10:00pm Thursday 11th June 2009
By Tom King
ONCE upon a time, there were three Leighs. Old Leigh by the harbour, modern Leigh on top of the hill, and a third Leigh, out on the creek.
The third Leigh, the Leigh houseboat colony, has been wiped off the map as utterly as the lost city of Atlantis. Yet unlike Atlantis, there are people alive today who were once members of this lost community.
In the end, they were compelled to come ashore, but they still remember the idyllic way of life.
Once a few tides had come and gone, most people in Leigh forgot the houseboats had even existed.
Almost 60 years went by. Then, last year, a couple walked into Leigh Heritage Centre and said to the volunteer on duty that day: “We want to get some information about the Leigh houseboats. Mum lived on one when she was a child.”
The volunteer, Carol Edwards, confesses: “I thought I knew a bit about Leigh, but I had never heard of the houseboat colony.”
But Carol’s curiosity was sparked, and she embarked on a quest aimed at finding everything she could.
“Once the word started getting about, it was surprising how many people came to me with memories of the houseboats,” she says.
Eventually she managed to extract enough reminiscences and memorabilia, including the birth certificate of a baby boy born aboard houseboat Minorette, to compile a book.
The question asked by that couple at the heritage centre had been answered more fully than either they, or Carol, could ever have imagined.
People have always lived in old boats along the east coast.
Charles Dickens’ famous account in David Copperfield of the Peggoty family, who lived under an upturned boat in Great Yarmouth, was real for some families on Shoebury marshes.
Their residences, complete with chimneys and windows pierced into the upturned hulls, set the standard.
But the heyday of the houseboats seems to have begun soon after the end of the First World War, and coincided with the era of plotlands, those one-acre stakes in Essex countryside acquired by those keen to escape from the big city smoke.
The houseboat owners were a diverse bunch, but they all shared at least one common characteristic – independence of spirit.
They included master carpenter Albert Lawson, who constructed the grand staircase at the Astoria (later Odeon) cinema in Southend, a prosperous scrap-metal dealer, Harry Abrahams, a journalist and a photographer, who specialised in taking pictures of daytrippers.
These people had no landlords, no mortgages and no rates bill. They were almost wholly self-reliant, using paraffin and kerosene to heat and light their boats.
Most were highly practical people. One even set up a wind-turbine, providing electricity before much of Leigh had access to the mains.
The community also had its own shop and cafe on a boat, the St Kilda, where basic provisions were dispensed along with cups of tea and gossip, and their own milkman.
They relied on the authorities for just one service, water. This they obtained from a standpipe on Bell Wharf. The tap had been installed by the council for use by fishermen. Officials became so incensed to discover they were providing a lifeline to the colony they paid for a full-time guard on the tap.
The houseboaters simply waited until the guard went home at night.
If the houseboat colony was a refuge for the people who lived there, it was something of a retirement home for the boats themselves.
The jumble of leaky hulks and tubs included former fishing boats, lighters and refuse barges.
Done sailing, and with a hodgepodge of infrastructure, including garden sheds, planted on top of them, they settled into domesticity like elderly hippopotami.
For children in particular, life in, on and around these old vessels was a life of bliss, even if they took it for granted at the time.
Survivors recall swimming, mushroom and blackberry picking expeditions on Hadleigh Downs, and canoeing around the backwaters.
The children all had tasks, including digging holes in the mud to bury the toilet waste. With the arrival of the Second World War, a new task was added to the list – digging bits of shrapnel from the houseboat roofs.
Looking back, 60 years later, they tend to use the same phrase. “Happy days.” Yet this contented community had a bitter enemy, intent on its destruction.
Southend Corporation eyed the houseboats from the land, and plotted annihilation.
“The shore should be rid of these vessels,” health officials told a Southend Standard reporter. They were, they said, “nothing less than a menace to public health”.
Something of a double-standard was being applied here, as what the council really wanted was to acquire the land on Two Tree Island for a rubbish tip. The council tried many tactics to shift the houseboats, but they were dealing with a formidable group of people. Only in 1948 did Southend corporation acquire sufficient power to evict the owners.
The houseboat community had also been weakened by the loss of quite a few of its members in the war.
Following eviction notices, many of the houseboats were abandoned, left to rot on the mud.
The last Leigh mud-dweller appears to have departed by the end of the 1950s.
“It was,” says Carol, “as if they had been airbrushed out of history.”
Now, thanks to Carol’s researches, they have been written back in to local history.
Michael Brown, who spent his childhood on a houseboat says : “I am often asked, if I could have changed anything about living on a houseboat, what would it have been?” His answer: “Nothing.”
l The Life and Times of the Houseboats of Leigh-on-Sea by Carol Edwards is available at £4.99 from Book Inn, Broadway, Leigh, or, C Edwards, 28 Exford Avenue, Westcliff, 8SO OFF. Make cheques payable to C Edwards and add £1.30 for postage
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