Doris Coppell has written about her two decades of life afloat on the English canals. Unusually, she's written about it from her native New Zealand, where she retired after she came off the waterways fifteen years ago. I found the story today in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner:
The book Kiwi Afloat begins in 1970 after Doris, who was born in New Zealand in 1923 and today is 82, had married her second husband Alexander Coppell, a Lancastrian, and was living in Bradley Road, Bradley.
They discovered a common interest in boats and bought the Salidha, a 30ft clinker-built converted ship's lifeboat, at Apperley Bridge on the Leeds to Liverpool canal.
The Salidha's adventures - beginning with the heartbreak of finding her at the bottom of the canal after all the graft of getting her ready - are just the start of Doris's no-holds barred, often humorous, account of life on the inland waterways.
While the book has been published down-under, the newspaper story says she hasn't found a publisher in the Kingdom. No matter, thanks to internet commerce you can buy it online here.
Doris isn't the only one to have come to this country, fallen under the bewitchment of the waterways and written about it. New Englander Jeremy Scanlon did it in Innocents Afloat, for example.
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