Engraving of the week .

 

 

 

'Lowering the Eel Bucks ' - From Life on the Upper Thames (1875).

 

Eels once formed part of the basic diet of many riverside communities and they were beloved by Londons East Enders along with cockles and whelks.

The eel buck was peculiar to the Thames although eel fishing was practiced on many other English rivers. The wicker basket was made locally from willow harvested from the rivers banks and was then mounted on a wooden framework where it could be raised and lowered into the water.

There are many accounts of its hindrance to navigation and the buck is perpetuated in the names of a couple of islands - Buck Eyot and Handbuck Eyot  one near Shiplake and the other near Marsh Lock.

The Eel Buck passed out of use early in the last century and this could partly be due to an increase in living standards as the eel had always been considered as a food of the poor. Today with the stocks of eels being said to have declined by up to 95% the species is strictly protected. Environmental  factors, overfishing and global warming are said to be some of the reasons for this catastrophic decline although the presence of high levels of industrial chemicals in the fish could also be another potent reason for its scarcity.

Engraving of the week.

POLLING THE WILLOWS - from Life on the Upper Thames by H.R. Robertson. 1875.



A characteristic tree of all riversides the willow is especially evocative of the Thames and Cherwell valleys. They are still pollarded today but in Robertson's time the the branches resulting from polling produced a useful crop and work for those engaged in harvesting it.
The trees used to be polled every seventh year in the middle of winter and the resulting trees were called pollards. The wood had been used from early times and produced such things as baskets, parts for carts and gun stocks, harrows, shoemakers lasts, clogs, forks, hay rakes, rafters, ladders, poles to make hurdles and lattices and for many other uses. It was particularly famed as the best wood for producing charcoal  and as the chosen wood for cricket bats.
In the Victorian era it supplied the timber for water wheels and for the floats of paddle steamers. It was also used in tanning leather.
                                                            

The First Roses and Castles 1873.

Illustration by H R Robinson in the Art Journal 1873.

My Dec 2110 blog ‘On the canal in 1858’  contained the first written description of Narrow Boat decoration. The illustration shown above depicts the first known illustration of this art.
Henry Robert Robinson made his sketching journey on the Upper Thames in the early 1870’s with the express intention of recording the life, lore, customs, crafts and the workers of the river. We are fortunate to day that Robinson was so ambitious in the scope of his enterprise because he has left us with a priceless collection of unique illustrations of riverside life in the mid 19th century.
The results of Robinsons work were published in a series of articles written for the British periodical the Art Journal during 1873. As well as showing obscure and long forgotten crafts the artist also includes detailed written observations which are invaluable for us today.


Gilt decorated and embossed front cover and spine of ‘Life on the Upper Thames’  1875.
A couple of years later in 1875 the artist collected his articles together and published them in book form.’ Virtues’ the art publishers produced the book and the result was as you can see a handsome volume which must have been quite an expensive item to buy and was I suppose the Victorian equivalent of a coffee table book. My copy is a presentation copy with the name of the collage on the front cover.

Title Page.

The book contains an engraved frontispiece titled ‘The Pride of the Thames’ which is absent in the art journal but which again clearly shows the boat decoration.
The artist writes in his chapter on the boat people that their trade is declining and that the boats were called besides the familiar ‘canal boat’,’ barge’ and ‘monkey boat’ -  ‘wussers’. I must admit that I hadn’t come across that title before!
There is much more of interest here and I hope to be able to blog about the written descriptions in a future blog.
Meanwhile in the coming weeks I will be blogging more of the 36 full page engravings from the 36 diverse chapters of this rare book 
Pride of the Thames.

Women of the Barges.Aug 29th 1942

‘Illustrated Magazine’. August 1942.                                                          

‘Illustrated Magazine’ was published throughout the 1940s /50s and was along with its great rival – ‘Picture Post’ a  very popular source of news and current affairs.
Of the three articles concerning Britain's canals in wartime published in these two magazines; the ‘Illustrated Mag’ shown above has a very early entry which might interest those interested in the origins of the ‘Idle Women’ and the wartime boat training scheme on the Grand Union.
  
