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March is the month when we celebrate International Women’s Day all over the world. We decided to have International Women’s Week so earlier in the month posted for 7 days on Facebook to celebrate some of the many women who made the canals the incredible place they are now.
International Women’s Day (IWD) has been around since 1911, celebrating women’s achievements and promoting equality. Since then women have worked or volunteered on the canals on a par with men but with little recognition. We celebrate those stories in our work so decided to have a week of posts to our social media highlighting some of the remarkable women of the waterways whose stories we have told over the years.
Follow the links or click on the images to hear/see/read more.
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Angela Rolt and Ray Aickman were both involved in the inception and early years of the Inland Waterways Association when it first started.
Angela was Tom Rolt’s first wife – they married in July 1939 and set off from Banbury on NB Cressy on a journey that led to the publication of Narrowboat in 1944. The woodblock illustrations were based on photographs taken by Angela.
Ray was Robert Aickman’s wife – he had written to Tom after reading Narrowboat. The result was the two couples met in August 1945 and the Inland Waterways Association was born.
Both Angela and Ray worked tirelessly for the IWA and on behalf of the waterways until 1950. You can listen to their stories on our Soundcloud channel
The wartime women trainees were the subject of Heather Wastie‘s Idle Women and Judies, a piece she created in 2015. A year later Kate Saffin would start researching for a story she wanted to tell about women in wartime and that is how Heather and Kate met, starting our journey telling the stories of ordinary women doing extraordinary things!
Sonia Rolt was one of the wartime trainees who married a boatman and stayed on the canals after the war. They later divorced and she became Tom Rolt’s second wife. In this interview in 2011 (she died in 2014) she talks to Lorna Yorke, another remarkable woman of the water who comes from boating stock, lives in Stoke Bruerne and has spent many years researching and documenting the history of the boating people.
The wartime women’s training scheme recruited women to work commercial boats when their male captains and crews signed up to fight in the armed services. About 100 women expressed interest or started; about 50 of them worked for any length of time transporting vital goods between the east London docks, via Brentford and on to Birmingham. Loads of coal, steel and wood, to help keep supplies moving. Too many women to name all of them, but on our website we have gathered all the books, articles, newsreels, interviews and obituaries that we have found. Happy browsing.
And if you have suggestions for anything we have missed, just let us know.
Alex Bennett joined us when in 2017 we recreated the journey worked by the wartime trainees with our show Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways. Alex was an amazing boatwoman, with her Fellows, Morton & Clayton boat, Tench. Very sadly, Alex died in a fire February 2018. She was an extraordinary person- skilled boatwoman, always full of vitality and laughter. This is the tribute that our project videographer Erin Leonidas Hopkins created.
Tina Gittings was one of many women who put on their sturdy boots and rolled up their sleeves to help rescue the canals. Women labouring, cooking, boating, organising… united by a common cause – to save the Black Country waterways. We had the pleasure and honour of recording many of their stories for our 2019 I Dig Canals project, including Tina’s. She did a lot of digging over the years but it was romance that first led her to the canals and Dudley tunnel.
Image: https://dudleycanaltrust.org.uk/gallery/
And lastly The women born to the boats. We’ve celebrated women from the 1940s to the present day but to finish it’s time to remember the generations of women born to the boats, who grew up to marry boatmen and raise their own families whilst constantly on the move. Some were employed as crew in their own right. They had little schooling, didn’t write books or letters, their lives aren’t recorded in the minutes of meetings of ‘important’ committees but a few were recorded telling their stories (see Ramlin Rose; the Boatwoman’s Story by Sheila Stewart), mostly they just got on with the work, as Rose says in the book: “always keeping the boats ahead”.
We hope you have enjoyed this brief introduction to women of the waterways. Let us know on Facebook or Twitter/X what you found of interest in our recordings. We hope to be sharing more history at Calvalcade, Crick and Foxton Locks in May and June
