At the beginning of June, I happened to be moored next to two boats, Heron and Jupiter, who were taking part in the Tom Rolt centenary cruise, retracing the route taken by Tom Rolt aboard his boat Cressy in 1939 and described in his book Narrow Boat, published in 1944. I had read this book several moons ago when some of us attempted to start a Canal World reading group. Although this group seemed to struggle and die, I found this book both interesting and challenging.
Rolt depicted the canals of his time and described the changes he saw taking place in a way that was very much of a bygone age but, strangely, still applicable to many aspects of our own times.
He saw the replacement of old skills by modern mass production and the movement of populations into the cities that this brought. He saw this as being indicative of a movement away from an "old" Britain, in which work was a product of people's way of life, towards a "new" Britain, which regarded work simply as a means of making money. The canals, he argued, belong to the old way of life and he regarded their reducing economic importance as a part of an almost inevitable decay of our entire society as we convince ourselves that material wealth is the road to happiness, even if it results in spiritual poverty.
Having taken to the water in search of spiritual rather than material wealth, I can agree with much of his sentiment but there's something that tells me that the idyllic life he imagined contained the seeds of its own downfall. The boaters of his day may have been self-employed, and their boats built using traditional skills that took a lifetime to learn, but the canals themselves, the means by which they earned their living, were run purely for profit. When the canals were no longer profitable, the loss of the spiritual wealth of the communities that relied on them simply never featured in the calculations.
Why have I felt the need to write all this? Apart from the first ten days or so, I have spent most of my time travelling along the Trent and Mersey Canal, following the path taken by Tom Rolt and passing through many towns whose history charts the rise of the industrial revolution and the subsequent decline of manufacturing. Like Tom Rolt, I can appreciate the spiritual value of the skilled work involved in those industries. Unlike him, though, I think this was of little consequence to the relatively small number of people who profited from it.
As a result, I found myself surrounded by what most people would regard as a fantastically rich industrial heritage, but wanting nothing to do with it and yet somehow thinking that I must be missing out on something. I imagine that this will be an important theme, so it will probably be something I'll be returning to from time to time.
