A great picture here of Charity Dock shortly before we left in 1985 when Jo Gilbert was still running it. It's interesting for me because our old boat Pelikas - the square sterned, flat roofed one - is moored the far side of the boat with diamonds on the front (which I think was called Sister Mary, after Sister Mary Ward who used to minister to the boatpeople down at Sutton) The bow of the boat bottom left is IIRC an old steel BCN boat that was sunk there for many years to protect it. I wonder whatever happened to it? Under the canvass adjacent to the caravan was a Bolinder in perfect nick, but then a lot of the apparent 'scrap' lying around the yard then was priceless. But then the yard was priceless too. Very little work ever got done there, or if it did it was months after it was promised, but the place was filled with old boatmen who's been turfed off the boats at the time of the Great Freeze of 1963 when they were left dependant on Bedworth Council to house them. They couldn't keep away from the water and were always wandering down to the dock. They were a fund of stories which I'd have loved to record, as I'd have loved to photograph them; but it just wasn't possible. I was only party to the conversations because I'd been around so long I was was seen as being a part of the yard. If I'd ever started taking pictures or wandering around with a tape recorder, they'd have dried up on me, and besides, Joe would have thrown me off the mooring straight away. Thankfully, it wasn't all lost because John Saxon who worked the boats himself moored his boat Lion there (I think you can just about see the bow of it on right directly under the furthest of the cranes) John, who is still cruising, went on to write a considerable amount about his experiences, as well as writing songs for some of the early Mikron productions.
Joe - referred to in John Grace's poem 'The 'orrible Trip' on the record Straight from the Tunnel Mouth - was, of course, an old rogue. As were the Tooleys down in Banbury. There is a surviving correspondence between Joe Gilbert and Bert Tooley which is in private hands and which I have been privileged to read. And what reading it makes as the two of them battle it out between themselves to work out who was getting money from (Nursers, was it?) for a job that Joe had cocked up and Bert hadn't done right either. http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/29911 Steve [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
