Mike Connell, a Midlands artist has donated three framed drawings to Oswestry Town Museum to be part of the “Ghost Boat” exhibition.
This consists of artifacts and the remains of the narrowboat Usk, which were unearthed at Crickheath Wharf, near Oswestry by the Shropshire Union Canal Society as the restoration of the Montgomery Canal continues.
Mark Hignett, who curates the museum said, “They’ve only been up for a couple of weeks, but we’ve had so much interest in them. The pictures seem to have given form and life to the display, and it was so kind of Mike to give them to us as it’s sometimes hard to visualise these things.”
At dusk on Monday 26th July 1887, the last boat of the day, the Usk, was slipping gently into Hadley Park Lock near Trench, Telford. This lock was unusual as the bottom gates had a guillotine mechanism with the gates going up and down with a counterweight box, rather than swinging side to side. They looked like something from the French revolution.
George Benbow was skipper of the Usk, and it appears that as the boat passed under the lock gate, George did not duck and was hit and killed by the counterweight box.
From that very day, the Usk was doomed, an unlucky, haunted boat that many boatmen would not work aboard so she was abandoned and sank on the Montgomery canal at Crickheath, probably in the 1890s, and there she lay until the restoration of the canal by the Shropshire Union Canal Society unearthed her – a ghostly reminder of a tragedy long ago. And George? Is his spirit still near the boat – its skipper forever – who knows but at least he’s no longer lost or forgotten!
Mark continued, “History can sometimes be an abstract concept so anything that helps explain the past is always welcome”.
Drawings (M Connell).
Mark Hignett with the pictures.
(Credit: Shropshire Union Canal Society)
