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 Murder near the Good Ship Gloria IT’S just past 6am, early May, and rather than disturb my motley crew I take a walk along the towpath of the Worcester- Birmingham canal. Canal boating is a little like camping or caravanning: you rise early to make the most of the daylight. Our boat was 7Oft long and four cabins. I’m promoted to 'Le Capitaine', as second-mate Marie addresses me (she speaks little English). First-mate is my sister, used to canoeing in Alaska, so unflappable - not that, just likely to be eaten by polar bears. The rest of the crew are, of course, revolting. Dawn, damp and drizzling. I spy a church on the horizon, in the little hamlet of Oddingley. Here, quite bizarrely, they commemorate a murder. Two hundred years ago, newly appointed priest George Parker raised local tithes (taxes) to an unprecedented level and the farming population were unhappy. They hired a hitman and, when he threatened blackmail, they had to dispose of him. Eyewitness reports are bloodthirsty - the shotgun was only partially successful, so Parker was clubbed to death with the butt - and the affair literally resurfaced in the 1960s when excavations for the new M5 motorway brought up skulls and other bits. Just the stuff, then, for a peaceful voyage amid the ducks and swans on the canal. I rouse the crew with a few lashes of the cat-o’-nine-tails and we’re soon at Worcester to join the River Severn. It’s a lovely little city; not totally ruined by town planners and, like York, best appreciated from the river. The splendid cathedral has the oldest royal tomb in the country, that of King John, and for other rebels, look no farther than local MP Michael Foster, who introduced the private members Bill which became an Act of Parliament banning fox-hunting. a brave man. I send the crew for Le Shopping: 20 m of cable, spare torch batteries and a 10mm ring spanner. As soon as they return - with, instead, four bottles of Wash ‘n’ Go, a ton of chocolate and packets of things with wings - we descend two deep locks to the river. This is Diglis Basin, a serious wharf. Forty years ago, it was full of working boats; those days are gone and it’s now full of pleasure craft like ours. On the Severn, the May blossom is out, and the sun, and the university rowers are practising their strokes - and missing a few as they eyeball Irma sunbathing on our roof. We are upstream of the tidal reach and the notorious Severn Bore - a mini-tsunami, a tidal wave, caused by the Bristol Channel funnelling into the river. Ten-foot waves are best avoided by narrowboats & fishermen, too, if you’ve ever seen a swan with a hook and 20ft of nylon line in its beak. Murders aside, there is no shortage of history as the bloodiest battles of the English civil war were fought hereabouts. Charles Stuart, proclaimed king at Scone, attempted restoration of the monarchy with an army of 17,000 Scots. Oliver Cromwell had other ideas and an army twice the size. The streets of Worcester, a tabloid might have commented in 1651, ran rivers of blood. You can learn all about Roundheads and Cavaliers at Worcester’s Commandery museum. More battles followed: financial ones when the Staffs & Worcs canal owners saw a threat to their waterway linking the heart of England to the Severn. The engineering work was awesome. A "stupendous undertaking" was the comment in 1794, and famous Scottish engineer John Rennie was called in. He eschewed the idea of shiplifts - a new-fangled concept - and opted for fewer, deeper locks. Later, it was reported that boatmen would urge the donkeys on at the 35-flight Tardbigge locks, inserting a block of wood to create an extra paddle. Highly dangerous and, as those bibles, Nicholson’s Guides, say, "a practice we would not even contemplate today" I urge my donkeys on upstream to Stourport, a town much nicer than its name suggests. We’re trawling history again as pioneer canal builder James Brindley established a base here and we have the delightfully named Pratt’s Wharf and Falling Sands locks. We’re off the river and on to the Staffs-Worcs canal to Kidderminster. Green and leafy, it’s hard to believe we’re only 30 miles from Britain’s second largest city. We could travel further through these sylvan byways of middle England. These 18th-century routes linked all important towns and cities and put the Great into Great Britain as our ancestors were able to trade with the New World. But today, we enjoy the canals for leisure, and drifting with the current down.river, I think of Lewis Carroll: |
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