Narrow Boat (1944)

Tom Rolt was a very complex man, never more so than in his seminal book Narrow Boat. He captures the end of the age of working canals and enjoys observing the end of an era. His observations and opinions were made at a time long before detailed analysis of records was available. Working on gut feeling his words captured the imagination of the post war public and set into motion the foundations for the canal restoration movement. He was a pioneer of the new movement. ( )

This is the author's first book, and paints a fascinating picture of the end of the working canal age in England and Wales. The illustrated editions are highly recommended. The author has much more subtle and ambivalent views about the old countryside and the Industrial Revolution than the previous reviewer found: but you need to read his autobiography The Landscape Trilogy to get these, and to get the personal context of the Narrow Boat book. Rolt was also a very active advocate of steam railways (very much the product and driver of the Industrial Revolution) and was well aware of his internal conflicts between his love of the English and Welsh countryside, enjoying his work as a craftsman engineer with steam and diesel, motorising a horse-drawn canal boat, and being a vintage car driver and mechanic. ( )

Rolt is an excellent writer, with a good eye for what he sees and good descriptive text, but with massive cultural blinkers.

His description of his travels on board his converted narrow boat Cressy back in the 1940s was to be one of the sparks leading to the foundation of the Inland Waterways Association and the restoration of the British canal network.

In the regard of writing about his journey, and his description of the life of the few remaining owners of horse-drawn boats when he encountered them, he gives many useful details (I'd never known that concertinas were popular instruments among boatsmen).

However, his blinkers come from his conviction that everything of the past is good and everything of the machine age is bad. He says quite seriously that he believes the canals to be the safest form of transport ever devised, but does not spot the contradiction when he encounters a boatman whose daughter had recently drowned in a lock (in fact, drownings and other accidents were pretty common).

He comments on the life span of over a hundred of some old countrymen in the parish records he views and attributes it to their simple life, but fails to spot the high infant mortality in those same records.

He loves his books, but believes that the illiterate boatman loses nothing by his lack of knowledge.

It's a good book if you want to read about the pre-restoration Inland Waterways, complete with the last surviving canal pubs (in the era of real ale served in a jug), but you may find it a touch annoying if you feel that you wouldn't actually want to have lived in Olde England even if it looks very charming in retrospect. ( )