Exploring Rolt's Landscapes E-Book

Joseph Boughey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 333

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

L.T.C. Rolt played a crucial role in the revival of Britain's inland waterways and pioneered the first preserved narrow-gauge railway. He is still a towering figure in the fields of inland waterways, preserved railways and post-war conservation: a bridge and a locomotive have been named after him, and there is a Rolt Prize, Rolt Fellows and an annual Rolt Lecture. In this series of linked essays, Joseph Boughey explains aspects of Rolt's earlier life and work, and sets his writing and practice in a broader context, considering such themes as the landscapes Rolt knew; the nature of travel and 'country' writing; the organicist movement of the 1930s and '40s; English canals and navigable rivers from the 1930s to the '50s the background to early railway preservation; and the nature of craft, craftspeople and preservation. Exploring Rolt's Landscapes focuses on an earlier period of Rolt's life before he devoted his life to writing professionally. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the rich history of Britain's waterways.

Leseprobe

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Joseph Boughey, 2024

The right of Joseph Boughey to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 180399 272 3

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Dedicated with respect to the memory of Brenda M. Boughey and Sara Richards for forty combined years of love, companionship and support.

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Interlude     Around Banbury

2 Eighty Years of Narrow Boat

Interlude     Cheshire

3 Influences and Involvements: Massingham, Organicism and Literature

Interlude     Chester

4 The Early Inland Waterways Association and Waterways Revival

5 To the Rural Idyll? Irish Waterways and Railways

Interlude     Tardebigge

6Worcestershire, Craft and Waterways

Interlude     Llanthony

7 Encounters with Transport History: Willan, Hadfield and Rolt

Interlude     Banbury

8 Railway Revival, Conservation and Voluntarism

9 Afterword

Glossary

Bibliography

Notes

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As I relate in Chapter 1, I have been interested in waterways and their history since infancy, and more generally interested in the natural and built environment and environmental politics and management since my youth. Between 1989 and redundancy in 2010, my teaching was partly around these latter areas, the most satisfying being the teaching of postgraduates – many of whom were professionally involved in environmental management and planning – at Liverpool John Moores University.

As I got to know the late Charles Hadfield in the late 1980s – writing an account of his work as Charles Hadfield: Canal Man and More – I became more aware of L.T.C. Rolt, who was a close friend of Charles after they met in 1946. I met his widow, Sonia – a very interesting person in her own right – after Charles’ death in 1996. In the process, L.T.C. Rolt the writer became Tom Rolt the person – a warm, more human figure.

Re-reading much of Rolt’s writings, it became apparent, as with Hadfield, that there was a great deal to discern, and much of his world that might continue to disappear. His thinking seemed to form an intangible heritage in need of conservation, even over aspects with which I (and others) would significantly disagree. I began to investigate Rolt’s earlier life and to write and lecture about it, wondering about a biography. As with Hadfield, ‘his life and work’ seemed more accessible to write about than his personal life and, when he similarly had been involved in the making of history as well as dealing with the historical, it seemed best to focus on parts of that. This account thus concentrates on Rolt’s earlier life and his involvement with waterways revival and the beginnings of narrow-gauge railway revival.

I am from a generation that could well have followed the suburban small-town life that my parents, post-war, might have envisaged for me. However, as with many from the middle class born in the 1950s and 1960s, I found myself seriously blown off course. In my case, it was an early commitment to environmental politics, partly spurred by an interest in waterways. Attendance at university and polytechnic also diverted me, as did two unconventional marriages.

What especially and personally blew me off course was the tragedy of losing my first wife, Brenda, in 2002 – which halted my research into Rolt – the subsequent confusion, and then building a new life with Sara, herself recently widowed and grief-stricken through this and other traumas. The long-lasting consequences of this were compounded when Sara herself passed away in April 2023. I had begun work on this book of essays – indeed, I recall reading through drafts while Sara slept during one of the many long visits to her in hospital – and she was pleased that I was working on it. I contemplated abandoning the project when faced once again with building a new life, but so much work had been done that I felt it best to continue. I must express my gratitude to The History Press, especially to Amy Rigg, in agreeing to a delay, without which I might well have been unable to continue. Thanks are also due to my agent, Georgia Glover, of David Higham Associates, for her caring support at a difficult time.

