Frome Family History Group met for the last time in the library recently.
All future talks and events will be in the Cheese and Grain. Our speaker was Alison Cannon, who gave a beautifully illustrated talk on Victorian boating holidays on the Kennet and Avon canal.
Alison was intrigued when she started researching the history of the Kennet and Avon Canal, that it was extensively used by leisure craft, including canoes, rowing boats, and horse-drawn boats. In the early nineteenth century, the canal was used by commercial traffic to transport coal, stone, and agricultural products, so it was a surprise to find out how many leisure craft used the canal as well.
Using the diaries and newspaper reports from the time, Alison was able to give us a flavour of what it was like to travel on the canal. Ladies faced a particularly hard journey. Hampered by their long dresses, they had to either negotiate the locks, which meant opening sluice gates themselves, or taking their craft and all their possessions out of the water and carrying everything around the lock.
One of these early travellers was Hester Butson, who, together with another lady and a gentleman brought along for ballast, used a Canadian canoe to navigate the canal from Reading on a bank holiday weekend in 1889.
The Kennet and Avon Canal passed through attractive countryside and villages on its way between Reading and Bristol. Bristol was disliked because of the unpleasant smells and squalid canal families on the commercial craft. Devizes had its 29 locks to navigate, often by the owners of the craft if no lock keeper or other likely person was available. It was often a dangerous occupation. Reading was described as a depressingly uninteresting place by one diarist but the villages and scenery on the route made travelling worthwhile.
The first holiday narrowboat was converted for residential use by Charles Penruddick in 1886. The interior was similar to a Victorian parlour in a wealthy home, including the piano. In 1890 ‘Life in a Canal Boat’ by Charles Penruddick was published in the Newbury Weekly News describing his journey from Reading to Great Bedwyn.
Alison was thanked for a most interesting and enjoyable talk and the library staff were also thanked for hosting Frome Family History Group over many years. Our next event will be on Tuesday 28th January when we will have a short annual business meeting followed by Sue Latham with a visual display of secret Frome. This will be at the Cheese and Grain on the first floor. A lift is available.
By Christine Featherstone
Pictured: Hester Buston
