THE canal at Braunston, where the Grand Union Canal and the Oxford Canal meet, is the busiest place anywhere on the British canal network.

It is a splendid rural setting, with the boats of Braunston marina and in the pretty village of Braunston up on the hill where All Saints Church, otherwise known as the “Cathedral of the Canals,” has overlooked the village and the villagers for over 10 centuries and the canals and the boat people for over 300 years.

The Canals and River Trust is based in the old “Stop House” — the old building that was used to collect tolls from passing freight boats.

Today Braunston in Northamptonshire is pleasant spot to tie up if you are on a boating holiday. 

One hundred years ago it was a very different place. On August 13 the canal at Braunston made national headlines as one of Britain’s main transport arteries came to an abrupt halt, with tonnes of cargo locked up as the boat families of Braunston went on strike.

It was a bitter strike and lasted for 14 weeks. This dispute was an early test of the recently formed Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU).

It involved 684 men working mainly for Fellows, Morton & Clayton (FMC), but the Chester & Liverpool Lighterage Co and Midlands & Coast Canal Carrying Co also became involved.

The dispute arose when FMC proposed a 15 per cent reduction in boatmen’s rates of pay. Life on the boats was tough, taking loads, mostly horse-drawn, many miles from across the Midlands to Brentford and back.

The main problems with long-distance canal-carrying were that whole families lived aboard in cramped overcrowded conditions often no more than 10 by seven feet.

The families were being used as unpaid labour and were not protected for sickness or injury; with children receiving little formal education, many boat families could not read or write.

The pay structure was also irregular. Boatmen were paid by the tonnage they carried but had expenses, which were not reimbursed by their employers, and working hours were long.

Boatmen could easily work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for £1.5 shillings, the equivalent of about £50 today.

I would like to thank Peter Frost, a great friend and contributor to this paper, for raising the profile of this significant industrial struggle at the time of the 90th anniversary. 

The resulting strike brought to a halt to virtually all long-distance traffic on the canals between London, the Midlands and north-east England.

Eventually, the dispute was taken to arbitration, and the industrial court imposed an adjusted reduction of 5 per cent to take effect in two equal instalments on November 19 and December 18 1923.

While this dispute did not bring the result the boating families wanted, it was embryonic in developing the TGWU’s organising skills.

For while Braunston was the centre of the dispute, boats were tied up at across the Midlands in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Nottingham, Coventry, Leicester and Market Drayton.

Unusually for the period, the dispute generated a significant photographic archive. Victor Long, the photographer, had a studio in Rugby, but also had premises in Braunston, between 1923 and 1928.

He was in the right place at the right time, and he took numerous pictures of the strikers and their boats which tell us a great deal about the life and times of the boat families and the dispute.

The strike was organised by a TGWU official, 42-year-old Samuel Brooks, from the union’s West Bromwich office. For the period of the strike, he lived in the Ship Hotel, adjacent to the wharf entrance at Braunston.

Even though he had little experience of the canal trade, Brooks was to make a big impression on the boat families, not just by his physical appearance — he was a big man — but also for the way in which he organised a wide range of support and social activities for the boat families.

He organised full strike pay for the men regardless of their length of union membership.

He appears in many of the photographs, easily identified by his trilby hat. The president of the TGWU, the Labour MP Harry Gosling, who was also secretary of the Waterways Trade Group and was later to become minister of transport, also appears in some of the images.

On November 19 the boats began to move after the adjudication courts settled the scales of pay.

The end of the dispute must have been a bitter one for the canal families. The union could claim this as a victory since it had succeeded in sustaining a lengthy strike involving a significant number of men by canal boat standards, and it had won recognition, arbitration and a revision of the employer’s proposals.

Now we can see this dispute as a sign of things that were to come for the TGWU and many other unions in the docks and other industrial sectors. 

To mark the centenary there will be event in Braunston supported by Unite on November 4 — this includes Alarum Productions staging of their play Rats, Ropes and Revolution. Told through spoken word and song, it tells the story of the famous strike from a woman’s perspective.

For further information go to bit.ly/BraunstonCentenary.