What Type Of Boat Is "Flamingo"?

Some years back, when we first acquired "Sickle", I did a post entitled "What kind of boat is Sickle?" intended to explain her origins.  That post has remained popular, and still gets quite a few hits, so, although "Flamingo" is a rather more conventional boat, it seems to me that some may be similarly interested in the history of a boat from the same builder, but not of the same type.

As I explained when I did it for "Sickle", it is hard to know what level to pitch such an explanation at.  A serious enthusiast may want a lot of detail, and is highly likely to already know anything I might say to explain it to those with only a scant knowledge of working boats. As I did for "Sickle" I will try to steer a middle course for those who want to know a bit more than it is a boat about 70 feet long and 7 feet wide, built to carry cargoes.  In particular I'll attempt to explain how how it fits in amongst other boats with a similar origin, such as "Flamingo".  The next several paragraphs are really little more than a cut and paste, though, due to both boats having similar origins.

In the 1930s, a massive program was under way to try and improve the Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham with a view to trying to revitalise trade on this canal.  Alongside that initiative, a new company called the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company was formed, and after taking over a number of already existing narrow boats, it started an ambitious plan to build large numbers of brand new boats in anticipation of all the new carrying contracts they hoped to secure.

The new boats were still built in line with the then traditional methods, and basic layouts, but also standardised on what were then modern 2-cylinder diesel engines, and provided new facilities like electric lighting.  The boats were built theoretically able to carry larger loads than on many existing boats, although ultimately the depth of water available on the routes actually meant that the bigger boats were never loaded near to their theoretical maximum.

"Sculptor" is a "Star" Class "Small Northwich" built by W J Yarwood & Sons

Ignoring some earlier types, a total of 174 pairs of boats were built, (so just short of 350 in total), being a roughly a 50/50 split between boats known as "Star class", (on account of being named after astronomical features like stars, moons, constellations, etc.), and "Town class", (as these took place names, although in practice what constituted a "Town" was actually often a bit spurious!).

Whereas "Chertsey" is a "Town" Class "Large Woowich" built by Harland & Wolff

What distinguished the "Stars" from the generally slightly later built "Towns", was that most of the former had a hull side depth of 4' 2", whereas the latter were built 4' 9" sides, which gives them a significantly different appearance.  Both classes featured a mix of boats built in wood, by firms like Walkers of Rickmansworth, or boats built largely in steel or iron, (although most of the "metal" built "Stars" were actually of composite construction with metal sides, but wooden planked bottoms).

Steel or iron boats were either built by Harland and Wolff at Woolwich, or W. J. Yarwood and Sons at Northwich on the River Weaver.  This has led to the boat types having nicknames like "Small Woolwich", (a shallower sided "Star" class boat built by Harland and Wolff) or "Large Northwich", (a deeper sided "Town" class boat built by Yarwoods).

Just to confuse an otherwise neat pattern though, "Sickle" was however a motor boat delivered amongst 8 pairs of the "Star" class boats differed somewhat from the other "Stars".  These were all built by Yarwoods of Northwich, in all steel, but with 4' 6" hull sides, being part way between a more typical "Star" and a "Town".  But additionally the boats were built with a slight 'V' shape to the bottom, as well as having very rounded "corners", (known as "chines"), at the point that the sides would normally join to the bottom in a more angular way on other boats.  Such evidence as is available suggests the "Middle Northwich" boats were probably less used, and the fact that four motors, including "Sickle", were converted to ice boats in 1942, means half the available motors were lost as carrying boats very early on.

"Flamingo" with steerer Ron Green, Oct 1963 (Photo: Mike Webb)

In fact, although this massive building of a new narrow boat fleet, including much effort to bring new traffics to the canals was a success in many ways, it is widely regarded that it consistently faltered because of one specific thing - the operating company's failure to ever attract, train and retain enough crews to keep anything like the whole fleet in traffic.  Obviously the fairly rapid coming of the Second World War hardly helped, and famously we have the women volunteer crews, (the so called "Idle Women"), who took over some of the crewing duties at that time - however their impact was not that great in sheer numbers.

Paired with Beverley (Photo Jon Talbot) - 1965 stated, but believed later

It seems that despite up to 180 pairs initially being available, (there were smaller numbers of other craft I have not described here), nothing like that number was usually in service at any time, and there were times where the decision was taken not to try and crew more than around 100 pairs.  Hence there are recorded periods where large numbers of these boats remained moth-balled, and of course the fact there were more than crew could be found for led to progressive disposals over time.

Temporarily out of use at Braunston (Photo Hugh McKnight)

"Flamingo" is a "Large Northwich" "Town Class" boat built by W J Yarwood and Sons in 1936, but "Flamingo" is clearly not the name of a UK town or place.  "Flamingo" was in fact built is the GUCCCo's "Letchworth", and carried that name in GUCCCo service, and continued to do so after 1948 when the waterways were nationalised and the fleet passed to British Transport (Waterways) - ultimately "British Waterways".

