1975, Dir: David Gowing, 51 mins
The old timers speak out across the decades, of their times working in the Thames Sailing Barges, a shoal draught coastal freight carrier that had not changed much since the 1600s. The film is made by documentary maker and keen sailor David Gowing and consists of archive footage spliced with 1970s barge racing film and interviews with people who were beginning to restore and preserve the barges as well as those who had sailed them when it was a job of work to carry freight and and down the London River.
What comes across is a hard way of life where the wind and tide dictated how much money you had in your pocket. “We thought we were well off if we had half a crown,” says one old skipper. There is an interview with James Lawrence in his Brightlingsea sail loft which he set up after more than quarter of a century working on barges, and there is great insight into how and why things were done from some of the skippers who became masters of their trade in one of the trickiest stretches of water in the world.
These include Chubb Horlock from Mistley in Essex who went to sea aged 16 in 1914 taking stores to France in WW1. Chubb, a skipper from the age of 19 and one of the great racing skippers, also describes in plain, if harrowing, language how he lost his childhood friend who had been swept overboard the Vigilant off Harwich. Having tacked back at nighttime in a F5 he was able to get his mate alongside but lacked the strength to pull him aboard, and lost him. “The reason it hit me so hard was he was like a brother to me. I thought at one time I should leave the water,” he recounts.
The film is narrated by the English stage and screen actor Michael Hordern, and it’s well worth watching! DMH
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