Caption reads - ‘Empty; the – ‘Heather Bell’  heads for the collieries to take on a load of coal’.                                                                    
The March family from Worcestershire had owned the ‘Heather Bell’ for some years before war broke out in 1939 when they decided to help the war effort by carrying with the boat. The photograph shows Daphne March (Daughter) and a crew member with the boat at Tipton.. Initially Daphne’s elder brother was involved with the running of the boat but after he entered the armed forces Daphne and her mother ran the boat alone.
The boat carried coal from the Birmingham area for delivery to canal side premises in Worcester with a return trip with flour to Tipton. Occasional trips were made elsewhere.

L T C Rolt living on his boat ‘Cressy’ at Tardebigge on the Worcester & Birmingham canal during the war years would have known this boat and its crew well. He mentions  a boat passing him in the dusk and the ‘Roedean’ accents of the female crew members  floating back to him as the boat passed by.
    The boat started its run to Tipton in February of 1941 but after her brother left to enter the armed forces Daphne advertised in the Times for a new crew member. Molly Trail joined the boat and she in turn introduced Kit Gayford as a crew member.Molly left in the autumn of 1941 but Kit Gayford stayed on until the boat sank in an accident in December of that year
After leaving the Heather Bell, Molly Trail was one of those involved in planning the wartime female boat training scheme for the GUCC and the Ministry of War Transport and in the summer of 1942 Kit Gayford joined her and they both started training the women who applied to join the scheme.
The March family were thus early forerunners of the all women wartime crews  although it should be said that it was not unknown,from early times on, for a wife (after the death of her husband) to steer the family boat perhaps with the help of a daughter.
The subject of Daphne March,the ‘Heather Bell’ and the ‘Idle Women’ boat training scheme is dealt with in much more detail in a great item by Mike Constable in a current article in the Historic Narrow Boat Owners Club newsletter. http://www.hnboc.org.uk . Mike has researched this subject very thoroughly and is able to deal with it in some detail.

                               
Daphne March and her mother.                                                                        

Daphne features in another wartime publication which I will review shortly.

Promoting the canal in 1923.

The larger canal companies occasionally issued promotional material and the booklet shown above is one of the earliest  in my collection.

With its colour printed front cover and tasselled cord binding it looks  quite prestigious and was obviously designed by the Aire and Calder Navigation Co to impress potential customers with the size of their canal and its state of the art equipment.

Coal hoists are featured.                                                  

As are their tugs and carrying craft.                                            

Their ‘tom pudding’ compartment boats for coal carrying.

& their very large modernised locks.

The  undated booklet has 30 pages and 20 plus photos and diagrams and seems to have been issued in the early 1920’s.

A Day Out at Compton Verney & British Canal Art (and other things).

‘Popular English Art’  by Noel Carrington & Clarke Hutton. 1946.

 

I have written in a previous blog of the first recorded mention of the painting and decoration of the English canal  narrow boat (see my Dec 2110 blog – On the Canals in 1858). This was unfortunately just a written description and as vivid and detailed as it is, another 15 years passed before we have our first visual idea of this painting in an engraving by H R Robertson in ‘ Life on the Upper Thames’  published in 1873. I will be showing this and some of the other superb engravings from this book in a future blog.

My purpose here is to take the story on from this point and although we have various mentions of ‘ the gaily painted barge decoration’  and ‘ the decorated pails and buckets’  in various accounts of canal voyages made during the subsequent half century it is not until the years of the second world war and after that the boat decoration is recognized as forming part of a much wider British Folk Art tradition.

Noel Carrington's book was the first to include Canal Boat Art in his book of British folk art in 1946. Carrington was the brother of Dora Carrington the artist of Bloomsbury & Lytton Strachey fame. Before WW2 he had edited Country Life before becoming involved with Penguin Books at the outset of their publication in the late 1930’s.

Carrington introduced a series called King Penguins during the war and their colour printed board covers as in ‘British Popular Art ‘ were often designed by Clarke Hutton.

Published in 1946.                                          Published in 1951.

 

Margaret Lambert a historian and Enid Marx an artist designer are generally credited with recognizing and initiating an  interest in Canal boat art in particular  and British naive art in general. Since the early 1930’s they had amassed a huge collection of paintings and artefacts from all over the country. Nothing escaped their eyes – fabrics,inn & shop signs,fairground items, corn dollies, cig cards , metalwork and ephemera off all kinds – all found a place in their collection.

This collection  is now housed at Compton Verney in the Warwickshire Countryside and a visit there is a really good day out where you can see amongst the Measham Teapots and Old Canal Art, many other strange and wonderful things and yes they do have a cafe. http://www.comptonverney.org.uk/collections/british_folk_art.aspx.

