editorial Help the Wey & Arun

The Wey & Arun Canal Trust has suffered criminal damage to its restored length of canal which will cost over 50 grand to fix. Please help!

Editorial

Help the Wey & Arun! We were appalled to hear, just as we were preparing to send this issue to press, that the Wey & Arun Canal had been hit by a major vandalism attack. And we’re not just talking about the annoying but unfortunately commonplace graffiti, ripping up of newly planted trees or the like. No, in this case those responsible destroyed the control equipment at multiple locations for the canal water back-pumps which have been installed by the Wey & Arun Canal Trust at every rebuilt or new lock on the Loxwood Link restored section as a way of ensuring a decent water supply on a canal which historically struggled for water. In addition, they removed security padlocks and opened lock paddles to release water, causing serious damage and putting at risk the Trust’s Easter boat trips (an important money-spinner as well as a big publicitygenerator for the Trust’s restoration work) and potentially disappointing many customers.

Altogether it looks likely to cost more than £50,000 to repair. Which is not only money that the Trust can ill afford at a time of high inflation (and even higher rises in costs of construction work), but it will impact restoration progress in other ways - for example having to concentrate on putting things right will take WACT away from restoration work, and make it more difficult in the short term to accommodate visiting groups such as WRG.

I’m not going to get into who might have done the damage or why, or what we’d like to do to them (other than to say that WACT is working with Sussex Police, who anyone with any information should contact on 101 quoting “0731 of 02/ 04/23”) because there’s something much more useful that we can do.

Pictures by WACT

The Trust has launched a fundraising campaign to pay for the repairs, and we can all contribute to it by going to weyarun.org.uk/loxwood-appeal. Please consider making a donation. And to end on a brighter note, the Canal Trust’s volunteers managed to install temporary pumps just in time for the Easter boat trips to run - although managing water levels is going to be tricky until permanent repairs can be carried out.

A clash of dates: In Mike Palmer’s Chairman’s Comment on pages 6-7 you can read some more of his thoughts about the summer’s Canal Camps, and about how organising the week-long summer camps programme has been gradually getting back up to speed after the last few years. But it’s not just about week-long Canal Camps...

Elsewhere in this magazine you will read two reports from weekend working parties. One was a joint weekend by three of the mobile groups, London WRG, KESCRG and WRG Forestry, carrying out tree and vegetation clearance on a new worksite on the Shrewsbury & Newport Canals. The other was the post-Covid return of the annual BCN Cleanup, run jointly as a WRG centrally booked weekend also involving local canal groups in the West Midlands, and spent throwing grappling hooks into lesser-used parts of the Birmingham Canal Navigations network, hauling out old bikes, shopping trolleys, tyres and other junk (this year we found a kettle, a bog seat and a ceremonial sword!)

It’s good to see these events getting back up to speed too, alongside the week-long summer Canal Camps, but the eagle-eyed among you might notice from a couple of slightly cryptic comments in the dig reports that we managed to organise both of them on the same weekend - which was a shame as quite a few volunteers (including the Editor) would have liked to have gone on both of them. Now once again I’m not going to get into recriminations about whose ‘fault’ it was (and both events had good reasons for not being shifted from that date), but I will say that: (1) the fact that both events were successful despite the clash is one more sign of things generally getting back to a healthy state and (2) it’s clearly time to bring back the Navvies diary pages, which haven’t been a regular feature for some time (because postpandemic so much of what we’ve done has been organised to a shorter timescale and on a more ad-hoc basis than it used to be) but would help prevent clashes like this. So I will!

Chairmans Comment

In Navvies 316 I said “2023 is not the year to decide to give Canal Camps a miss and go trekking in the Himalayas!”. Well it seems you have taken me at my word as it took just a few days for our 2023 Canal Camps schedule to become pretty much fully booked. There are still a few places available and, right now, it’s looking pretty likely that we will be adding some more Camps to the schedule soon and so, if you haven’t got a place yet, keep looking. Why do I say with confidence “looking pretty likely”? Well, you know that suggestion I made that (perhaps) all our local societies might use the ‘gap’ that the pandemic created to do some more intensive planning and get even more work ready to go. Well it does feel like it’s come to pass. Normally at this time of year we would be getting approached by (say) the Nitts and Stuffs Canal Society with “any chance of a Canal Camp?” But in the last couple of months it’s been more the case that they have been asking for three or four weeks (each!) Now obviously not all these requests will result in Canal Camps this year. But if one or two of them do then that’s a significant increase!

