E. Temple Thurston (1879–1933)

A lovely, lyrical book about the English countryside on the verge of the First World War, from the perspective of a few weeks spent travelling around the canals of the West Midlands on a rented commercial narrow boat. Thurston describes setting out from Oxford in May 1911 on the recently refurbished Flower of Gloster under the care of Eynsham Harry and his horse Fanny, and travelling up to Birmingham, then back down the Stratford Canal to the Avon, down the Avon and Severn to Stroud, and then over the Cotswolds back to the Thames on the Thames and Severn Canal. He enjoys the slow pace of canal travel and the way it takes him to out-of-the-way places, and he clearly appreciates the company of Harry, who not only knows everyone on the canal system, but also has a very keen appreciation for nature, and has studied the habits of birds.

Temple Thurston was a moderately successful Edwardian novelist and playwright, born in Suffolk but spending much of his early life in Ireland. At the time of writing this, he had just been divorced from his first wife, the bestselling Irish novelist Katherine Cecil Thurston (she was to die in slightly mysterious circumstances later in 1911).

The "Flower of Gloster" is really one of those books that only became known because of someone else who read it quite a bit later, in this case the campaigner and industrial historian L T C Rolt, whose 1944 book Narrow boat launched the craze for recreational canal cruising in Britain. Writing about his time living on a converted canal barge in the thirties, Rolt credits Thurston with being the first person to notice the canals as something other than a rather outdated system for transporting cargo very slowly around the country. Compared to Rolt, Thurston's interest in the canals themselves and the people who live and work on them is fairly superficial: he's more interested in the way they act as a back door to rural England. He turns back in horror on the approach to Birmingham, where Rolt goes into lyrical ecstasies about the industrial heritage of the region and its importance to Britain's development.

Inevitably, expert canal historians have taken Thurston's book apart and concluded that he couldn't have made the journey described there in one go, and that the book is most likely a composite of several separate canal trips. But it is very interesting, especially the part about the Golden Valley and the Thames and Severn Canal, because that closed to navigation shortly after the First World War. (There are projects to restore it, and some parts have recently been reopened.)

The other association the book has in many people's minds is the 1967 ITV children's drama serial called The "Flower of Gloster", which actually had almost nothing in common with Thurston's book except that the plot centred around a journey in a horse-drawn narrow boat. I remember enjoying it, but I'm sure I didn't see it the first time it was broadcast, because that was before we got a TV...… (més)