Transporting Tar in Brum

Romance and Industry of a City’s Canals: New Angle on Birmingham from the Barge Towy

A tiny candle-illuminated cabin was the only light in the deep murk below the canal bridge. I stumbled down a bricked slope to the towpath. It was not yet four o’clock on a dark morning.

“Towy ahoy,” I bawled, wondering if that was correct canalese. A dog barked and an answering voice came from an unexpected direction. Gleaming lights and clouds of smoke and vapour high on the tar distillery only accentuated the gloom at my feet, but with vague watery noises an even blacker shape materialised as Towy slid her stern across the canal, and I went aboard to meet skipper Leslie Berridge.

He banged on the cabin.

“Get up, you two,” he shouted to his daughters, Annie, 13, and Gertrude, 12, and we crawled along the narrow gunwales to the engine room where, after a fearful pyrotechnic display, the 15-h.p. diesel engine spluttered into life.

The Berridge Family

Towy was lying alongside its butty, Kubina — the two 70-foot narrow boats housing the Berridge family. Mrs Berridge was confined aboard Kubina with her new sixth-born. Johnnie, five, and Tommie, three, were also sleeping there, and Annie joined them, leaving Gertie as sole crew of Towy. Eight-year-old Leslie, having already fallen in the cut 15 times, was deemed safer at Wood End Hall, the Erdington hostel of the Birmingham Education Committee, which gratuitously accommodates up to 29 canal children during term and sends them to school. The idea originated with George Cadbury, and was suggested by the National Association of Inland Waterway Carriers for inclusion in the 1944 Education Act.

At four o’clock we were off — empty for Nechells gasworks. A smell compounded of oil, tar and canal enveloped us, and a darkness which the skipper’s eyes could penetrate though mine could not. With consummate helmsmanship he sorted out water from land even when light from factories fell across the canal, making confusion worse confounded.

Grotesque Dances

In such patches the angles of buildings were reflected faithfully in the motionless water ahead, to break into grotesque dances in our disturbed wake. Past Accles and Pollocks, past Simplex and up to Spon Lane and Chance’s, where the travelling crane overhead was lit by beams from the works. Entrances to factory canal basins loomed like black caverns, but one revealed momentarily a beautiful industrial diorama of blue radiance and red flame, and a glass-sided workshop floated past like a green aquarium.

Then a cutting, with pollarded willows above against a sky already hinting at dawn. Gertie made her appearance as we went down the three locks at Smethwick, nonchalantly steering while drinking a cup of tea.

“Watch her put it straight into the lock,” said the skipper proudly as Towy crossed a short pound from one lock to another we had just opened. It entered flawlessly, and he added, “I won’t let her off in the dark though.”

An Unaccustomed Slant

Tangyes, Avery’s Scales — Midlands industry passed in review. When we reached the long “straight” beside the railway through Winson Green I could see well enough to take the tiller.

A bombed mill where once flour boats congregated was passed on our left, and we came up to our first unaccustomed slant on the city centre — a back view of Wales Cots, Oozells Street with netball stands on its flat roof, and the television contraption atop Telephone House.

Gertie ran ahead at Tindal Bridge with a kettle for water from a towpath tap. The Worcester Canal branched from our right, tunnelling beneath the Church of the Messiah, and at the Crescent Arm we began our descent of the 13 Farmer’s Locks. Gertie, a windlass in her belt, took me to the first lock, which was empty. Deftly she raised the nearside paddle with her windlass and rushed to the bottom gate to close it. Charging back again to the top gate she raised the centre paddle and crossed the gate to raise the far one. The lock filled in a minute. Then pressing our combined weight on the arm we ponderously opened the top gate. Normally Gertie manages this alone.

“Them is Brummagem”

Behind us the skipper brought Towy into the lock, closed the top gate and paddles, released the water through the paddles of the bottom gate, opened it, and chugged out. Steadily Gertie and I shoved and turned our way downstream —  under Summer Row at Saturday Bridge, beneath the Science Museum and Newhall Street, through the massive railway arch below Snow Hill, to the foot of the lock staircase and an unusual view of St Chad’s.

