Complete New Tales of Para Handy

by Stuart Donald

  Two years later the equivalent record for the English Cup was set by Preston North End with a 26 to nil victory over Hyde.

  I hope that any supporters of Rangers who may read this story will excuse the placing of a totally fictional game at the very real Ibrox Stadium: I am sure they will, particularly when it involves such a convincing victory! And I doubt very much if there would have been any ‘all-ticket’ games in Para Handy’s day, but sometimes a little anachronism becomes a must in the telling of a tale!

  It has also to be admitted that the Kyles area is better known for its Shinty traditions than for any pretensions to football. Shinty is perhaps best loosely categorised, for those unaware of its finer points or even of its existence, as a version of hockey which seems to have few rules and scant consideration for the safety of the protagonists. A game with a Physical Contact Quotient which makes almost any other team-game seem a pansy pursuit, and enjoying a strong loyal and local following in the Highlands (to which area it is largely confined), it has been described by uninitiated critics as legalised mayhem. To those brought up with, and devoted to, the traditions and the finer points of the game, such a comment is as a red rag to a bull. So I unreservedly withdraw it!

  6

  An Inland Voyage

  On occasion, the Vital Spark left her familiar Clyde haunts for the sheltered waters of the Forth & Clyde Canal. Sometimes she was bound for the farther shores of the Firth of Forth to load barley for the distilleries back at Campbeltown. Sometimes she would pick up a cargo of timber from the seasoning basins at the port of Grangemouth. Sometimes her business was within the canal network itself, taking coals to the Carron foundries or uplifting pig-iron from Bonnybridge.

  Whatever the reasons for her presence on the canal, Para Handy viewed such journeys with an unremitting and quite remorseless loathing.

  The other members of the puffer’s crew looked on these inland voyages as a welcome relief from the more demanding environment of the open waters of the Firth, and the associated problems of wind and tide. To chug effortlessly through the countryside along a smooth ribbon of never-ruffled water was sheer paradise compared with the purgatory of battering round Ardnamurchan in the teeth of a howling headwind and a steely, rolling swell.

  For the skipper, though, the canal was hell: for here, in every town and village through which the little vessel passed, he was at the mercy of the unfeeling urchins who watched the approach and greeted the passage of the puffer with undisguised derision.

  At least on the river and in the firth the sarcastic cries of “Aquitania ahoy!” from boys fishing from piers or hanging over the stern of the crack paddlers shooting past the lumbering puffer could be ignored. The puffer would eventually be out of earshot of the piers, and the paddlers would much sooner be just a dot on the distant horizon as they sped away, carrying his tormentors with them.

  On the canal the taunts were ever-present. The Vital Spark was easily outpaced by the ragamuffins of Avondale or Twechar, who assembled on the banks in droves as she approached and then ran alongside her with their merciless, mocking cries as she wheezed her way towards the next set of locks. Her looks and her speed were compared unfavourably with the elegance and pace of renowned passenger-vessels like the Faery Queen or the May Queen and Para Handy could only escape the verbal onslaught by retiring to the wheelhouse, tightly shutting door and windows however hot the weather, and feigning a lofty disdain that he certainly did not feel.

  “Man, Dougie,” he would protest, as he watched the gang race ahead and line up at the parapet of the next bridge the puffer must pass under, “ye wud think their faithers and mithers wud bring them up wi’ some sense of the dignity o’ the sea! They’ve no more respect for the Vital Spark than if she wass a common coal scow or a cattle barge!”

  Thus a fine May morning found the captain in a foul mood as the puffer approached Camelon on the Forth and Clyde Canal, their destination the Rosebank Distillery on the outskirts of Falkirk with a cargo of the best Fife barley. Her progress through the locks at Grangemouth had involved running the usual gauntlet of taunt and insult and the skipper’s patience was exhausted.

  The Vital Spark nosed in to the quayside at the Rosebank basin where two horse-drawn drays stood waiting to start carting the sacks of grain to the adjacent distillery warehouse.

  Para Handy, once the unloading had started to the accompaniment of the noisily hissing clatter of the puffer’s temperamental steam-winch, made tracks for the distillery office to report his arrival.

