Peter Underwood's Page

SEASIDE WE LIKE TO BE BESIDE Perhaps it is because I was born on the East Coast, within earshot of the waves breaking on the shingle beaches on stormy nights and always with the friendly flash of the lighthouse, visible through the curtains, that my idea of a day out is a day at the British seaside – there’s even a song about it. ‘Oh I do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ dates back to music hall performer Mark Sheridan who first recorded the song in 1909, Another music hall favourite, Florrie Forde, also recorded a version and the song was still part of a visit to the seaside when I was a child. The Edwardian enthusiasm for the British seaside, peaked in the 1930s with a post war boom through the 1950s and 60s, although, by then, many large seaside towns had already seen their best days. My summer holidays were day trips to Felixstowe or Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth or even Clacton. Even though almost every part of our coast is different it is all tied together by the sea that surrounds us and it has a collective Spirit of Place It’s that aggregation of landscape, buildings, history, sounds, smells, and people, even food, that conjures a recognition and affection and takes us back time and again.

Reflections after the fireworks

Last Flowers of Autumn

Oh we do like to be .....

Abersoch on the Lleyn Peninsula

West Highland Railway Portmadog

Stafford' Victoria Park in summer

Holmes Mill Clitheroe where industrial history meets modern money making

QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERS

Canal and River Trust’s Chief Executive is now nearly a decade into the job and has recently re-emerged into the public spotlight, with a long corporate video of him reading a summary of the claims made in the Trust’s annual boaters’ report, and an online event, being marketed as an Annual Conference, where Richard Parry and Chair of Trustees Allan Leighton promise to answer pre-vetted questions from boaters, set for next Monday afternoon. Cynics, with long experience of CRT, may suggest that the questions chosen might possibly be the ones Parry, Leighton and their Public Relations team want to answer. There are, however, many questions which do need answers and we have been compiling a short list.

HUNT THE PORKIES AS CRT FINALLY PUBLISHES ANNUAL REPORT

RE- POSTED DUE TO EDITING GLITCH HUNT THE PORKIES AS CRT FINALLY PUBLISHES ANNUAL REPORT The publication of any organisation’s annual report is an opportunity for directors and corporate public relations executives to get together to present the best possible version of a business or organisation – even if doing so means they have to lose a few numbers deep in the detail and emphasise the positive wherever it can be found. It is common corporate practice and normally targetted at a limited audience of financial journalists and investment bankers. Canal and River Trust in its role as a pseudo charity with wide commercial interests has utilised its annual report from the beginning as a way of impressing it’s funders in Whitehall and Westminster, as well as potential donors and external supporters, with boaters a long way down the list. As a result we have seen every year, some figures moved from one category to another, items included in one year’s report and ignored in other years, and it all makes any realistic comparison very difficult. But there are those, like my colleague Allan Richards, with he patience to examine every paragraph and the contacts within the organisation to be tipped off about the more blatant shenanigans. He exposed the falsification of the previous annual report – something CRT bosses eventually admitted – and the release of the 2020/21 report after a long delay meant that he and others have been looking at it with some scepticism. BOATERS PAY MORE – FOR LESS? After a summer in which many boaters have found it impossible to freely travel the system, with major structural failures on major canals, long term water shortages due to lack of maintenance and numerous lock failures Canal and River Trust has announced that it is hiking licence fees by four per cent for narrowboats and nine per cent for widebeams – starting in April next year. And more ....

CANAL TRUST BACKS TORY PLAN FOR MORE ‘CHAIN GANGS’ ON TOWPATH

CANAL TRUST BACKS TORY PLAN FOR MORE ‘CHAIN GANGS’ ON TOWPATH Canal and River Trust is being briefed as one of the prime beneficiaries of a Tory plan to double the number of tagged offenders required to carry out community work More offenders will be told to clear rubbish from waterways in what the right-wing newspapers are labelling as ‘chain gangs’ in an initiative the Tories are promoting as a law and order crackdown, in the aftermath of the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving policeman. BEFORE THE TAPS RUN DRY The commercial water companies are reported to be planning to build vast new reservoirs to deal with water shortages caused by hot dry summers and wetter winters as global warming continues – and they are saying they want to use canals to move water around the country. RIVER LEA ISSUES STIRRED UP AGAIN The so-called safety zones on the River Lea in London remain a highly contentious issue with passions easily stirred over the hundreds of mooring spots local liveaboard boaters fear will be lost if Canal and River Trust go ahead with plans to restrict large sections of the river in the name of safety for rowers. Now there is an abiding suspicion that a peeved and vindictive Canal and River Trust, having lost the opening battle is now intent on introducing a whole set of new rules, claiming they were already there but hadn’t been enforced. OPEN WATER IS IN DEMAND There is a massively increased demand for public access to open water, according to the Daily Telegraph, and it comes from wild swimmers, canoeists and anglers. All those people want somewhere to put their boats in the water, and anyone of the inland waterways will have seen the boom in canoes and paddle boards on the canals, actively encouraged by Canal and River Trust. Which leads on to another question for the Trust – will they allow, or even encourage, wild swimming?

