50 years ago the birth of WRG

1970: WRG? What’s that then?

The final part of our series marking WRG’s 50th year in which we look back at what was happening in 1970, and how Navvies Notebook reported it...

50 years ago...

In the previous article in Navvies 303 I covered the actual launch of WRG in summer 1970 as reported in Navvies Notebook (to give the magazine its original title). Well, I tried to. But it was the ultimate ‘low key’ launch: although the WRG display made an impressive debut at the Inland Waterways Association’s National Rally of Boats at Guildford, in the pages of Navvies there was precious little to even give the faintest hint that some thing major was on the way - that Navvies and the canal volunteer movement that it served were undergoing a transformation: from being a magazine for assorted ‘mobile’ volunteers not attached to a particular project, into being a national organisation in its own right, with the magazine at the heart of what it did. But if Issue 26’s coverage of WRG’s arrival on the scene was scant basically the words “published by Waterway Recovery Group”, brief mentions of the “WRG bank” and a “WRG calendar” for sale, and “cheques payable to Waterway Recovery Group” for people ordering safety clothing by mail order then the “rather skinny” (in the editor’s own words) 16-page issue 27, published in November 1970, was marginally more forthcoming. It still wasn’t exactly prominent in editor and founder Graham Palmer’s leader column on the first page, but there was just a hint of an organisation and one of its roles in his comments about the “WRG Bank” being “under heavy pressure” having supplied safety gear and tools to various groups, his thanks to people for their support of this fund, and his appeal for more donations of trading stamps, coupons and cash to keep it going. Elsewhere in the magazine there’s another hint of the move from a magazine to an organisation: the Albert public house [Victoria Street, London SW1 - it’s still there today!] on Friday the 4th December. Among events will be the first London showing of a film dealing with the Welshpool Working Party and the Montgomeryshire Canal in general, and discussion of future plans for 1971. Please try to come along if you can.

I wonder what was planned at that meeting.

Where did we work? This was pretty similar to the lists of sites that I included in previous issues (and the ‘eleven we made earlier’ photo feature on the cover pages of Navvies 303) - the diary pages showed that work was continuing on the Upper Avon, Pocklington, Kennet & Avon, Stratford and River Wey - but there were a couple of new projects on the horizon... Looking ahead: two new projects got a mention elsewhere in the mag. Firstly, the following appeared in the ‘Bits ’n’ Pieces’ column:

Confirmed: that Stoke on Trent City Council, Staffordshire County Council and British Waterways Board have finally reached agreement, both physical and financial, concerning the restoration of the Caldon to Froghall; work is expected to commence shortly.

That one was completed and reopened four years later in 1974. But there’s a second new project mentioned, which is still with us today, albeit usually referred to among canal restorers under the collective name of ‘Cotswold Canals’, covering both the Thames & Severn and the Stroudwater...

Like that other disused canal in the south, the Wey & Arun, the Thames & Severn Canal still excites a lot of attention from would-be restorationists. One of these is Pete Stevenson, who has written a lot of letters to the press concerning the T&S. For those of yu who cannot yet decide upon your priorities, Pete writes the following:

After reading Mr Household’s fine book of the canal page 27

[The Thames & Severn Canal, Humphrey Household, pub: 1969] little need be said of its history and a mere detailing of the distances and locks should suffice.

The Thames and Severn Canal is 28 miles long and has 44 locks lifting it to 362ft 6in above sea level for a distance of nine miles between Daneway Top Lock and the Siddington Flight (including the 2 1/4 mile Sapperton Tunnel). The Stroudwater Navigation is 8 miles long and has 13 locks, if we include the filled-in lock and basin at Framilode on the River Severn. Briefly the Stroudwater Navigation has the M5 motorway bisecting it near Eastington; two short filled-in sections at Ebley and several lowered or culverted bridges. The junction between the two canals is at Wallbridge in Stroud. From here to Sapperton is eight miles and 29 locks (two are eliminated) with Brimscombe Port filled in and built upon. The tunnel has fallen-in at three places, but can be restored, it is believed. From here to Inglesham (near Lechlade) is 19 miles and 15 locks (including a two-step staircase lock) and has filled-in lengths at Siddington (1/2 mile) Cerney Wharf (300 yards and 3 locks) and a ploughed away sector from Marston Meysey to Kempsford (1 1/2 miles). Between them the canal is frequently a linear jungle but both the Thames Conservancy and the Gloucestershire County Council are said to believe that the Inglesham to Kempsford length is restorable; and the sector between Cerney Wharf and Cerney Wick is also not without hope.

The Stroudwater Navigation is virtually a civil engineering job (if a feasability plan can be adopted for the motorway crossing) and from Stroud to Sapperton spot clearance at locks and a general clean-up at Daneway to the tunnel is called for. But the real work would be to tidy up Siddington four locks and clear the towpath to Cerney Wharf.

