hi welcome to today's episode we have Matt hello Or Matthew he said I could
call him Matt absolutely he's our best friend now and sorry about that to our
other best friends we are going through the hedge today to see Tooley's boat
yard so come with us
one of the reasons the boat yards really famous is
obviously the Tooleys that you know are very famous on their own but one of the
reasons why everybody knows about the boat yard is because there's a chap
called Tom Rolt he had he was basically a mechanic and he was an engineer and he
specialized and had built built cars and he had a garage but he didn't like the
way cars being mass-produced so he sold his share the garage and he bought a
boat which used to belong to his uncle called cressie and he knew the
Tooley's and he bought his boat here to have it restored he wants to become a
writer so he wrote he came here started writing about the toolies and what they
were doing to his boat and restoring it and the boat is thought was a bit odd to
see he was pitting a bow he was first of all converting a a narrow boat into a
livaboard and which is an odd thing to do anyway but then to to to make it even
worse he put a boat a bath on it as well for his wife which the boaters thought
was absolutely you know completely extravagant thing to do is like have a
pool or something you know they thought was completely extravagant then he wrote
all the characters and all the work they did in the dry dock and the plesters in
the Forge and his journey when the waterways and the state of the canals
and this became catalyst for setting up the Inland
waterways Association which obviously campaigned for saving the canals and
reopening them so the reason why we've got a network now to cruise on
is because of Tom Rolt and his book and it all started here with them bringing
their boat to the Tooley's so that all happened in the dry dock here that's
where it started
if that something interests you there is so much more here
and there's so much in you know interested in the boatyard and there's
so much history and we've got lots of really interesting facts and information
and my personal story of running this yard I've put into a book called
forging ahead the history of Tooley's boatyard and that covers the complete
history from the the canal arriving at Banbury through to modern times here
and it talks about the characters and the Tooley's, Rolt and the personal stories as well
now this workshop here it's dated in 1930s and it's all made out
boat hulls you look in there that's all budworm from the bottom of the boats
where they were sitting in the water
the toolies took over the yard in 1900 they
were farmers. Basically Emmanuel Tooley took over the bought some boats and he became
what was called a number one which is a sole trader which owned their own boats
and they got paid per load they delivered and they delivered coal and
oh no they didn't they delivered pig iron between Coventry and Sammerson's foundries
So they would delivery pig iron to Coventry and they'd bring sand back to the foundry and then
George Tooley took over the yard around 1900
this is the paint state from basically
the nineteen well the workshops of the 1930s but basically
it's paint really from 1950s all the white leads and red leads and all the good
stuff you can't use these days but one of the interesting things is this door
this door was made of planks of a boat called a fair trader and came into the
dry dock to have the back cabin replaced and they recently reused the wood to
make this door one of the interesting things is is that if you look at the
door itself this is where they've been cleaning the brushes and there's a layer of paint
on the door there which is about two and a half inches thick so that was a Tooleys
door for cleaning their brushes
and this is belt of machinery shop and this is
where they used to make all the metal parts of the boat so the machinery dates
from about 1890 so it was secondhand to the Tooleys. we've got a lot of volunteers
who've been helping us and it's actually the Banbury model engineering society who
actually stripped all these machines down and restored them all so they'll
worn and working order working slowly but we've just fitting motors to them so
we're gonna be running full speed and using them as well
the way this works is over in the corner it takes a belt up to
the ceiling and then from the ceiling it turns this wheel and then the wheel
comes turns across your head this bearings at the top and holds the top it
turns that wheel at the top and that comes down to this rather there's bench
and there's a rather impressive circular saw which is on this bench which is
least used for actually cutting the planks
This is the dry dock it dates to 1788 well actually no doesn't because we changed our mind we
said it was 1788 but we changed our mind to 1778 and again you have to find out
from the book if you interested in that one
basically it's a dry dock and it's very unusual for dry docks to be dry and if
you look at the floor it is actually bone dry docks or works extreme very
very well the way it works is that at northern end there are three heavy
wooden planks might hold back the water we lift the top plank the water comes
into the dry dock and it fills up in about five minutes
we're going to replace the rest of the planks take this planks out and we then
bring a boat in and we put it into the dock and tie it off with ropes
