The first time I saw Rose Skinner’s windlass belt, Kate Saffin was wearing it.
At first glance it is a very simple thing: a leather belt, decorated with rivets, designed to hold a windlass securely at the waist. Nothing elaborate. Nothing particularly glamorous. Just practical, clever and completely suited to the job.
But of course, it is much more than that.
Rose Skinner was born in 1925 and spent much of her life living and working on the canals. She was one of the last generation of boat people to carry freight by water.
She married Jack Skinner on Easter Monday in 1946. Together they worked the motor boat Kent and butty Forget Me Not, carrying coal from Warwickshire to Oxford, and later worked Redshank and butty Greenshank. They are credited with helping to save the Oxford Canal from closure, first in 1955 and again in 1957.
By around 1962, as carrying became harder, Jack and Rose left the boats. By then they were working for Willow Wren.
Kate Saffin met them many years later.
“When I first moved onto a boat in 1999, I had a mooring at Langford Lane,” she told me. “In the cottages there lived Jack and Rose Skinner.”
Jack was the nephew of Joe Skinner, famous as one of the last of the Number Ones.
Jack and Rose had retired from working boats to a small cottage at Langford Lane and kept a GRP cruiser for days out.
Kate would visit them.
“Jack would joke, ‘See you in three weeks!’ I suppose that was because of how long it was between visits. They both loved to sit and chat, so it was really hard to just pop in for half an hour. You needed to make time. More like an hour and a half.”
It was Rose who first showed Kate how she carried a windlass.
Rather than lugging it by hand, Rose simply tucked it into a belt around her waist.
At first, she gave Kate a fairly ordinary brown plastic belt from Banbury market. Kate used it constantly and became a complete convert.
Then, once Rose had seen that Kate really did use it, she gave her something much more special.
Her own windlass belt.
“It felt very special,” Kate said.
She doesn’t know whether Rose originally bought the belt, but she does know that Jack added the rivets to decorate it for her.
That small detail changes it somehow.
It stops being just a clever bit of boating kit and becomes something made personal by one person for another.
Rose herself clearly knew exactly how useful it was.
Kate remembers one of her favourite stories.
Rose had taken the GRP cruiser out and stopped to work a lock when a holiday boater decided she needed some help.
Speaking loudly and slowly, he called out:
“YOU NEED A LOCK KEY, LOVE.”
Rose replied in a suitably doddery voice, “Yeeees? A lock key?”
He tried again.
“YOU NEED A LOCK KEY TO WORK THE LOCK!”
Rose unzipped her coat, whipped out the windlass from her belt and had the paddle up before he knew what had happened.
She was still boating well into old age.
Kate also remembers Rose travelling from Langford Lane to Banbury aboard Utopia when she was already in her eighties.
Rose had insisted they needed an early start.
At around six in the morning, she was knocking on the roof ready to get going.
“She completely wore the crew out,” Kate laughed.
Rose died on 27 June 2012, aged 87.
Her windlass belt remains with Kate.
It is not a grand object. It was made to do a job, and it did that job very well.
But it also carries Jack’s rivets, Rose’s ingenuity, Kate’s memories and a small piece of a working canal life that has almost disappeared.
Which is quite a lot for one old belt to hold.
Front page image courtesy of Tooley’s Boat Yard. An original piece by The Big Orange M
Exact replica of Rose’s belt made by Sally onboard Craftybird with all 53 heavy duty rivets! Jack couldn’t have fit more on if he tried. He must have really loved Rose.
(thanks Kate for letting me have yours to study for a bit!)