Harry New has too many cars. This is not my assessment. Harry knows he has too many cars.
“How many?” I asked.
He started counting. There was a three-wheeler Lomax, a 1935 Austin 10, a 1934 Standard Nine drophead coupé, an Alfa Romeo GTV, a Peugeot 308 and a Ford. We arrived, eventually, at eight.
“My wife once said, ‘Nobody needs five cars.’”
Harry paused.
“I said, ‘I’ve got eight.’”
All of them work. All of them are insured and on the road. This seemed an excellent introduction to Harry, because the cars are really only the beginning.
Harry makes traditional rope fenders. He makes buckby cans from sheets of metal, riveting them together in the old way. He makes macramé cabin lace because, he says, it is quicker than crocheting and he does not have the patience for that.
“I’m not impatient. I just don’t like wasting time.”
He plays guitar, banjo and harmonica. He was a drummer for thirty years and played in rock bands in the 1960s. He writes songs, has a 16-track recording studio and has made a CD. He restores old cars, designed a windlass, keeps chickens and, somewhere amongst all this, has taken on an almost completely derelict old canal wharf and begun quietly uncovering it.
And that is still nowhere near the full list.
Harry left school at fourteen and a half after failing his 11-plus, much to the surprise of his teachers. He started as a tea boy in the motor trade and left as a manager before changing direction completely and becoming a forester and groundsman at Solihull Riding Club.
Alongside that, he became a professional photographer, specialising for a while in life-sized prints of horses’ heads. This led to him inventing and patenting a darkroom system which the family went on to manufacture and export to 22 countries.
Their two sons joined the business. They still make photographic equipment, including a camera for Ilford and a pinhole camera.
Somewhere along the way they also made show jumps for the British Olympic team and lecterns for the Army and UK government.
“Oh, and the Queen bought one for her own darkroom.”
Apparently an extraordinary amount goes on in farmyard barns in sleepy Hatton.
There is, though, somebody else who belongs in any explanation of how Harry has managed to live like this.
“My lifestyle is only possible because I have a wife like my Anne.”
Anne with an E, photographed by Harry, around 1976.
Harry and Anne raised a family and ran a successful business together without, as he puts it, “having to live in each other’s pockets”. They have now been married for sixty years. Anne lives in a lovely house; Harry lives on his lovely boat. People apparently find this arrangement surprising.
“We’ve never got on better.”
They met when Anne was seventeen, after she jumped off a moving bus.
Harry has since explained to his children and grandchildren that they exist only because buses in the 1960s didn’t have doors.
When Harry left the motor trade to take the job at the riding club, Anne trusted his judgement despite the complete change of direction.
“Without all these Annes, where would we be?”
Their two sons share the same birthday, exactly four years apart.
Harry considers this confirmation of his status as a precision engineer.
I had gone to see Harry because I knew about the fenders and his work on the wharf. It quickly became clear that these were only a fraction of his story.
When Harry first took the wharf on, much of it was almost invisible beneath ivy and trees. He showed me an old photograph. Once there had been a three-storey building here, with smoke coming from the chimney and a horse emerging from beneath the bridge. Now there are fragments: walls, stonework, the remains of an old stable and one particularly intriguing little structure Harry has gradually uncovered.
“There is a room in there.”
You cannot actually go into it because parts of the building might be unstable, so Harry has fenced it off. Inside, though, the roof is still there. Not a conventional roof, but a brick arch, like a bridge.
Harry has a theory.
“The people who built the bridge built that and they didn’t know how to build a roof, but they knew how to build a bridge.”
It is wonderfully plausible.
He doesn’t want to restore the place into something pristine. He talks instead about taking off some of the loose stones and perhaps putting them back.
“We’ll just put a smile on its face. That’s all.”
That may be one of the nicest descriptions of conservation I have ever heard. People who have walked the towpath for years now stop and look at something they never knew was there, and Harry seems delighted by this.
His philosophy for the whole place is equally straightforward: “Wild but tidy.” He has removed fencing because he hates fences. Chickens wander about. Harry doesn’t clip their wings and they apparently see no particular reason to leave. There is a bat somewhere. There is no mains electricity.
Someone suggested putting power and water onto the site. Harry is resisting.
He explained why with a long story about an isolated tribe being introduced to saucepans and knives and eventually becoming dependent upon them. His point was that once you have electricity, there is no going back. You can have a washing machine on your boat. You can have a big fridge.
An air fryer, I suggested.
Exactly.
“And we’re fine.”
He likes it that way.
Then there is the workshop.
Workshops are peculiar places. If you have one, you probably understand. There are tools you reach for every day without thinking, things you have altered because they work better that way, and small solutions to problems nobody else knows existed. They are intensely personal spaces.
I admitted to Harry that my own workshop is probably my favourite place to be. I go into it while the kettle is boiling in the morning and back again last thing at night. If I make something I am particularly pleased with, I have been known to take it to bed with me so I can look at it.
Harry understood immediately. His version involves the recording studio. Sometimes at eleven o’clock at night he decides one track on one of his songs isn’t quite right. He will just go and remix it. Then suddenly it is half past five in the morning.
There is something about making that does this, I posited. You begin with nothing: an empty space, a length of rope, a sheet of metal, a tune in your head. Then, slowly, there is something where there wasn’t anything before.
Harry agreed.
“That’s absolutely true.”
His fenders are made around a core of heavy cable. Years ago Harry bought five 250-metre lengths of it. He estimates he now has enough to last until he is 127. He makes roughly one fender a day. He could probably make two if he pushed himself, but that does not seem to be the point.
Nor does he sit making the same thing endlessly. Harry reads books in much the same way he lives his life: three at once. A few pages of one, then put it down and pick up another.
“I don’t know why, but I find I can read better that way.”
Apparently the same principle applies to everything else. There is always another project waiting, another idea, another thing he could be doing.
Even the windlass he showed me had a story attached to it. A traditional windlass requires a tapered socket, which makes it relatively complicated to manufacture. Harry came up with a simpler design using laser-cut parts which achieved the same taper with far less fabrication, then gave the design to the man making them. The maker later told him how much time it had saved.
Harry seemed rather pleased about that. Not proud exactly, just satisfied that a problem had existed and he had found a way around it.
Eventually I asked the obvious question.
How does he fit everything in?
“When I wake up…”
Before his feet hit the floor, Harry already knows what he is going to do. There are always things in the pipeline, things that need making or fixing and things he has been meaning to try. He lies there and chooses.
Right. That today. And that. And perhaps that as well.
Then he gets up.
He works until about seven in the evening and eventually stops for bread and cheese and a bottle of wine. After that he might watch a DVD, read, play guitar, banjo or harmonica, or perhaps write something.
“I never stop,” he said. “I can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. Sleep is such a bloody waste of time.”
It isn’t that he is frantically busy. He doesn’t seem frantic at all. He simply appears to be interested in far too many things to justify spending unnecessary hours unconscious.
There are fenders to make, songs to write, cars to restore, old buildings to uncover, chickens to locate, tools to improve, books to read and, somewhere beneath several decades of ivy, an old canal wharf that just needs somebody to put a smile back on its face.
Sleep can wait.
