Black Country Living Museum, Dudley

In motion and at rest,1: Immortal Diamond

A memory from a visit to the Black Country Living Museum in 2019. Diamond is part of the museum’s fine collection of canal boats. The museum is crossed by canals that belong to the Birmingham Canal Navigations and on a small branch of this network the museum has built a boat dock populated by vessels that were once common on the canals around Birmingham and the Black Country. Many of these are day boats – designed to take cargoes such as coal, iron, limestone, and clay over short distances that you could cover in a day. Among their number are one specific type – the Joey boats, steerable from either end, that I’ve already mentioned in an earlier post.

Diamond is not a Joey boat, but an impressive composite narrow boat (with metal sides and a wooden bottom). She was first registered in 1928 and was built by John Crichton & Co of Saltney, Chester, for the Midland and Coast Canal Carrying Company of Wolverhampton. She was no day boat, but had two cabins, making her suitable for long journeys between the Black Country and the Mersey. She was damaged in an air raid on Birmingham in 1944, and rebuilt, after which she was renamed Henry, under which name she had 16 years carrying coal, after which she was sold again, rechristened Susan, and continued to work until the museum acquired her in the 1970s.

The fact that a narrow boat could be built in the 1920s and see the best part of 50 years’ service before being ‘retired’ to a museum reminds us how long-lasting canal transport was in Britain. Canals began before the railways, survived the coming of rail, and were only really killed off by the inexorable rise of road transport.* So boats sporting the delightful paintwork of Diamond – both the bright colours of the exterior and the lovely images of castles and flowers that appear when the folding doors are opened – had a long innings. That we can still appreciate these beautiful boats is due largely to the canal revival, spearheaded by campaigners such as Tom Rolt and bodies like the Inland Waterways Association in the postwar period. Museums like the BCLM have also played their part. Thank heaven they did, so that such things can still be appreciated and enjoyed, and so that, in these confined times, I can remind my readers of the richness of colour, historical interest, and folk art that’s available online. 

- - - - -  

* For a vivid account of the lives of those working and living on narrow boats in the 20th century, see Sheila Stewart, Ramlin Rose: The Boatwoman’s Story (OUP, 1993)

On the high seas

Provincial, rustic, folkish, naïve – and fun

A friend remarked that the painted boss in my previous post would look at home on the prow of a sailing ship, and I have to say he’s on to something. The straightforward, slightly naïve carving of the boss is close to folk art, as is quite a lot of the sculpture on churches, especially the gargoyles, corbels, grotesques, and similar carvings on some of our smaller parish churches. Folk art is usually defined as art created by untrained amateur artists who worked outside the tradition of art education, apprenticeship, or art school. Medieval church carvers no doubt served apprenticeships and carved for a living but their style often seems more personal and provincial than the work of the sculptors who decorated the west fronts of the great cathedrals, from Chartres to Wells. Call it rustic, call it folk art, it does have something in common with the carving of old shop signs, puppets, and ship’s figureheads.

I therefore turned to the pages of the several books on English popular art and found, in Noel Carrington and Clarke Hutton’s Popular English Art (King Penguin, 1945), this colourful illustration by Hutton of the figurehead from H M S London. Noel Carrington described the art of ship decoration like this: ‘Marine decorators took their motives from those current in architecture and furnishing ashore, but gave rein to that little extra exuberance for which sailors always seem to have a partiality.’ In Britain’s navy, such figureheads, along with a riot of other carving along the bows and sterns of ships, found favour between the Restoration and the end of the 19th century Subjects varied from goddess to royalty, lions to naval heroes.  

The early-19th century figurehead in Hutton’s picture is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Hutton seems to have gone for exaggeratedly strong colours – the actual figurehead has much paler skin and her dress has a more muted hue. Her crown, in the form of a castle or city wall, is a common attribute when the ship’s name is that of a city – the notes on the museum’s website suggest that it may be based on the White Tower, the central structure of the Tower of London and the square structure with corner turrets is certainly reminiscent of this famous castle.

Readers within reach of London who like this kind of thing will find much of similar sort in Tate Britain’s Folk Art exhibition, which opens on 9 June and promises to be spectacular. I’m planning my visit.