  “You’re looking a bit out of sorts today, Peter”, commented the manager, who was well acquainted with the skipper and his crew over many years.

  Para Handy explained the reasons for his ill-temper and, to his surprise, found he had a sympathetic ear.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said the manager. “We have just exactly the same problems with the little terrors. Thirty years I’ve been here, and 30 years of splendid service we’ve had from generations of our Clydesdales. But now these new-fangled motor wagons are all the rage, honest horses aren’t good enough for the kids of Camelon.

  “ ‘Peep, peep! Oot o’ the way!’ or ‘Can ye no’ get them oot o’ first gear then, mister?’ are the least of the insults my men have to put up with when they’re out on the roads with the drays.”

  “No respect, chust no respect at aal,” agreed Para Handy. “It’s a peety we couldna gi’e them a lesson they’d remember, a lesson to shut them up next time they felt like givin’ lip to their elders and betters.”

  “Dreams, dreams, Peter,” said the manager and, reaching into a drawer of his desk, produced a square bottle of the colourless straight-from-the-still whisky and poured them both a generous dram.

  Unloading the barley sacks took till late afternoon, and so the Vital Spark lay overnight at the Rosebank basin. As the crew were preparing for an early start the following morning Para Handy was surprised to see the distillery manager come running up. Behind him, two workmen were pushing along the towpath a strange-looking machine mounted on four small wheels.

  “Could you do me a wee kindness, Peter? Could you put this fire engine off at our Maryhill bottling plant for me?”

  Half-an-hour later the puffer cast off and headed towards Lock 16, junction with the Union Canal to Edinburgh, on her journey westwards to Glasgow and the Clyde.

  Macphail the engineer was of course the only man aboard able to even begin to comprehend the workings of the machine which now perched on the hatch of the puffer’s empty hold. Leaving his engines to their own devices he prowled round the little contraption, cap in hand, scratching his balding pate.

  “Two horse-power,” he read aloud the inscription on the brass plate riveted to the platform on which the device was mounted. “Two horse-power fire pump.”

  “Whit does it dae, Dan?” queried Sunny Jim.

  “Ah’ve read aboot them,” said the engineer. “It’s wan o’ they new-fangled petrol injins the same as they hae on caurs, but this wan’s for pumpin’ watter.” He gesticulated to the hoses coiled round drums on opposite sides of the frame. “It’s tae pit oot fires. Ye stick the end o’ wan o’ they hoses intae the watter, caw that haundle on the end tae get the injin sterted, and point the ither hose at the flames. The watter gets pumped up and the fire gaes oot.”

  “Man, man,” said Para Handy in some surprise. “An infernal machine, my Chove! Whateffer will they think of next?” And he resumed his contemplation of the spring countryside as it slipped by at the rate of 4 knots.

  They had a peaceful passage across the central heartland of the Forth and Clyde valley but the canal urchins appeared again as they approached Kirkintilloch.

  “Would you look at that,” cried the exasperated skipper as a gang of young boys raced along the towpath beside them, pulling faces and catcalling, “a skelp behind the lug’s what they’re sair in need o’.” And he pulled up the sliding windows to shut himself into the cramped wheelhouse.

  The door opened and Sunny Jim s
queezed in.

  “Captain,” he said, “I’ve got an idea…”

  Five minutes later the puffer glided into the Townhead locks in Kirkintilloch. Sunny Jim jumped for the iron ladder let into the stone walls of the lock and climbed to the towpath. Pushing his way through the assembled crowd of young boys he helped the lock-keeper to swing the wooden gates shut at the stern of the boat. The lock-keeper opened the sluice in the gates above the puffer’s bow, and water started to pour into the lock to lift the little vessel up to the level of the next stretch of the canal.

  Jim peered down onto the deck of the puffer 10 feet below him. There was surprising activity taking place on the hatchway.

  The mate was uncoiling one of the water hoses on Para Handy’s “infernal machine” and Macphail was preparing to swing the iron starting-handle. The skipper himself, with a suspicious glint in his eye, was cradling the brass nozzle at the end of the second hose in his hands.

  The puffer continued to rise up the surrounding lock walls as the water flooded in from the higher level. Rows of grinning faces to either side awaited her coming as the Kirkintilloch urchins prepared to subject the hapless Para Handy to another torrent of abuse.

