A flurry of letters in the waterways press recently has
once again highlighted the problems of getting young people involved in the
canals. They are the next generation of waterway enthusiasts (OK, for some of
us the next-but-one generation) and we need them to take over and become the
main thrust of the waterways movement when we are too old to be the main thrust
of anything.
But first we have to get them interested in canals - and
this is getting increasingly difficult. In the old days, the usual career
progression for the sons and daughters of the then-current generation of
waterways enthusiasts was simple enough...
You started as a small brat who got under everyone's feet at
boat rallies ["Rally": an old English word for a Festival].
Then you joined the Scouts or Guides and braved the
rodent-infested waters of the BCN in a 50-year-old canvas canoe, sleeping in
derelict toll-houses, drinking canal water and cooking over a bonfire of old
tyres dragged out of the cut. And meanwhile all around you, Alfred Matty and
Caggy Stevens kept the old traditions going with their joey-boats full of
stinking rubbish and toxic chemical waste.
Next you spent a week or two with WRG, wallowing in slime
and Weil's disease at the bottom of a derelict lock while an incompetent drunk
with tunnel vision (and deaf in one ear) waved loaded barrows around at
head-height with a knackered barrow-hoist and poisoned everyone with diesel
fumes - and in the evenings you listened to the old timers talking about how
rough it was in their early days.
Then you saved up your pennies and lied about your age to
get you and all your mates into a cheapo Willow Wren 12-berth camper (rising to
about 20-berth as soon as you were out of sight of the boatyard) for a week of
learning about beer, the opposite sex and canals, in that order.
Hopefully this meant that by the time you had found out all
that was necessary about the opposite sex, there was a good chance that both
you and the main person responsible for providing this information were already
canal enthusiasts. After a particularly heavy session in the 'Bear and
Bolinder' you would discover that you were (a) on a total of six different IWA
committees between you and (b) soon to become parents. In another couple of
years the whole cycle would start all over again with the kids getting under
your feet at boat rallies.
Not any more. Cheapo camping boats are no more. Modern-day
nanny-state attitudes mean that expeditions on the BCN in canvas canoes are
likely to end with the kids in care and the parents in prison. Health and
safety regulations mean that instead of getting killed or poisoned by WRG
barrow-hoists at the bottom of a lock chamber, teenagers these days have to
hang around on street corners getting killed or poisoned by passing cars
instead.
In the absence of any opportunities to get the new
generation of potential waterways enthusiasts into canoes, campers or canal
camps, people are having to look elsewhere.
One place to look is of course the education system. Most of
us learned about the canals in our history lessons (OK, when some of the
current IWA council members were at school it probably didn't count as history
yet). But how many actually remember anything that they learned (or rather
failed to learn) about canals at school. All right, I admit that when it came
to canals, I was the one sitting up listening attentively to the teacher while
the rest of the class flicked ink-pellets at each other and cribbed each
other's maths homework. But that was only so I could put the teacher right when
he made an elementary error such as confusing the Walsall and Walsall Junction
canals or mis-pronouncing 'Pontcysyllte'.
The best way to make canals more interesting to pupils is to
take them to see a real canal, rather than boring them about it in class. We
need to "get the class onto the cut, not the cut into the classroom".
As it happens, one of my friends actually managed to quite
literally get the cut into the classroom - the school was situated at the
bottom of a canal embankment, there was a flight of locks nearby, and the
paddles weren't padlocked overnight... and the metalwork teacher was too dumb
to even wonder why his kids wanted to make lock-windlasses...
But I digress. We need kids to get out and see real canals,
not just hear about them in their lessons. And this is happening to a certain
extent - with field-trips to canals, special schools' events at waterway
museums, and TV programmes in which a couple of moronic rag dolls demonstrate
that you don't have to be clever to do canals.
But even that isn't necessarily enough. Take a look at the
average bunch of youngsters on the towpath. How many are actually listening to
the teacher droning on about George Kingdom Telford and the Nearly-new Main
Line and horses that legged boats through tunnels while the claustrophobic crew
walked over the top, and so on? More likely they're busy trying to push their
mates into the cut and make it look like an accident. Or planning an impromptu
game of cricket using a Calder and Hebble handspike and a dead rat. Or sneaking
off behind the stop-plank shed for a sly fag (if it's a single-sex school) or a
snog (if it's a co-ed - or they're that way inclined...)
No, the answer is BOATS in particular and WORKING CANALS in
general. As many of the recent letters in canal magazines have pointed out -
and everybody but BW seems to have realised - no amount of teaching, however
clever the methods used, will ever have anything like the impact on the
youthful mind of a genuine in-depth experience of the canals. Or failing that,
why not let them go boating?
And why not? After all, children always used to help with
steering the working boats. And with the proposed introduction of drink-drive
limits and breath-testing for pleasure boaters, perhaps one way out for the
average boozy boater might involve the use of steerers who are too young to
drink?
Unfortunately I am not sure that the hire-boat industry
would see it that way.
Well, what about smaller boats then? As I mentioned earlier,
that was the traditional introduction to boating for youth groups - but what of
the perceived dangers that modern attitudes so often see in activities
involving unaccompanied youngsters? As far as safety is concerned, surely if
they read all the warning signs that now decorate the canals, there could be
few dangers that they would still at risk from. (Actually if they read ALL of
them, they wouldn't have time for any boating because they'd be too busy
reading signs.)
And as for the dangers of undesirables on the canals (the
ones who aren't digging with WRG, that is) - I telephoned the Birmingham area
office of BW to ask whether child-molesting was likely to be a problem on the
local canals.