The essay form seemed to provide a useful way of tackling the many issues raised by studies of Rolt’s work. Essays do not require comprehensive and exhaustive study, and enable close focus and depth with some issues, leaving others to be explored and followed up. I have emphasised particular issues and angles, some idiosyncratic, drawing on a range of sources. This has produced an advanced version of the inevitable conclusion that there is more to discover, explore, interpret, comprehend and conclude.

I have been an enthusiast for waterways history, in differing ways, for sixty years, and was an academic, teaching about the built environment, for twenty-one years. I have found the distinction between academic research and publication and (the best of) enthusiast research and publication tedious and counterproductive. Since retirement, I have been involved in adult education, with the Raymond Williams Foundation in the 2010s, the Merseyside-based Philosophy in Pubs since 2009 and, more recently, experiencing Gladstones Library at Hawarden. All three have emphasised the encouragement of scholarship, with learning as a mutual process, distant from the credentialled assessment-oriented learning that I experienced in university teaching. I have come across a sharp distinction between academic work in transport history and enthusiast work, and often with each side, despite many honourable exceptions, more interested in establishing and defending boundaries than in enlightening others. I hope that these essays can be read by academic and enthusiast alike: they are aimed at an intermediate level of knowledge and comprehension.

My thanks go to many people for a project that began over twenty-five years ago, and I can only mention some here. Chapters 2 and 7 are much-amended versions of articles that originally appeared in the Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society, for which the editor has kindly given consent. I would like to thank Stephen Rowson for the use of some of the historic photographs in his collection, and Pauline Soum-Paris of The Waterways Archive for her efforts in providing further historic images.

John ‘Mellotron’ Adams, and Claudia and Heather Wardle, kindly read and commented upon some of my essays. My sister, Dr Christine Barnes, was very helpful with genealogical queries. Tim Rolt, Tom’s son, was exceptionally helpful in commenting on some obscure queries about his father. Victoria Owens kindly let me see part of the manuscript of her biography of Tom Rolt and offered helpful comments on my own draft text. In the now-distant past, Sonia Rolt was very helpful in recalling Tom and showing me round his family home in Stanley Pontlarge, along with showing me documents there that are now in the Ironbridge Reference Library and Archive.

I have benefitted from the help of archivists and staff at various places over the years, especially the anonymous ones at The National Archives, and a succession of archivists at The Waterways Archive, many of whom I have worked with as a volunteer. Voluntary colleagues at the archives and in the late-lamented Boat/Waterways Museum Society, who met regularly in the Rolt Centre – now the Tom Rolt Conference Centre – at Ellesmere Port, inspired me over the years with friendship and support.

Finally, but never last, my late wives Brenda and Sara always bore with my involvement in researching and writing about Tom Rolt and other subjects. I hope that they would be pleased that these essays have come to fruition.

None of these people and organisations necessarily endorse any of my views, and all errors are my own.

1

INTRODUCTION

This book comprises a series of essays about the earlier work of the late Lionel Thomas Caswall Rolt, focusing upon his ‘landscapes’. In this introduction, I explain my approach to some of the concepts and approaches involved, beginning with some of my own background.

While I was at primary school in 1963 and 1964, my parents introduced me to waterways holidays, hiring a boat whose journey included the waterways between Gailey, on the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal, and Barbridge, on the Shropshire Union Canal. This was less than twenty years after the publication of Narrow Boat, Rolt’s first book, and we read about his trip as though it was a recent one. I recall a fascination with the Newport Branch, which led from the Shropshire Union at Norbury Junction, and his descriptions of this canal as barely navigable (by 1964 it had been closed for twenty years, although a society had been formed to restore it, which my late sister Hilarie, still at primary school, soon joined). Later, we acquired his The Inland Waterways of England and gradually realised that, by then, it was a portrait of the historical waterways of the late 1940s.

Rolt himself seemed to be a distant figure, who did not put too much of himself in his canal books; although later it would become clear how personal and particular his views were. By the time I learned of his early death in 1974, family canal holidays had largely ended.