  Sunny Jim had a quick, whispered consultation with the keeper as the level of the water in the lock rose higher. That worthy quickly took shelter in his nearby hut, and Sunny Jim, with a last check of the levels, jumped six feet down onto the puffer’s deck and shouted: “Now!”

  Macphail swung the starting-handle, the little petrol engine fired, the water pump got down to business, and in a matter of seconds a powerful jet of water shot from the brass nozzle in Para Handy’s grip.

  With a whoop of triumph, he directed the jet to left and right, sweeping it across the ranks of his tormentors who, caught totally by surprise, were quickly drenched through before they hesitated, broke, and fled in disarray.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” called Para Handy with a grin of triumph. “Two horse-power and an auld man, that’s aal it takes to send you packing! Maybe next time ye’ll think twice before you give any lip to the men who run the horses and puffers on this canal, eh?”

  And, turning the pump off as the lock gates ahead of him swung open and Macphail headed for the engine-room to put some way on the little vessel, he returned to the wheelhouse and began to rehearse the very satisfying story he’d have for the manager of the Rosebank distillery next time they met.

  FACTNOTE

  Only two of Scotland’s canals — the Crinan and the Caledonian — remain fully navigable today, though some stretches of the Forth and Clyde, and Union, Canals have been restored and there are some pleasure sailing opportunities.

  The Crinan and the Caledonian remain in use because they still fulfil the purpose for which they were built — to offer an alternative, for smaller vessels, to what would otherwise be a long and exposed sea-passage. Scotland’s other major canals had provided for the convenient transportation of raw materials in bulk, such as timber, steel or coal: and the speedy and more comfortable movement of passengers.

  Since both these functions were, in the course of time, better catered for by the railways and the road networks, the canals became outmoded and eventually abandoned. Thus were lost the Forth and Clyde Canal from Grangemouth to Bowling: the Union Canal which (across beautiful countryside and over some quite spectacular aqueducts) linked the centre of Edinburgh to the Forth and Clyde Canal near Falkirk: the Monkland Canal from Glasgow to the coalfields of Lanarkshire: the Paisley Canal from Glasgow to Johnstone, all that was ever completed of an ambitious project to link Glasgow by canal to Ardrossan on the Ayrshire coast: and the less-well-known Aberdeenshire Canal which ran from the Granite City northwards to Inverurie.

  THE NEW HORSEPOWER — Here is the precursor of the juggernauts of today, an early brewer’s lorry with, perched on the fence, some of the urchins whose taunts on and off the Firth could make life such a misery for the beleaguered Para Handy. But it would be 50 years before the last horse-and-cart disappeared from the streets of Glasgow.

  At the height of the canal ‘boom’ there were proposals for many other, smaller scale, projects throughout Scotland from the Solway in the south and as far north as the Moray Firth. Some of these, such as a two-mile cut to carry coal from the Ayrshire mines to Saltcoats harbour: a three-mile waterway, again to carry coals, across the Mull of Kintyre from the Machrihanish mines to Campbeltown: and a two-mile canal at Cupar in Fife, to convey limestone, were actually completed.

  Two hugely ambitious projects came to nothing: but it is quite intriguing to speculate how the economic history of the country might have been altered if they had. One, first mooted at the beginning of the nineteenth century, proposed a cross-Scotland canal linking Dumbarton on the Clyde with Stonehaven, south of Aberdeen, by way of Stirling and Perth. The second, which was actively promoted for over 60 years and only finally buried for good in 1947, was for a canal linking the Firths of the Forth and the Clyde, a through route for ocean-going vessels, a huge waterway which would have been on the same scale as the Manchester Ship Canal in England. Several alternatives were considered: by far the most dramatic, not to say controversial proposal, would have taken the waterway from the head of Loch Long and through Loch Lomond to debouch into the Forth near the village of Fallin a mile or two east of Stirling.

  7

  Those in Peril on the Sea

  Conditions had deteriorated throughout the October night and when the crew awoke in the morning it was obvious that there could be no question of the Vital Spark beginning her return journey to Glasgow. Far from her usual haunts, she lay against the wooden pier at Scarinish on the Inner Hebridean island of Tiree, where she had unloaded a cargo of winter coals.

