Wooden-boat-building

Reader's Letters & Queries: NarrowBoat, Spring 2017

The costings of the boats that are refered to in the wooden-boat-building feature (Winter 2016, NB) are interesting, as they don’t seem to have been subject to much inflation. You may know that the King’s Langley farmer Newman Hatley had a full-rigged (but small, 70ft by 14ft) Thames sailing barge built in 1801 by Joseph Piper of Hammersmith, for use in taking his corn and flour to Brentford and Paddington (and maybe further afield), and no doubt bringing back manures, coal etc. Its Grand Junction Canal gauging number was 91. In 1804 he told the agricultural commentator Arthur Young that it had cost him £262.10s, a huge sum which may well support your suggestion of the high cost of shipbuilding oak at the height of the Napoleonic war. Fabian Hiscock, by email…