Centre Cabin Boats

Reader's Letters & Queries: NarrowBoat, Autumn 2010

Centre Cabin Boats Looking at Mike Beech’s Historical Profile article ‘The Leicester Line’ (Summer 2010 NB), I could not help be surprised at the photograph of a wide boat on page 20. I have an original unused postcard of the same image taken at Birstall, with similar historical information and boat dimensions written in ink on the back by hand. If there are two, I wonder how many more cards this mystery writer has recorded these same details on. My card is undated but I doubt that it was taken in 1958, more like the Edwardian period or later. This type of boat was not unique to the Leicester Line and is a typical upper Trent craft seen on the river and adjoining canals and waterways. They are recorded with their distinctive centre cabins in canal boat registers for Leicester, Loughborough, Gainsborough, Nottingham and Lincoln; and were used as far distant as the Lincolnshire fens. Several photographs of similar craft are in The River Trent Navigation by Mike Taylo…