Looby on old narrowboat Sweden, Oct 8th 2006, Norton Junction.
The looby was the point on old butties and horsedrawn boats where the towing rope was attached, about a quarter of the way back from the bow. A looby (variously spelled loobey or luby) doesn't get used much nowadays, as my photo ably shows.
In the Bible, Judges Ch.12, v5-6, shibboleth was a (presumably) random word used by the Gileadites simply to detect if the people trying to pass them were their enemies, the Ephraimites. The Ephraimites couldn't pronounce the 'sh...' sound; they'd say 'sibboleth'. And thus the Gileadites would know their enemies and put them to the sword.
The word of God says that forty-two thousand Ephraimites were smote. Which even by current Middle Eastern standards is quite a tally. No wonder Ephraimia isn't a member of the the UN.
A shibboleth in modern parlance is a word used to detect if you are one of us or one of them. In short, a password.
I wrote yesterday about NarrowBoat magazine installing a shibboleth on its website, where it demands that you type in 'the last word on page 41'. In a comment on GrannyB someone posted the word itself (which, ironically, didn't contain the 'sh' sound). Almost immediately, the webmaster change the page to '17'. (I tried 'arse' and no, it's not that).
Is this daft of them? Well, considering that it was only a holding shibboleth until the webmasters got to work installing subscriber passwords, yes I think it was. It's early days for NarrowBoat magazine, very much a 'beta' version, and I would have thought that they'd be amused and gratified by the attention, and would consider it good advertising for when they have a site worth returning to.
But then again, perhaps they actually have a sense of humour and are simply joining in the game! If you have a copy of the magazine, and/or you have a blog, would you like to play the game too? That is, pounce with the relevant word in a blog post or a comment as soon as WW changes the page!
Plea to WW: play your cards right and you could attract a lot more attention to NarrowBoat magazine.
AET: Auctioneer's Extortion Tax. The percentage an auctioneer add to the final bid price when you buy something. Sometimes also known as Buyer's Premium.
As a bidder, if your winning bid isn't the final amount you pay, the extra they charge you on top of that bid is the AET.
For example, when Henry Butcher Auctions sold 80 assorted workboats on behalf of British Waterways last April, the amount you bid for them wasn't the amount you paid. No, you had to pay an additional 15% AET to Henry Butcher.
You were also charged yet another 17.5% government VAT on top, but I'm not sure if that was just chargeable on Henry Butcher's AET, or on top of the whole lot (i.e. 32.5%). Ouch. I think this is a rip-off of the buyer, and designed purely to grease the auctioneer's relationship with the vendor.
The problem with AET is that the buyer has to do quick sums to find out if they can afford it as they go along. Hell, it just feels wrong. Why should the buyer have to pay extra for the privilege of buying? As the 'buyers' premium' link above explains:
It's a bit like Tesco's charging you 30 pence for tin of baked beans, and then charging you an additional three pence fee [plus VAT] for the pleasure of having shopped in their store.
I subscribe to Ben Schott's 'Word of the Week' email. It's fun, and doesn't outstay its welcome. This week Schott's word is 'ebberman', defined as "One who fishes underneath bridges". It's a valuable word in the waterways context, but I'm not sure where this word came from - I suspect Schott simply picked it up from sites like Phrontisery or A Word a Day or Double-Tongued Word Wrester.
I really like both AWAD and DTWW - they gives good examples and full reference, which few others do. If - like Schott's or Phrontisery - you don't quote sources you can simply invent a word and put it into currency without accreditation, but that's cheating. DTWW and AWAD, unlike others, don't cheat or take the rat-run to a definition - they always cite. Perhaps it's significant that neither has a citation or definition yet for 'ebberman'.
But what's really needed is a word for anglers who fish on lock approaches. The blighters, the nuisances. Perhaps we can co-opt 'ebberman' to mean those as well? I've got example pictures of both 'ebbermans' and lock-approach anglers, in pictures, but I can't lay my hands on them right now, sorry. I'm too behind with the cruising log. Maybe later, if you remind me.
Incidentally, DTWW is available as a 'feed' (if you know what a feed is, here's the link) - I recommend it.
There's a man in Nuneaton this week who's advertised on Apollo Duck, asking to buy a project boat:
Wanted for winter project, will consider anything in steel from a leaky shell to a fully fitted boat needing a refit, must have full standing room, cash waiting up to £5,000
Actually there's dozens of 'em for sale at any one time. Just go to the narrowboat section of Apollo Duck and type 'project' into the search box. There are 66 of them today.
A project, in canal boat terms, is a garden shed. Its what a man takes on to get him out of the house. A man's got to have a hobby, after all.