There are good records that show "Letchworth" at work in the 1940s and 1950s, although we have yet to find any pictures.  However by the late 1950s narrow boat carrying was very much in decline, and Brtish Waterways were increasingly disposing of surplus craft.  In the meantime an independent entrepreneurial carrying company, "Willow Wren", had been formed  and was energetically trying to keep the traffics alive, and to seek out new opportunities, which it did with some success. "Letchworth" was one of a batch 8 of motor boats that Willow Wren purchased from British Waterways in 1961, (for just £1,900 for all 8 boats).

Paired with Beverley, probably about 1968 (Photographer unknown).

At that time it was Willow Wren policy to rename boats it bought into the fleet to those of birds, and "Letchworth" became "Flamingo" at that point.  "Flamingo" entered active service for Willow Wren almost straight away, and its history for the next 9 or so years is fairly well recorded, including surviving the collapse of the original Willow Wren company, and its rebirth as "Willow Wren Canal Transport Services", (often written  "Willow Wren CTS").  "Flamingo" operated with various buttys on some of the very last long distance canal carrying contracts, including delivering the very last ever load of grain from

 The doors were painted by Jess Owen (Photo by unknown).

Brentford to Whitworth's Mill at Wellingborough on the River Nene.  Eventually Willow Wren CTS had lost all its available work, and was forced to close.  Only months later the "Blue Line" boats delivered their very last loads of coal to the "Kearley and Tonge" "Jam 'Ole" in Southall, and regular long distance deliveries by narrow boat came to an end, (although arguably the much shorter haul traffic of lime juice pulp from Brentford to Boxmoor, which carried on several more years, could claim being the very last).










 

Willow Wren colours retained when in use as a trip boat (Photo by unknown)

In some ways to me "Flamingo's" greatest claim to fame is its Willow Wren years, so it is likely that on any repaint we will retain  that livery, and its "Willow Wren" name.  "Flamingo" has a very different history to "Sickle" despite their very similar origins, (built same year, at same place by same builder and for same company), and both have performed very different roles for the majority of their working lives.  We feel privileged to be able to own both.

Note: I am not in a position to be able to seek permission for all the photos used, even though some are now in my possession as original prints. If anybody objects to the use of any image, or wants a credit added, please send me a message to that effect - thanks.

End of an Era - "Chalice" Is Sold!

Posted by Alan

Those who "do" Facebook, or follow the CanalWorld Discussion Forums will probably know this, but it seems quite a few read the blog, but don't necessarily see updates in either of those place.

So for completeness, repeated here......

Chalice is blacked for its new owner, following a clean survey.

A bit of an historic day for us on Friday, as the sale of "Chalice" has gone through quickly and without bother - the money is now in the bank, so she is firmly now not our boat.

Chalice is the boat we bought 10 years ago when I came back to the canals after many years of not owning one, and we have covered a huge amount of the canals and rivers in that time, much of it many times, and we have had many great adventures.  Right now I'm naturally a little bit saddened to lose a comfortable, reliable and well sorted cruising boat when its replacement needs many weeks of hard graft to make it anything like as usable, but at least now we are relieved of responsibility for one of the fleet, and can knuckle down to sorting out "Flamingo".

"Chalice" has never been craned before in our ownership - always "slipped".

My extreme thanks to Dominic Miles and his team at Rugby Boat Sales for handling the sale of "Chalice" and quickly finding us a buyer that quickly progressed through survey to completion.  What we badly wanted was to price sensibly and get it sold, and that is exactly what we have achieved.

Incidentally the surveyor apparently found "Chalice" in very good order with nothing significant to report - quite unusual on a 20 year old boat, and we are pleased to be able to pass on a boat we have owned for half its lifetime with such a clean bill of health.

Eventing in 2015?

Posted by Alan

It is becoming abundantly clear to us that there will be heaps less boating done by us in 2015 than in the bumper year we had last year.

We are selling our leisure boat "Chalice", that has served us well or the last ten years, but its very much older replacement "Flamingo" will be a major project before it can be used in the same way as a reliable and comfortable boat that we can live afloat in for weeks at a time.   It is quite possible a the moment to stay on it for several days on its mooring, but that is in no small part because so far we have not started pulling it to pieces!  Once we do, it is likely to  be at least a partial building site for many months, probably with few of the services based on water and electricity that we have come to expect in "Chalice".  However it still has a conventional working boat back cabin, so can already compete with "Sickle" in providing that small living space, even if much of the main cabin conversion ends up being in disarray as we work through it.