It was later, when the controversies that led to Rolt’s expulsion from the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) were highlighted in the late Ian Mackersey’s Tom Rolt and the Cressy Years (1985) and then in the late David Bolton’s uneven Race Against Time (1990), that my attention was drawn back to Rolt.1 After I realised that much (then) recent history could soon be lost, I had begun to research the working life of Charles Hadfield, Britain’s leading waterways historian. I became much more interested in Tom Rolt, who had been a close friend of Hadfield’s, despite their significant differences in outlook. I met Rolt’s widow, Sonia, at the time of Hadfield’s funeral in 1996, and sought her help to recover more of Rolt’s story and influence. I saw him as part of a group born in the Edwardian period, who had been influential in the making and exposition of transport history, and gradually investigated some of his disappearing world. After my first wife Brenda died in 2002, I set much of this work to one side, but interest slowly revived as the 100th anniversary of his birth approached.

I had worked on articles and lectures about Rolt and explored places that he knew, some of which were much changed. In 2011, I was approached to appear on a programme for the BBC: The Golden Age of the Canals. This involved a journey on the Shropshire Union Canal from Nantwich, north to Barbridge, following a route that my late father had taken in 1963, and, incidentally, one that Rolt had followed in 1939. Only when I boarded the hired boat at Nantwich did the filmmakers advise me that they wanted me to talk about Tom Rolt. Fortunately, I had engaged in a lot of research and reading about Rolt by then, although I had found myself developing ideas that contradicted some established accounts about him.

Later, I was more briefly involved in a sequel, The Golden Age of Steam Railways, in which, sitting on a pile of sleepers at Wharf Station in Tywyn, I commented on the Talyllyn Railway revival and Rolt’s role. I was also involved in 60th-anniversary celebrations on that railway, taking part in a conference at Tywyn, at which I presented a paper to a largely railway audience, which formed the basis for a much modified article in the Journal of Transport History.2

In these investigations, Rolt seemed to be an ambivalent figure, exploring and admiring places and people at work, with ideas that diverged from much of mainstream politics and, perhaps, conservation. His writings inspired in me an appreciation of landscapes of various kinds, but also some doubt about their interpretation. Would I want myself or others to live in the kind of world that he desired?

Further considerations were raised by encounters with two places that were connected to Rolt.

Mill Street, Nantwich

In the summer of 2021, seeking to minimise the threat of coronavirus during the pandemic that had begun early in 2020, I sat down with my late wife Sara to drink tea outside a bookshop in High Street, Nantwich. What had begun life as a bookshop with some catering was now a café with a bookshop: hospitality prioritised over the possibility of learning, perhaps. Looking down the north side of the High Street, I caught sight of a scene that seemed to evoke the world of Tom Rolt and display his influence. While the bookshop is flanked by the historic Castle Street, it was the three-storey buildings beyond – now shops with flats above – that I found more prominent. These were early nineteenth century, built from handmade bricks. The wall beyond the last one had featured two signs, a metal one and an older wooden one (which had partly crumbled away), both proclaiming ‘Mill Street’. This had elements of something of which Rolt, who had come to know Nantwich in early wartime, would approve. He wrote in Narrow Boat: ‘To step down from some busy thoroughfare onto the quiet tow-path of a canal […] is to step backward a hundred years or more and to see things in a different, and perhaps more balanced perspective.’3

This street had led not to a canal but to a mill (Boughey Mill, as it happens) on the River Weaver, which is not navigable here; but in his time, this did indeed resemble a scene from a previous century. Nantwich had been a market town, specialising in Cheshire cheeses, with a widened High Street forming a market square in front of the present bookshop. Praising Cheshire farming and watermills, Rolt saw a place like Nantwich as the embodiment of organic relationships that stretched between town and country to relations between humans and machines. He also saw these as under threat, with little means of salvation. While he asserted that butchers sold only meat that had been locally raised and slaughtered, Cheshire cheese was being superseded by cheese that was an ‘imported substance’.4

Walking round the corner into Mill Street, after a short pedestrianised section that is lined with older buildings, any sense of a surviving past diminishes rapidly. While some nineteenth-century buildings survive, the street becomes a modern road, serving a car park that is flanked by modern apartments, before a relief road, constructed in the 1990s, cuts across the final section of the street. The site of the mill, which burnt down in 1970, has been paved to provide a feature in a riverside park.