A 'project boat' is hopefully still afloat, or could be made so if given a little bit of sealant and a vigorous bilge pump. 'An ideal project boat' means that it has an old engine fitted, and with a few weeks care (and a new engine) the buyer might get it working and then they can start stripping out the decrepit cabin.
'A perfect project boat' means that the owner's wife has finally persuaded him to sell the boat for whatever he can, so that she can get him back to his house to get his garden shed in order.
The following is a perfect example of a project boat. It was recently sold on "the 'Duck" with the minimum of gloss (and the minimum of price - £1,250):
27 foot Narrowboat in need of love and attention (more attention than love!). Steel hull in good condition. Lister single cylinder engine in running order with electric start. Rainwater leaks through roof, mainly from missing roof handrail, has thoroughly soaked the interior. The rear deck woodwork is rotten and the cabin door has seen better days..... It is currently afloat but will have to be removed from its current mooring fairly quickly unless you have better negotiation skills than me! Will make a lovely weekender with some time (which I don't have.....) and effort. Can take pics and email them as requested. Open to offers, must sell soon!
Here's a clever way of naming your boat - in both Semaphore and Morse!
England also expects you to put the name on your boat in a way British Waterways can read, and this boat's owner has done that as well. But he's gone one better, and signwritten it in a way Lord Nelson could have read it too.
Define: Buttons is the little girl who used to be on the packets of Cadbury Chocolate Buttons in a variety of guises, but always sporting three blonde ponytails and with springs for legs. Her feet are little cookie-cutters, and she walks across fields of chocolates, stamping out buttons in her wake.
The shock of late 2001 saw a change from Cadbury Schweppes to Cadbury Trebor Bassett, and a new marketing manageress. Determined to build her own career, she stamped out little Buttons with her own heavy Eastern European bootprint. But Buttons will be back, I'm sure of it. In the meantime, the little chocolate girl will find a homely refuge on Granny Buttons.
Christine thinks Buttons was modelled on her. The similarities are indeed striking. Both have Simpson-yellow ponytails, perky little retrousse noses and springs for legs, as my picture of Christine shows.
Define: Buttons are short waterways-related posts on my blog. A button often starts on one theme and drifts on to another, depending on what I find to illustrate it with in links. But it's all intensive work and can take me some time. Buttons aren't simple streams of consciousness; I always research a lot on the web and find some 'further reading' - frequently in unexpected directions.
And if the career of the post, from start to finish, surprises you, well, believe me, it often startles me. For example here, where I never realised that what I began would finish with such a surprising twist.
Chocolate buttons, according to the Cadbury website, are 8% protein,
30% fat, 56% carbohydrates, and 525 calories per 100gm. Golly, I don't know how little Buttons keeps her figure! My buttons are
hopefully a little less fattening.
It's an odd thought that a 'hobbler' must have been one of the fittest men alive, in the days when it was a common term. Eily Gayford, one of the original IDLE WOMEN, describes 'hobbling' as the process of running ahead to get the locks ready, and hobblers in the old days would sometimes be intinerant men available to hire. It was a term restricted, apparently, to the Midlands, and particularly to the Birmingham & Worcester canal.
The term is little used these days, and the process is known almost universally as 'LOCKWHEELING' - perhaps because it's more effectively done by bicycle - especially where the locks are further apart.
A pound is a stretch of water between two locks.
A pound is a customary unit of weight, originally the weight and value of a pound of silver, and nowadays worth barely a daily newspaper.
A pound is another name for the 'hash' symbol.
A pound is a promissory note once (until 1971) worth twenty shillings, and originally worth four dollars.
A pound is a coin now worth very little - except for a load of pees.
A pound is a blow with a hard object.
A pound is where they put stray dogs until the owners collect them or the local authority gets bored with them.
Pounds are a family who live on a narrowboat in Oxford.
But mainly a pound is a stretch of water between two locks.
Pounds can be long or short, and the longer or larger the pound, the more water it holds to feed the lock(s) at the end of it. One of the longest I know of is the 38-mile three-legged pound between Coventry Basin and Atherstone Top Lock on the Coventry Canal, and the third stretch to the end of the Ashby Canal. If you discount the paltry inches of the Hawkesbury Junction stop lock, you could lump another ten miles or so of the Oxford Canal onto to that figure.
Another long pound is between Tipton Factory Locks on the BCN Main line, Tardebigge Top Lock on the Worcs & Birmingham, and Lapworth Top Lock on the Stratford Canal. Taking the Dudley Canals into account this is over 40 miles without passing through a single lock - although it feeds no fewer than five descending locks and receives the water of five higher ones. And barring breaches or leakage, these pounds don't usually vary much in water level over the season.
