chairman ’ s comment

MKP on why we don’t have a confirmed Canal Camps schedule for 2023 yet, and what exactly the ‘recovery’ bit of our name signifies...

Chairman’s Comment

This December-January edition of Navvies is the one that usually carries our Canal Camps booklet for the following year. And I know that, for some of you, it really did form part of your Christmas ritual – take time away from the melee of Christmas festivities and read up on what we would be doing in the following year and start to ponder which of the promised events seemed the most attractive.

And then start to plan all the practicali ties – applying for holiday, planning the travel, thinking about the skills that you could learn at the Training Weekend, contacting your friends to see who might be interested in joining you, etc.

So it is with regret that I have to inform you that your annual ritual will have to be delayed by a month or so. Don’t read too much into this. There are no big ‘issues’ or ‘showstoppers’. In fact if I have one message to give to you all it is that the WRG Board believe that 2023 is going to be busy year with lots of activity and, in the middle of all that activity, a decent number of Canal Camps.

“Why no confirmed Camps schedule then?” I hear you ask. Well the annual schedule is a collaborative thing between WRG and the local societies that host us. While we all are still coming out of the pandemic and heading towards our ‘new normal’ it’s just an unfortunate fact that the timeline is not lining up with the December Navvies press date. We would love to think that Canal Camps is something you could just switch back on but that is just not the case, it’s a careful ‘ballet’ of dates, permissions, skills, leaders, village halls and task planning.

But we are not quite so cruel as to take away every bit of your Christmas ritual and so Martin has constructed an article that could be titled ‘2023 Perhaps’. It’s like a Camps brochure but, in much that same way that every Camp in the Camps brochure contains the clause “this camp may be cancelled due to circumstances beyond our control”, this ‘preview article’ has the clause “you know what, this Camp may not even run in the first place!”. So please feel free to have that Christmas ponder about what might take your fancy in 2023, It’s not just about restoring you’ll just have to wait a bit longer before you find out if your dreams are going to come true.

One final comment on this situation: I’ve been involved in this whole ‘setting out our Canal Camps store for the next year’ exercise for multiple decades. The list that Martin has worked from represents some really great work on some really great sites – 2023 is not the year to decide to give Camps a miss and go trekking in the Himalayas!

Hopefully I’ve reassured you that Canal Camps are going to be part of 2023, I only have one final piece of news. It can’t have escaped your notice that, at least according to some reports, the cost of living is rising. Unfortunately many of those rising costs affect the basic Canal Camps operation: food, fuel, PPE, energy, accommodation, etc. So the WRG Board, having carefully reviewed the accounts for all the Camps this year, have taken the decision to raise the cost of a week’s Camp from £70 to £80. This decision was not taken lightly, but it’s the first price rise in many years.

But that is enough about our day to day activity – how about raising the bar a little and going for “what work should we be doing?” or even “where should we be doing that work?” Well for those Navvies readers with a long memory these next statements should not come as too much of a shock but I still think they are worth restating now, as a memory jog to the ‘longer in the tooth’ reader and perhaps an education to our newer readers. The common understanding is that the main business of WRG is canal restoration. But let’s just pull that apart shall we?

Firstly it’s Waterway Recovery Group – so we are not just limited to canals but all waterways. That’s the easy bit, next the recovery bit: I’m told that ‘recovery’ was deliberately chosen over the seemingly more appropriate ‘restoration’ option because our founders felt that all waterways could be worthy recipients of our helpful efforts whether already navigable or not. Now anyone who has taken part in a BCN Clean Up shouldn’t be too surprised by this – that’s an attempt to ‘recover’ a waterway from a somewhat neglected state to the state we believe all waterways should be in. The fact that it’s a navigable waterway doesn’t mean it can’t be recovered to a better state. A similar comment could be made for the Chelmer & Blackwater Navigation, and that’s why we work on it.

Now I can imagine that the more cynical Navvies readers might be thinking “Why is Palmer suddenly rabbiting on about this? Has he sold out to the Canal & River Trust or something?”

Well don’t worry –that’s not the case (but there may well be an interesting project coming up that is on a navigable CRT waterway), it’s just that I think It’s worth spending a little time correcting these misconceptions.

Finally, mentioning the WRG founders must unfortunately include the sad news of the death of Jim Woolgar this September. Looking around I see much for Jim and his family to be proud about. Hugs and kisses, Mike Palmer