STILL EARLY DAYS…

Indulge me for another blog  staying with my canal and the years of fishing enjoyment it gave me until my early teens.  As I mention I fished between Droitwich and Bromsgrove at a series of locks called the Astwood flight.   In those days it was a working canal with horse drawn barges (longboats) taking goods backwards and forward between Worcester and Birmingham.

The bargees were a race apart. Slim , wiry guys with walnut coloured complexions, usually wearing a cap with collarless shirt and waistcoat.  The women in a skirt and apron, often a shawl and  thier hair in a bun and equally brown complexion.  They were friendly people and if we were not fishing we could still hear the sound of the lock paddles rattling as they let water into the lock, even from where we lived..   We often grabbed a bag, ran down across the field to the canal and shouted out “Any crumb mister”,  Now they usually carried two things, coal and crumb.  Crumb was our name for the raw cocoa they carried on its way to the Cadbury Chocolate factory at Bourneville.   It was basically unrefined cocoa in mostly fist sized lumps.  It was brick hard but responded well to breaking a piece off and having a good suck.    I still remember the taste to this day. Sweet yet bitter at the same time but when your access to regular sweets was poor it was great.  

I don’t suppose they had a lot of money but the inside of the barge was usually immaculate with lots of brass items and pottery.  What was the star of the show however were the horses that pulled the barges along the towing path.  To us they were huge, cart horses with flowing mane and tail and feathering around their hooves but it was their nature that impressed most .  They were guided by a couple of ropes from the barge and a mere flick of the reins or a shouted command was responded to at once.  They usually had their heads firmly into a nosebag and took absolutely no notice of you whatsoever. If you were fishing on the towing path side you had to move your gear and step back into the hedge as they went past at a regulated pace otherwise I swaer they would have just walked all over you.  The longboats made little difference to the fishing as they glided past unlike the later prop driven motor boats that stirred up the bottom silt and discoloured the water for some time.   They often moored up for the night a few miles upstream where there was a canal side pub not unsurprisingly called the Navigation.

The ‘fiver’ where we fished for carp also had another character who fished there on a regular basis, an elderly guy we knew as Mr Workman if indeed  that was his real name.  He arrived most days on his battered black bike and was completely predictable in what he did.  He was not very talkative and kept himself to himself but he was a successful fisherman.  He fished in the same place every day and also used the same method as he targeted the bream.  His porcupine float was fished over depth hard on the bottom with mashed bread as groundbait and bread paste kept in a damp cloth for bait.   He usually caught something, usually bream up to about 3 pounds and he always kept them. Quite what he did with them we never had the nerve to ask but I learnt a lot from watching him.  The only other method he used was a large bunch of wasp grubs fished over to the rushes where he often caught an eel.  This was only  six or seven years after the end  of the war remember (Jesus I feel old) so I guess he used his catch for food and we did have the odd eel to eat ourselves I remember but certainly not bream.

He did have another strange method I have never seen before or since.  He called it ‘sniggling’.  It consisted of a hollow walking type stick which at the bottom sticking out at right angles was a small section of fine diameter brass pipe.  A piece of stout line or cord was thread down through the stick and pipe and a good sized hook fixed on the line at end of the brass pipe. To this he attached a bunch of worms.   He went up to the brickwork of the lock a short distance from where he fished and poked around the underwater brickwork looking for a gap or crevice.  It was here he said the ells spent much of the day and the aim was to present the worm literally on the ells nose, give it time to take I and then try and pull the eel from it’s hiding place.   I can’t recall him ever seeing him catch one like that but I doubt he would have wasted his time if he didn’t get one from time to time.

We understood he cycled quite some way to fish were he did but after several years he stopped coming, we presumed from ill health or possibly worse.  Strange how your memory works, or in some cases doesn’t.  Someone spoke to me yesterday to recall some trout fishing  I did with him at a lake some years ago.  .  I had no recollection of it whatsoever yet I can see Mr Workman sat there fishing in minute detail as though it were yesterday.