But a pound can also be the few yards between locks in a flight. It's all the same, topographically speaking: a stretch of water between locks. A single lockful of water can mean the difference between floating and STEMMING (running aground) in a short pound.
Important to note the difference between a pound and a POND. The latter, especially as a SIDE POND, is the water that you let out of the side of one lock, so as to feed (or half-fill) the one below or alongside.
Oh Rodney, what a plonker! Poor old Rodney Trotter was a butt of scorn from his brother Del-Boy Trotter in Only Fools and Horses. And few parents have dared call their boys Rodney in the last couple of decades.
But Rodneys have long been on the receiving end of infelicitious remarks. In the old working boat days, when a boat was dirty or scruffy or badly maintained, it was known as a 'rodney boat'. The origin of the term I don't know, but I've heard that 'rodney' was once a dialect term for a tramp.
The slide is the sliding hatch on the rear roof of a traditional narrowboat. It's usually wood, and usually quite narrow, and normally slides on brass runners. And if traditional, as seen here on the (heavily restored) FMC Josher Egypt in Atherstone Top Lock, it'll usually be brilliantly painted with one of the four card suits.
Granny Buttons also has a slide. But it's not quite a slide in the conventional sense. It's light steel but still thumpingly heavy, and must be raised first and lifted over the back doors and clear of the Morse engine control before being dumped back on the brass runners.
Incidentally, have you been doing your homework? In this photo you can see several of the other unusual waterways terms I've already covered in my little homespun glossary. Can you spot the tunnel cutter, the PIGEON BOX (OK, I've not done that one yet), the tipcat and the strapping post?
Are you a sailor? If so, you'll be all at sea on the English canals. The 'CUT', the artificial canals of England, were never about sailing, but rather about getting across the countryside from city to city. They are roads, they go from town to town in the English countryside. The only thing canal boats have in common with seagoing ships is that they float.
Early canal diggers became known as 'navigators', later shortened to NAVVIES, but the men (and later, families) who actually crewed the boats soon gained their own ethnic identity more akin to modern CB-toting truckers, and never thought of themselves as mariners. Indeed, they looked down on genuine sailors with scorn, considering these upstarts as men who had no place on the cut.
Eily Gayford, in her memoir of wartime boating The Amateur Boatwomen, mentions how the born-in-the-cabin boatmen would turn their nose up at conventional sailors who tried to become inland boaters. Even putting a water container in the 'wrong' place on the cabin roof would be evidence clear enough of the sailor's ignorance and lack of skill, as far as the boatman was concerned. Sailors were clearly not boaters. And helmsmen of the sea would have a tough time becoming STEERERS. Simply wiping the salt off your shoes wasn't enough.
Old boaters never died - they simply let go. To 'let go' is (or was) to untie the mooring straps and start off. In the working boat days they never, ever 'cast off'.
In modern West Coast psychobabble, when you 'let go' of a fond memory you are supposed to see it drift away into history while you stay where you are, rooted in your eternal present. But for the canal boatmen, travelling and constant movement was their present - they kept on the canal, and when they 'let go' each morning, it was the 'bank' that moved away.
And when they'd finished travelling, just for the night they'd tie up again. It reminds me of the classic Lerner song 'Wand'rin Star':
When I get to Heaven, Tie me to a tree, Or soon I will be gone and then You'll know where I shall be.
The side pond is the - well, the pond at the side of a lock, into which you can empty half or all of its water, instead of wasting it all on the lock below. It's used mainly on STAIRCASE or DOUBLE LOCKS, or where the locks are close together. The upshot is that you waste less water than you need.
The other upshot is that the complication of working them, and the attendard problems of extra manning, is often more costly than the amount of water you save, especially in the era of the novice boater. So most side ponds are either virtually invisible and transparent to working (as in the Bratch locks on the Staffs & Worcs canal, where you don't need to worry your pretty head about them, and where they aren't technically sideponds anyway) or disabled, as in the Cheshire locks of 'Heartbreak Hill' and many of the Grand Union locks.
The side ponds of Foxton Locks and Watford Locks are perhaps the most active of all, and the perplexity of working them means they have, rare amongst lock flights, permanent on-duty lockkeepers and careful written instructions. You MUST open the red-marked paddles letting water from the side ponds into the lower lock BEFORE open the white-marked paddles letting water out of the lock above, leading to a simple if sinister mnemonic drummed into all boaters as they descend:
Red before white, and you'll be all right. White before red, and you'll be dead.
