L-Plate Boating – SGM Publishing

by Geoffrey Lewis & Tom McManus

Paperback £6.99; ISBN 978-0-9564536-0-0; March 2010; SGM Publishing

Two long-time boaters and friends for many years have got together in L-Plate Boating to give us what is probably one of the most amusing books available about England’s canals. Their stories include a first-time boating trip, the hazards of buying a boat by remote control, and some of the disasters that can (and do) happen to the best-intentioned and most experienced of boaters.

Geoffrey Lewis is better known as the author of a number of popular novels about the canals, set in the latter years of their working days, when the carrying trade for which they were built was still running – for more information, take a look at the relevant pages of our website. He lived on the canal in his own boat for sixteen years, before moving back ‘on the bank’ in 2007, and has run both a passenger trip boat and pairs of the old working boats, both loaded and empty. He is currently Captain for ‘The Friends of Raymond’, a charity which maintains and operates one of the last pairs to be involved in canal carrying at the end of the 1960s.

Tom McManus, universally known as ‘Mac’, has also been a boater of many years standing. Beginning with a trip on a borrowed boat, the hazards and hilarity of which he describes here, he went on, as many of us do, to enjoy hire-boat holidays until he and his wife Pam took the plunge and bought a boat of their own. He retired early from the motor trade, and they now ply the system year-round, enjoying life and selling books and souvenirs to passers-by and fellow-boaters from the hatches of the Mona Lisa. Many of the chapters of this delightful book recount memories of the things that have gone wrong over the years, from the equipment that fails to work the way it is supposed to, to the attempts of an ‘experienced’ boater to show off a bit which have failed miserably. Included are some of the more amusing problems of trip-boating with forty passengers on board, and of handling a pair of seventy-foot-long working narrowboats, as well as Mac’s tales of how they went about buying the Calico, their first boat.

A glossary of terms, written by Geoffrey Lewis, explains with a sense of humour what some of the more obscure words used mean to a boater.

One chapter reproduces a short humorous piece of nonsense first written by Geoff to amuse his colleagues in the days when he worked part-time with a maintenance gang on the canal towpaths, in between passenger trips with the Linda; and the last passage in the book is a marvellous piece of nonsense poetry, in the style of Spike Milligan, written by a twelve-year-old passenger during a trip on the Raymond, in the summer of 2009.

Illustrated with a series of wonderful sketches by Marlene Keeble, these tales serve to prove time and again that even those who should know what they’re doing on ‘the cut’ can get things horribly wrong from time to time – a very comforting thought for us lesser mortals!

‘The seven-page glossary of terms alone is worth the price – but with the useful tips and humorous true stories, this is a must-read book for anyone venturing onto the canals and waterways of Britain’ – Mike Freeman, Buckingham Canal Society.