Can you help

Can you help?

News From The Water Opinion

Now and again I am asked ‘so what is your solution?’ when the ineptitude and untrustworthiness of the Canal and River Trust is demonstrated once again by a boater or often a whistleblower from within the Trust. My usual, glib, answer is that I wouldn’t start from here, and boaters, including myself were telling anyone who would listen nearly 15 years ago that David Cameron’s experiment in offloading responsibility for non-productive functions from the government’s books was not motivated by any love of the UK’s waterways. The ‘clever’ idea of creating a dubious charity company to operate the BW waterways, and soon the Environment Agency waters, if all went to plan, was flawed from the start and those boaters objecting to the idea had no doubts that the end result would be a system in decline, leading to failure.

BATTLE OF THE RIVER LEE IS OVER – FOR NOW AT LEAST After a long, loud and articulate campaign by boaters against Canal and River Trust’s plans for “safety zones” on the River Lee that would have removed many of the mooring spaces on the river, it looks like the Trust have been forced into a grudging climbdown. The protest parades of boats, towpath lobbying and several stories in national newspapers siding with the boaters pushed the Trust into agreeing to set up a proper consultation exercise, using an outside body Hopkins Van Mil, who have not backed CRT’s plans for safety zones, but have sent them back to the drawing board to produce proper risk assessments, real accident figures and share all that information with all groups using the river. The consultants report also backs up the NBTA demand for a group where boaters, rowers and other users can come together to work out their own solutions to any safety issues. NOW YOU CAN’T COME TO OUR FESTIVAL – SO THERE! And yet, and yet… Just as Canal and River Trust were forced to capitulate to London’s Boaters and the National Bargee Travellers Association in particular, it seems that, like a truculent child who has had his toys removed, some within the Trust couldn’t resist lashing out in spite. SAFER TOWPATHS NEED TO MAKE A COMEBACK. One of the encouraging things to come out of the River Lee safety zones consultation was the need for river users to look more widely at safety - beyond occasional collisions between rowers and other boats and towards making the waterways safer places to be, whether you’re a boater, rower, walker, runner or cyclist.

UNACCOUNTABLE – AND THEY DON’T CARE Lack of accountability has long been at the heart of Canal and River Trust’s failure to convince boaters that it is honest, open and working to improve the vast heritage of our working waterways. The politicians heading up the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs don’t want CRT to fail because that might mean it comes back onto the Government's books, so they seem to connive in letting it get away with cheating, by providing fake figures and it remains to be seen what the Charity Commissioners will make of CRT’s actions. For most people the only court of appeal against CRT’s often draconian, actions is the Waterways Ombudsman but long held suspicions that she is in CRT’s pocket, they do pay her after all, seem to have been confirmed his week. CRT has admitted falsification of its annual report, after its fiddling of the figures was reported by a whistleblower and exposed by my colleague Allan Richards. MOORING RESTRICTIONS CAMPAIGN CRT has long had a tendency to slash mooring times without proper consultation and their latest efforts in Milton Keynes, site of their anonymous headquarters building, has provoked a new campaign by the National Bargee Travellers Association. ENVIRONMENT AGENCY UNDER FIRE FOR ‘UNETHICAL’ PRICE HIKES The Environment Agency’s consultation on some sharp price hikes for boat licences, as it attempt to revise and standardise its charges across the Thames, Anglian and Upper Medway systems is coming under attack from several directions. SPIN AND REALITY At a time when Canal and River Trust is spending time and money on pursuing its wellbeing agenda at any cost – in just the last few weeks we have seen them asking which spirit animal we might be, lots of pretty pictures encouraging us to ‘breathe’ and even some advice on how to build a musical ‘folk instrument’ out of a couple of lolly sticks – it is informative to look back at how the Trust deals with genui

SILLY SEASON For more than half a century as a working hack, I have had to deal with the so-called silly season, when the world is preoccupied with enjoying itself and real news is in short supply. In a commercial news organisation that threatens income so news standards suddenly drop and any old rubbish appears – it is a public relations manager’s delight. Well News From The Water isn’t a commercial operation so we don’t need to tell you about Canal and River Trust’s incredibly boring online campaign to attract more volunteers by running this.