Slackers is the name used for PADDLES or SLUICES on the Environment Agency-controlled Anglian waterways - including the Nene and the Great Ouse.
The snubber is the single long line by which a MOTOR tows a BUTTY narrowboat behind it, typically a full boat's length long. The snubber is normally used when the butty is loaded with cargo; otherwise the empty butty's bow will be tied very close to the motor's COUNTER.
When I began this glossary, I meant it to be of words, phrases and definitions that everyday canal cruising would come across. I wasn't going to include historic terms from the old boating days, if one didn't see them *now*. But one does still see snubbers now and again, most recently when President towed its butty Kildare down to London for the Canalway Cavalcade, and back to their joint home at the Black Country Museum. The snubber was used, normally, when towing loaded butty boats; if the butty was empty it would be tied up close to the motor's COUNTER.
The slope of a canal or river is the rate at which it descends as it goes downstream. Normally an English canal has no slope; the POUND between locks is level, and any waterflow you see is probably the result of nearby locks being opened, or perhaps slow leakage where the PUDDLING is poor.
However, the Llangollen Canal has a gentle slope of about 1" a mile, notably in its upper reaches from Llangollen itself down to the New Marton locks. You can clearly see this at the BRIDGEHOLES and aqueducts, where the canal is barely a boats-width wide and the water funnels in to flow at a mile or two an hour.
This slope on the Llangollen had two curious side effects, one historical, one practical:
Stop planks are a series of stout wooden planks inserted into 'stop grooves' (I won't bother to glossarise that) to create a stoppage.
The stop groves are found wherever the the canal narrows - at BRIDGEHOLES, at the head and tail of a lock, or at stop locks. Often the stop planks will be kept close by, ready to be inserted at a moment's noitice.
On the Bridgewater Canal the stop planks are always adjacent to the narrowed part of the canal, and small permanent cranes are stationed there, ready to lower the planks in a trice.
A stop lock is simply a lock between two canals that are very close to each other in water level.
Two centuries or more ago, when one canal was built to join up to another, existing, canal, it was difficult to get the two stretches to match exactly in water level. Wiithout a stop lock between, then the canal with the higher water level would naturally - and quickly - lose its water. And since the two canals would (usually) be separate businesses - and water was the very stock in trade of canal companies - the water loss would represent a commercial loss.
So a stop lock would allow the canal companies to control and 'meter' how much water was lost to their competitor.
Perhaps the most picturesque is Hawkesbury Junction at the junction of the Oxford and the Coventry Canals, still popularly known as 'Sutton Stop' after Mr Sutton, the lock-keeper and junction manager for many years in the 19th Century.
One of my favourites is at Autherley Junction, where, in the 1830s, the brand new Birmingham & Liverpool Junction Canal (now the Shropshire Union) linked up to the Staffordshire & Worcestershire canal.
The latter was already nearly 70 years old and profitable, but prone to summer water shortages. The newcomer was several inches lower where it met the older canal at Autherley Junction. Without Autherley Stop Lock,
Here, both are at their summit levels. and if they hadn't built a stop lock the veneral Staffs & Worcs would have had its own water level 'stolen'. Six inches can make quite a difference.
The most curious stop lock is probably at Kings Norton, near the junction of the Stratford Canal and the Worcs and Birmingham. Here, there's a curious 'guillotine gate' arrangement, now permanently stuck in the up position (the different water levels having long since been sorted out).
I was cruising from Birmingham in March, and had just passed through the Kings Norton stop lock when two beefy young men threw rucksacks across the locks, then themselves ran up and JUMPED across the lock - all seven feet of it. I managed to catch the second youth in mid-jump in the winter twilight.
This was my most memorable stop lock experience.
Rubbing strakes are the raised steel bands around the narrowboat hull that help to protect it from dents, abrasions and collisions.
My intention in this glossary was to define the terms peculiar to the waterways of Britain, and espcially to the ethnically unique narrow canals. The rubbing strake is a common item in boats worldwide; nevertheless, it seems to me that their design, construction and purpose is different enough to justify a definition here.
Canal narrowboats, almost uniquely, were designed to make a snug fit with the architecture and 'furniture' of the narrow canal system. Narrow locks and BRIDGEHOLES were built to fit the 7'2"-wide narrowboat (some say that was the standard width of the C18th farm cart) and even with the now-standard 6'10" 'narrowerboat', it's still a snug, snug fit between the steel hull and the brick or stonework. So bumps and scratches, even collisions, are not 'likely', but inevitable. Put out your rope or plastic fenders, and often you'll simply get jammed in locks or have the fenders torn off. The steel strakes of narrowboats are tough out of daily necessity.