Back at the High Street, the Square has long been pedestrianised, with the older shops replaced by cafés, charity shops, chain bookshops, stationery shops and banks (the latter themselves now very much reduced). If Rolt evoked historic environments under threat of decay and destruction, what now remains provides only echoes of the past that he perceived. Ironically, the preservation of the bookshop building owes its survival to having been listed since 1948, under part of a planning system that he publicly abhorred. Several of the other buildings were listed in 1974, the year he died. He would, at best, feel ambivalence over such forms of protection, prompted by what the cultural geographer David Matless has called ‘planner-preservationists’.5

To my mind, the opening of Mill Street provided a glimpse (and now only a glimpse) of what might be termed ‘Rolt country’: landscapes that he would recognise, containing elements of a past that had survived rather than being consciously recreated or conserved. These landscapes could exist in the mind, in clear memory or reconstructed through imagination, sometimes prompted by remnants and their interpretation. Rolt is perhaps less known or recalled for his interest in historic environments as for his emphasis on historic transport and, later, engineering biography, industrial archaeology and museums, the latter increasingly part of what would be later termed as ‘the heritage industry’. He was prompted, however, less by antiquarian curiosity than by a desire to retain and revive elements of an apparently beneficial past social order whose declining traces he had perceived in the 1930s and 1940s.

He had a critical, practical involvement in two features of post-war conservation – the retention of Britain’s navigable inland waterways and the preservation of narrow-gauge railways – but he sought to be a professional writer. The essays that make up this book focus on these roles, their background and the body of literature in which they were embedded. Rolt’s landscapes could (and still can) be visited in the imagination as much as on the ground, but his interpretations can be clarified and contested.

A second beginning, seventy years after Rolt visited Nantwich, was an event I attended, which aimed to celebrate Rolt’s life and work.

Chester Centenary Rally, 2010

Historic transport featured at the Tom Rolt Centenary Rally of June 2010. Organised by the (then) Chester & District Branch of the IWA (an organisation that Rolt co-founded in 1946), this sought to celebrate the centenary of his birth. The event took place on the Shropshire Union Canal at the wide basin of Tower Wharf in Chester, which was able to accommodate numerous boats. Sixty years before, he had suggested the first such canal boat rally at Market Harborough in the English Midlands.

The rally’s location was well chosen. Chester was where he was born, although his family had soon moved to Cusop, near Hay-on-Wye. Rolt first came to prominence for his writing about a voyage in the narrow boat Cressy, converted in the 1930s for pleasure use. Cressy was part of a fleet that was mostly built in the nearby Shropshire Union boatyard, which remained intact, if somewhat decrepit, by 2010 (it has since been somewhat revived). Like much that he favoured, it had survived through underuse and failure to invest in modernisation. A large plaque on the bridge opposite this yard proclaimed his connections with several causes that he inspired about historic environments.

The boatyard had been occupied by the firm of J.H. Taylor between the 1920s and the 1970s. This built flats and floats (large canal freight vessels) in the interwar period, and in the 1950s began to build specialised canal pleasure boats. Rolt had not intended it, but Narrow Boat had helped to inspire wealthier readers to consider acquiring, commissioning or hiring pleasure boats to open up and explore what he had depicted as a hidden world.

This did not include the basin on the towpath side of the canal, now flanked by tall apartments that mimic some of the lines of warehouses. There were canal warehouses here before the basin was filled in during the 1950s, but after 1921 they had not been served by the canal and, indeed, the re-excavated North Basin is still not used to moor pleasure boats. This reflected one of the fears of the early (and, indeed, later) IWA – that some water space might be retained for its appearance but not for any use for navigation.

The plaque is worth considering in detail. It disguises his later expulsion from the organisation that he co-founded, asserting: ‘The success of the IWA in halting the dereliction of the canal system and ensuring its survival owes immeasurably to Rolt’s vision.’ The term ‘immeasurably’ provides a reminder that it remains unclear what would have happened after 1944 if Narrow Boat had not been published.

While dereliction was indeed halted, Rolt’s vision only partly guided developments in waterways revival. These essays will attempt to reiterate, critique and conserve aspects of that vision. As he stressed historic conservation more than the development of recreational boating, much of Rolt’s legacy for the current waterways scene is, perhaps inevitably, limited.

