The Battle of Stourbridge by Heather Wastie

The Battle of Stourbridge

This is a tale of enthusiasts
This is the tale of a turning point
This is a tale of determination
This is the Battle of Stourbridge

Back in the seventeen seventies
a canal was dug 
from Wordsley Junction to Stourbridge Town,
Stourton to Black Delph.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo
passed along it every year.

By eighteen sixty six
the sixteen locks were worked
by thirty two boats a day.

Nineteen sixty saw them in a terrible state
with heavy creaking, leaking gates
and balance beams half burned away.
Priorities had changed, the future 
looking bleak for waterways.

From Stourton to Stourbridge
the cut - no more than mud and rushes, 
stagnant water - stirred a group of local folk
who got together, cogitating, agitating, 
making a nuisance of themselves.

There’s a narrow boat stuck on the Stourbridge Arm,
can’t move forward, can’t move back.
Big boats, small boats, all in a queue,
This is the Battle of Stourbridge.

A procession of people pulling a rope,
stretched from the stern on the towing path. 
Rocking, pulling, working together.
This is the Battle of Stourbridge.

Vesta charged a wall of spoil.
Landrover, chain, power of Dane,
beat of Bolinder, churning mud.
This is the Battle of Stourbridge.

“Canals should not be stinking ditches
They could be an asset for everyone.
Clear the towpaths! Dredge the bed!”
“Not on your life,” the authorities said.

And when the enthusiasts brought a dragline digger in,
a man was sent from the BTC*
wearing gum boots and a trilby hat.
He looked and said, “You can’t do that!

You’re breaking the law!”
There was such a to-do.
“If the dragline bucket so much as breaks
the surface, we will prosecute you!”

The bucket was dropped 
and it landed 
a mention in The Times.

Blokes are lying flat on their bellies,
raking rubbish out of the cut.
Forcing a passage, a right of way.
This is the Battle of Stourbridge.

A rally of boats in ’62,
three long years of muddy campaigns,
Saturdays, Sundays, summer evenings, 
labouring through sun or rain.

Months and months of committee meetings,
bring and buy sales, fish and chip suppers,
exhibitions, spreading the word, 
following purse strings, lobbying councillors,
not giving up until they’d won.

This was the Battle of Stourbridge.

© Heather Wastie
June 2020, commissioned for Creative Black Country's Bostin’ News project

* British Transport Commission

Written using memories of Jeni Hatton, Jose Wyles and my mother, Sheila Smith, during Alarum Productions’ ‘I Dig Canals’ research project. Additional material sourced from this article on the Stourbridge website written in 2004 by my father, Alan T Smith Also inspired by a series of photographs from 1961 on the Inland Waterways Association website.