Rubbing strakes in white boats or rubber inflatables serve a similar remit but must work in a very different environment. Apex Inflatables, for example, demands they should be light-coloured so as not to "...leave marks on other vessels". Ha! I don't think an Apex Inflatable would care to share a lock with Granny Buttons - or any other narrowboat, blacked bituminously as we all are.
Narrowboat rubbing strakes don't vary too much in design or concept. But occasionally you come across a boatbuilder with a certain sense of style...
A stoppage is the temporary closure of a canal for repairs or maintenance. Usually these are planned, and a stoppages list is always carried on one of the British Waterways sites.
In the old days of commercial carrying the stoppages would be timed for holidays, especially times of high summer or bank holidays such as Easter or Christmas. In his autobiography, LTC Rolt recalls the local lengthsmen at the Tardebigge depot making stoppages over the whole thirty-six locks of the flight one Easter to make minor repair. There would be an outcry about that now, because the leisure-oriented canals have to be open over holiday periods.
Nowadays there's a 'stoppage season', normally commencing on the first Monday in November (in even-numbered years that's the day before the US congressional elections) and ending the Friday before British Summer Time kicks in on Sunday morning. BW offices also consult with influential business such as hire companies, and I've found that there's a metachronal rhythm about many of the lock closures as they sweep up the canal. This makes my own winter cruising plans easier, because weekend by weekend I can often follow a pattern of lock closures in a long, slow winter cruise.
But stoppages aren't always planned, of course. At time of writing, a fire at a canalside warehouse on the Ashton Canal has left the building dangerously unstable and liable to collapse into the canal; so traffic through the canal has been stopped while BW and the local authorities assessed the repairs or demolition required. And last year, shortly after I passed Burscough on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, a collapse of the canal bank led to a stoppage and two-month repair project. BW lifted out my boat (for free) to get around that particular stoppage, which led to the gloriously surrealistic scene on my definition of tunnel bands, and the following stoppage:
A strap, in canal parlance, is a rope used for mooring or halting the boat's progress through a lock. As far as I know, the term is not used for the towing rope of a horse-drawn boat.
Strapping posts are the stout (if sometimes decayed) wooden posts to be found near the top of many locks. They were originally designed to have STRAPS thrown around them to bring the old horsedrawn boats (and later, butties) to a halt in locks and keep them stationery, and don't have too much use in the era of propellors. Many have been removed in recent years as they were tripping hazards, although there's demand that those remaining should be the subject of preservation orders.
'Smarties' is the jokey term a lot of boatyard people use for the decorative false rivets on many modern copies of old working boats. Steve Hudson produces an easily recognised JOSHER hull, mostly with smarties dotted around the bow.
The effect has sometimes been derided as 'washer josher', but I see it as decoration rather than pretence, just as the scumbling on steel is designed to prettify, not to fool people into thinking it's a wooden boat.
The tipcat is the broad, banana-shaped rope fender on the stern of the narrowboat. It's usually topped off by one of two rope BUTTONS (no relation to Granny). Really macho workingboats-manque will even sometimes have three.
I've also seen three tipcats, stacked one on another, as here:
No one on the canals I've spoken to seems to know the origin of this curious word, although various books define it as an old children's game, where a pointed stick is knocked around by another stick in various ways. There's a description of tipcat on Alex Johnson's page about 'Village Games of Yesteryear'.
A 'tunnel cutter' is the semi-circular brass ring above the vertical exhaust pipe on a traditional canal boat engine. Said to prevent dirt or soot from a tunnel entering the exhaust pipe as it passed trough the tunnel. By the time diesel engines were thumping away in canal boats, many tunnels of the canal system had had smoky steam tugs towing horse-drawn boats for many years, and had built up substantial coatiings of roof soot. So the brass tunnel cutters made practical sense.
Indeed, when Robert Aickman and Tom Rolt made the final pre-restoration passage of the Standedge Tunnel on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, Aickman later recalled that he had to take three baths, one after another, to remove the soot and soil from his body. And when BW was restoring Standedge Tunnel fifty years later, they had to begin by removing six inches of soot from large areas of the tunnel. Little wonder that a tunnel cutter was needed in the old days. Nowadays, perhaps it stops the tunnel from being coated by the soot of a diesel, rather than stopping the soot of old steam engines from falling down the diesel exhaust.
When I heard this term recently from a passing boater, I instinctively checked it out for provenance on Jim Shead's waterways glossary. However, the most amusing definition comes from Billy Bubbles, Bill Davies' web site.