The plaque continues: ‘His energy and the influence of his writings extending into the wide and varied sphere of what became industrial archaeology continue to enrich the life of many.’ While the precise impact of any writing can never be finally known, Rolt’s contribution beyond waterways probably enabled the enrichment of many more lives. My essays do celebrate his inspirational writings about (mostly) waterways and the enrichment of lives through the ‘energy’ of his practical involvement and commitment.

I feel that Rolt had two phases of interest: the first included his practical involvements, until 1953, with waterways and railways; the second, in which his somewhat apocalyptic pronouncements had been reduced, covered engineering biography and the growth of industrial archaeology and museums. These essays focus on the former period, but there are clear links between the two, including his membership and roles in the scholarly Newcomen Society, which he joined in 1945, and the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society, which he co-founded and in which he remained active until his death.

A further plaque, by now one among several, was placed on his suburban Chester birthplace that summer. His widow, Sonia, although now frail, was able to attend the centenary event with the help of her son, and visited a stall for the IWA. On a platform opposite was a locomotive, Tom Rolt, which had been brought by road from the narrow-gauge railway in Wales that he had helped to revive, and his veteran car, an Alvis, which Tom’s father had acquired in 1925.6

While at the rally, I began to reflect about what Rolt himself might have thought of this event. As a private man who eschewed personal publicity, he might well have been embarrassed by so much emphasis on his personal role. Would he approve of so many pleasure boats or preserved heritage vessels that had been restored but were rarely, if ever, used for their original purpose? Would he be keen to see the locomotive and car as exhibits, rather than in everyday use? And would he have been content with the loss of living landscapes that he admired – the Talyllyn and other preserved railways embodying heritage as tourism – or the lives upon carrying transport boats superseded by boats for leisure?

The desire to commemorate and commend much of his commitment and influence may have obscured the study of some of his ideas, especially the formative ones that took him into the 1950s. Reading these, partly through his autobiographies and in private letters, made me wonder whether the implications of these ideas were fully understood, and indeed about the lineages whereby sets of ideas and practices can be inherited in various manners. It also made me wonder whether, should his record of association with fringe right-wing causes become more prominent, this would, if left unconsidered, necessitate explanation and rehabilitation.

Commemorative events sometimes inspire renewed interest in a significant figure, with the formation of study groups and societies, conferences, seminars and journals. This has yet to take place for Tom Rolt, bar a website, which records tributes and lists his publications, some of which remain in print.7 Rolt Memorial Lectures and the Rolt Fellowship, which began in the 1970s, continue, along with a major conference at Ironbridge in 2024. The 50th anniversary of his death has prompted Victoria Owens’ biography, but otherwise there has not been much follow-up in research and writing; especially limited is any detailed critical assessment.8

Appraisals and Influences

The 50th anniversary of Rolt’s death in May 2024 and the 80th anniversary of the publication of Narrow Boat in late 1944 present opportunities for further appraisal of his work and influence. I would endorse the late Raymond Williams’ view that a life can be continuous before and after the living of a physical life; in a secular sense, these essays concern influences before and beyond that life.9 Rolt’s influence does indeed continue, but in forms that maybe he could not imagine or endorse. We owe to him a broad shoulder upon the wheel of movements for waterways revival, largely for pleasure boating; for preserved tourist railways; for historic engineering, technology and industrial archaeology; and for a certain view of landscape as a living embodiment of an underlying sustainable society and economy. My main stress lies on the waterways and railway involvements, especially in writing, that brought about his practical engagements into the early 1950s. In many ways, he is a literary figure – no doubt a minor one, with a ‘middlebrow’ authorship and audience, but a literary figure, nevertheless. It is that figure, his actions and the views that he expressed and developed that are the subject of critique here. Tom Rolt the person, by most accounts friendly, charming and thoughtful, is not under appraisal.

Rolt’s writings on landscape partly concerned processes that he felt had influenced or formed the places that he admired and whose conservation he sought in different ways. They also continue to draw attention to various such favoured landscapes. To revisit these is to attempt to perceive some aspects of what he saw and how much they have changed, but also sometimes to raise some doubts about his perspectives on these places. They may have also left unpreserved the forces that helped to produce and maintain these landscapes – the people, skills, crafts and meanings, artefacts, material culture, communities, homes and means of transport. Rolt, amid others, helped to conserve these through recording and describing – literary in his case, antiquarian or anthropological in others.

