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Our River
end with advice for the Thames boater
that’s still relevant today including a call to slow
down and avoid trying to get so many miles under
your belt that you don’t enjoy what you do see and
perhaps surprisingly for such an out and out snob
of the old rural Thames he also says not to dismiss
the larger towns. He writes:
“I particularly recommend stopping at Reading for
the night; the river there is ugly and uninteresting,
but at night all cats are grey. “
Each type
of pleasure
boat in use
on the Upper
Thames has
its following
with the
broadest
split being
between those who favour the all wooden boat
and those who favour the steel hull or the even
more modern GRP (glass reinforced polyester)
or fibreglass hull. The GRP camp think that wooden
boat owners are madmen with more money than
sense while the wooden boat enthusiasts, while
avoiding as far as possible any admission that
owning a wooden boat is rather like floating down
the Thames feeding twenty pound notes to swans,
think that the GRP or
plastic fantastic
boat
owners
are missing the point entirely.
Within each world, plastic and wood, are further
subdivisions and clans based on manufacturer and
builder. In the GRP camp there are the
cabin
cruisers for the people
founded in the 1950s:
Norman Cruisers of Lancashire and Freeman Cruisers
of Moulsford, Oxfordshire whose founder Mr John
Freeman passed away in his sleep just a couple of
weeks ago on 26 July 2013, just shy of his 96th
birthday. The people on these boats are reliably lovely.
Then there are the big, showy boats, the massive
Sealines of landlocked Kidderminster with their flying
bridges, (the company went into administration at the
end of April), the aft cockpit Brooms which started out
building beautiful wooden boats on the Norfolk Broads
that were owned by the likes of Ernie Wise and Dick
Emery, luxury Westwoods and Sheerlines and the
Dutch Aquanauts. These boats, which can cost from
£50,000 for an old one through to half a million pounds
or more are all by and large too big to squeeze beneath
the 7’6’’ Osney Bridge above Oxford thus preserving
the Upper Thames from Osney and Godstow right up
to Lechlade for smaller cabin cruisers and the narrow
boat enthusiasts. The latter are of course a class on their
own, who frown upon most cabin cruisers of whatever
construction. Narrow Boat people will quite happily
spend long hours in all weathers outdoors tiller in hand,
chugging along behind the hardy retro types rowing
their skiffs, can by-and-large drink for England and
will growl at you through snarled teeth if you call their
pride and joy a barge. Only joking, except about the
boozing of course, which is legendary and probably
the result of standing out at the tiller in all weathers.
Aficionados of the all-wooden boat may be found
congregating each July, between Regatta week and
Swan-Upping in the Fawley Meadow at Henley for
the Traditional Thames Boat Rally. A regular at the
rally is Alaska, an elegant steamer on which HM