Preservation
The Society aims to preserve wooden working boats, and its fleet of six wooden boats is moored at Portland Basin at the confluence of the Ashton Canal, the Peak Forest Canal and the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, known to boaters as Dukinfield Junction.
The Society's oldest boat is "Lilith", a working boat which was 100 years old in December 2001. Lilith is a butty, i.e. a narrowboat without an engine, destined to be towed, or hauled, by another boat. Lilith was also a Birmingham "joey" boat, and No. 9 in Stewarts' and Lloyds' fleet.
"Forget-Me-Not" was built in 1927 as a horse-drawn boat for Henry Grantham who was a "Number One" (owner boatman). The boat was used to carry coal from Coventry to the Grand Union Canal, but from 1959 she became a houseboat.
"Hazel" is the last surviving full length example of a Runcorn Wooden header, built in 1914 to trade on the Bridgewater Canal. From 1929 she was owned by Number One Agnes Beech. Subsequently she served as a comfortable home to several families.
"Queen", built in 1917, was originally named Walsall Queen and is the oldest surviving wooden motorised narrowboat.
"Elton" and "Southam" were donated by British Waterways as an alternative to being scrapped. Southam is one of a fleet of 62 wooden butties (known as "big rickies") built for the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company in the Thirties at Rickmansworth.
Read more about this topic: Wooden Canal Boat Society
Famous quotes containing the word preservation:
“The preservation of health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men’s preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men’s wills such as men would have them.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)