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Mick Beattie

An appreciation

character: the man responsible for training weekends, canal

camp griddles, Bungle’s nickname and much much more...

R. I. P. Mick Beattie

[Overheard on the two-way radios in use by the site volunteers at an IWA National Festival] [Mick Beattie’s voice]: “Daddy Cool: ‘Dickhead’ is one of the words we do not use over the radio. Other words we do not use over the radio are...” [long string of expletives and no doubt, much laughter follows]

I started with that quote from a festival some years ago, because it combines three essential

elements of Mick – direct, mischievous, and helpful – plus a bit of basic Anglo-Saxon thrown in for good measure.

However there was a lot more to Mick than the guy who scared new volunteers with his

sometimes rough mannerisms, horrified Navvies readers with his bad language, and drank

Pernod by the bucketful, but had a genuine heart of gold and would do anything to help.

Throughout his involvement in WRG from the late 1980s, he was absolutely committed to the principle that despite being a volunteer organisation it could and should take a profes

sional attitude to matters such as Health & Safety, training and the quality and condition of tools and equipment supplied to canal camps – and his legacy remains wi th us today. At the same time, he managed to lead numerous canal camps at sites as diverse as

Bude, the Cotswold Canals, Chichester, Lancaster, and IWA festivals in Manchester and Huddersfield; get heavily involved in the WRG Navvies Anonymous mobile group; and mastermind the WRG Logistics operation maintaining tool kits and trailers from his home in Black

pool (often to the bemusement of his neighbours).

But rather than fill this page with my thoughts and memories, I’ve filled it with quotes

from many of the other WRG folks who knew him better than I did, and whose recollections will go much further towards doing justice to someone who Mark Richardson rightly describes as “a unique and irreplaceable man”.

Initial impressions of Mick could be of the tattooed, skinhead, hard drinking, heavy smoking, womanising, swearing, aggressive sort of chap that you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of, but you soon realised he was actually kind, helpful and if you were in the shit he would help get you out of it (often before you had even realised you were in the shit...)

Mick was brilliant like that – helping anyone in trouble. If he liked you, he’d tell you that you’d been a bit of a ‘Silly Billy.’ If he didn’t, he’d use a whole string of other rude words I dare not repeat. Either way, he’d never leave you in a hole. Mick had a desire to make everything better whether that was for volunteers, colleagues or just bailing out a friend in need – which he did a lot.

I had to give Mick’s report to the Festival meeting regarding craning boats as he couldn’t stay. I had to re

phrase it a little: “If you want to lift jolly big boats a jolly long way, tell them they will need a jolly big crane!”

My parents donated a tumble drier to WRG for use at festivals. Mick and Roger Burchett turned up to collect it while they were out, and my parents got a phone call from my very worried sister “Father Christmas and a skinhead have turned up to take the tumble drier away….”

The biggest influence he had on me was when I arrived at the Salford National for my first camp, he asked me what my name was and I said “George”. “Right, we’ll call you ‘Bungle’ then”

At Salford National we got introduced to both the Lightweight Land Rover (which had a stereo fitted that played one Pogues album continuously at full volume whenever it was turned on) and the frankly glorious 101 forward control Land Rover with its V8, the gearing of which meant it was the fastest thing on the road up until about 50 MPH at which point it was flat out! Still, it was interesting

let him spin the tyres up. In frustration he got out, grabbed a shovel and started shovelling mud up and heaving it at the Land Rover...

He would always insist on the right kit for the job, particularly when it came to lifting (which later became his day job), I once met him on a site where he was organising a lift for Land & Water; he sent one of his chaps off site to go and get some proper tag lines made up rather than the manky bits of string in the back of the van.

Mick somehow blagged a crewcab Transit pickup from a local hire firm for free. We used it exten

sively for building the moorings for the National Festival that year, and then at the festival itself. We had it so long that when we did take it back they had forgotten they even owned it.

We were at the bottom of the car park - Mick was at the top using the radios to control the one way traffic

flow, describing the last car in any run so you knew when you could start sending cars up. This was fine until Mick got bored and started inventing cars or changing their colours - oh and he made a suggestive comment over the radio about one driver just as I was kneeling at her window, radio blaring out of my back pocket....

Craning boats in at Huddersfield - we couldn’t see the crane as it was some way below us and the boats arrived over a 40 foot line of trees. We would spin the boats while they were in the air so

they landed in the canal pointing in the right direction - according to Mick’s radio instructions - “Other way round... [pause] ... same way up.”

Mick used to ring my mother from the M6 late at night, whether I was home or not, and tell her to get the bacon sarnies on for the WRGies inside the van.

Mick was very keen on training people to use equipment properly: the training weekends that he started continue to this day, very much along his original lines, and this has led to many more of our volunteers being able to safely and competently operate equipment to the benefit of the waterways restoration movement. He knew that accidents happened, but woe betide anyone who abused the tools.

Whether it was painting neat lines of colour on endless tool handles, or brightening an otherwise repetitive evening of cutlery marking by engraving a soup ladle with ‘For external use only’, Mick ran WRG logistics with a creative sense of humour and ferocious attention to detail.

At one point Mick wanted to introduce griddles to the catering kit and he took the suggestion to the WRG board to trial it on kit A. They replied that no, they didn’t think it was a good idea, so on no account was kit A to have a griddle. Mick went away and bought one for kit B instead...

I first met Mick when I was sixteen, my first canal camp at Glasson Dock in the 1980s. He started the day with a huge, wild mop of curly hair and hours later, it had completely gone. This was the start of the skinhead (and Pernod) years but it was also, more importantly for me, the start of our amazing friendship.

When Mick started a conversation with “I’ll tell you something, Lou”, you never knew if the next

sentence was going to be a profound insight, a handy snippet of life advice, or a piece of unrepeatable filth. Most memorably, it could be all three at once.

He always took great delight in finding out your favourite song, learning it then ruining it by singing it back in the voice of Kermit the Frog. Stairway to Heaven has never been the same since!

Mick was exceptionally observant and had a sharp and frighteningly quick wit. He was wickedly mischievous and often attracted a crowd with his pranks and slightly unconventional responses to situations or with his entertaining anecdotes.

RAX (Transit van of old) reversing lights had failed to engage when reverse was selected. So Mick fitted a manual switch on the dashboard so they could be turned on as necessary. He then took great delight in doing this at traffic lights, and watching cars behind reverse away from the ominous looking large bumper of an ageing Transit van!!

When Mick met Sue the Horse (as he fondly referred to her,) he also found peace and true content

ment, and although this meant that more time was rightly dedicated to their new life together, he never forgot about the years he had spent with WRG, or the many people he had met along the way.

He was, and always will be, the truest of friends, and (as someone recently said though he would never agree) a legend in his own lifetime.

Mick, you take care now.