On English canals the towpath frequently changes sides. And, of course, at canal junctions, by definition, it does it twice. There are always bridges at junctions, for otherwise how could the towing horse or the BOWHAULER, have pulled the boat around from the other side to the new canal? (Well, OK, you could have had a ferry, but that's silliness-intensive.)
Where the towpath crosses the canal, the old canal builders put a turnover bridge. The spiritual gypsy would prefer the older name: ROVING BRIDGE, perhaps a more romantic sentiment.
Some of them can be astonishingly, poetically, sinuous and curvaceous. I love the lovingly winding turnover bridges of the Macclesfield Canal, where a horse of old could be walked from one side to another without detaching the towing rope. I can't find a link to a good picture of such a bridge at the moment; no matter, I have some wonderful photos myself somewhere, and will find them in good course.
You might prefer the other term: crossover bridge. That one smacks of the road planner to me, and doesn't get a link in my glossary.
Talking of crossovers and road planners reminds me of modern road flyovers. And did you know there are canal flyovers? There really are. But does the brand new industrial strength no-nonsense Wasserstraßenkreuz Magdeburg really have any of the organic and delicate charm of the Poole Aqueduct of 1831, where the Macclesfield crosses over the Trent & Mersey?
Rhetorical question.
The summit pound is the highest navigable stretch of a canal. All water flows downhill, and every lock drains water. The most sensitive part of any canal for water is the summit level, because it relies on any spare water from the reservoir feeding it. Wise canal builders constructed large or long summit pounds with plenty of water to feed the locks that sprang off it. And even when the reservoir runs low, a good long pound will suffer many, many locksful of water drawn off it before the level sinks to be unnavigable.
Examples of sensible summit pounds are the Leicester section of the Grand Union, from Foxton to Watford (a dozen miles and a couple of good reservoirs) and the old line of the BCN, from Wolverhampton to Smethwick, including the abutting Wyrley & Essington canals (at least another dozen or more miles. (Pedants stop reading: I know the Titford Canal is technically the summit pound; but I'm illustrating a point here).
The more short-sighted navigationists would endow a canal with a short summit and a dearth of reservoir water. The Tring summit of the Grand Union (about 3 miles) and the Kennet & Avon summit near Devizes (similarly unendowed) still suffer worrying water shortages in even the briefest of hot summers.
Tunnel bands are the two (rarely three) brightly painted bands/stripes on the back of an English canal narrowboat. Usually they are cream and red, and in my recent dry-docking I had mine own painted those colours once again.
They are always visible on a floating narrowboat to a towpath walker, but sometimes they are visible even to a passing motorist. Last year, when we moved Granny Buttons by road around a canal obstruction, you could even see the tunnel bands from behind and below, if you were unlucky enough to be stuck behind a slow-moving flatbed lorry.
I say 'slow-moving', but clearly it wasn't as slow as the trailer of harvest straw being towed by the tractor. At times, Granny Buttons was in motion at over 45mph, which is a dozen times her usual top speed on the waterways of England.
Traditionally a well deck was the stern deck of a horse drawn boat, where the tillerman or steerer stood in a 'well', surrounded by the sides of boat. Since the advent of the motor narrowboat a century ago, with its flat COUNTER stern, and especially with the modern leisure narrowboat, the well deck now generally refers to the front deck.
I call it the cockpit, my more jocular friends call it the poop deck. But I'm told it's technically the 'well deck'.
Referring to the front deck of the narrowboat as a cockpit can result in confusion. I once told a boat engineer I had a problem with a gas pipe in the 'cockpit' and could he fix it. I gave him the key, and off he went. He phoned me later that day to say he 'couldn't find a ****** gas pipe in the cockpit'. He'd been looking at the stern. Mea culpa.
A winding hole is the widened part of the canal designed to allow a long narrowboat to turn in a narrow canal. The name, as with the technique 'to wind', is pronounced as in the wind that blows.
The technique is basically simply, but a neat 3-point turn is rarely possible. It's important always to put the bow into the 'hole' or v-shaped part. Hold it there - let it go aground if necessary, keep the tiller hard over, and apply a healthy burst of revs to the propellor. The bow will be held against the mud of the shallow part, and help 'pivot' the whole boat slowly round. You'll almost certainly need two or three extra reverses, and even more if 'the wind that blows' is blowing the wrong way!
Of course, you might have a bow thruster, you posh bastard! (I mean, lucky devil!)
Valley isn't a well-preserved term on the waterways, but it still pops up in some guides and location maps as one of the contrarian terms of the old boatmen. For valleys were what we now call embankments. It's not such an odd term, perhaps. After all, the embankment *would* be crossing a valley, and perhaps the boatmen were simply referring to where the canal actually was (i.e. crossing a valley).
