> On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:53:15 -0500, "Viva" privacy.net> wrote:
>

>>
>> "Ben newsam" gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:74ru04dhhcn5ics9n1phifgu8ugioaurvm@4ax.com...
>> [..]

>>> 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

>>
>> It's good that it's saved and protected. Nice bit of history that you
>> touched. Cool pic too.

>
> 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.