The Thames had almost disappeared.
I had arrived early at Brentford. Rex had already helped me through the previous lock, but an unusually low spring tide meant it was way too soon to pass through Brentford Tidal Lock. We had to wait.
Rex pointed towards the narrow entrance onto the river.
“If we’d come down earlier,” he said, “I reckon we could’ve walked across.”
The Thames looked like a small stream, reduced temporarily to a muddy creek winding between steep banks. But minute by minute, the water returned.
At 3:01pm, standing beside the lock, Rex pointed to the corner of a floating pontoon stranded awkwardly above the mud.
“Let’s use that as a marker,” he said.
The water beneath it was barely moving. Beyond the lock gates, the riverbed stretched away in ridges of slick brown silt. A tree trunk lay half-buried in the channel, its branches stripped back by passing propellers. Boats moored in the Creek nearby sat temporarily beached.
“We can have a chat,” Rex said, “and then we’ll see.”
Eight minutes later, the tide had already reached the pontoon.
By twenty past three, the mud banks were disappearing.
The speed of it was notable. Boats, ropes and floating pontoons slowly reassembled themselves as the tidal river returned.
Before retiring, Rex worked as an engineer at Heathrow Airport.“I used to maintain jet aircraft which all had their foibles” he said. “tides at least are predictable”.
He does not fit the stereotype of a waterways enthusiast. He has never owned a boat and, despite living in Brentford since 1999, he has largely ignored the canal running through the town.
Then he retired.
Like many people, he discovered that financial preparation for retirement and emotional preparation are very different things.
“You think you’re prepared,” he said. “But like many people, I wasn’t really.”
A few years after leaving Heathrow, he was walking beside the canal near Brentford Lock when someone from the Canal & River Trust stopped him for a chat.
“Have you ever thought about volunteering?”
Rex trained alongside experienced lock keepers, shadowing different shifts and learning the mechanics of the waterways. To his surprise, he loved it. Two and a half years later, he is part of a small all volunteer team operating the Thames Lock. “We’re quite proud that since January we’ve never missed a boat booked through us.”
Later that afternoon, a flotilla of historic boats was expected through Brentford; around fourteen in total, travelling upstream from Limehouse and Woolwich as part of a campaign highlighting the growing funding crisis facing Britain’s waterways.
Their arrival depended on the same narrow tidal window we were waiting for now.
For the Canal & River Trust, which manages thousands of miles of canals and navigations across England and Wales, volunteers like Rex have become increasingly important. Until recently, Brentford’s tidal lock required full-time staff for every passage. Now all of that work is done by volunteers.
“It’s taken pressure off the CRT full-timers,” he said. “There aren’t many of them.”
Spring tides are caused when the gravitational pull of the Moon and Sun align and produce especially high and low tides. Around Brentford, where the River Brent joins the Thames, the effects can be extreme. The river narrows, the water accelerates, and the tidal range becomes especially visible.
Local topography can change tidal effects dramatically. The Bay of Funday in Canada, for example has huge tidal variation yet the Caribbean on the same ocean has virtually none.
The tree trunk remained stubbornly visible near the lock entrance.
“That’s a problem,” he muttered.
To most people it looked insignificant; a few branches caught in the mud. Rex could already see the potential issue: a propeller from a boat turning onto the Thames could catch on the submerged tree branches. Only briefly visible because of how low the water was.
“I’ll have to report that,”
“Technically,” he admitted, “it’s not our water.”
This distinction hardly seemed to matter.
“We want to use the lock,” he said. “We want to make sure it’s safe.”
This sense of stewardship by volunteers is reassuring. Our canals’ survival are supported because of people like Rex; volunteers who become custodians almost accidentally.
Brentford itself has changed enormously during his time there. Once part of the industrial “Golden Mile” running west out of London, the area was lined with factories employing thousands of workers: Firestone, Smith’s Crisps, Gillette, Lucas Aerospace. Most are gone now, replaced by apartment blocks overlooking the water.
“There’s actually very little in Brentford now,” he said.
Not nostalgia exactly. More an observation about how quickly places can change.
At 3:28pm, less than half an hour after Rex first pointed out the stranded pontoon, it was floating properly again. The tree trunk was disappearing beneath the rising water.
Soon there would be enough depth to leave the lock and turn onto the Thames for the journey upstream to Teddington.
Rex explained the manoeuvre one final time.
“When you come out,” he said, “don’t be tempted to cut the corner.”
Boats leaving Brentford for Teddington have to make a surprisingly sharp right-hand turn onto the Thames.
“It’s not really ninety degrees,” he explained. “More like one hundred and thirty.”
“Go straight down the middle,” he said. “Then make a nice gentle swing out into the river.”
For somebody who insisted he was “not very chatty,” Rex and I had managed to spend the best part of an hour together discussing tides, engineering, volunteering, local history and retirement.
Meanwhile the river had continued rising beside us.
The exposed mud banks had vanished. Water swirled again against the lock gates. The Thames, absent only an hour earlier, had returned.
Rex looked down into the channel once more and nodded to himself.
“Just a few more minutes,” he said. “And we’ll have you on your way.”