It's an ill wind that blows no canal boat good. To 'wind' (as in the wind that blows) is to turn a narrowboat in a turning point or junction, so that it's facing back the way it came. It's a rare spot on the canal that a full-length canal boat can turn in, other than in these dedicated 'winding holes'.
Unfortunately, Sod's Law being what it is, the wind usually does blow no boater good, especially when he's trying to wind. It's said that 'winding' got its name from the way early boatmen would employ the wind against the boat to help turn it. I'm less than convinced. As often as not, the wind can work against your boat in a tight turning spot.
If the name came from the methods boatmen used to help them turn the boats, I'd say it was more likely they'd have called it 'shafting'!
I know I'll be gainsaid on this by the more wizened canal hands, but I suspect it comes to us from the same route as windlass
The winding tool for operating most lock gears. They are often (but erroneously) called 'lock keys' by beginners, and linguistic inertia being what it is, the term has crept into more general use. this is a problem, since many locks have their own (security) locks, to discourage vandalism, and it's clearly a recipe for confusion to have two types of 'key' to work a lock, not to mention the two types of lock!
Wing walls are the brick or stone walls at the tail end of the lock.
Woolwich boats were (are) a class of steel working boat built at Harland & Woolf in Woolwich, London.
Once, all boats were towed. And while the beast of choice was the horse (or ANIMAL), sometimes there was no choice for the boatman but to physically pull the boat himself. Pulling the boat yourself was - is - bowhauling. And it's still done occasionally, usually as voluntary fund-raising exercise, sometimes right across country, more frequently as a short piece of desperation when the engine fails.
I enjoy an occasional short spell of bowhauling, usually from lock too lock on a flight. Luckily I've never had to do it of necessity, when any pleasure would sink quickly under strained shoulders. With friends I once 'sternhauled' a boat nearly two miles back from Bosley Locks towards Congleton on the Macclesfield Canal, just to find a place to turn. Average speed, ooh, one mile an hour or so, tops.
Tumblehome is the way that the superstructure of a canal boat slopes inwards as it rises to the cabin roof.
The smaller canals especially were never built to majestic gauges, and the 18th Century bridges and tunnels often had (still have) have very circumscribed arches. The original boats built for these waterways ended up - inevitably - trimmed to fit the space available, and when not laden down with cargo would need to have the sloping sides simply to get through.
For example, the horsedrawn boats of old would typically have extreme tumblehome:
Modern boatbuilders have sought a compromise between the unforgiving brickwork of 230-year old tunnels
and the demands of middle class retirees for more interior space. On balance, I have to agree - the occasional rasp of wet brick rubbing expensive paintwork is an acceptable fee to pay for the benefit of more room inside at shoulder level.
But some boatbuilders, I think, go a little too far.
When the average Briton comes across a scheme or item he thinks is not worth his time, he'll often say: "I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole". I believe Americans say much the same, except it's a "ten foot pole".
Any sensible canal boater carries a wooden pole on the cabin top, in order to punt the boat afloat again when it runs aground, and the most suitable length just happens to be about ten feet. It will normally be about two inches in diameter, and usually made of a hard wood.
However, the working boatmen of old called it a 'shaft', never a 'pole', and the term continues amongst experienced boaters today.
Note the word 'punt'. There's a fast attrition rate of shafts/poles on hire boats especially, because the instinct for beginners is to use them as levers or like pole vaults, bending them until they snap - which can often happen with a delicate force of only a few pounds.
The shaft should be placed against the bank or in some solid part of the canal bed and pushed down its length. It will then bear the force of hundreds of pounds, and usually will free most sterns that have gone aground.
Whether you say 'barge' or 'canal boat' or 'narrowboat' (or indeed 'narrow boat' - two words) nothing is quite as much a shibboleth on the waterways as what you call a boat.
Like most boaters who've bought into the dream, I'm more authentic with my language than the real boatmen ever were. They've been called - called themselves - bargees as well, and the terms they used could vary from canal to canal. The boats had varying names that sometimes were synonyms, or at other times could be very specific terms.
Broadly speaking (in several ways) a barge is a wide-beamed boat - typically 10-14 feet wide, whereas a narrowboat is one that fits in the narrow canals and locks of the Midlands, never more than 7'2" wide. In working boat days, the term was usually separate words - 'narrow boat'. However, in a waterways ukase Waterways World made the single-word form their chosen style some years ago. So Granny Buttons is a NARROWBOAT, *not* a barge.