we then replace the planks and we pull the plug and the plug is a drainage
sloose in the corner of the drydock which takes the water off to about two and a
half three hundred meters away once it's outs we wash the floor we wash
the boat and we generally do hull blackings in the last 15 years we've done
one and a half thousand boats for the dry docks that's around a hundred a year
so on average about one every three days this boat here is in for a complete
paint job it's in for six weeks and that's a stripped back to bare metal and
a full repaint of the boat
the other thing I wanted to ask about is the old wooden boat that we've been moored up next to
Yes we can talk about that
Do you want to go inside it
this boat here was called Hardy and it's a boat built in
1940 by nurses so it was probably built for the war
we don't have things like
moorings which bring income in like the other larger yards as a commercial yard
is very very small and we've also got the element of the general public as
well so that has also adds pressure to us which isn't very profitable as it was
so but we still want to do all that side of it and it's really important to show
everybody the boatyard so one things we want to do is to hark back to the days
of the Tooleys and they were they ran a boat yard which was famous for wooden boats
and restoring wooden boats so we would like Tooleys to go back and start looking
at wooden boats and working on them more and we are actually have plans to
actually build the outside of Tooleys will be building brand-new wooden hulls
on the site there are boats around like this like Hardy around the system now we
wanted to get a an old boat to restore and we wanted to boat with some ties to
Tooley's but we couldn't really find one in the time frame we had and we found
about this boat Hardy up at Braunson it was sunk and had been there for 4
years and it was in danger of being broken up so we went up and we raised it
we've we got off the canal bed floated it, patched up all the holes and decided
we're going to have the boats and we we salvaged it pretty much and we brought
it back to Tooleys where we're actually restoring it in the meantime we just so
happened find out that actually Hardy is a local boat and they used to deliver
coal to banbury and actually which is absolutely amazing and I've got
photographs of a moored outside the dry dock and it's rather bizzare so it's
really really crazy one of the reasons for lifting this boat up was to actually
say to everybody look there's these historic boats all the way around the
country which are sinking or sunk they are falling apart and they're being
broken up and this is our history and we should not that this happened so we
should do something about it and so by raising Hardy we would like to bring
some publicity and some attention to the fact that this is happening and we'd
like the future of Tooleys to actually address this and to try and rescue some
of these boats which are being destroyed
Due to the interest in the boat yard we get a lot of people asking questions
actually part of our remit is that we show this to the general public so
recently we've actually come up with the idea of actually doing an open day in
fact that we are actually opened mornings from 10 o'clock until 12:30 and that's on
every Saturday and it's free and you can come along and you can come into the
boatyard see areas of the boatyard you wouldn't see normally you can go to the
dry dock and you can have a look at the boat in there you can go into the forge
you can see a blacksmith and some of the volunteer blacksmiths as well doing
demonstrations and we also have a guided tour and we're for guided tours we do
that for donations as well and then you can be shown around the boatyard and be
told the history of the site but if you don't want to have a guided tour you can
just wander around and chat to many of the volunteers which are here and he will
tell you all about the site anyway and you go to the belt room and the
carpenter store and we also have boat trips as well as well so that we've got
to be charged for those ones as well all the money we make on the day of the
working museum is actually goes back into the working museum itself so if
that all happens and hopefully shortly we'll also have our tea room set up here
as well
we don't actually get any funding on the site at all and I never had received any
money actually working with a lot of volunteers and we've got a great
supporter of volunteers but about twenty volunteers now who are learning to be
blacksmiths who are learning how to handle boats and also doing guided tours as well
We also are all looking for volunteers so if anybody would like to
come along and help out then that would be fantastic we could really do in fact
where we were a network of friends of Tooley's where you can come along and
and sign up to be a friend of Tooleys so that that would be a really good thing to do
okay literally here is the gate that Matthews
gonna close on us Thanks for everything Thank you for rescuing us and for looking at our boat and for showing
us around the yard and also for being an awesome historian that's kind of what
you are isn't it yeah so and we're gonna put those links to the book below we're
gonna put the links to or everything in the description below so watch that
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