And even if none of these possible Camps happen, we are going to need to be at the top of our game for the foreseeable future. Why? Well, let’s have a think about the current situation:

Firstly for many of us it’s a return after a gap of a few years. So many of us are going to be a bit ‘rusty’ and therefore we need to be careful.

Secondly, you can apply exactly that thinking/reasoning to those of us trying to run the organisation. So you may need to bear with us.

Finally (and this is a slightly bigger ‘picture’), just like those local societies, WRG’s parent body the Inland Waterways Association has also been working away. In particular they managed to produce the excellent report Waterways for Today.

This report outlines the benefits that the waterways network provides to the whole of the country (not just the boaters/anglers/towpath walkers that immediately spring to mind). It provides genuine documented evidence for all of these benefits and, crucially for us, every justification for supporting a navigable waterway also applies for a waterway under restoration. So with campaigns like this it is highly possible that more opportunities/projects will appear.

So that’s my thoughts as to the importance of our work for the next few years. Daunting? Well, let me tell you my thoughts on that as well:

I’ve known WRG a very long time and for all that time it’s been an organisation that has always risen to any challenge. Now traditionally at this point in the story the phrase “WRG is built on its people” or similar would be trotted out. Which is of course true, but I’d like to try putting a slightly less sickly coat of paint on that. It’s the way all you people behave, be that bringing (unbidden) a barrow load of bricks to the brickie about to run out; offering some help to the volunteer unloading a van; or grabbing a tea-towel when you see someone else plunge their arms in the sink.

Then, to build on this image of special people (and I’m rather glad to say my phrase in navvies 317 of “sitting The IWA report, available online round a table and sharing good food, good thoughts and good laughter with good friends” appears to have been well received)…

WRG has always been an organisation based around pragmatism. The ‘hard and fast’ rules we do possess have usually come up through the ranks, and the ‘unspoken’ rules always have. It makes it a wonderful organisation to run - perhaps a little strange to those viewing from the outside, but hopefully everyone on the inside can see that we way we do things make sense. It’s not only wonderful but it also inspires in me great confidence about all of you. Waterway Recovery Group is an immensely strong, resilient organisation that can take any challenge and rise to it. I mean – what else would we do?

And on the subject of ‘unspoken rules’ and ‘the way we do things: just to clear up any misinterpretation of a couple of decisions we have recently made...

. A default size of 12 volunteers per Camp: This has come from both general feedback and our Covid Working Group. The feeling was that increased spacing was appreciated generally but also meant that in the event of any ‘infectious development’ (not just Covid) it would spread less quickly and therefore it would give you more time to spot it and take any necessary actions.

Now what we really should be doing is poring over the dimensioned floorplans of each Village Hall that we keep in our database in Head Office and providing a precise figure as to how many volunteers each Camp could support. Except, of course, we don’t have them and even if we did, there is no guarantee that they would be accurate ever since the Lower Nittwell Village Hall installed their third shower room (!), and certainly we could only guess how a Leader likes to arrange the village hall anyway (“Oh I like the Burco over there and the Toaster near the firedoor” etc).

So we took the rather clumsy but terribly pragmatic decision to make the ‘default limit’ for each Camp 12 volunteers (including Leader / Assistant / Cook). That is just a starting point – if the Leader looks at both the accommodation and worksite and feels that the number could go up then we will increase the size of the Camp – the majority of the summer Camps have already done this.

. Giving the Camp bookings link to each leader in advance of it appearing on the WRG website: This was not about making sure that all the leader’s mates got preference over ‘normal’ bookings via the website. It was about making sure that those with the rightskill set for the job were allowed to book on before the camp was fully booked. Especially if the numbers were kept down to 12, then it became even more important that the people with the right skillset got preferential booking. This tactic was all about getting ‘the right tools for the right job’.

Mike Palmer