The Refurbishment of Riccall 1999-2006

Part 1

It all started nearly 20 years ago. I had separated from my wife and kids and was living with my parents near Hexham and working in Middlesbrough. I realised that until the marital home was sold I would have no capital but still needed somewhere to live and thought maybe a narrowboat might be the answer. By this time I had met Louise and she bought me a birthday present of a day hire of a narrowboat out of Skipton. Despite the appalling March weather, we had a great day and were hooked! Shortly after that Louise spotted an advert in the Yorkshire post for the sale of an unfinished narrowboat project in Hull – appropriately a bare hull! So I negotiated with the builder, a semi professional who had run out of time, money and space and, £4,000 lighter, was the proud owner of 45 ft of a lot of future effort.

We found a great boatyard at Methley Bridge near Castleford where the focus was on boat work, not spit and polish. It was a fascinating learning curve for me to use my existing experience in car and house refurbishment and add it to that required for boats. All the other guys in the boatyard were really helpful but if you asked for advice you got as many different suggestions as people you asked!

Just under two years later ‘The boat’ a fully fitted out 45ft narrow-boat was craned into the river and for the next few years we spent as much time as we could cruising in her.

But we also made a few trips to our friends, Gill and Brian who lived north of Carcassonne in France and of course the French canal system beckoned particularly the Canal du Midi, which we usually saw at its best, in spring or autumn.

We realised that to do the French and European canals the way we wanted to would require a bigger boat and so about 12 years ago we started to look for a suitable vessel.

I had a very limited budget for this enterprise and so anything which had already been converted was out of the question. Ideally a Dutch tjalk would have been great but there appeared to be none available at that time but this may have been due to poor research on my part.

There was a potential Leeds Liverpool short boat (60ft x 14ft) called Stanley laid up near Leeds which we bid for but not enough to beat the other sealed bids. We also looked at a barge called Misterton (70’ x 14’) which had lovely lines, but somebody warned us that it needed re-plating. (this subsequently turned out to be untrue) and the sale price at £15K was too high for me. I was also kicking myself because three years earlier I could have bought a Sheffield called ‘Hope’ for about £3K! Then we heard that a number of the Waddington’s fleet of Sheffields and bigger were being sold off.

Victor Waddington had been head of a water transport and timber enterprise and had spent years buying up redundant barges, convinced that water transport would make a comeback! But he would never sell any of them (except one – Dry Tan which Ann Cowling managed somehow to talk him into selling to her and Steve). Before the old man Victor died, he had been convinced that his two sons Steve and Tony were not nearly old enough to be entrusted with the running of the business. They were only in their early 40s at this time! So he left the business in the hands of trustees with Steve, salaried, to run the water transport side and Tony the timber operation. At the same time the trustees agreed to sell off some of the many barges that were scattered all around Yorkshire in various states of disrepair.

By the time I got to hear of this, quite a few had already been sold but there were still many left to choose from. A trip to the headquarters of the Waddington empire at the end of the disused Dove and Dearne canal followed and after a brief conversation with Steve, who explained where I might find some suitable barges, we started our search. So we looked at Sectan which had been bought by Stuart and work on it had started. I didn’t like what he had done so far, and felt he was asking too much for it.

There were lots of others to look at in various dead ends and river arms all over the place - some so full of water they were resting on the bottom, others with most of the superstructure rotted away, but eventually we found two side by side, at Sandal Lock near Doncaster, which looked promising, Riccall and Cambridge. On closer inspection Cambridge, although built more recently, had had half of its engine removed and wheelhouse partly dismantled. By this time I had narrowed down the aspects which I particularly liked about the various styles of build of the Sheffield barges which we had been looking at. Riccall seemed to tick all the boxes, i.e. riveted construction, hooped hold cover (rather than peaked) slightly smaller hold giving larger forecabin and engine room areas and a wheelhouse and engine which looked as though they were still operational.

I ascertained from Steve that the key to the engine-room hatch padlock was hidden in the wheelhouse and I asked Ray (who at that time owned a barge named Knottingley) who I knew had a lot of experience with barges, to come with me to suss out the engine. (I think at that time Ray thought I was a complete wanker but he agreed to come anyway!) The engine was a Lister JP3, hand start, with a dry sump and separate oil tank. Ray showed me how to check that the injectors were operating properly, by turning it over and listening for the ‘squeak’ and we drained all the water that had collected in the ‘dry’ sump. Then he showed me how to decompress the engine with the cylinder top levers and swing it over with the starting handle. We gave it a go - Ray turning the handle and when it got up to speed, me dropping the decompression levers one by one. And it started! Amazing !

