the height
of their commercial use.
This change of
fortunes did not become generally evident until
the 1960s. My father, however, together with some
of those who still made a living from the canals,
had read Narrow Boat and had in 1946
noted the potential offered by the formation of
the Inland Waterways Association.
Such
entrepreneurs provided services to the expanding
leisure market: fuel for stoves; diesel for
engines; painting; sign writing; decorative pots
and panels; replacement fenders lost to careless
collisions; replacement lock keys, by the dozen,
for novice navigators and of course narrowboat
servicing and maintenance.
My
father’s thoughts, however, returned to his
encounter with Tom and Angela. He remembered
operating the lift-bridge for them at Banbury and
recalled the suggestive glance made by Angela at
Tom as she had descended the steps into their
galley. He observed that Tom had moored Cressy
before even reaching Hardwick Lock.
My father knew
of many lonely narrowboatmen. He also foresaw the
potential for men to hire boats for pleasure. He
thus teamed-up with working girls of his
acquaintance to discretely add a unique service
industry to the waterways with customers by
personal recommendation and by appointment only.
Few canal
users can recall seeing our narrowboat, Ladies
of the Night. She is liveried in black, with
her name rendered in shades of grey adjacent to a
subdued, crescent moon. She trades between
midnight and dawn, and never progresses beyond
two miles per hour, lest she disturb the sleep of
more conventional canal users. When moving or
mooring in daylight she is swathed in the
tarpaulins of a working narrowboat and sports
panels with a different name.
We now also
operate her sister-craft, Gentlemen of the
Night, and next season we are hoping to move
into the recreational substance market with the
launch of PotPourri.
I sometimes
wonder what my great, great, great grandfather
would have thought of the way our family have
carried forward the commercial traditions of the
British inland waterways.
I like to
think he would have approved.
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Photographs
are taken on the Oxford Canal, England, between
Napton and Banbury
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