My health issues, particularly the eye problem, but also the injuries sustained when I fell in at the mooring, have also heavily impacted us making a proper start on "Flamingo", and instead we have largely focused on assessing what we have, and making some basic improvements to increase useability wherever we can.  Even so, we realised quickly that we could not continue to meet the costs of three boats, and that getting "Chalice" on the market had to take priority over "Flamingo" for a while.  Now, with "Chalice" at a brokerage, hopefully we can spend more time on the boat we intend to be its replacement, (although I face further eye surgery in a few weeks time, and my damaged shoulder shows little signs of any great improvement).

So where does all that place us in respect of actually doing any boating in 2015 in our own boats?  We certainly want to not spend our entire time boatbuilding, and do want to fit in some trips around working on "Flamingo".  Each year I try and work out what events are on, (particularly those relating to historic boats), ad we then attempt to work out a provisional plan of which e might attend.  This plan is never written in stone, and has to be amended as circumstances change - for instance last yea we lost all three of the first events planned, because Odin, our dog, was critically ill - although we did manage everything we had in mind after that once he was OK to go boating again.

Here is a list of events that I think we will be thinking about.... 

Sat 16^th - Sun 17^th May – Rickmansworth Festival ("Sickle" - missed last year because of Odin).
 
Fri 12^th - Sun 14^th June – Stoke Bruerne Family Festival (A firm favourite - possibly both boats).

Sat 27th - Sun 28th June – Braunston Historic Boats (Although the very loud music in the beer tent is somewhat of a deterrent for this one).

Sun 16^th August - Fenny Stratford Boat Festival (A new event, and certainly a possibity, as "Sickle" is based there, if nothing else is happening)
 
Sat 29^th - Mon Sep 31^st - Alvecote Historic Boat Gathering (We are less sure about logistics for this one, but we love it, and would like to get at least one boat there)
                             
Sat 12^th – Sun 13^th September - Stoke Bruerne Village at War (A "must" for at least "Sickle" - a lovely event, this one).
 
Sat 26^th - Sun 27^th September - BCLM Working Boat Gathering (Hmm! - This would be lovely,and actually being inside the BCLM is a very different kind of thing altogether.  Unlikely, I guess, but perhaps not impossible!)

Buy A Boat and Get a Free "Lucky Dip" of tools.....

Posted by Alan

Well it has to be faced up to!

I have reluctantly started to find out what lurks in the several inches of grease and oil ridden water that were residing below "Flamingo's" engine.

Plenty of old cans, and rags, but rather more dangerously, at least one broken bottle which had jagged ends pointing upwards.  I was rather lucky to get away with this unexpected find, as I felt around in the sludge with my bare hands.

However some rather more useful stuff has also started to surface, so here is a selection of what I have pulled from just two very small sections of the engine room bilge that I can actually reach in to....

The cross head screwdriver and the adjustable spanner came up this afternoon when I managed to drop one of my own small spanners in.

As I reached down to try and find it, I captured both of these, before I successfully found what I had actually dropped.

I wonder how much else is lurking down there, although unless engine and fuel tanks ever come out, I don't expect I'll ever find most of it.

"Chalice" Now Advertised For Sale.

We simply can't go on owning three narrow boats!

We had hoped to have "Chalice" on the market sooner than this, but life has rather got in the way.

Anyway we are finally there, and today Rugby Boats at Stowe Hill Wharf near Weedon on the Grand Union have added "Chalice" to their website.

Details here.

Pictures here.

Flamingo - Sky Blue and Orange?

Posted by Cath

This is not a boating post, this is part of an occasional series, which chronicles the work involved with getting Flamingo refitted to our taste and requirements.  It won't be a blow by blow, this is what we did on each day, but more a 'these are the things we did this week'.

Flamingo's previous owner had very different requirements to us. She was permanently moored, and connected to mains 240 V electricity, and was used as a regular 'pied a terre' for the owner who regularly worked in nearby Coventry, some distance from his home in Scotland. He didn't need to consider how much mains power he used, and he fitted a large diesel heating unit in the engine room, which he seems to have used to run the central heating most of the time. There is also a large multi-fuel stove, which can run the radiators, but we think that he ran the heating by diesel most of the time.  There is also a massive bathroom, with a full sized bath. At the moment, for us to have a very shallow bath means running the stove hard, with the radiators turned off, to get the water in the tanks hot enough.  Why are we not using the diesel heater, then? Well, it uses a lot of diesel, and on the one occasion Alan tried to get it lit he managed to singe a lot of his hair and beard - I put a veto on it at that point. We are considering getting rid of it as it is not really practical for our needs, and takes up a lot of space in the engine room, making any engine maintenance difficult.

