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:
“Is not our role to stand for the one thing which means our own salvation here but with which it will also be possible to save the world, and with which Europe will be able to save itself, namely the preservation of the white man and his state?”
—Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966)
“I do seriously believe that if we can measure among the States the benefits resulting from the preservation of the Union, the rebellious States have the larger share. It destroyed an institution that was their destruction. It opened the way for a commercial life that, if they will only embrace it and face the light, means to them a development that shall rival the best attainments of the greatest of our States.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)