20th November, 2024 in Transport & Industry

Should you write a book or get involved in practical environmental campaigns?

By Joseph Boughey

What could be the role of a writer in fostering advocacy and encouraging change? Journalism may have an immediate activist approach, helping to shape and change public opinion, but what about books about the environment? The example of the late L.T.C Rolt, influential in the revival of British inland waterways and preserved steam railways, and who both wrote and campaigned, may provide some insights.

Rolt’s practical involvements were bookended by two books that he wrote. Narrow Boat, written in 1939-40 but published late in 1944, was his account of a leisurely journey over a declining canal system in the English Midlands. He travelled in his own boat, Cressy, converted into a floating home, and explored what seemed to be a hidden world distant from modernity. Rolt depicted boats, trades, ways of life and landscapes that he saw as changing in adverse ways; he felt that the aspects that appealed to him were threatened, but mainly expressed regret and despair rather than any call for action. This approached an apocalyptic vision, akin to an early Green viewpoint. He declared that he was ‘appalled at the loss which our civilisation has sustained’, but this was not through the destruction brought by war, but in the decline of a rural social and material order.

He had anticipated modest interest in Narrow Boat, but, writing later, ‘no one was more astonished than I by the recption it received’. Its readers included some whom it inspired to seek to use canals for pleasure boating, while a smaller number felt that something could be done to rescue canals, and in 1946 formed, with him, the Inland Waterways Association (IWA).

From the outset this body,which continues in being 80 years later, campaigned for the revival and development of Britain’s waterways, rather than to simply seek to provide public information or critical support for the owners of waterways, many of which would be nationalised.

Rolt was to use his powers of writing in acting as honorary secretary to the IWA, mainly in the composition of documents and the writing of numerous letters. He found, however, that, along with many meetings, this took up so much time that it inhibited his book-writing projects, and put him in a precarious financial position; he had aimed to make a living as a full-time writer while living cheaply on his boat. In retrospect, long after the extinction of much that he favoured and admired, although the canal lines themselves have survived for leisure use, it all seems hopelessly nostalgic. The book itself stands as a form of preservation of a vanished world.

Rolt was to discover, with others, another transport-related cause – the decrepit but functioning Talyllyn Railway. This was a former quarry and passenger line that was not nationalised, running up the rural Fathew valley from the seaside resort of Tywyn.

Prior to writing, Rolt here helped to draw together members to form a Preservation Society, and became the paid manager of the Railway for the first two seasons of voluntary preservation, in 1951 and 1952. He completed Railway Adventure about his experiences, after he had ceased to be manager, a role in which he organised volunteers (then a pioneering involvement) and staff, and effected many practical tasks. This book did not prove quite as inspirational as Narrow Boat, but by the time it was published a railway preservation movement was slowly developing. He was pessimistic enough to envisage the possibility of failure in the closing pages of Railway Adventure, but saw this as a gesture of defiance against a new Dark Age of bureaucratic centralised control. In contrast with Narrow Boat, the railway book did not sell well after 1953 or inspire much further interest until the 1960s. He later wrote that ‘the hush that greeted it was positively deafening and soon the book had sunk’.

After this, Rolt returned to his main purpose of making a living through authorship, although he did get involved in committee work in various contexts. Like others, he was capable of practical involvement, but this diverted time and attention from the writing of books. He commented later that when when writing was seen as a freelance career, readers might expect involvements in unpaid work which could, as Rolt found, prove to pose major problems. In his case, his accounts veer from the parochial to giant adverse statements about civilisation, but his practical moves were modest, considered and careful.