Idle Women? When the 2nd World War came upon us, blokes signed up and women did their bit too. In time some robust women were recruited to join the Inland Waterways to help run the narrowboats and deliver supplies.
Inland Waterways badges were awarded once the girls were trained. IW was the basis for the ironic name, Idle Women, because of course they were anything but.
Instead they slogged in all weathers up and down the waterways delivering loads of coal, wood, wheat – whatever was needed, breaking through ice in the winter, shielding their eyes from glaring sun which beat off the cabin roof in the summer, lock-wheeling, eating at the tiller, loading, unloading then clearing out after the cargo, and generally earning their place in the closed and private boating community. Let’s not even mention the bucket, as loo facilities were a pipe-dream.
The original boating community had been forced from their houses by poverty, to live on the boats which provided their living. This boating community still lived and worked in this way.. They didn’t have time for education as they moved from pillar to post, living in their tiny back cabins because the hold must be as big as possible to allow as much of a load as possible.
How do I know so much about this world? Because I am writing a series of novels about The Waterway Girls for Arrow publishers which is out on 7th September..
This is why I was so delighted to attend the launch of:
Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways with Frost Magazine’s drama critic, Paul Vates, some while ago at the Cruising Association at Limehouse. It was written and performed by Heather Wastie and Kate Saffin who told the story of these women before embarking on a tour along the Grand Union Canal in their narrowboat – to perform at canalside venues along the way. Paul and I had a fabulous evening: it was huge fun, and most informative too.
Heather has sent her latest blog on their progress along the canal. If you get the chance, you must see them in performance. So, over to Heather who is talking about The Bottom Road, which Verity, a character in my book, called the Brum Bum.
The women who hated The Bottom Road by Heather Wastie
When I was a child we owned a 70 foot narrow boat which was registered in 1913 and used to carry cargo for Fellows Morton & Clayton. My parents restored the tiny back cabin to its original state, with roses and castles on the doors, a stove to be blacked, brasses to be polished and a bed stored in a cupboard, and Dad built and fitted out a long modern cabin at the front, over the hold where the cargo would have been. As a family we started our boating adventures in the West Midlands in the 1960s and 70s when many of the canals were in a dreadful state, neglected, unloved and in many cases derelict. I remember what it was like travelling through Birmingham on a canal which was closed off with high walls – dirty, smelly and dark.
I have written poems and songs since I was very young, and remember writing a humorous song about all the rubbish you could find in the canal in those days. Little did I know that many years later I would write and perform a show about the canals, touring by narrow boat to canalside venues. The show is called Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways and is a double bill with writer and actor, Kate Saffin. Kate already had a theatre company, Alarum Theatre, and we met on Twitter in February 2016, quickly realising that we each had half a show. Within 2 months we had started our first tour.
During World War 2, cargo boats travelled from London to Birmingham to Coventry and back to London, and part way through the war, a new breed of boater joined the workforce. Women from mainly middle class backgrounds were trained up to operate pairs of boats – a motor boat towing an unpowered ‘butty’, each 70 feet long – carrying 50 tons of cargo from London up to Birmingham. Once the cargo had been unloaded, the boats travelled empty to pick up coal from the Coventry coalfields. ‘The Bottom Road’ is the nickname that was given to the route they took in the early days of the scheme, a route hated by trainees and working families alike. Up to that point, they had been operating wide locks into which motor boat and butty could fit side by side. Now they were faced with narrow locks which could only take one boat at a time, so they had to work the boats through separately and pull the butty by hand – known as bow-hauling. It was tough, dirty work. Here’s the chorus of a song I wrote for the show, all about The Bottom Road:
We all hate The Bottom Road,
Oil and grease and soot and muck.
We’d rather go back the way we came
Than work through dirt and single locks.
There was an alternative route which involved going back through the double locks but all the working boats were told to use The Bottom Road in order to save water. Towards the end of 1944 there was a sit down strike after which the boats were allowed to ‘go back the way they came’. The Idle Women tour (‘Idle Women’ is a nickname given to the trainees after the war) has been travelling since the end of April with two boats – a modern one and a historic boat very similar to the boats the women used. We decided we should include The Bottom Road in our tour in order to take the show to more places through which the trainees would have passed. It is no longer the filthy route it was; in fact much of it is in beautiful countryside.
Though I have been boating for most of my life, I struggle to remember which canal goes through which places. I remember The Bottom Road though, because I turned the place names into a section of the song! I will sing it at shows until we leave the Bottom Road next week and head back towards London where our tour ends on 5th August. As I write this, we have completed 34 out of 50 shows, having performed in pubs, pub gardens, a hay loft, an abbey, a church, community centres, historic waterside buildings, marquees, a cafe, a museum … in a variety of weather, from heatwave to rainstorm, and have developed a deep empathy for the wartime women whose stories we tell.
See www.alarumtheatre.co.uk for tour dates and further info.
The Waterway Girls by Milly Adams: pub Arrow. Out in pb on 7th September 2017