The Narrow Boat Book
£9.95
This book is out of print. The copies available are second hand, in near-as-new or very good condition. Published by Whittet Books.
Today, narrow boats take families on holiday, but for over a century at the heart of the industrial revolution, they were the contemporary juggernauts, travelling sometimes 24 hours a day with vital cargoes of coal, food and manufactured goods; the canals were as as well known and as celebrated as the modern motorways. Canal people lived a colourful, cosy, nomadic life, with their own customs, culture and morality.
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To the questions of all those who have wondered about narrow boats – how did they operate, what did they carry and to where, who built them and how, who lived in them – this book provides the fascinating answers. It vividly evokes the scenes of canal life, the tap dancing in canalside pubs, the muffled hooves of the horses in the early morning, the children riding their bicycles inside the empty boats; it relates tales that are sometimes sad, as of suffocation in the cabin, and sometimes humorous, as of the boatman whose boat ran away without him.
Tom Chaplin, the author, is immensely qualified to write about canals. His family have been associated with waterways for many years, and from an early age he spent much time with narrow boats. He has toured the majority of the inland waterways of Britain, and he and his wife chose a narrowboat, Stentor, for their first home. He was a director of the riparian ownership service, T. Harrison Chaplin Ltd.
Author: Tom Chaplin
Binding: Softback
Published: 1978 (This edition is a 1984 reprint)
Pages: 128
Size: 245 x 190 mm
ISBN: 0905483057
Publisher’s Price (in 1984): £4.95
