Exhibitions

Curated by Stephen Pochin

Sutton Stop in the late 1940s – The Photography of Robert Longden
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry (26 June – 30 August 2010)
Inland Waterways Museum tour –
Gloucester | Ellesmere Port | Stoke Bruerne (September 2010 – August 2011)
Yorkshire Waterways Museum, Goole | London Canal Museum (2012)

It seems fitting that the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry should be hosting an exhibition of Robert Longden’s evocative pictures of working life on the inland waterways of the 1940s and 1950s.

Longden’s employer was Sir Alfred Herbert, a local philanthropist who ran the biggest machine tool company in the world from a factory that backed on to the Coventry Canal. Both men died in 1957. Herbert bequeathed the gallery to the city and Longden’s photographs are being shown there for the first time.

“They’ve gone the full circle,” says his great-grandson Stephen Pochin, 42, a London-based artist and photographer who has spent many months cleaning and digitally restoring scans of the lantern slides that were once Longden’s props as he gave talks in his capacity as president of the Coventry Amateur Photography Society.

Why resurrect them now? Stephen ponders for a moment before responding: “I’ve always been aware of their existence because his work used to come out at family get-togethers. And in 1997 some of them were published in the book called A Canal People by Sonia Rolt, who worked on the inland waterways in the war and got to know my great-grandfather. But I also knew there were more. My mother and my uncle told me about them. They’re both in their 70s now, so it seemed prescient to take a closer look.”

The 43 large prints that have emerged from the painstaking restoration process capture a way of life that was coming to an end as the unassuming master toolmaker in bicycle-clips framed the boat people in the viewfinder of his Leica camera.

Two years before Longden’s death, aged 78, councillors in Coventry (very much the hub of the motor industry) were clamouring to fill in the waterways and cover them with Tarmac. Thankfully, a local canal preservation society was formed to fight the plans, and they won a reprieve. Today the Canal Basin warehouses are full of artists’ studios, co-founded in the early 1980s by John Yeadon, artist and Stephen’s ex-painting professor. The Basin works as a co-operative for post-graduates in fine art to establish themselves as practicing artists. There are over 30 pieces of public art along the five-mile stretch to Sutton Stop, where the Coventry and Oxford canals converge.

Stephen has photographed this backwater as it is today, including leisure boats with transfers of traditional roses and castles on bogus leaded windows. His colourful shots make a marked contrast with his great grandfather’s brooding, grainy images of a smoky industrial landscape. Take away the electricity pylons and some of these pictures evoke Victorian England. It was coal that these working boats conveyed. What wasn’t consumed by the power stations and factories was conveyed at a leisurely pace downstream to Oxford and sometimes on to Brentford or Limehouse in London.

“With up to 50 tons on board, there wasn’t too much room for the family,” Stephen speculates. “The living space wasn’t much bigger than this,” he adds, gesturing at the dining-room table at his home in Putney. Large families were not exactly uncommon and his great-grandfather’s photographs abound with smutty faces peering out from unkempt mops of hair. An urchin leaning against a lock might have stepped straight from the pages of Dickens were it not for his Start-rite sandals. A little girl with a knowing expression is playing shops with an eclectic assortment of goods – tins of boot- polish, a piece of toy railway track and various items evidently dredged from the canal – all laid out on a newspaper emblazoned with the headline: ‘I was 17 months as Stalin’s Prisoner’. There are telling shots, too, of dolly tubs, tin baths and mangles as women battled daily against the forces of grime.

“There’s no mawkishness or sentimentality about these pictures,” Pochin reflects. “But there is respect.” And respect was in rather short supply for itinerant boat people who, rather like gypsies, tended to be regarded with suspicion by those who lived close to the canal. Among those who distrusted them, apparently, was Longden’s wife, Nancy. “Perhaps she resented him becoming friendly with the canal families, he obviously had to chat to them before they’d allow him to take their photographs. And, from what I gather, he’d promise to give them a print on their return journeys.”

There would soon come a time, however, when they wouldn’t return. Within 10 years of Longden’s death, their working boats had already chugged into industrial history.