L. T. C. Rolt - Biography

Biography

Tom Rolt was born in Chester to a line of Rolts "dedicated to hunting and procreation". His father Lionel had settled back in England in Hay-on-Wye after working on a cattle ranch in Australia, a plantation in India and joining (unsuccessfully) in the Yukon gold rush of 1898. However he lost most of his money in 1920 after investing his capital in a company which failed and the family moved to a pair of stone cottages in Stanley Pontlarge in Gloucestershire.

Tom studied at Cheltenham College and at 16 took a job learning about steam traction before starting an apprenticeship at the Kerr Stuart locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent, where his uncle, Kyrle Willans was chief development engineer. His uncle bought a wooden narrow fly horse boat called Cressy and installed first a steam engine and then (having discovered the steam made steering through tunnels impossible) a Ford Model T engine. This was Tom's introduction to the canal system.

In the thirties slump he was jobless and turned to vintage sports cars, taking part in the veteran run to Brighton and acquiring a succession of cars including a 1924 Alvis 12/50 two seater 'ducks back' which he was to keep for the rest of his life. He bought into a motor garage partnership next to the Phoenix public house in Hartley Wintney in Hampshire (their breakdown vehicle was an adapted 1911 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost) and together with the landlord of the Phoenix, Tim Carson, and others, formed the Vintage Sports-Car Club in 1934. He also found and helped create the Prescott hill climb.

In 1936, Kyrle bought back Cressy, which he had earlier sold, and several trips on the waterways convinced Rolt that he wanted a life afloat. He persuaded Angela Orred, a young blonde in a white polo-necked sweater who had swept into his garage in an Alfa Romeo in 1937 and got caught up into the vintage car scene, to join him in this idyll. Tom bought Cressy from his uncle and set about converting her into a boat that could be lived aboard, the most notable addition being a bath.

By the summer of 1939 they decided to defy Angela's father's reluctance and got married in secret on 11 July. Work on Cressy was completed at Tooley's Boatyard in Banbury, and on 27 July they set off up the Oxford Canal. But the second world war intervened and Tom, a pacifist at heart, immediately signed up at the Rolls Royce factory at Crewe (on the production line for the Spitfire's Merlin engine). He was saved from the tedium of the production line by the offer of a job in an Aldbourne foundry. They battled south in Cressy through storms, reaching Banbury a day before the canals were finally frozen over for the winter. The following March they negotiated the Thames in flood and battled up the Kennet to reach Hungerford where he worked for more than a year.

Their first four month cruise became a book which he initially called Painted Ship. Despite sending the manuscript to many publishers, he had to put it aside as they all considered there was no market for books about canals. It wasn't until a magazine article he wrote came to the attention of the countryside writer H. J. Massingham that he had the break which led to the book's finally being published in December 1944 under the title Narrow Boat. It was an immediate success both with critics and public, with fan mail arriving on the boat at Tardebigge where they were then moored.

Two of the letters he received were from Robert Aickman and Charles Hadfield who were both to figure prominently in the next phase of his life, as a campaigner. He invited Robert and his wife Ray to join them on Cressy and this trip Robert later described as "the best time I have ever spent on the waterways". It was on this voyage they decided to form an organization that a few weeks later in May 1946 at Robert's London flat got the name of the Inland Waterways Association, with Robert as chairman, Charles Hadfield as vice-chairman and Tom as secretary.

This was a critical period for the waterways, which were nationalised in 1947 and faced an uncertain future, as the traditional life which Rolt had so movingly described was faced with extinction. Tom pioneered a direct action on the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal which stopped British Waterways from closing it, organised a hugely successful Inland Waterways Exhibition, which started in London but toured the country, and proposed the first boat rally at Market Harborough. Aickman, with a private income, was working full-time on the campaign whilst Rolt, who had only his writing to support himelf and was still living aboard Cressy, struggled to meet all the commitments he found himself with. Eventually he fell out with Aickman over the latter's insistence that every mile of canal should be saved and in early 1951 was expelled from the organization he had inspired.

By this time also he had decided to bring his life on Cressy to an end and return to his family home in Stanley Pontlarge. Angela departed to continue the mobile life, joining Billy Smart's Circus.

A letter he had sent to the Birmingham Post in 1950 resulted in the formation of the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society and he now threw himself into this and became chairman of the company, which operated it as a tourist attraction. "By the time the fateful letter terminating his IWA membership arrived, he was already busy issuing and stamping passengers' tickets from the little station in Towyn".

He got married again to Sonia South, a former actress, who during the war had become one of the amateur boat women who worked the canals and had married a boatman. She had been on the council of the IWA. They had two sons, Tim and Dick, and continued to live in Stanley Pontlarge till Rolt's death in 1974.

The fifties were his most prolific time as an author with the best known being biographies of Brunel, which stimulated a revival of interest in a forgotten hero, George and Robert Stephenson, and Telford, and his classic Red for Danger, about historic railway accidents, which became a text book on numerous engineering courses. He produced many works about subjects that had not previously been considered the stuff of literature: civil engineering, canals, railways, etc. In the last years of his life he produced 3 volumes of autobiography, only one of which was published during his lifetime.