Malcolm Braine

Obituary: NarrowBoat, Summer 2021

Legendary boat-builder and restorer who formed a link from the historic working boatyards to the modern leisure-boating era From a very early age Malcolm Braine became familiar with the sight of canal boats on his way to school across the Birmingham old and new Main Lines at Galton Bridge and Summit Bridge. His first recollection was of seeing an icebreaker being drawn by a team of horses on both towpaths. He also recalled his first ride being aboard Noah Hingley’s tug Crown from Sandwell Colliery shutes to Netherton Tunnel with a train of day-boats in tow. His introduction to a boat dock came in the dreadful winter of 1947, when he was still at school, when he visited Morris’s dock at West Bromwich and Ernest Thomas’s dock at Old Birchills, Walsall. The young Malcolm quickly learned to appreciate the vagaries of tar, pitch, horse manure, chalico and oakum. The following year, he was recruited into the nascent Inland Waterways Association by Tom Rolt when on a fami…