Not motoring
Bad timing
Gavin Stamp
Being a Not motoring correspondent can be a dispiriting task when — as is so often the case — those who ought to be allies turn out to be the worst enemies of public transport. There is a strong case to be made for railways, but then those in the industry who ought to know better stupidly let down the cause. This may reflect a fun- damental defeatism or intrinsic mediocrity resulting from decades of being under- mined by car-obsessed governments. Even so, I find it difficult to look kindly upon the odious and blinkered RMT union when it stages 'industrial action' not only on a Sat- urday but during the Glasgow holiday weekend. Such selfishness must delight the Government and only hurt ordinary Glaswegians who — like me — were plan- ning, say, a day out in Edinburgh. Not that the bosses are much better: why does Scot- rail choose to introduce the winter timetable during the same special weekend, halving the number of trains of the West Highland Line which those on holiday might be tempted to use?
So enough of trains for the moment. I turn my attention instead to a rather slower and more sedate form of public transport which, nevertheless, has great merit. I think of canals, for it was extraordinary to read a couple of weeks back of a project to build a canal across England from Carlisle to New- castle for sea-going vessels. Can this be serious? Ship canals make a lot of sense when — as with the Suez and Panama cuts — they save thousands of miles on a jour- ney. Or they can be strategic, avoiding a route under the control of another govern- ment. This was the case with both the Gotha Canal built by the great Telford across Sweden from the North Sea to the Baltic and also the Kiel Canal across Jut- land whose completion, according to one historical conspiracy theory, set the timetable for the outbreak of the first world war. For both avoided the Kattegat and Danish interference. But in this late proposal the distance saved is rather less and there is little strategic advantage these days. Such a canal for big ships would avoid a potentially hazardous voyage past either Lizard Point or through the Pentland Firth but it surely cannot really be an economic proposition.
Not that the idea of linking the Atlantic with the North Sea is new. It is possible to cross England from east to west by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, but this was only intended for narrow-boats and not ocean-going vessels. In Scotland it was dif- ferent, however. In 1784 John Knox (not that John Knox) proposed three canals to connect the 'Atlantic and the British Sea' which would 'open up a circumnavigation within the heart of the kingdom to the unspeakable benefit of commerce and the fisheries.' And this was achieved. One was the Caledonian Canal built by Telford from Fort William to Inverness by utilising Loch Ness; the other two comprised one route: the Crinan Canal across that long obstacle to navigation which is the Kintyre peninsu- lar and then the Forth and Clyde Canal to link Glasgow with Edinburgh and sea to sea.
The first vessel to pass from Leith to Greenock in 1790 was the Agnes of 80 tons, but neither venture was ultimately a suc- cess. Ships kept getting bigger and bigger while the waterways' width was fixed. The Caledonian Canal never made money while the Forth & Clyde was killed by the railway and is no longer navigable throughout. After all, in the early 19th century, boats connected Glasgow with Edinburgh but the journey took a day; today the train does it in well under an hour. Fortunately, the Crinan and the Caledonian Canals still operate, but only for pleasure boats. But if canals can have no future for pas- senger traffic, they certainly do have a future for the carriage of freight. The great canal historian Charles Hadfield — who died in August and whose essential books I am naturally pillaging for this article certainly believed in them. I was interested to read in his obituary that he was expelled from the Inland Waterways Association which he helped found — because he was too favourable to development of the sys- tem; he was 'insistent that policies should be based on practical possibilities, rather than emotion. This did not mean timidity, but bold advocacy of the achievable.' I wonder what he would have thought of this new cross-England canal project?
Nevertheless, those who continue to use Britain's pioneering and therefore old-fash- ioned canal system for pleasure owe Had- Please Simon, let's not confuse mutual desperation with sexual chemistry.' field a great debt. It was he who persuaded the Treasury that many of the uneconomic canals could be retained at a marginal extra public subsidy while the British Waterways Board tried to break even, and this think- ing was enshrined in the 1968 Transport Act. In consequence, large numbers of people can now hire a narrow boat and explore the canals of Britain on holiday jaunts, and the slow pace of movement on water through both the countryside and through cities is peculiarly enjoyable and fascinating.
Fascinating, because the canal user sees a different aspect of the land from the motorist or the rail traveller. When Birm- ingham is described as the Venice of the North, people laugh. But it is: the city is criss-crossed by canals, the product of Birmingham's early importance in the Industrial Revolution. Few notice them, but below the streets, confined often by high brick industrial walls, are locks as well as stretches of water and towpaths. Indeed, the history of transport is visibly told at Spaghetti Junction, for below the crum- bling concrete motorway viaducts are rail- ways and below the railways are canals. Britain's waterways enable you to see our industrial cities from the bottom up, as it were.
A new canal from the Irish to the North Sea would have rather less appeal, but that is no reason not to build it.
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