“Them locks is Brummagem,” Gertie informed me, and “Mom had her teeth out there,” pointing to the Dental Hospital. This bright-eyed little girl, to whom Brummagem is 13 locks and a central hospital, has had no schooling and cannot read or write. She has never slept in a house, travelled by train, nor seen the sea, though she regularly does the six-day round trip with Towy and Kubina to Ellesmere Port, whence the family returns with 44 tons of fuel oil, earning £11 on the trip.

Birmingham was awaking. Peeping through warehouse windows I saw men packing crates; lathes were whirring; fans ejected dust, hot air and industrial odours onto the canalside; and artificial flowers in a frosted window imparted a flash of colour. Here was a strange beauty, more angular, less colourful than trees and fields, but as fascinating — shafts of sunlight striking through arches; the changing shapes of smoke wreaths enough to distract a writer’s attention from low bridges which threatened to decapitate him.

“Aston Eleven”

The “Aston Eleven” or the “Lousy Eleven” might equally refer to the “Villa” according to the loyalties of the man in the street. To the man on the canal they refer to 11 back-breaking locks. Lock-keeper Parker, who ticks off passing boats on a slate, showed me that a dozen or so boats descend and climb the stair daily, but 77 each way were recorded on February 4, 1928.

Windsor Street Gasworks receded astern; Thimble Mill Lane Bridge, a surprisingly graceful curve of the many-sided New World buildings rising cliff-like from the canal Cuckoo Bridge and, at Salford Bridge, a glimpse of the outside world.

The canal suddenly came to life. Off a boat-building yard we encountered a Clayton black-boat laden with creosote for the G.E.C. From a hatch on the houseboat Corn in Egypt a head enquired of the skipper as to the health of “Bill” who was, apparently, “still on the box”.  Then the skipper called to Gertie below: “Here’s your Auntie Ivy,” and as our boats passed he told his relatives, who ply from Camp Hill Wharf, “We’ve got a babby now.” Following Auntie Ivy was the Gipping, a dog in his kennel amidships and Mrs Jinks shaking a mat over the stern.

Trawling for Coal

So to the gasworks. Our hatches were opened, and within 15 minutes 22 tons of crude tar at 90 degrees Fahrenheit poured from the feeder into our holds. Surely Towy’s timbers will never rot.

A gay mallard was swimming around at Nechells as we began our return journey — as exotic as unexpected among power stations and railway sidings. Speed was reduced along the wharf while we trawled for coal from the canal bottom, the most profitable five minutes’ fishing I have ever seen. The outward journey had taken four-and-a-half hours, reaching six m.p.h. on open reaches. Our return, working the 27 locks in reverse direction, was to take an hour longer.

Fleeting vistas from bus tops are the extent of the townsman’s familiarity with Birmingham’s canals. The canalside view of a bus is of a momentary red or yellow switchback appearance across hump-backed bridges — up, down and gone. Otherwise, with few exceptions, this trench through the city, this “cut,” is a world apart, and one fears, a dying world.

Graveyard of Boats

One boat only passed us on our homeward way — an open boat with wire coils, horse-drawn from Hockley to Power’s Saltley. But continually we chugged through a graveyard of boats, waterlogged, their timbers decayed, their skeletons rusting. Gold to the scrap man, dross to the carrier. Back at Junction Wharf, while Towy disgorged her tar, I warmed my chilled body at a Viking funeral — a leaping bonfire of a narrow boat timbers and the mast of a butty. 

But around, in and on a dozen boats, was prolific life like that of a fair-ground. Laundry blew merrily, toddlers frightened my parental heart with their waterside gymnastics  — heirs to a separate race which inter-marries and goes its way. Before you apply ordinary standards to their conditions and upbringing, remember the skipper’s father-in-law who wants to return to the boats from his new house because it is too draughty. 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Barrie Stanton for sharing the original Birmingham Weekly Post article with us.