Blessed waters Even the boldest of characters need some quiet time now and then. And Brian Blessed was happy to drop the actor’s mask when speaking to Waterfront recently. Away from the stage, he reveals there’s nothing he loves more than the stillness and peace of spending time by water. 10 years after Brian supported our first ever campaign to recruit volunteer lock keepers, it was wonderful to catch up again with the star of Z-cars, Cats, Flash Gordon, Blackadder and Henry V to hear why our canals and rivers mean so much to him. As he cheerfully admits, he might not be the first person you’d expect to meet on a canal: “I do have the reputation of being a noisy man, but my biggest love in life is space, peace and quiet. I spend a lot of time with Kenneth Branagh who recently described me, much to the interviewer’s surprise as being ‘the quietest person I have ever met’.” Tracing his love of water back, Brian explains it all began in his Yorkshire childhood: “I was born in Mexborough in 1936. We were surrounded by canals and rivers. The Sheffield & South Yorkshire Navigation ran right past my school in Goldthorpe. Patrick Stewart and I also went to summer drama school in the Calder Valley. That was always the centre of the earth for me. We had wonderful views of the Rochdale Canal running through Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd, where Ted Hughes comes from. It was just a wonderful, beautiful place, right in the middle of the valley. Mystical and wonderful to explore as a child.” Rivers and canals also played a big part in the books that Brian loved most as a child. “I always felt a certain affinity with Ratty from Wind in the Willows you know,” says Brian. “I share his enthusiasm for boats. But there’s also this
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wonderful, less well-known passage when Ratty meets Mr Mole and talks about his love of water. Mole asks: ‘You really live by the river?’ And Rat replies: ‘By it and with it and on it and in it… It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.’” A keen supporter of canals and also butterfly conservation, Brian has previously given a canalside talk in support of the team restoring the Cromford Canal, on the borders of Derbyshire and North Nottinghamshire. He explains: “Canals took a bit of a beating after the war, chemicals contaminated our countryside, killing three-quarters of our butterfly population and ruining our rivers as well. But that’s all changed, thank God. Now we are winning. Canals are the pride, joy and lifeblood of our country. Young and old alike are sharing the magic of the canals and people need them badly.” Having reached the ripe old age of 85, there’s no sign of this famous adventurer slowing down. After attempting to climb Mount Everest and completing his cosmonaut training in Russia, Brian says he’d love to go on a worldwide canal adventure. “I’d like to be exotic and do the Suez or Panama Canal, and there are vast natural canals leading to Mount Ararat. Oh, there’s no end. But the most important thing is that we are preserving them here in England and Wales. We need to keep fighting the good fight, constantly be on our guard to protect and preserve them.”