There are also the interior landscapes of his imagination. Visits to some places – many of them obscure – can bring out some elements of these, and I have incorporated a range of limited reflections upon recent visits, alongside more theoretical considerations. Composed in different styles, these form ‘interludes’ between the essays, but they might be viewed as brief essays in themselves.10

These essays comprise studies of Rolt’s ideas and his work, but ones that depart from the somewhat semi-hagiographical assumptions that, perhaps quite properly, characterised the centenary events. I should stress my own perspectives, as some readers will disagree with the basis for my judgement. I am doubtful about much of Rolt’s worldview, with its ‘green’ elements that could descend into reactionary romanticism.

Writing may assume an authorial consensus that readers share, but in this world of severe ideological divisions, even among members of the same middle class and supporters of neoliberal capitalism, this must now be untenable. For my part, I would turn round the oft-quoted assertion (attributed to the American theorist Fredric Jameson) that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. I feel that within the continued framework of neoliberal capitalism, it is difficult to envisage a position in which the end of the world for most of humanity has been averted. My comments, which differ greatly from Rolt’s, should be viewed in this context; there are a range of alternative perspectives.

My own main influences for this book have been the reading of three academic writers: David Matless, cultural geographer of landscape; Patrick Wright, literature and cultural studies writer and broadcaster; and the late Raymond Williams, writer on cultural studies. None of these were contemporaries of Rolt. The oldest, Williams, shared a strong affinity with Rolt’s love for the landscapes of the Black Mountains, which will be discussed later.

The others, in their differing ways, share an interest in landscapes, people and material culture from the past, often set in a context of literature. While Wright makes no explicit reference to Rolt, he discusses many figures with whom Rolt was loosely associated, mostly through H.J. Massingham and his associates, like Viscount Lymington.11 These were, perhaps disconcertingly, on the fringes of the political Right between the 1930s and 1950s. Much of Wright’s work is concerned with the analysis of places and their connections, often unexpected, with people; he is interested in the relations between the historic or ‘heritage’ and the national present.12

Matless, much more an academic specialising in cultural geography, discusses Rolt’s Narrow Boat in his Landscape and Englishness. Perceptively, he places Rolt among agricultural organicists (several of them on the political far/fringe Right) and depicts him ‘interweaving descriptions of humdrum objects with giant statements on civilisation’.13

What Matless calls ‘canal culture’, Rolt had sought through direct involvement rather than the external observation then emphasised and promoted by the Mass Observation movement. Rolt perceived an authentic folk culture in the painting of boats, a form of folk art, and collective singing in canal-side pubs like that at Shardlow in Derbyshire. He felt that these remains of a stable, organic, traditional England would not survive the attention of ‘scientific planners’, and Matless observes ‘a fault line which over the following decades would come to dominate commentary on English landscape in an increasingly elegiac, melancholy, hopeless manner’.14 That critical fault line, between the ‘planner-preservationists’ and ‘organicists’ will be explored in Chapter 3.

Matless stresses the contrast between Rolt’s endorsement of the Potteries landscape as one truly reflective of the Industrial Revolution and the later modern factories of the Great West Road. Those who peopled a landscape are as significant as its appearance. Rolt felt that the boat people, or at least some of them, could be traced back to the ‘pre-machine-age peasant’, and suggested that they had links to Roma origins. Finally, Matless points out that Narrow Boat was unusual among organicist literature in having ‘an immediate and considerable effect’ in fostering the revival of waterways for leisure. This will be examined in later chapters, in particular Chapter 4.

All three writers display numerous differences with Rolt; it is doubtful that any of them ever met him, or that he would not disapprove strongly of authors who were more (Williams) or less (Matless and Wright) explicitly located on the political Left. However, all focus as he did on landscapes, ‘heritage’ and culture. While acknowledging the influence of broad economic social and political structures, all three consider linkages with and between more vernacular factors.

