The forgotten story of the 'Idle Women' - who fought the Second World War on Britain's canals

Chugging under a bridge in London's Little Venice, the narrow boat "Tench" slowed down just enough for me to scramble aboard from the towpath. At a glance, this 1936 vessel doesn't look like anything special, betraying little about the momentous journey she was about to finish. 

But the 467 miles and 356 locks she had travelled over the summer of 2017, will be just a footnote in the lifetime of this sturdy 72-foot iron craft, which has survived a world war and the decline and subsequent revival of the British canals.

I joined Tench for the final day of her round trip from London to Birmingham, following the same route taken by a group of wartime volunteers popularly known as the “Idle Women”. This historic vessel was one of a pair of narrow boats, run by an entirely female crew, to make the journey in tribute to the intrepid women who stepped in to run Britain's supply boats, 75 years ago.

Towards the end of 1942, as hundreds of thousands of men went off to fight in Europe, the first handful of female “trainees” signed up for a job that would turn out to be one of the most challenging of the Home Front.

After six weeks of training the women were dispatched to operate boats, hauling 50-tonne cargoes of coal, steel and cement between London, Birmingham and Coventry.

The trainees, who later became known as Idle Women - a play on the initials of the the Inland Waterways badges they wore - worked in teams of three, operating a pair of narrow boats known as a motor and butty, the first towing the latter by rope.

They would complete round-trips of about three weeks, often working gruelling 18-20 hour days, sometimes in freezing and foggy weather, to deliver the essential wartime supplies. They slept, ate and washed on in tiny cabins on board.

“The work was tough - from loading and unloading and the long days they put in when travelling in all seasons and all weathers, and going through endless locks, often in the dark and unable to use torches because of the blackout,” says Tim Coghlan, who edited excerpts from the diaries of Evelyn Hunt, one of the first trainees to volunteer in 1942.

Evelyn, who had first worked in the Camouflage Directorate (tasked with hiding bombing targets from the enemy) during the war, had a knack for describing the conditions the women faced with unabashed detail.

“What a day! Quite the worst we have yet had! And what a night to start writing this diary! The wind is howling outside – I should think it is as wild a gale as I have ever heard,” she writes in her first entry on January 1, 1943.

A few days later she woke to find the canal iced over: “Started to get up at about 7.15am. Very cold. While still dark, I threw sordid contents of a bucket overboard as usual and was surprised to hear a sharp splash - the cut was frozen over with ice about a quarter inch thick.”

Evelyn and her crewmates Audrey “Steerer” Harper and Anne Blake - who together crewed narrow boats “Sun” and “Dipper” - became the faces of the trainee boat women, appearing in Pathe newsreels and featuring in the press of the day.

While their stories are less ubiquitous than those of the much bigger Women’s Land Army (WLA), the Idle Women have acquired the status of heroines among many modern canal enthusiasts.

I was first made aware of the Idle Women after becoming a "boat woman" myself - having moved onto a narrow boat in early 2017. While the lifestyle is not comparable to the tough war work of our forebears, the constant demand of maintenance and the regular mishaps that occur on an ageing craft have given me a taste of just how challenging things might have been. 

It has also given me a glimpse of the camaraderie that the women must have shared - a modern version of this carries on today, via the social media groups modern boat women rely on to share information, advice and, when things go badly wrong, empathy.

So, it was with anticipation that I joined the Idle Women of the Wartime Waterways crew on the last days of their journey into the heart of the capital.

The 15-week trip started at Bull’s Bridge in West London, the former site of the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company (GUCCC) depot, moving to Limehouse Basin (where the boats were once loaded with supplies), then back through London and up the Grand Union to Birmingham - where they were unloaded before heading to Coventry to pile up with coal destined for London.

The idea to recreate the Idle Women’s path 75 years on started with writer Kate Saffin and poet Heather Wastie, who paired up to perform theatre, poetry and music adapted from the women's experiences, at 50 shows staged along the route.

Saffin’s play Isobel’s War is based on the true accounts of the women, channeled through a fictional character, whose diary is found in a storage trunk.

Both agree that the journey has affected their perception of the Idle Women. “I’ve been very conscious, particularly when I’ve been steering Tench, of the places where we were going through, what they would have seen,” Saffin says.

Wastie, whose poetry and songs are based on collected scraps of dialogue and historic accounts, adds: “The more you write using someone else’s words, the more you start to identify with them. Every time you perform it, if you’re living it, you feel you know them a bit better - or you hope you do.”

It’s not a glib sentiment. Almost every geographical point along the journey has significance to the women who forged the route before them, more than seven decades ago.

Reading Evelyn’s diary myself, I stumble on a particularly heart-wrenching post from Cowley,in Oxfordshire. 

“Yesterday I was deeply impressed with Nanny [Anne] who had the courage to pull a little dead boy out of the canal,” she wrote on July 7, 1943. “He came close past the stern of the butty whilst I was steering and I could easily have put down my hand and pulled him out but I hadn’t the courage … It is sad to see a drowned child.”

Sadly, it was not the only time Evelyn and her crew mates encountered a corpse in the canal.

Newsreels of the time show images of the women with clean faces and tidy hair, albeit having swapped skirts and dresses for much more practical trousers. The reality of working with the filthy cargoes of the time would have been much less glamorous - especially as they often struggled to find adequate clean water.

“They couldn’t pamper themselves, they had to go to the toilet in a bucket, they struggled to keep clean,” says Saffin. They also endured the hardship of rationing, with the added difficulty of temporary ration cards which many shops would not accept, as the boaters were not local.

“We subsisted on cocoa with condensed milk, national loaf and peanut butter,” one of the most well-known of the Idle Women, Olga Kevelos, once recalled. “I was always hungry - all the time.”

Saffin says the voyage gave her insight into how fit the women must have become, after weeks of pushing to meet delivery deadlines. “Physically it was hard work,” she says. “Even steering was hard work. Most were doing a far more physical job than ever before – and long hours of standing are tiring, as well as locks.”

When the war ended in 1945, there was little demand for the women to continue working on the canals.

Some went on to lead exceptional lives, including Kevelos, who become Britain’s leading female motorcyclist. A handful even became titled - including Evelyn, who married her former boss at the Camouflage Directorate, artist Tom Monnington, becoming Lady Monnington when he was knighted.

Another well-known "Idle Woman", Sonia Rolt, made the waterways her life's passion after seeing her first canal on her first day of training. She fell in love with a boatman and stayed on the water after the war's end, marrying him in 1945. They later divorced and she married waterways campaigner Tom Rolt, with whom she devoted her life to the preservation of industrial heritage, eventually earning her an OBE. 

While there is conjecture about how much being one of the Idle Women defined the women’s lives after the war, given most worked on the canals for only a short period of time, there is no doubt the unique experience left its mark.

“I think war changed everybody’s lives, but it was particularly noticeable for the trainees as they were taken out of their comfort zones and the work was extremely hard and demanding,” says historian Mike Constable. “Those that stuck it out for any length of time came out of it with a new outlook on life.”

And as any boat woman or man will know, that is part of the joy of living on Britain's meandering waterways.