There was quite a lot to do, very much the way Restoration Committee works now is as we developed it then. It’s added a few more bits and pieces but pretty much as we set it up. Travelling round the country is something I wanted us to do. I didn’t want to have meetings in London or something – they still go everywhere – to be with the people doing the work.
Q: Jumping back again to WRG in the 70s A: Even before then – we’d had the Southern Stratford reopened in ’64 by the Queen Mother. As we
Harry Arnold
know it was opened rather than restored so we had rather a lot of work to do there. Things like working at Edstone Aqueduct - fun and games when we were on a learning curve with sheet piling. It had been opened but it wasn’t getting much use – Wilmcote Flight and all sorts of things needing work doing on them. The canal was National Trust owned in those days and there wasn’t much money and the canal really was not doing too well. David Hutchings was on the scene of course – he’d been the one with the Stratford and the Upper Avon – I got involved in that one as well. My goodness, he was a charismatic character! We restored a lock on the Upper Avon – we drove two rows of sheet piling and dug it out and got a new lock and a river cut in absolutely no time flat. We Building bywashes during one of the Stratford Blitzes did things people didn’t believe could be done. Stratford Blitz came on a bit later – I used to drive Graham up there. Another little memory is being in the village hall at Lowsonford – about 10 o’clock at night we heard a Bolinder coming up the canal and the place emptied in about two seconds flat!! I remember the Fleur de Lys pies as well, they were lovely pies that we used to have on a Saturday evening.
Q: You mentioned Stourbridge? A: Yes - the Stourbridge Sixteen – IWA, I think, were persona non grata with Waterways [BW] so the work was instigated by the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal Society and it was David Tomlinson who spent two to three years on the Stourbridge Flight of locks. They were very derelict, the lock gates were all falling apart and the chambers were full of mud. With London & Home Counties we used to go up for the weekend, John Dodwell was one of them, my brother Peter as well. We would be clearing out a lock at the weekend near one of the bottle kilns and we had about the most unstable vessel known to man: a narrow boat as a mud boat. We used to fill this up – it was wheelbarrows and planks and barrow runs filling up the mud boat (called Wallace) and then it was someone else’s job to empty it. That was very important - the Stourbridge Sixteen which opened in either late ’66 or early ’67 was another critical link on the BCN. I went up there quite a bit.
Q: And Droitwich? A: Yes – the Droitwich Dig – we had a canal there absolutely full up of reeds. There were some sections in water and some dry sections there – a lot of Droitwich was to do with clearing out the channel. We had Hymacs [excavators] there and one of the things about using the Hymacs – I remember my brother saying to Graham “I think to work properly we need to get the Hymacs in the bed of the canal – just not on the banks”. I remember Graham being uncertain a little bit as whether he dared put Hymacs in the bottom, whether we’d lose them. But in the end, that’s what he did. We did a lot of work there and then there was a big time lapse before it all got picked up again. Lovely to see it open now.
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