In 1985, Bob Geldof was busy arranging Live Aid to raise
funds for relief of the ongoing Ethiopian famine. Meanwhile at Midland Bank in
Barking, Gerry Baker, Paul Calvert, Keith Markham and I were arranging a
slightly less significant, but to us, important event, a boating holiday on the
Norfolk Broads. Having successfully negotiated the same two weeks holiday for
us all (a task not to be underestimated, as anyone who has wrestled with a
holiday rota will appreciate), we booked our boat, and on 6th July 1985, loaded
our luggage and provisions into Gerry's
car and set off for Beccles.
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| Left to right: Keith, Me, Gerry and Paul |
Remarkably since they were putting a fairly expensive piece
of boating equipment into the hands of complete novices, the boatyard seemed
comfortable with allowing us to steer their shiny cabin cruiser away from its
moorings with minimal training beyond where the controls were and what they
did. They did warn about the limited headroom, but a practical reminder is
always better than a theoretical one and I soon learned to duck when going into
the cabin by walloping my head on the door frame before we had travelled more
than a few hundred yards.
The Norfolk Broads, or more correctly, The Broads, since
they include parts of Suffolk, cover 117 square miles and have more than 120
miles of navigable waterway. I've no idea how many miles we covered in our
fortnight there, but I do know how many pubs we visited because for some reason
I decided to keep a record of them and somewhat geekily, I still have that
list, which is reproduced below. Given the fact that the top speed of hire
craft on The Broads is limited to a pace equivalent to no more than a brisk
walk, we managed to travel a remarkable distance in the first couple of days
alone, reaching Wroxham by Monday, about 26 miles from our starting point in
Beccles. Mind you we might not have travelled so far had the pubs been open all
day; in those days the licensing laws meant that pubs closed in the middle of
the afternoon, typically at half past two or three o'clock, reopening at about
six, except on Sundays when the closed for even longer.
On the Sunday we stopped at The Stracey Arms, a cavernous
pub of little character that was extremely popular; compared with many of the
more traditional, rustic pubs we visited it had little to commend it.
Apparently it is now permanently closed and I doubt it is much missed. It seems
that Gunga Din's Old Colonial Inn is no more either, although with such a
non-PC name that is scarcely surprising! Other notable pubs included The Lord
Mancroft, notable for a reason which Paul will recall but which I am not
prepared to go into here on the grounds of delicacy, and The Bell Hotel in
Norwich. The Bell served up one of the best pub lunches I have had, consisting
of a vast steak and kidney pie and help yourself to potatoes and vegetables,
which I took full advantage of to the point where I was unable to eat or drink
anything else until much later that evening!
Food and drink played significant roles in our holiday. It
was perhaps unnecessary for us to cart quite so much food with us (we stocked
up at a supermarket the night before leaving) as we cooked little on board
apart from breakfast, although I do recall concocting something with eggs and
tinned potatoes (ugh) and Paul kindly offered to make beans on toast on one
occasion, although he rather put the rest of us off by enquiring if we actually
wanted our beans cooked and our bread toasted. Paul's appetite (and all who
know him will know that it is wide ranging and sometimes prodigious) had to be
addressed regularly and we always knew when he wanted to eat because he would
be overcome with a sort of thousand yard stare.
The middle weekend of our trip found us in Thorpe St Andrew
near Norwich, a charming little place that I would happily go back to (in fact Keith and I did, a few years later) on Live Aid weekend; the weather was glorious. While
the others took themselves off for a curry, I stayed on the boat as I was not
then a fan of Indian food, ate cheese and biscuits and watched Bob Geldof
implore the nation not to go to the pub but to send him their (expletive
deleted) money instead. I went to the pub.[1]
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| The Buck at Thorpe St Andrew |
Earlier in the week we had reached Potter Heigham, renowned
for the low bridge which it is only possible to pass under with the aid of a
pilot. A few years later I went on a long weekend on The Broads with my wife
and brothers-in-law; it was October, there were high winds and when we
attempted to turn round at Potter Heigham we were at one point wedged sideways
across the River Thurne. Judicious use of boathooks was needed to get us
pointing down river again. Most of The
Broads is easy to negotiate, even for novices like us, especially for me as the
only one of our number not to have a driving licence, but Gerry in particular
proved adept at manoeuvring our boat into awkward moorings. It was the lack of
speed rather than anything else that proved a problem when we came to crossing
Breydon Water, a stretch of water about
three miles long and almost a mile wide that we navigated to enter
Yarmouth and the northern Broads. At the limited speed we were capable of and
against the wind, the crossing seemed interminable and at Yarmouth we
encountered some pretty big vessels before gratefully reaching the River Bure.
By the middle of the second week we seemed to have covered a
large proportion of The Broads and having reached Oulton Broad on the
Wednesday, stayed there until Friday when we moored up in Beccles to return the
boat the following day. Here we had a last meal in a restaurant (the name of
which I have not recorded) and Keith and I ordered cauliflower cheese, which
proved to be a whole cauliflower covered in cheese sauce rather than the more
usual florets!
We returned our boat (intact, believe it or not), returned
home and decided that this boating lark was actually rather good fun. So much
so that we decided to do it again the following year, but this time not on The
Broads. It proved to be a much different experience!
To be continued...
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