Race Against Time: How Britain's Canal Heritage Was Saved

I've been reading Race Against Time, the story of the rescue of our Kingdom's inland waterways from neglect, abandonment and likely complete destruction.  It's a splendid, riveting read, and in many ways far more dramatic than the standard histories of the canal's original builders.  Recommended.

Skim through the standard tales of canal restoration and you learn the outline pretty quickly.  There's a Stanley-meets-Livingstone moment, in what might as well have been darkest Africa for all the British civil servants cared.  A sensitive engineer called Tom Rolt falls in love with life on the canals in the 1930s, lives afloat and writes a book, Narrow Boat about their gradual dereliction. It's an unexpected best-seller, and a dapper young literary character called Robert Aickman is fired by its success to meet with Rolt at his boat, and persuade him to form an association to rescue the canals. 

That seminal meeting, at the top lock at Tardebigge (near Bromsgrove), led to them founding the Inland Waterways Association, the start of a war against official disdain for the canals, and the whole restoration movement.

However, Race Against Time is in many ways a biography not of that movement, but of one man, Robert Aickman.  It probably wasn't author David Bolton's intention, but I felt I was reading the tale from Aickman's perspective, and the story presented all of his grand and petty behaviours.  It showed his drive, enthusiasm, charm, and selfless commitment; and it also brought out his monomaniacal ego and at times monstrous petulance.  Tom Rolt was probably just the excuse for Aickman to find his cause in life.   Rolt seemed concerned about a vanishing way of life, as much as about the canal as amenity, and when his ideas were absorbed and somewhat warped by the IWA, he effectively vanished from the scene. 

I got the impression that Aickman (gregarious though he was) was a hermit crab who found in the canals the perfect shell for his character and fought ferociously for it.  Long before Narrow Boat he discovered a dried and derelict Stratford-upon-Avon canal in casual walks between plays at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. It sparked his imagination, and if Rolt hadn't come along, he'd have found another excuse to fan the flames. Aickman worked hard and justifiably achieved his stature, whereas Rolt's greatness was very much in the 'thust upon him' class.

Of course, Aickman wasn't alone, but Race Against Time pits him as a field marshal controlling generals, each canal with its army of restoration volunteers whose idea of a good time was spending their holidays in cold, rain and mud.

The canal system of England seems now to reflects Aickman's character and aspirations.  He fought against every single canal closure and dreamed of opening them all up again.  Even today canal societies exist for restorations that are surely impossible, from the Wilts & Berks canal in the south to the Dearne & Dove in the north.   

David Hutchings says in the book's closing chapter about the great reopening of the Upper Avon in the early 1970s: "It was our ignorance that got us through. Any engineer would have thought it was idiotic to try a scheme like this, but we weren't clever enough to understand how difficult it was going to be, so we just blundered on."  In short, they managed to do it - and are still doing it - because they don't know it's impossible.

And now I really must take this book back to the library. It's a month overdue.  I don't mind.  Even a £5 fine will be worth it.

Search for 'Robert Aickman' on the web, and you'll more likely find him listed as "one of the finest modern writers of ghost stories".  Indeed, his two great achievements - waterways and story writing -  are almost separate, watertight compartments of his life, and the only portrait I could find of him on the web is a zealously guarded thumbnail from the so-called 'National Portrait Gallery'.

The NPG is indecently proprietorial about this photo (considering it is supposed to be a publicly financed gallery) and its description of the man himself.  It calls him a "short-story writer, editor, author, novelist", states that the original photo is publicly 'not on display' anyway, and almost wilfully refuses to mention what thousands of waterways lovers would consider his greatest achievement and splendid legacy to us.