  The prospect was chill and cheerless. A south-westerly wind of storm force howled mercilessly across the treeless, blasted machair of this flattest of islands, and savaged the scattered clusters of croft houses which huddled together as if searching (in vain) for some element of shelter from the worst excesses of the weather. Occasional flurries of rain were swept across the bleak landscape in stinging horizontal sheets.

  Most frightening of all, though, was the state of the sea itself. Between Tiree and Mull, 15 miles away, the ocean seemed to boil in fury as the wind whipped the tops off the steep waves: and the rocky sentinels of the tiny Treshnish islands which lay off the Mull coast at times disappeared under the cataracts of flying spray exploding from the mountainous breakers which disintegrated against their low black cliffs.

  “My Cot,” said Para Handy, as he slammed the fo’c’sle hatch behind him after a quick peek out to assess the situation, “I doot we’re goin’ nowhere today, laads: indeed I doot if even Mr MacBrayne’ll be goin’ anywhere. Heaven help any shup that’s been caught oot in this.”

  Macphail — whose stock of novelettes lay out-of-reach for the moment in the engine-room — looked up from his perusal of the only reading matter to hand, a copy of the Oban Times which the Mate had purchased the previous day in the Scarinish shop. “If the Mountaineer so mich as pits her nose oot o’ Tobermory in this, they’re askin’ for trouble,” he agreed. “This is aboot as bad a storm as I can mind of for mony years.”

  Sunny Jim, whose previous sea-going experience — as a hand on the Cluthas — stopped at Yoker, was mightily relieved to have confirmation that the puffer was not intending to venture into a storm the very sound, never mind the sight, of which had given him an apprehensive, sleepless night.

  “Whit’s the worst experience at sea that ye’ve ever had wi’ the Vital Spark, Captain?” he asked.

  Para Handy scratched his right ear reflectively.

  “That would have to be a time a few years back, when we wass bringin’ a cargo o’ brand new herrin’ boxes from a Campbeltown factory up to wan o’ the fush-merchants in Oban. But it wass a bad experience not because it wass dangerous at aal, Jum, but chust because it wass so doonright vexatious.

  “We had to sail to Oban roond the Mull o’ Kintyre,
because they wass repairin’ wan o’ the locks in the Crinan canal and it wass closed to aal shups for three weeks. For several days afore we set oot from Campbeltown, there wass a steady wund from the west: not a gale, you understand, but chust this constant, constant wund.

  “Caairyin’ a bulky, light cargo like herrin’ boxes meant that even wi’ the hold cham-packed wi’ them we still had a lot of freeboard, so we wass able to pile up a great mass o’ them as deck cargo as weel. Even then, though her stern wass doon, her bows wass still up, and there wass a wall o’ the boxes aboot eight foot high streetched right across the hatchway.

  “Ye couldna see a dam’ thing ahead of the shup from the brudge, and the Tar had to sit on the tap o’ the deck cargo to gi’e us directions.

  “Effery time we roonded the Mull and the wund hit us, we chust got pushed back! Even wi’ Dan’s predecessor, McCulloch, pilin’ on the coals and near burstin’ the biler wi’ the steam pressure we couldna get enough power to mak’ ony headway into thon wund! The pile o’ boxes wass chust like a sail and we wass doin’ mair speed under wund-power — but goin’ astern — than we effer did under steam-power goin’ ahead!

  “I wass bleck-affronted. Effery mornin’ for fower days we left the harbour at Campbeltown, and effery evenin’ for fower days we had to turn back there to anchor overnight and try again the next day. I have neffer been so embarrassed aboot the shup even though it wass not her fault — it wass the wund. And when the fishermen in Campbeltown foond oot what wass goin’ on they took a real rise oot o’ us. My Chove, wan night someone cam’ oot in an oarin’-boat while we wass aal asleep and pented oot the name o’ the shup on the stern and pented on Cutty Sark instead! And the local paper printed a piece sayin’ the vessel should be caalled the Bad Penny because she kept comin’ back, and that if we stayed ony longer we’d chust as well get a Cooncil licence to give roond-the-bay trups to towerists!”