Life’s rich tapestry Print E-mail
Written by Linda Hart, 2005   
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It may be a cliché, but as Linda Hart discovers, Sonia Rolt's life as a canal boatwoman, interior decorator, librarian, author and doughty campaigner for the preservation of historical buildings and inland waterways, fulfils the description perfectly. 

"Working on the canals during the Second World War was a life-changing event for me," says Sonia Rolt. We are in the sitting room of her 14th-century Cotswold home, with its uneven flagstone floors and everywhere shelves heaving with books. Almost three dozen of them are by her late husband, Tom - the writer LTC Rolt - the pioneering saviour of our inland waterways, vintage cars and independent railways.

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Sonia in the late 1940s steering a boat from the Chilterns loaded with aluminium from Brentford.
We are surrounded by files, papers, magazines and correspondence relating to the many organisations Sonia supports and to the projects she has 'on the go' at the moment. "I have just arranged for Timothy West, that stalwart canal campaigner, to write a foreword to a new edition of Tom's three-volume autobiography," she explains.

She's also planning events to mark the publication 60 years ago of Narrow Boat, Tom's famous account of his 400-mile journey along the Midlands canals at the beginning of the war.

"Then there's Brunel in Bristol," she says, referring to a wide range of events for the Isambard Kingdom Brunel bicentenary in 2006. It was Tom's ground-breaking biography of Brunel, published in 1957, that brought the magnificent achievements of the 19th-century engineer to a wider public.

A moment later, a magazine surfaces. "I thought this might help you," she says, showing me an article she wrote recently for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), founded by William Morris in 1877. In it she explains the intricate structure and history of the medieval house - initially two cottages - in which we are sitting, which SPAB has helped to protect from the ravages of time since Sonia and Tom moved in over 50 years ago.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, or perhaps behind myself - as one often does when talking to Sonia Rolt. Decisions she made 60 years ago still impinge directly on her life today, while things she does today bring back vivid memories of her past. So perhaps it's best to start at the beginning, with that life-changing event when she was a young woman studying to be an actress at the London Theatre Studio.

When war broke out she was sent to do very arduous work for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which had taken over the Hoover factory at Perivale. "In 1943," she recalls "my two flatmates and I saw an advertisement for a wartime scheme seeking young women to work on the Grand Union Canal. We were all quite physically fit and thought we could manage it. We didn't know anything at all before we went to be trained - I don't think any of us had ever seen a canal."

But after a few weeks, "the three of us were in sole charge of two narrow boats - the one with the motor pulled along its heavily laden companion, called the butty. We carried up to 50 tons of steel or aluminium on the run from London to Birmingham." For the return journey they picked up coal near Coventry and delivered it to factories near London.

Exhausting work

Not only did they navigate the boats through locks and tunnels, but they also had to empty the bilges, scrub the hatches, coil the ropes, repair the motor, clean the propeller, change the batteries, fill the water cans, chop the fire wood, air their damp bedding, buy food, make meals, and endlessly deal with the coal dust that got everywhere.

"I found the work exhausting but liberating," Sonia told me. "Meeting the working boaters for whom this was a way of life was a revelation to me. Perhaps because I was an orphan with a nomadic upbringing, I thought they had something I hungered after. I was probably being nostalgic and unrealistic - but I was hit between the eyes by this extraordinary community. So I soon made friends with the boaters and the people along the bank."

But with George Smith she made more than friends. Despite their differences - he had a traditional boaters' upbringing, and was unable to read or write - when the war ended they married and earned a precarious living working a pair of Samuel Barlow boats along the Midlands canals.

"When you cast off, you always felt you were going off into a new world. I loved the way the arch of the canal bridges obscured what was to come - and then suddenly revealed it, this beautiful countryside we were going through."

It wasn't necessary to ask Sonia why the marriage ended after five years - she had offered enough clues, and I knew from my own life that reality has a funny way of asserting its claims on you after a few years of rebellion. In the early 1950s a new phase of her life began.

Tom Rolt, almost ten years older than Sonia, had been attracted to the canals for many years. In 1939 and 1940 he and his wife Angela had explored most of the Midlands canals in Cressy, a barge they had converted into a permanent home.

His first book, Narrow Boat, was such a moving account of their voyage that its publication led directly to the formation of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA) in 1946, credited today with saving our canals from the neglect and maltreatment that almost destroyed them.

After living on Cressy for several years, Angela wanted to continue their nomadic life abroad, but Tom felt drawn back to the family home at Stanley Pontlarge, on the slopes of Cleeve Hill. While both marriages were slowly ending, Sonia and Tom were running into one another at meetings of the IWA.

In his autobiography, Tom recalls his first impressions of Sonia: a "rather frightening, left-wing, blue-stocking". But he soon came to value her charm, intelligence and experience. When the IWA was granted a meeting with a government minister, he made sure Sonia was there because her knowledge and experience were uniquely valuable. "In my campaign to improve conditions for the working boaters," he wrote, "she became my right hand."


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