Interesting that half a century on, the bit that he describes as “virtually a civil engineering job”, implying that it’s the most difficult, is the one that in this very issue we’re looking forward to seeing reopened (see p16-21).

Running the canals: We’ve already seen in earlier articles in this series that contributors had some fairly strong views on how the waterways were being run by British Waterways Board, but in issue 27 this extended to the start of a series Thoughts on Waterways Management, written under the pen-name of ‘Woolwich Small’. Article No 1 kicked off with a moan about how BWB spent more time moving its dredgers around the country to where they were needed than actually clearing silt out of the canals - and went on to criticise the inefficency of time spent “waiting for the hopper, waiting for the mechanic, waiting for the foreman, or simply waiting for their pension and playing cards meanwhile”. And on that subject I can remember a time when it was a standing joke about British Waterways dredger crews that they spent all their time sitting around and drinking tea - so it tends to raise a wry smile when I hear folks today suggesting that contracting work out has been the downfall of the Canal & River Trust, and they should improve efficiency by bringing it back in-house. However Woolwich Small isn’t following that route, as he continues “Let us dismiss at once the purely political notion that all nationalised concerns are automatically inefficient: when they are, they can survive longer than a commercial firm, but that’s all.” He goes on to philosophise about railways (“running the railway involved a lot of clerical work, obeying the rules and no initiative”), and canals (“most were owned by the railways who regarded them as unwelcome encombrances, bought to stifle opposition, and deputed their management to staff found unfit even to run the railway”). He blames this for the situation in 1970 where the canals were still run by staff with no great abilities beyond “running a deliberately noncompetitive enterprise”, adding that although there were still “many devoted and enthusiastic men, particularly at local depot level” without whom things would be much worse, “below their level many of the rank-and-file are dreadful: dimwitted layabouts in search of a sheltered occupation... Why should the maintenance gangs always be filled up with the sweepings of the labour exchange?” and blaming this last issue largely on low wages. One wonders what these underpaid menials thought of being called useless by the only people on the waterways who were paid less than them the volunteers... Ultimately, though, he blamed it on bad management - but cautioned against bringing in management consultants (for fear of appointing a canal equivalent of the railways’ Dr Beeching, whose 1963 report led to large-scale closures) - and promised to “think about the sort of brief that waterway management should have” for issue 28. Of course if you want to criticise management (and let’s face it, most of us do!) you perhaps need to be ready for the challenge “So, do you think you could do it any better?” Well, perhaps they did. Another piece elsewhere in the same issue commented on the recent change of Government (Ted Heath’s Tories had won the election and replaced Harold Wilson’s Labour Government), on concerns at the impact of possible public spending cuts on the waterways (especially given that officialdom was still felt to take the view that eliminating an urban canal such as the Ashton in Manchester was cheaper than restoring it), and the more optimistic prospect that (under Heath’s stated aim of “not more but less government” - yes, politicians

have been saying it since then!) responsibility for waterways could be farmed-out to a non-Government body. The author ended with the following:

We have always said we could run the waterways better than anyone else; given breadth of imagination and strength of purpose, that is precisely what we have more chance of achieving than ever before.

So that answers that question. Yes, we genuinely did think we could do it better!

And finally: the Bits ‘n’ Pieces column reported that it was “Rumoured that a plan has only recently been abandoned to lease quite a percentage of canalside land to two well-known holiday camp firms.” Hi-de-Hi, boaters!

But there’s more: That was where this article (and the whole 50 years ago series) was going to end, having reviewed six issues of Navvies Notebook from 1970 in the corresponding six 2020 issues of Navvies. But then I noticed that there had been a change of plan in late 1970 and the team had squeezed in another issue just before the year end. And it was an interesting one too. Not least as a result of Woolwich Small’s thoughs on waterway management, as Graham Palmer mentioned in his leader...

Woolwich Small’s column seems to have caused no little stir - unfortunately in the wrong places... Reading through it again, I must say that I feel that it has been somewhat misunderstood.

I read it to mean that the great majority of BWB ‘canal’ workers are all that one might expect, but owing to the lack of adequate wages it is becoming more and more difficult to recruit staff of the right calibre.

Anyway I have asked ‘WS’ to write something for this issue to clear any misunderstandings, and sincerely hope that anyone who works on the waterways will accept my apologies for any insult they feel to have been committed.

Flicking forward a few pages brings us to an example of the ‘stir’ that the article had caused, in the form of a letter to the editor form Laurence D Gibney. He was “dismayed” at the “lack of diplomacy” shown, but also felt that laying the charge of inefficiency at the door of BWB was singling it out unreasonably, and unfair: that with few exceptions the whole of British industry and commerce is conducted inefficiently compared with other countries in the world; our position in world markets proves this. ‘Woolwich Small’ would appeear to be a typical byproduct of today’s educational manufactory - a human machine packed with facts and figures without any idea how to use them. His knowledge of human relations in a situation where both volunteers and paid workers are required to co-exist would appear to be very small.”