Enid Marx was a fellow student of Eric Ravelious who in turn taught John O’Connor (see my Jan Post) and its noteworthy that all these artists had an interest in ordinary, very humble and yet quirky subjects and artefacts as indeed did Barbara Jones…..

Barbara Jones’s work ‘The Unsophisticated Arts’  was published in 1951.

 

My favourite and probably the most scholarly and yet quirky of all the books mentioned in this article is this lovely book which emanated from a series of articles in the Architectural Review published throughout the 1940’s. This review deserves a separate article of its own since it played an unacknowledged role in bringing together  and publishing for the first time articles,art & photographs by young artists and designers such as Barbara Jones & Eric De Mare. In a future article I hope to show some of these early articles which were the precursors of mature works such as ‘Unsophisticated Arts’ and ‘The Canals of England’.

Barbara Jones was interested in all things odd,unacknowledged and quirky – follies,fairgrounds,shop signs,grottoes and all forms of popular art. She helped to organize the 1951 Festival of Britain and the ‘Black Eyes & Lemonade’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the same year, one of the first exhibitions of popular art to be seen in this country. One of her book jacket designs will be familiar to some and I show this below.

The ‘Salvo’ and Reginald Mills.

 

 

Untitled Print by Reginald Mills. Undated.

 

Canal book ,ephemera and print collectors may be interested in this print from my collection which I recently ‘rediscovered’.

No prizes for guessing the location although ‘artistic license’ and a touch of the ‘Enid Blyton’s’ reigns supreme in the bottom left foreground I feel.!!

Still its an unusual subject and one which many people although they may know the location will not know the boat tied up near to what is now the Canal Museum at Stoke Bruerne,

The original painting is in the archives of the Salvation Army and this will immediately give a clue to the boats identity especially to canal buffs of a certain age.

I have no idea whether the artist Reginald Mills was a Salvationist or not but I have seen another work of his portraying the Salvation Army in a town centre so he could well have been. As a painter he was active in the 1930 – 50’s period and is very well known for his paintings of the London Blitz .

The boat is of course the ‘Salvo’ with Brigadier Fielding standing in the hatches. The Fielding's ran a mission to the boat people on the Grand Union Canal from 1950 – 1964 and the painting I would think dates from the early 1950’s. Brigadier Fielding had known the boat people from an early age as his parents ran a general store patronised by the boaters at New Bradwell.

Like many I can remember the Fielding's in retirement at their cottage on the offside at Norton Junction. B W had awarded the couple the cottage rent free as an acknowledgment of the couples service to the canal boatpeople.

Joe & Rose in the ' Tunnel'.

 

Boaters who were young in the 1960’s may remember Joe and Rose Skinner,their boat ‘Friendship’  and their motive power – Dolly the mule. Joe was a gentleman of the old school and a connection to times long past. When in retirement at Suttons Stop he was a regular attender at boat rallies and the like and it was at one of these that I first came across him.

The cover photo of the magazine above hasn’t reproduced very well so apologies for that but it is an unusual shot that not many of you will have seen. Joe can just be seen behind Dolly on the towpath.

The shot was taken from a bridge over the ‘tunnel’ at Fenny Compton on the Oxford Canal and shows the boat on what must have been one of their last trips.

If you want to know more about Joe & Rose then ‘The Last Number Ones’ edited by Hugh Potter is the book for you. Or for a personal anecdote on Joe I can do no better than recommend an article by Tony Lewery who like me fell in love with the cut, its characters, its boats and its art in the 60’s http://www.canaljunction.com/mainline/0803.htm

The Skinners and their life are also mentioned in the Guardian obituary of Jack Skinner,a nephew of Joes and himself a living legend. Jack died in 2008 at the age of 88 and details of his life and of how he saved the Oxford canal (twice) can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/jun/16/1

The Canal Woodcuts of John O’Connor.

‘Canal’ by John O’Connor. Woodcut. No21 from an edition of 70. (Authors collection)

The year 1950 saw four important waterway books published, all now well established as classics .They were ‘The Inland Waterways of England’ by Tom Rolt, ‘The Canals of England’  by Eric De Mare, ‘British Canals’ by Charles Hadfield and probably the least known of the four ‘Canals Barges and People’  by John O’Connor. As Mark Baldwin says in his ‘Canal Books’  (1984) ‘we can look upon 1950 as the dawn of a new canal age in publishing’.