Our needs will be very different. Flamingo is a historic boat, and was one of the last boats to deliver grain to Wellingborough mill in Easter 1969. Our intention is that she is a cruising boat to replace Chalice, but we also want to take her to as many historic boat festivals as possible. She needs to be comfortable and warm, be able to have guests on board, but she needs to be able to do this largely on 12 V as we will be away from 'shore power' while cruising. We will have an inverter to give some 240 V, but this will drain our battery power. At the moment the central heating pump is 240 V, so we need to think about alternatives, especially as the pump is extremely noisy when run on the inverter.

We will need to get rid of the bath in the future, as it uses so much water, and considerable amounts of fuel to get that much water up to temperature. This means that the bathroom can be much smaller, which will give us more space for the kitchen and living room.

While we were prevented doing very much to the boat at the beginning of the year by Alan's health issues, and because we were getting Chalice ready to go to the brokerage, we have also been thinking about what we want to do with Flamingo, and where we might start what is going to be a major refit. We didn't want to rush into this, because we wanted to think about where the best place to start might be, given that anything we do will have some repercussions elsewhere - for example, anything which involves the plumbing will mean that we cannot then run the central heating.

Fortunately, Flamingo has a back cabin, with a small stove, so whatever state the main cabin is in, we will aways be able to retreat there. However, when I took the mattresses from the cross bed home to get the covers dry cleaned our sons complained about the strong smell of diesel in the house. The foam mattresses had been permeated with this smell, so I washed them in the bath - this was a mistake. The resulting stench of diesel filled the entire house and was so bad that I got the mattresses out of the house to go to the tip by getting our son to throw them out of the bathroom window. We have now ordered new mattresses on line, but one of our tasks while we are here this week is to find out what it was that caused the mattresses to smell so strongly.

This week

We spent some time first on Chalice, polishing things and making sure that she was clean for the brokerage. Then, the following day, we went boating on William (already blogged by Alan). Then we had to think about getting on with sorting Flamingo out.

Alan lifted the floors in the back cabin which confirmed that there was no liquid or any problems under the cabin. However, we know that there is a quantity of oily water under the engine - we think that this is the most likely cause of the diesel smell in the mattresses in the back cabin which is right next to the engine room - unless the previous owner had stored oily rags in there.

Alan's tasks this week have been to look at the liquid under the engine and try to sort out the electrics to be more suited to our need.

Several times in my life I have understood electrics enough to get through exams, however, as soon as the exam has been over the information has left my brain. This does not worry me in the least, I know that I am never going to need to use it.  Alan has so much better and deeper knowledge and understanding of all things electrical that I couldn't possibly pit my paltry understanding against his. If there is an electrical task, then he is the man for it. I don't bother to retain this information, why would I need to?  I generally leave him to it when there is something electrical to be done.  If necessary I can hold things, make coffee, supply biscuits, but if he needs a second opinion, I am most definitely not the person to provide it.

So, Alan spent several days testing electrics and batteries, and pumping mucky water out from the engine room.  How did it get there? We don't know, until it is investigated we won't be able to make any guesses.

My first task was to try to reduce the clutter in Flamingo. 

Last week we moored Chalice at Flamingo's mooring before taking it to the brokerage, and emptied everything on board into Flamingo - which has a great deal more space, but a great deal less storage.  The general effect was something like a very untidy garden shed.

Over the previous week we had visited our local second-hand furniture store, and bought a fairly large pine cupboard (which Alan had to modify to add another shelf). I spent much of the day going through the bags of dumped items from Chalice and the few cupboards on Flamingo to rationalise what we want to keep on board - and then find space to store it - either in the ridiculously limited kitchen cupboards, or the new pine cupboard (mainly crockery) or the set of drawers that we had bought a few weeks earlier. I was left with several large bags of clutter and duplicates to take home.

The following day I was supposed to be rubbing down and undercoating the steel cover that Alan had attached to block off the old cat flap that made it impossible to fully open the doors and so made it hard for Odin to get into and out of the cabin. However, I thought that I would just rub down the paintwork which had been tar damaged from the chimney, and then I found some other bits that needed attention...

Eventually I had rubbed down large areas of the back of the main cabin.

In medieval times they used to reuse vellum documents when it was considered that they were not needed any more.  They would be scraped, or washed down to remove the old writing. These are called palimpsests, and are of interest to historians because traces of the original writing can often be recovered. I found that Flamingo is something of a palimpsest, with traces of the old colour schemes underneath the Willow Wren livery that she sports these days.  The most surprising is the sky blue roof and orange back to the cabin. 

The formerly orange back to the main cabin on Flamingo. Alan's repair to the cat flap is currently in pink primer. The black markings is anti rust treatment prior to a coat of primer.





 
Nowhere to Nowhere else
Miles: 0, Locks:0

Doesn't It Look Empty Without Our Stuff!

(Boat Chalice - posted by Alan)

Chalice is now with a broker, and should be on the market soon.

It certainly has not looked this empty (or tidy!) since we bought it!