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| Meeting up with Les, a
fellow young boating friend |
The last couple of days
have been spent getting ready to downsize in a few weeks. The new boat is 12 feet shorter than our
current home so that means we will have to declutter further. Most of our land based
belongings are in storage in Redditch and as we are not far from there we
loaded up the car on Friday so we could visit the storage unit on Saturday to drop it all off.
There has been another
boat moored next to us since we got here and we got chatting to the owner,
Terry, who turned out to have been born in the area. He’s a lovely guy and delights in recounting
stories from his past; he has retired but still makes the odd boat hood or
cratch cover. Until he was 16 he lived
with his parents and sister in a lock cottage next to where we are moored. The cottage was demolished in 1963 and all
that remains is the front path.
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| The front path - all that remains of
Terry’s childhood home at lock number 8 on the Atherstone flight |
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| An old photograph of
Terry’s childhood home |
Terry gave me a set of
photographs relating to the Atherstone flight of locks and I have included
these photographs at the end of this blog entry.
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| A comparison of the top
lock from the 1950s, when the canal was still full of working boats, and when
we came down on Thursday. |
When we took Buddy for a
walk on Saturday morning we got talking to a guy sitting reading outside his
boat. Once he realised that we were
interested in canal history he asked if I minded if he picked my brains. He had just come off the Birmingham and Fazeley
canal and had noticed that the bridges all had doors in the sides and he
wondered if we knew what they were. I
couldn’t help laughing as he had hit upon one of my favourite canal topics –
stanking plank stores. I explained what
they are used for and that each canal has different methods of storing the
planks. When I get some time I’ll add a
page to the blog explaining the different types of stores across the country.
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| Stanking planks store
photos taken when we first visited the Birmingham & Fazeley canal |
Later in the morning we
went to the storage facility in Redditch.
We had to drop stuff off that we couldn’t keep on the new boat and also
pick up a load of stuff that Jo wants in her new flat in Edinburgh. That meant we had to take a lot of things out
before we could find what she wanted. The first thing to take out was Buddy’s full
size bed which we put down for him.
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| Buddy happy with his old
full size bed in the corridor whilst we unpacked and repacked the unit |
In the afternoon we went
to a place called Bumblehole in Dudley for the annual Black Country boat
festival. We had planned to go in the
boat this year but as Karen is working again at present it is too far to go for
her to drive to work. When we got there
we soon met up with Les (picture at the top) and Nicola and spent a while
wandering around the stalls together. As
they both have dogs we took all three of them for a walk in the local green
space – old mine workings – apparently the coal seams were up to 30 feet thick
in this area and useful lumps can still be scavenged from the remains of the
slag heaps.
It’s great that there are
still green places retained in the grimmer parts of Birmingham.
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| Part of the boat festival |
We sampled a few of the
local beers and bought a few things before making our way back home for the
evening. I was telling them about
meeting up with Terry and coincidently Les knew him as he had made the cratch
cover for Les’s boat. As they are both
good raconteurs I suspect they spent many hours talking about the past
together. As usual it was good to catch
up with Les and Nicola and we parted knowing we would meet up again sometime
soon.
As I said earlier here are
the other photographs of the Atherstone flight that Terry gave me.
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| Transferring coal at the wharf |
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| Terry's family home at lock 8 |
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| A later picture of Terry's home |
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| Terry and his sister by the lock |
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| Cottage at lock 5 - it is still inhabited |
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| The top lock |
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| The top lock frozen over |
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| Wharf above the top lock |
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| Coal boat above the top lock - the arm to the right no longer exists and is not present in some of these old photographs |
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| A more up to date picture of waiting at the top lock |
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| Another coal boat at the top lock |
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| A postcard showing the top lock without traffic but the arm still present on the right |
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| This now the Atherstone visitor moorings with modern houses to the right. This photo shows crusing boats as opposed to mainly working boats in the other photos |
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| One more picture of the top lock. This time looking up to the wharf and what are now visitor moorings on the left under the bridge |
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