A guest post by the fabulous Sue Wilkes, author of the forthcoming book Tracing your Canal Ancestors
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| A canal boatwoman and child in the 1920s Cassell’s Book of Knowledge (c.1924). Nigel Wilkes collection |
The narrow-boats of the Midlands canals were often crewed by families. ‘The boatman’s wife does the cooking, assists in steering, and takes a turn with the bigger children in walking along the canal bank driving the horse, mule or ass.’ (Factory and Workshops Act Commission, 1876.)
Not all canal families lived on the boats full-time. Inspector C.W. Hoare noticed that on the Bridgewater Canal: “Some women and children live on the boats all the year round, in fact they have no other home, whilst others lock up their houses and live in the boats for a week or fortnight at a time, according to the distances the boats have to carry their cargo”.
Because women helped to steer the boat, this took priority over their other work such as cooking meals or washing clothes, which had to be fitted in as time permitted.
A boatwoman told a reporter for the Birmingham Daily Mail in the 1870s that she couldn’t complain about canal-boat life when “you ‘as your ‘ealth” but that it was ‘bitter bad’ if any of the family were ill. Because they were on the move all the time, it was difficult for canal families to attend medical facilities or schools.
Canal boatwomen worked for long hours and were out in all weathers, so they were sensibly dressed. They wore a full-length skirt, a blouse, a pinafore to keep them clean and a shawl. Their bonnets were decorated with long, heavy frills to keep the sun off their heads and necks. When Queen Victoria died, boatwomen adopted black bonnets as a mark of respect, and this seems to have become ‘standard’ wear for some time among older women.
Canal boatwomen worked for long hours and were out in all weathers, so they were sensibly dressed. They wore a full-length skirt, a blouse, a pinafore to keep them clean and a shawl. Their bonnets were decorated with long, heavy frills to keep the sun off their heads and necks. When Queen Victoria died, boatwomen adopted black bonnets as a mark of respect, and this seems to have become ‘standard’ wear for some time among older women.
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| Narrowboat cabin interior, 1870s. Drawing by Herbert Johnson, Our Canal Population (London, 1879). Author’s collection |
During the world wars, there was a shortage of crews on the canals. In WWII, women like Margaret Cornish, Susan Woolfit and others who had never worked on the canals volunteered to become trainee boatwomen. The boaters nicknamed them ‘idle women’ because of the ‘I W’ (Inland Waterways) badges they wore.
By the 1950s, family-crewed boats were virtually a thing of the past, and their traditional way of life vanished.
