Claytons at Oldbury: Follow Up

Last Traffic: NarrowBoat, Spring 2015

Hugh Potter

The feature in Winter 2014 NarrowBoat about the final days of this much-loved fleet brought in memories and photographs from several readers.

At Clayton’s Yard In the early 1960s I was fortunate to work in the Birmingham area for a major firm of chartered surveyors which specialised in industrial concerns. This took me to many parts of the Birmingham Canal Navigations and here are a few slides taken at that time of Clayton’s boats at Oldbury before the big freeze of 1963, so probably in 1961–2. In the early 1970s, my wife and I had a narrowboat built at Les Allen’s yard and it was fascinating to travel over the same waterways and witness how dramatically the scenes had changed. No longer the vibrant and humming factories, just dereliction and no steam trains! Richard Courteney Lord, Cheltenham Kubina and Pearl…