Those were the days.

As  I have mentioned on this blog before, some of my earliest experiences of the canals were in the form of hire boat trips in the 1970s, with fellow students from Salford and Newcastle Universities.

Recently, one of the fellow participants, who I haven't seen for many years, got in touch to share some of his photos from those days.  There have been a lot of changes since those days: to the canals, to hire boats and, dare I say, to the student population.

I thought I'd share some of them with the readers of this blog  starting with a few that show the living conditions aboard the boats.  We always hired from either Willow Wren at Rugby, Willow Wren Kearns (which later became Middlewich Narrowboats) or - for the more hardy amongst us - a camper from Union Canal Carriers at Braunston  (the early trips took place over the Christmas and New Year holidays, when prices were low and the cut was very quiet.)

To start with here is a fairly typical crew: This lot shared two 8 berth boats from Middlewich on a trip up the Llangollen Canal in 1974/5  (I was on a different boat this year, but third from the right is Hilary, who later became my partner - one of a number of matches made on those boats!)

New Year's Eve was always a highlight of the trips and invariably celebrated in a canalside pub (as was every other night). Here is Sycamore's crew warming up in 1975  at Tipton:

Sycamore was also the venue for New Year's Eve in 1977 at Barbridge Junction, before spending the rest of the evening in the Jolly Tar (now demolished).

These boats did not exactly offer luxury accommodation and with a full crew of 12 aboard were rather "cosy". There were no showers, or even any hot water, other than what you could boil in a kettle: the only "facilities" were a couple of toilets, that discharged into the cut!

We were definitiely not the "snowflake" generation and we certainly had to be resilient to survive the hardships of mid-winter on these boats - as I'll show you in my next post.