"No, no trouble at all. We've just introduced a special
Child-Molesters Licence at £120 per year for the whole of the BCN. Of
course it will go up 10 per cent every year, but we're thinking of bringing in
a 'Gold Licence for Undesirables' to cover child molesting, vandalism,
drug-dealing, graffiti spraying and meths-drinking."
But the main trouble with getting kids back onto boats is
that boating is expensive. (I think I may be stating the obvious here - but
just in case any Waterways readers are unaware of this fact, I'd like to
also point out to them that the Pope is still Catholic and yes, bears really do
relieve themselves in the woods.)
The reason that cheap camping boats are almost extinct (so
much so that any surviving ones are likely to get SSSI protection) is that they
have to pay the same licence fee as a luxury hire-boat of the same size. So
although the boats cost less to build and maintain, the difference is not
enough for them to be attractive to the young and not-so-rich. (or the old and
not-so-rich either - but this is really one for the IWA's new Canals for
Codgers campaign rather than Waterways for Youth)
And similarly with small boats - they may be cheaper to run
and license than a 70-footer, but it's still a huge expense to buy a year's
licence when all you want is to take a skiff on a five-mile trip. It would
probably be cheaper to load the skiff and crew onto a trailer and hire a car to
tow it there rather than go by canal.
So is there any chance that in the interest of getting more
youngsters onto the cut, BW will lower the licence fees for small boats, or
make cheap day-tickets available for unpowered craft? For the benefit of those
readers who needed to be told that boating is expensive, I have to say that it
seems unlikely. (and perhaps I should also point out that porcine aviation is
as yet in its infancy) The government has told BW to squeeze the boaters until
the pips squeak, and that means charging as much for licences as they can get
away with - anything else represents a loss of potential revenue. (Perhaps this
explains BW's apparent blindness to the importance of getting kids onto boats -
it might cost them money). And for some strange reason, the government do not
seem able to be able to regard this 'loss' as an 'investment' in future
generations of boaters. In fact to them, the 'future' seems limited to a period
of approximately five years - I cannot for the life of me think why.
So if we can't get them boating, can we get them involved in
other ways?
As explained earlier, that is not really an option on canal
restoration project. Yes, many of us can remember canal digging a while ago,
when the current WRG chairman Mike Palmer looked and behaved like a typical
spotty 12 year old kid - and some of us are even old enough to remember when he
actually WAS a typical spotty 12 year old kid. But that was a very long time
ago, and wouldn't be allowed today on a WRG dig. No, insurance rules mean that
age limits are here to stay, at least on 'building site' type work.
Other kinds of work are more of a possibility - canal
cleanups for example. Under-16s have often taken part in the East London and
BCN rubbish-removal exercises and proven themselves to be excellent at this
particular task. Better, indeed, than many of the older volunteers. It's
strange how they sometimes seem to be able to guess exactly where the next old
bike or shopping trolley will be found. Almost as if they were present when it
was thrown in...
Another area they could get involved is canal maintenance.
Many urban waterways are classed as 'remainder' waterways, which makes it
difficult for BW to spend any money on maintaining them. Picture the average
urban 'cruising' waterway such as the BCN main line, reflect on the fact that
this is a canal that it is 'easy' for BW to spend money on, and I think you'll
realise that the 'remainder' canals are a problem. Therefore I understand that
BW are looking at using child labour to maintain these canals - for example to
carry out jobs like painting the lock-gates. I hear that in place of the
'traditional' black and white, new colour-schemes have been devised - based on
the colours of the most popular local football club with "John loves Kylie"
sprayed over it in a contrasting colour of aerosol paint.
But finally, although cheap hire-boats and small boats may
be out of the question for various reasons, there is one class of boat that I
have hardly mentioned, and neither have BW - probably because they have almost
forgotten that they exist. I refer, of course, to cargo-carrying working narrow
boats. So much have they been forgotten that the maze of new regulations has
largely passed them by, and far as the government are concerned the canals were
probably built so that John Prescott could pose for photo-calls in BW
inspection launches.
As mentioned earlier, young children traditionally helped to
work the boats. Some of them could steer before they could walk, and most of
them were kick-starting Bolinders at the age of three, and looking forward to
running their own pair of boats by the time they were four. It has even been
suggested that boaters' names for places like 'Berko' and 'Maffers' for
Berkhamsted and Marsworth were a result of the toll-clerks communicating with
young steerers in baby-talk.
Child labour on canals is a part of our waterways heritage
that is almost lost, but which could with a bit of help be revived. So let's
appeal to the Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage to get the children
back where they belong - working 18-hour days steering working boats, blacking
the stove every morning before breakfast, leading the horse until they fall
asleep with the reins in their hands (and then being soundly thrashed by their
parents for it) and all the other ways in which youngsters traditionally
enjoyed the waterways. And the government are bound to be enthusiastic; after
all, it'll save on education provision - as it was equally traditional that
canal children hardly ever went to school.
But what cargo will these boats carry? Coal, of course. The
staple traffic of the canal system in its halcyon days. And who is going to
provide the coal to transport - well, it's all part of the same plan to get
children to appreciate our glorious industrial heritage... and anyway, children
traditionally worked down the mines, too, didn't they?
You may think this is far-fetched. Well, my spies in Watford
have already spotted one sign that at least some people involved in the
waterways are taking the idea seriously - a file of papers labelled 'Brat
Safety Scheme'...
But I suppose it could have been a misprint.
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