In fact that's a good move, I think, because it mades it easier to hunt out canal-specific references on Google. 'Narrowboat' is more exclusive and distinctive as one word rather than two.
'Barge' is still a looser, less precise form. I guess I haven't defined it, have I?
When mooring, the boating oldtimers always 'tied up', using 'straps'. I've noticed more and more modern boaters (especially boating Canaltimers) tend to 'park', using 'ropes'. Only the names have changed.
'Animals' was the 19thC boatmen's term for donkeys and mules, used on a number of canals, including - and especially - the Worcester & Birmingham.
Of course, until a hundred years ago, pretty much all canal boats were horse-drawn. Well, when I say 'horse', I could mean 'donkey', or 'mule'. Donkeys and mules were beasts of choice with the British Army because they were powerful in relation to their small size and required diet, and were sensitive, intelligent and responsive. The Army had a saying: You can talk to a horse, but you can chat and whisper to a mule. Kipling echoed this respect in one of his Barrack Room Ballads: It's only the pick of the Army that handles the dear little pets.
It's been said that donkeys were popular with the canal boatmen because they could fit inside when the boat came to a tunnel. I find this hard to believe; despite their energy and stolid temperament, donkeys were often used in pairs, and it would surely have been easier to unhitch them and troop them around the hill rather than go to the trouble of loading a pair of slow-moving 'animals' onto a wobbly boat. If it is true, it's more likely of donkeys than the rather larger mules.
Mules were the animals of choice on many canals in Europe and especially America. The Delaware Canal, one of the USA's more remarkable canal restorations of recent years, still keeps a small team of mules to tow the canal society's boats. Just a shadow of the 3,000 teams it had working at its height, but keeping alive a small tradition.
Nowadays, 'animals' on the English canals are rarely equine. They are more likely canine, whether on the boat:
or lockside:
or just straining their leash:
To GONGOOZLE is to stand by the canal and idly watch the passage of boats, especially standing by locks or on bridges.
In his vade mecum on language World Wide Words, Michael Quinion quotes rumour that it was canal worker's slang, first recorded in late Victorian or Edwardian times. He says it was given wider currency by LTC Rolt in the seminal book Narrow Boat, first published in 1944, and "is said to derive from a couple of words in Lincolnshire dialect: gawn and gooze, both meaning to stare or gape." However, he adds, that is largely speculation. I've also heard it might originally be Cumberland dialect. I guess that means we are all experts on the origin of the term.
I find gongoozlers often very helpful on long flights of locks when I am single-handed, although it takes a certain social knack to rope them in and manage them as a team of ANIMALS or lock monkeys, and I've rarely managed this successfully.
When there are children amongst them, all social rules of behaviour are off, and you are allowed to be as silly and juvenile as you like. The grandparents always like to point out the mini-Rosie&Jims in my windows, and the less comprehending and articulate the child, the more childish become the adults.
It's fun to get them waving to the camera, although sometimes you have to prompt them.
There's a mysterious site called Gongoozler which seems to be in the mid-West of America (Iowa?) and is little more than a cooperative of mutual bloggers, who don't say (or betray) much about themselves, except to their own friends. I don't know how they stumbled on the name, or if it had any resonances for them.
The Gongoozler is the magazine of the Canal Card Collectors Circle. They are 'virtual gongoozlers'. Founded in 1978, they simply collect postcards about canals and meet once a year for a swap and a natter, standing around looking at the pictures of boats going by. To me it seems a bit - well, pornographic, in the sense that they grasp their enjoyment by looking at it instead of doing it. But I'm all for that too, if they like it. Whatever floats your boat!
Blogs have a huge range of applications, and I've just thought of another. I mentioned earlier about waterways glossaries, and how there's not an easily searchable one - i.e. where you type in a word, and up comes the individual definition.
Jim Shead does an excellent one, in terms of content, but it's not very practical to search, being split into four pages. If you know the name of the term, fine; if you only know the definition, not so useful.
Roger Fuller has a less compendious, but no less useful, 'jargon buster' on his Five Towns website, which also has a load of information about historic boats.
There's a boating dictionary on Marisafe.com, but this is American and inevitably is slewed away from the ethnically peculiar UK waterways. Although, interestingly, they do include such an odd term as 'gongoozler', a word that most British canal boaters feel they own spiritually.
I just realised that it's easy to create one with this technology, complete with photographic examples, so I'll start soon, a definition a day.
In the sidebar on this site you'll see a list called 'Categories'. Clicking on one of the categories filters the blog posts to include only those for that particular category. So click on 'Waterways glossary', and you'll have a list of only the glossary posts. Given one word a day, why, it should be finished in scarcely a twelvemonth!
