3 minute read
Eyes on the Prize
Hands down the handsomest award in IWA’s trophy cabinet is the Alfred Ritchie Challenge Cockerel. And its history is as colourful as the prize itself...
Perhaps the most recognisable element of canal culture is the traditional art form known as ‘roses and castles’. This distinctive decoration was most prominently used on the fixed panels inside the back cabins of working boats, but was also applied to portable items like water cans, hand bowls and dippers.
It continues to be synonymous with the waterways’ cargocarrying past, and to this day IWA honours the tradition with an appropriately eye-catching award for the most well-turned-out working boat at its annual Festival of Water.
Friendship first
The Alfred Ritchie Challenge Cockerel was inaugurated at the 1963 National Rally in London, although there were no entrants that year. The trophy isn’t listed in the 1964 National Rally awards but the following year, in 1965, it finally found a home in the very deserving hands of Joe and Rose Skinner for their boat Friendship, the last mule-drawn narrowboat on the Oxford cut. The oak-hulled, elm-bottomed craft had been owned by them since 1924.
In fact, Friendship was too long to get to the rally itself, which was held in Blackburn that year, but there was a subsidiary gathering of 14 full-length narrowboats at Lydiate, which counted as part of the event.
Fittingly, Friendship had been towed to Lydiate from Hawkesbury Junction (the Skinners’ home mooring) by one Colonel Alfred Ritchie, who gave his name to this award. Ritchie was a working boat enthusiast and director of Willow Wren Canal Transport Services, who himself owned a converted ex-Fellows Morton & Clayton craft called Lupin. Along with his wife, Mollie, he cruised extensively seeking new commercial traffics, and the couple also took a keen interest in the welfare of the boat-people and their children, assisting with the organisation of Christmas parties, for example.
Canalware champions
The Ritchies lived in the canal village of Stoke Bruerne on the Grand Union until 1967, not far from the then-recently established Waterways Museum there. They were great collectors of traditionally painted narrowboat ware and a number of the museum’s prized exhibits came from the Ritchies’ collection. Indeed, so knowledgeable were they on the subject that it’s very possible one of them may have painted the artwork on the trophy.
The couple also provided facilities for others to learn the techniques of narrowboat decoration. According to a short
Above: The block
of wood that forms the main painted part of the trophy is an old working boat cabin block.
Right: Joe and
Rose Skinner picked up the prize at the 1965 National Rally at Blackburn, on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.
profile of the colonel in a 1965 issue of Canal and River Monthly Review, were it not for the couple’s interest, and others like them, “this gorgeous style of painting might well have died out”. The publication added: “It is one of England’s few surviving arts, and it is vital that it should continue to develop and flourish, in an age when true values tend to become concealed in the moneygrabbing rat race of modern commerce.”
Longevity
These days ‘working boats’ come in many different guises, and a recent recipient of the award was from the Environment Agency’s modern fleet. But the colonel’s legacy lives on – that his award will be up for grabs at this year’s Festival of Water on the Worcester & Birmingham Canal is testament to the continued interest in folk art from our waterways.
What became of the man himself, little is known. After 1967, and having moved away from Stoke Bruerne, the couple became much less active within IWA. Thanks to the remarkable painted trophy they left behind, however, their name is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. And rightly so. As the 1965 feature on Colonel Ritchie continued: “It is such efforts of a number of devoted enthusiasts that have...brought an added life and interest to our waterways.”
