RESTORATION work on long-closed sections of the Shropshire Union Canal continues to discover long-forgotten history.

As the Shropshire Union Canal Society was busy shaping the canal channel at Crickheath Tramway Wharf last week when it came across ironwork from a narrowboat deep in the earth.

All the woodwork had long since rotted away but the iron skeleton remained bent but not broken.

It turns out that the sunken vessel was, almost certainly, the Usk, a ‘Narrer-narrer’, slang for narrow-narrowboat, and said to be haunted by the boatman who skippered her who was killed in an accident nearly 150 years ago.

However, the story doesn’t start at Crickheath on the Montgomery canal but at Hadley Park Lock on the Trench Arm of the Shrewsbury and Newport canal in what is now Telford.

The Usk Mole in Chester in the 1950s. (Image: Public.)

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The Trench arm built as a small coal canal with the lock being only 6’ 7” (2 metres) wide, so could only take tub boats or ‘narrer-narrers’, no wider than 6’4” (1.93 metres).

The dreadful accident happened as dusk was falling on Monday, July 26th 1887 as the last boat of the day, the Usk, was slipping gently into Hadley Park Lock.

Hadley Park lock. (Image: Public.)

The locks on the Trench arm, just south of Wappenshall Junction, were 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.

The top gates were the usual ‘mitre’ arrangement. They looked like something from the French revolution.

George Benbow was skipper of the Usk with 13-year-old William Evanson as his crew 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.

William said at the inquest: "We were coming through Hadley Park Lock, and George shouted to me to drop the gate. I was by the horse at the time, but I ran to do as requested.

"As I lowered the gate George did not stoop at all and so caught his head against the weight box. George then got onto the cabin and cried ‘murder, murder’. I asked him what was wrong, but he did not speak again, and it was then that I saw the blood coming from his ears and he dropped down on top of the cabin”.

The Lockkeeper, John Chilton looked after the locks south of Wappenshall also gave testimony.

He said: "I was following the Usk as she was the last boat of the day, and I needed to see that the locks were left in the right position.

"I was close to the boat when the accident happened and saw that George was looking behind to see how the boat was coming on – he ought to have stooped but instead he stood straight up and as the gate was lowered I heard a strange noise and the boy said, ‘He’s hurt, he’s bleeding’, and I asked George to lie down but he fell onto the deck and died within 10 minutes – before assistance came."

From that very day, the Usk was doomed, an unlucky, haunted boat that many boatmen would not work aboard, so she was sold and traded on the smaller canals on the Shropshire Union system, but the luck did not improve so she was finally abandoned and sank on the Montgomery canal near Crickheath, probably in the early 1890s, and there she lies to this very day, a ghostly reminder of a tragedy long ago.

The Usk and George Benbow may have long since sunk beneath the earth, but it is fascinating that restoring the Montgomery canal has given members a glimpse into the past and allowed this story to re-surface so that George, and his ghostly boat, the Usk, can be remembered.

With thanks for the research by Sue Ball and Jan Johnson