Its very interesting that of the four authors mentioned above; one was a historian (Hadfield) ,one an  engineer (Rolt) and two artists – De Mare (Photographer) and O’Connor (Artist & Wood Engraver).
They were too, all firsts in their way – Charles Hadfield was the first canal historian of the modern post war period, Tom Rolt as is well known, initiated a public awareness in our countries canal heritage , Eric De Mare produced some of the finest photographs of canal subjects which in many peoples eyes have never been bettered and the same could be said for John O'Connor's woodcuts.

‘Canal Boat’  by John O’Connor. Woodcut. No 70 from an edition of 70. (Authors Collection)

Canals and the canal boat people were a favourite subject for O’Connor and in the late 1940’s he depicted many such subjects on the southern Grand Union including a visit to the boat dock at Uxbridge. In his book he records his conversations with the boat people but it is his wood engravings that are the primary joy of the book.
He was innovative too in his use of colour overprinting with lino cuts which were applied over the top of the black & white wood engraving. This can be seen on the cover of his book ‘Canals Barges and People’ This is full of his woodcuts and was published in an edition of only 1,000 and due to technical problems was never reprinted. This together with the fact that the book has been broken by print dealers and is also collected by those interested in wood engraving has over the years resulted in a scarcity and steadily rising prices.
John O’Connor was a fine artist and master wood engraver and was taught by Eric Ravelious. If you want to know more about his life, influences and work try Wikipaedia or the Guardian or Independent obituary archives. John O’Connor died in 2004.
You may have come across a copy of one of the earliest pleasure cruising guides produced by British Waterways in the mid 1950’s.                                                 
The front cover of the earliest editions has a small woodcut vignette which  I think was designed by O’Connor and I reproduce one of these below. The later editions of these cruising guides had the woodcut replaced by a photograph.
                                                                      
John O’Connor can be included in that loose collection of British artists,designers,architects and photographers who from the mid 1940’s were the first to show an interest in Narrow Boat Decoration as part of a larger British Folk Art Scene. Following Noel Carrington, Enid Marx, Margaret Lambert, Barbera Jones and Eric De Mare; John O’Connor was one of the last  but by no means the least to have his contribution published in 1950.
It is unique and has never been bettered!!
In more recent times Tony Lewery has continued this interest in his books – Narrow Boat Painting & Flowers Afloat.
I hope to blog at some stage on these artist designers and their interest in British Folk Art and on the way in which they focussed attention on British canal boat decoration after the war.

Who was Amy? A signature from 60 years ago.

 

For those of you without specs or a magnifier, the dedication reads…’To Amy Alder . In memory of many very ‘un-idle moments. Susan Woolfitt’

The dedication is in my first edition copy of ‘Idle Women’  published in 1947 by wartime’ Idle Woman’ Susan Woolfitt.

 

So who was Amy?

As the dedication says …’to many un-idle moments’ , the most obvious answer is that she was one of Susan Woolfitts wartime boating companions. Yet no  Amy Alder is recorded as having been on the training scheme as far as we know. It has been suggested that she  might have been the landlady of the Blue Lias pub at Long Itchington. A favourite wartime ‘tie up’ for the boats on their way to Birmingham evidently.

The more visually agile amongst you and those who have perused an earlier blog of mine (See ‘Wartime Ephemera’ in my Nov Blogs) will have noted that the photo on the cover of War Illustrated and that on the dust cover of Idle Women are the same ! - this is because it was an official war time government photograph.

Any ideas anyone? Please let me have your comments.

While we are at it. I thought you might like to see the signature of one of the  other ‘Idle Woman’ who published an account of her experiences i e Emma Smith who kindly signed my first edition copy of her book ‘Maidens Trip’  recently.

 

For those interested Idle Women and Maidens Trip are still in print and well worth reading. Another account is by Margaret Cornish whose ‘Troubled Waters’  was published in 1987.

First Edition copy of Maidens Trip (P’bd 1948) & its nostalgic ‘period ‘ dust wrapper.

I cant resist also showing the rare 1st edition Paperback edition of 1950 again with a nostalgic but very different (period)front cover illustration.                                             

Remember…… more wonderfully nostalgic blogs to come.!!!! Let me know if you have any ideas about  ‘Amy’ or my blogs or anything to do with old waterway books.