By Martin Plant
Everyone has a story to tell. Based on this simple idea, the article called Saddleworth Voices is a feature of Saddleworth Independent.
Originally, it began as an oral history project when at the start of the new millennium a group of volunteers, with some funding provided by Saddleworth Parish Council and Delph Community Association, interviewed over 70 local people.
The recordings can be found in Delph Library.
Here, Martin Plant speaks to Greenfield-based artist Julie Green, nee Good, about life on a narrowboat in the 1980s.
And there is far more to it than meets the eye.
ONE OF the great attractions of Saddleworth is its canal, the Huddersfield Narrow Canal which, fully restored in 2001, runs between Huddersfield and Ashton-under Lyne.
Julie Green, who was born in Uppermill and lives with her husband Steve in Greenfield, worked in the 1980s with her then husband on a 70-foot narrow boat, travelling on some of our extensive navigable canals and rivers. (Today, there are over 4.500 miles of navigable waterways in the UK.)
Julie said: “We bought a boat and paid for a base mooring (which, as a business, you have to do) and a TV programme fronted by Judy Finnigan and Bob Greaves that was supporting new businesses came on board at Nantwich and filmed us.
“It was an excellent start to our enterprise which we had set up, hosting holiday makers. An agency handled the bookings, and people came to us, usually for a week, and we provided full board and lodging while cruising through some beautiful scenery from one place to another.
“A dramatic sight is the Pontcysylite Aqueduct near Llangollen, where the canal crosses more than a hundred feet above the River Dee. (It is the highest canal aqueduct in the world.)
“From a boat you look straight over the edge, a sheer drop, so I used to walk across using the towpath!
“It was good fun, but hard work! I cooked breakfast for our guests, cleared up, did some cleaning, opened and closed the locks on the canal as we moved from A to B, made a buffet lunch, then cooked the evening meal, four courses with wine.
“We usually moored up for the night near a pub. On a Saturday, I would have to cycle with my rucksack to find a laundry to be ready for our new guests.
“Sometimes, someone in another boat who didn’t know what they were doing would leave the lock gates open and all the water would drain out.
“This meant that there wasn’t enough water left to fill the lock, and we would be stranded!
“I would have to leap on my bike and cycle to a lock further up the canal to release water to fill the lock where we were stuck!
“If we were behind time, as a private boat with a spotlight we could travel by night. Hire boats are generally not allowed to do that.
“Also, a narrow boat, which is big and heavy, has right of way over lighter craft like cabin cruisers. However, everyone has to wait their turn to go through the one-and-a-half mile Harecastle Tunnel in Staffordshire!
“Over time, we covered much of the canal system, from the Cheshire Ring to Llangollen, the Midlands, down to London and the River Thames.
“Of course, the canal in Saddleworth wasn’t open then.
“The boat was built by Hancock and Lane, which meant it was really solid, with a Lister 3 engine. Once a year, we had to put it in to dry dock and scrub it down and repaint the hull with bitumen.
“For our guests there were a living room, a kitchen, three bedrooms – a bunk bed, a single bedroom, and one with a double bed, a bathroom with full-sized bath, and a separate toilet.
“We had our own separate living quarters. We had a powerful wood burner which heated a pipe that ran the full length of the boat.
“Our financial overheads included a monthly UK waterways licence fee which went up substantially during our time running this business.
“Our dog, Charlie, a labrador, was very happy on board but one day when I was on the bank about to open lock gates and he was sitting tied up on the “cratch,” which is the area at the front of the boat, he decided to jump into the water.
“He was still attached to the boat by his lead so he was dangling and choking. I ended up in the canal holding him up by his backside until I was able to push a heavy and bedraggled dog back onto the boat!
“After that, I didn’t tie him up, and he’d learned his lesson anyway!
“Some of our visitors were memorable! There was a couple from abroad who compared everything they saw unfavourably to what they had back home and four vicars who were hilarious and liked their wine!
“They had tapes of Strauss and they liked to watch the swallows in the morning while listening to the strains of the Blue Danube.
“A couple who wouldn’t listen to advice and drank several pints of strong scrumpy at a pub we’d stopped at.
“For a while, I lost them. I found her in the outside toilet taking photos of the blank whitewashed walls.
“A lady aged 93, fit as a fiddle, who drank nothing but water and ate hardly anything but eggs.
“Passers-by walking on the towpath were fine, though we did have some who got on their hands and knees to peer through the windows!”
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