The writer continued that he had “the highest regard for BWB’s employees” with few exceptions, had worked with them for seven years as a volunteer, and felt that “voluteers can hardly preach efficiency to BWB staff when our work is often completed inefficiently.” The average BWB employee, he maintained (to more than a few raised eyebrows, I suspect!), “gains great satisfaction from his work and in return puts that little bit extra into it and ito his interest and love for the waterways. He is often called out in the middle of the night to prevent flooding, spends hours telling tourists about the canals, in his own time. In few other industries today can we find men giving so much and receiving so little”. For the future “providing BW staff are still speaking to us” he proposed that volunteers should concentrate on “cementing improved relations with their local BWB depot”, that they should “appreciate our limitations”, and perhaps offer to take on routine maintenance work and leave BWB staff free to do the more sepecialist restoration work. ‘Woolwich Small’, meanwhile, said that he seemed “already in brief article to have created more misunderstandings than I thought possible”, when he was “not going to be just another knocker of BWB” and especially didn’t want to “impute (as some waterway enthusiasts have been too ready to do) sinister motives and underhand behaviour of people trying to sort out some pretty massive inherited problems”. He felt strongly about inefficiency, but he “started writing because I felt I had something constructive to say - what is Navvies Notebook and WRG if not constructive?”

Lightening the mood somewhat, if still not entirely getting away from the BWB-knocking theme (not to mention the usual dig at ‘inferior’ forms of boater), the following appeared:

Canalside Pulpit

by Rev. B. W. Bloke

WRG at last! Finally, scraping in right at the end of WRG’s founding year, Graham Palmer got in some serious stuff about what this new organisation was all about. Firstly and fairly briefly, he mentioned in his leader column something that will strike a chord with many folks who have been (or still are) involved in WRG publicity: And on the inside back page was Graham’s ‘Reflections’ piece where he finally went public about what the intended function / purpose / role of WRG might be:

(to be read with great solemnity) Dearly beloved, as we are gathered here today, There has been much discussion and ‘jumping to conclusions’ concerning just what the WRG is all about, primarily I

I would like to take as the theme of my address the subject of place, ideals, good intentions and probably several others that might suppose because it just ‘appeared’ at the [IWA Guildford National] Rally instead of having a formal launching. It is, and it is intended to be, a National Co-ordinating Body,

occur to me as I go on.

I expect that you, like me, have discovered at sometime or other that life is not all with an emphasis on ‘Do-it-yourself enthusiasm’. The title means just what you want it to mean, be it working parties or, say, recovering traffic (commercial) for waterways. We

about beer and fireworks and a weed-free channel. Often the locks all seem set against us. Frequently, in fact, the locks, like the arhope to be able to gently push the main effort to where it is most needed and to avoid undue waste of labour potential. It will be, and it is becoming, a pool of expertise in the use

mies of the Grand Old Duke of York, are neither up nor down but just leaking away.

The best laid plans, like the portions of a of plant and other techniques, so necessary if we are to stop fiddling around in the mud and concentrate upon the main task of quick, quality restoration at minimum cost.

woman, may be fashioned with considerable care, but as we know those of mice and men can go astray. How

We are also trying to raise much-needed funds to achieve this state of affairs, and several methods are being employed at this moment that

often have we put our trust in a rotten bollard and finished up in the silt?

But, as we suffer the slings and arrows and broken paddle gear on the climb to the summit, perhaps we can hope, at least, for ouone thing: that when we come to that final A.G.M and meet the Typical Navvies 1970-era sentiments... may result in a considerable amount of ready cash being available for our work.

So far so good. He then went off into what might come across to some of us today as being just a little on verge of conspiracy theory (especially to a confirmed cockup

great Chairman, he will say “Well tried old lad”; and not “BW Bloke, my boy, as a campaigner for the development of the inland waterways of the British Isles, you made a damn good noddyboater”.

theorist like myself)... The situation on the waterways is now starting to clarify itself: we are still ‘lumbered’ wtih the usual sort of bureaucratic, bumbling main waterway administration that we have come to expect, but there are signs that the evil intent of old has been replaced by a milder more cunning organisation happy to maintain an approximate status quo maintenance-wise trying to placate the ‘dissidents’ by appearing to be far more understanding and concerned.

But whatever one’s views, and for all that 1970 was a very different time from 2020 on the waterways and everywhere else, he nailed it with his final line:

We are busy building a WRG exhibition stand for use at the many canal rallies to be held next year over the country. An exhibit we can provide, transport we can provide, but what we lack if we are not careful will be adequate volunteers to man the exhibit when it is used at some of the more far-flung sites. If any of you feel you would like to help with this task next year, I would be more than pleased to hear from you. page 30

Finally I would mention that it is you, the volunteer, who has the capacity to make our plans materialise, to fulfil our ambitions of restoration and reconstruction. Please maintain the fantastic support you have shown for the past two or three years and be assured that your efforts and sacrifices are worthwhile and more than appreciated.