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At Cavalacade Kate performed Roses and Thorns supported by Polly Boccongelli providing music and song – glimpses of the lives of women across a century and several hundred miles of canals.
From Annie Brooks talking of the period around 1910, standing on a block of wood to ‘shove tiller over, so I learned to steer the boat when I was 7, along Barnston Wood coming to the Potteries’ to Rose Ramlin getting married in 1921 in Banbury – knowing everything there was to know about running a boat, but knowing nothing about ‘it’.
And onward through the boatmen’s strike of 1923, protesting against a proposed pay cut of 4d a ton, with an excerpt from Rats, Ropes and Revolution, the play where Kate told the story of Eliza and what it might have been like to be a boatwoman at the heart of the strike – no one asking her whether she wanted to strike, having to keep the family going, worrying they might lose their only home…
Then there was a big meeting one the wharf with a fellow from Parlyment, said we’d get better pay and ‘your wives can be left at home, not have to work and your children go to school’.
And wot ‘ome would that be, I thinks to meself, that cabin’s our only ‘ome.
Only to end up with a slightly smaller pay cut – 3d a ton rather than 4d!
The 1930s and the depression were hard work for the boaters, but the second world war brought respite from the struggles of keeping going, with Rose saying ‘we spent the war dodging bombs’ and Sarah trying to keep the family fed:
‘We were busy during the war and we’d move around a lot. But when we would go to collect our rations, a lot of the shop keepers wouldn’t give them to us, they’d tell us they weren’t for the likes of us’.
There was so much work for the boats that the Grand Union recruited women from the bank ‘trainees they were called’. Cue Isobel’s first lock and a bit of a tricky moment in a tunnel.
After the war, the canals were in decline but the campaigning to save and restore them started and by the mid 1960s there was a new wave of canal mania as local groups worked to restore neglected locks, pounds and tunnels. Romance often blossomed amidst the mud… Tina’s first date with Derek was spent breaking up an old wooden boat and Jeni’s with Graham involved straining gear oil through her tights!
And we rounded off with a rousing rendition of Peaceful English Waterway’ – a song by Heather Wastie that she started aged 13 and finished much later (around 2021):
How many kinds of rubbish can we find
On the peaceful English waterway?
I’ll tell you now of some that I know
And those I miss you will forgive I pray.
Oil drums, bikes & parts of cars
Prams & pushchairs, bottle & jars
Mattresses, cookers & the kitchen sink
Bricks & bolts, wheels & pipes
Enough to sink a ship
On the peaceful English waterway
You can probably work out the tune…