Rolt’s writing and practical actions underlay two significant revivals – in British inland waterways from 1946 and in the conservation of narrow gauge and steam railways after 1950 – along with the appraisal and preservation of much of industrial archaeological and engineering history interest. These essays focus mostly upon the first two. Ironically, Rolt’s very private character made him uncertain about the movements that he helped to start, and he would be in major doubt about, if not outright repudiation, of much that has been taken for granted in mainstream political circles since his time.

On Landscapes

Despite the use of the term ‘landscape’ in two of Rolt’s autobiographical volumes (the third was renamed Landscape with Figures posthumously), he did not define this, and it is a difficult and often contested concept. It may be appropriate to contrast Rolt’s perceptions of landscape – partly as scenery, partly as an experience of nature sometimes approaching the mystical, and partly as a working landscape (he had helped out at a local farm near Cusop) – with those of Raymond Williams, who was born in the same Black Mountains area in 1921, the year when the Rolt family moved to Gloucestershire.

Like Rolt, Williams saw the writing of fiction as important, and Border Country, his first published novel, and his final posthumous novels, People of the Black Mountains, were set in the area. It is unlikely that Rolt would have read the former or would have gained much if he had done.

Williams grew up in Pandy, a small Welsh border village beyond the southern end of the Vale of Ewyas. His family had farming connections – his grandfather had been dismissed and turned out of his tied cottage by his farmer employer and became a roadman. It was a place that people left in large numbers, beginning with women going into domestic service in Birmingham or to the mining valleys of south Wales. Williams’ mother was the daughter of a farm bailiff, while his father had started work as a farm worker before becoming a boy porter and then a signal worker on the Great Western Railway at Pandy.15

Williams described this as ‘a very particular situation – a distinctly rural pattern of small farms, interlocked with another kind of social structure to which the railway workers belonged’.16 He recorded that his father was friendly with local farmers and so they made up a close community, albeit one around acknowledged divisions. The Great Western Railway Company that Rolt would admire (and mourn), with its proud traditions, had been the same company that had victimised railway workers who supported the General Strike of 1926, including Williams’ father. The railway workers, unionised and linked by the railway to industrialised south Wales, formed a separate body in this rural area, heading up the local Labour Party.

Williams was conscious of this as a community in which individuals supported one another, even when, as in his case, scholastic achievement meant that a member was to be sent away to university in Cambridge. He reacted to views expressed by Cambridge academics that Rolt might well have endorsed. He attended a lecture by L.C. Knights (co-editor of the Leavisite journal Scrutiny) on the meaning of ‘neighbour’ in Shakespeare, and when:

Knights said that nobody now can understand Shakespeare’s meaning of neighbour, for in a corrupt mechanical civilisation there are no neighbours, I got up and said I thought this was only differentially true; there were obviously successive kinds of community, and I knew perfectly well, from Wales, what neighbour meant.17

Williams perhaps idealised the community of his youth, but also acknowledged the continuing influence of its landscape. His character, Matthew Price, draws a significant contrast in Border Country when, studying historic population movements in the area, he finds the landscape and its distance in time and space intruding. His thoughts are relevant to Rolt:

It was one thing to carry it in his mind, as he did, everywhere, not a day passing but he closed his eyes and saw it again, his only landscape. But it was different to stand and look at the reality. It was not less beautiful; every detail of the land came with its own excitement. But it was not still, as the image had been. […] He realized what had happened in going away. The valley as landscape had been taken, but its work forgotten. The visitor sees beauty; the inhabitant a place where he works and has friends. Far away, closing his eyes, he had been seeing this valley, but as a visitor sees it, as the guide-book sees it: this valley, in which he had lived more than half his life.18

Williams’ view can be contrasted with that of Rolt: Williams saw the landscape as a product of labour and a place of work of various kinds. In thinking about landscape and going back, one can take the visitor’s perspective, and in many ways this was true of Rolt. The labourers and craftsmen who built the much-admired Llanthony Priory in the Vale of Ewyas may have had aspirations but these may well have included getting paid and being able to find food and shelter. Aspirations may have rested with those who commissioned the building, although the short-lived monastic community there was seen as part of an initiative to counter Welsh insurgencies.