So now it was time to do some negotiating with Waddingtons to buy it.

I went to see Steve Waddington at the boatyard at Swinton to try and haggle with him over the price. I found him mending the engine cowling on a mobile crane and while rather ineffectually ‘helping’ him by holding the odd bolt while he put the nut on the other end. I asked if he could move at all on the sale price. I had established by this time that this was £8,000, a bit more than I wanted to pay! I suggested perhaps that if he would agree a price of £6,000 as far as the office was concerned I would give him personally £1000 cash in hand. But he was not interested. He said he had tried that before and the idiot buyer had bought a boat then handed an envelope with the cash in it to the office saying that this is the cash for Steve! The trustees were furious so he couldn’t risk that again. So during the couple of hours I was with him I tried various other gambits but all to no avail. Then eventually Steve lost his temper and said to me (and you will have to close your eyes here if you are of a delicate disposition because Steve is a rough old bargee with little finesse). He said to me, “Look, if you fucking want it, it’s eight fucking grand, and if you fucking don’t you can fuck off”! Classic!

“Oh” said I, rather taken aback. “Oh, alright then” and I went meekly off to the office and paid a deposit of 10% - £800 – the balance to be paid in two weeks. (I think he thought I was a complete wanker too!)

Three weeks later or thereabouts Louise and I had arranged with Ray to collect Riccall and bring her back to Methley Bridge boatyard.

As it turned out Ray couldn’t help us on the day and as we had both taken a day’s holiday from work, we went without him. The first hurdle was a locked gate. Riccall was moored in an area which was fenced off from the land and on other occasions when we had looked at her a BW working barge had been moored straddling the end of the fence and we had just hopped on at one end , walked past the fence and hopped off at the other end of the barge. The BW boat had gone! So we went to the lockkeeper and explained: fortunately he had a key to the gate and he let us in.

The next problem was to get Riccall out from ‘inside’ Cambridge without losing either of them in the strong crosswind that there was that day. But first I had to see if I could even start the engine. Louise operated the decompression levers and I turned the handle to swing the engine. When I thought it was going fast enough Louise dropped the levers and thankfully it did start. So whilst the engine ticked over (I didn’t dare stop it in case I couldn’t get it going again) we slowly inched Riccall backwards and Cambridge forwards until eventually about an hour later we had secured Cambridge back onto land and we were ready to cast off Riccall.

We also had to fold down the roof of the wheelhouse because being empty she was going to be too high to get under some of the bridges on our journey back.

The lockkeeper must have been keeping an eye on us because, as we set off and were blown across the canal by the wind, he had the lock gates open for us to go straight in.

This we managed reasonably well considering that Riccall only had about 500mms of draught (being empty) and that I had never handled such a big boat before, let alone such a huge wheel, long gear change lever and separate rotating throttle lever.

So we passed through that lock with the lockkeeper’s help and then to our amazement and eternal gratitude the lockkeeper accompanied us by car and operated all the lift bridges, and the one other lock, to the end of the New Cut.

Now we were on the Aire and Calder Navigation and there was a chance of meeting some 300 ton sand or fuel barge. Jeff (co-operator of our moorings at Methley Bridge) had lent us a hand-held VNF radio but we were not familiar with the procedure of announcing our presence as we travelled. Then, as we entered the difficult tortuous section between Knottingley and Ferrybridge I heard a couple of announcements on the radio; so I knew something was somewhere, but not what or where! Round the next bend came Humber Renown empty, not hanging around. I nearly jumped out of my skin, Louise yelped and with a quick spin of the wheel we managed to pass each other with inches to spare!


Afterwards I heard the skipper complaining bitterly to one of the other barges, on his radio, that they had just met Riccall and the wanker was not using a radio!

We had been lucky with the locks up to this point as there had been BW staff operating all of them and the flood lock at Ferrybridge was open, so that was OK too. As we came up the River Calder towards Castleford we rang friends at the boatyard to say we were on our way and bless them, there they were at Bulholme Lock with it all prepared and the gates open as we approached. So eventually in the late afternoon, after a successful if tense day, we arrived at Methley Bridge Boat Club moorings.

Now the real work of conversion could begin!