>> When I was puttering round the canals, there were far fewer boats
>> around of any sort (1973), and I was privileged to know Joe and Rose
>> Skinner over a couple of months, and was actually invited into the
>> cabin of their unpowered (ie, horse-drawn or towed by a boat with a
>> motor) narrow boat "Friendship". Joe, who had long since retired, was
>> famous as the "last of the Number Ones", which meant that he was the
>> last owner-operator of a commercial narrow boat. The boat wasn't in
>> good condition, the paint was peeling and the wood was rotting, and
>> once he showed me the painted castles on the side panels, usually
>> covered up with old tarpaulins.
>>
>> I knew that both Joe and Rose had passed away quite some time ago, but
>> it still caught me ooof right in my emotional core when I fiorst saw
>> this picture of Friendship, all tarted up and gleaming, out of the
>> water and in a museum...
>>
>>
http://nationalhistoricships.org.uk/images/300/friendship6.jpg
This site is even cooler:
http://www.canaljunction.com/news/mainline0803.htm
There is even more about him if you google on "oxford canal" and "joe
skinner" together.
It was a true priviledge to have met them. You just couldn't help
liking both of them, but especially Joe. He had a twinkle in his eye
when he spoke with his soft Oxfordshire burr. When I told someone
moored in Coventry that I had met an old bloke with a trilby hat,
sitting on the towpath splitting a log with wedges and a small hammer,
and that said bloke had invited me to meet the wife in the cabin of
the boat, that someone said "That would be Joe Skinner. And you got to
be invited onto the boat? That doesn't happen often, he must have
liked you."
I got to meet both he and Rose several times over the next few weeks,
and we used to see them sometimes in the evening in the old Greyhound
pub at Hawkesbury Junction outside Coventry.
One night at the Greyhound, the girlfriend of a friend was wearing a
rather short skirt, and he sat next to her, put his hand on her thigh
and said quietly (but quite distinctly so everyone could hear) "Hent
yew got no stockin's on then gel?", and Rose cackled into her
Guinness.
There was talk even then, that Joe's funeral would be a traditional
affair; the plan was to tie his coffin to the top plank of his boat
and hand-haul him back to Oxford where he was born. I don't know, but
I imagine that that is exactly the way it happened.