A later chapter returns to Williams and Rolt, but it may not be too reductionist to see their divergent views of landscape (and politics) as being conditioned by their initial class position and corresponding awareness of work and its shaping of environments. Rolt was drawn back in time, in place with Llanthony, by a partly mystical sense of belonging, and Williams too by a less-definable sense of rootedness. There is an element of self-rebuking in Matthew Price’s feeling about looking at his home landscape as if it was from a guidebook, and perhaps this is an accusation that, if levelled at Rolt, would necessitate a robust response.

Outline and Structure

The studies here focus on an earlier period of Rolt’s writing and practice around seventy and eighty years ago, between the publication of Narrow Boat in 1944 and Railway Adventure in 1953. During the remaining twenty years of his life, he concentrated on writing professionally, some of it based on research. Committee involvements would partly reflect his earlier developed and stated views, but he diverged more and more into practical ends and achievement. ‘Straight’ biographical studies would follow him through these years but could not delve too far into his earlier world views, their contradictions, sources and implications. I have chosen to tackle this through themes rather than chronology, making this a series of linked essays.

This book opens with an essay that marks eighty years since Narrow Boat, Rolt’s first and best-known book. It is set in the context of both earlier literary works and the waterways scene of 1939–40, contrasting this with the rapid critical examination carried out by Frank Pick of London Transport in 1941. The strong wartime influence of H.J. Massingham, a popular (and reactionary) rural writer, upon Rolt is explored over the development of his ‘philosophical’ work, High Horse Riderless, of 1945. This involved a rejection of industrialisation and called for a more rural, organic society, along with a stress on certain voluntary principles. Massingham is set in context with other organicist and rural revival writers and political figures, including Viscount Lymington, who would become a vice president of the IWA. The kind of nostalgic country writing of which Massingham was a leading proponent in the 1930s provides a background to Rolt’s work and the perceptions of much of his likely audience.

Rolt did not write Narrow Boat in order to launch any practical campaign to revive inland waterways, but the book’s impact after publication led him to co-found the IWA in 1946. While some of the IWA’s early history has been detailed before, this account focuses on Rolt’s role, some of the problems he faced and the significance of his involvement. In this respect, it diverges from some earlier accounts.

While he played no practical personal part in their revival, his portrait of some Irish waterways was recorded in Green & Silver. Based on a long voyage in 1946, this influenced the founding of the Inland Waterways Association of Ireland (IWAI). Rolt perceived special qualities in the west of Ireland, seeing it as a rural idyll, and commented on both waterways and railways. This commentary is evaluated against some of the realities of post-Emergency Ireland.

In wartime, Rolt lived on his boat Cressy at Tardebigge in Worcestershire, explored the county and wrote a volume on Worcestershire for a county series. He would distil his knowledge of inland waterways into a portrait of The Inland Waterways of England. Both books stressed the nature and significance of craft skills and people, and the desirability of their flourishing. The emphases in these portraits are considered, along with Rolt’s early encounters with conservation.

Rolt’s involvement with the historical has led some to regard him as an historian, but contrasts with two contemporaries – T.S. Willan and Charles Hadfield – indicate limits to his earlier historical investigations. His contribution to waterways history – with many insights, although perhaps with some missed opportunities – is discussed, making some differences in coverage and conclusions for the Worcestershire/Warwickshire Avon and waterways serving Leominster.

Rolt admired the railways before grouping and nationalisation, of which he disapproved, but developed the opportunity to revive one line that was not nationalised: the Talyllyn Railway in rural west Wales. This involved the pioneering of principles – voluntary ownership and management – which would eventually be applied elsewhere. The politics of conservation that this reveals are discussed. Unlike the inland waterways, Rolt would remain involved with this railway, despite its increasing dependence on tourism. His two years as railway manager, dealing with a distant board and local and national volunteers, are considered.

An Afterword attempts to draw together the discussions of Rolt’s writings and his contribution to post-war conservation, both in practice and principle.

The longer essays are interspersed with short, illustrated essays – ‘interludes’, in Matless’ apt concept – that discuss some of Rolt’s favoured landscapes. These vary in style and approach, and each makes different points about places associated with Rolt that, however much changed, remain worth visiting.

The Tom Rolt Centenary Rally in Chester in June 2010 at Tower Wharf on the Shropshire Union Canal. The boat at the front centre is the largely rebuilt former inspection vessel Lady Hatherton.

The steam locomotive Tom Rolt