A place to promenade, a place to play.
Geoff Andrews recalls the particular charm of the Kennet and Avon Canal and its environs during the post-war years.
Now it is a significant part of the local economy, but until it was rejuvenated in the 1980s the canal in Bradford on Avon was more a linear water park, principally for fishing and walking, and for kids all sorts of risky games, that usually involved getting wet, followed by chastisement at home.
Fishing on the canal
For fishing, the canal was an undisturbed stretch of water from Hilperton to Bradford Wharf, and then on to Avoncliff where there was a stop lock for many years, just before the aqueduct. Before that section below Murhill failed it had continued for miles towards Dundas, the favourite destination for Sunday school outings in a horse-drawn narrowboat in the 1900s.
The water was full of perch, tench, pike, roach, occasionally eels (but not gudgeon), and weedy but almost crystal clear in sunlight. You could see the fish you were trying to catch and to judge by my results, they could apparently see me.
There were frequent club competitions from The Beehive towards Ladydown, with well over a hundred men (exclusively) drawing lots for their labelled pitch spaced every 10 yards for about a mile. Each pitch had been prepared by the canal bailiff, with the grass cut and the reeds removed. At the end of the day the winner was the person whose haul was heaviest, but there were probably also prizes for the best specimens.
The Sunday evening passiegato
The Sunday evening walk in the ’50s was a local passiegato. As there was nothing else to do, many people on fine evenings took in part of the canal towpath in their walk. Everyone would be in Sunday best and all the men wearing their trilbies or caps and tipping them to other people they met (most of whom they would know). And gossiping.
In my time there was only one attempt (probably in about 1946-47) to get a boat through towards Bath. It was the first boat larger than a rowing boat I’d seen, and I thought it looked like Noah’s Ark rather than the small narrowboat it probably was. It might have been Meteor which did make such a trip. If so, its journey was much slower than its name suggests as weed choked the waterway.
Wildlife
Wildlife along the canal was doing well in the neglect. Grass snakes were common on the banks, often slipping into the water and swimming for the other side as you approached. No doubt they were attracted by the plentiful frogs and tadpoles.
There were water voles too, rabbits in the banks, herons, adders, slow-worms and a lot of birds. No foxes though, and only on one occasion did I hear, rather than see, a badger, which I disturbed in the bank by Benjamin’s Six Acre field, now part of the new wood. There were two cuckoos in spring, one near Ladydown and one nearer the Wharf, which my brother provoked to come very close with his imitation of its call. Other natural life we took for granted, but I was particularly impressed by the glow worms on the banks near the Trowbridge Road bridge.
In spring primroses and violets were everywhere, despite copious pickings for Easter or Mothering Sunday.
There was also a grisly side to the canal; it seems to have been the means which too many people chose for suicide. I was proud of a length of rope I had found until somebody told me it had been used to pull a body out of the water a few days before.
For no reason I know at several points, near Ladydown and by the swing bridge, there were gates across the towpath: they may be still there. They were possibly intended to prevent straying livestock, but often in irrational places.
Playing
The pillboxes of the Stopline were a mixed blessing, having been used as toilets too often to be useful as a schoolboy camp. They were finished in time before the invasion threat grew, apparently, but they were never equipped with anything – unless their fittings had already disappeared before about 1946.
The one pillbox which was unsullied was the best one, overlooking the clay pit. This was the camp of the Black Hand Gang, a bunch of older boys. We regarded them as the local mafia and gave them a wide berth. A small-scale black market in food was allegedly operated out of the pillbox
There was also a strange derelict building almost next to the canal about 100 metres from the Trowbridge Road bridge. It was said to have been a bakery but for whom: passing boats? For us it was castle, fort, whatever we pleased.
At that time the earth dug out when the canal was built was still very evident in the fields at the bottom of Poulton Lane – and steep enough that we used to be able to roll down it.
In the stretch from Frome Road to Avoncliff, Grip wood was always a no go area (although it apparently belonged to a distant relative), but Beckyanny* wood was a favourite playground. It was much larger than now and completely overgrown, apart from the path that led to Avoncliff.
The rifle butts left from World War I were still in place beyond the withy beds that were cultivated for the blind basket maker in town. The other end of the butts was said to be in a field beyond Belcombe, but I never saw them.
‘Mr Green’
For seemingly most of my childhood ‘Mr Green’, who lived near us in Southville Gardens, was employed on reroofing the Tithe Barn, reshaping thousands of stone tiles patiently. We’d call out to him when we were passing. I never saw anyone working with him, which probably accounts for the interminable time the work took.
In a hard winter we played on the ice, using pieces of wood and a lump of ice or a stone for knockabout ice hockey games, but I never saw anyone with skates.
Throughout the 1970s my father was chair of the local branch of the Kennet and Avon Trust and, with my mother, worked throughout his retirement on reclaiming the canal. Fortunately they both lived to see the job completed when the Queen officially reopened it in 1990 at Devizes – almost the last time my mother left the house.
* It is marked on maps as Beckyaddy, but to Bradfordians it was always Beckyanny wood.
