I’m a Boating Woman

‘I am a Boating Woman’ is our new single released in celebration of Rose Skinner’s contribution to our Warterways.

In the mid 1990s Jane was very fortunate indeed to have met Rose Skinner, master boatwoman. Rose was leaning over a gate carefully watching Jane moor up her boat and she shouted out to Jane that she was doing her knots all wrong!! It was the beginning of a really lovely cross-generational friendship where Jane was taught lots of invaluable boating techniques and told many wonderful stories of Roses boating days.

Rose had been born into a horse boating family in 1924 so she would have been one hundred years old last September 2024. This song celebrates her extraordinary life as a boatwoman - her childhood learning all her boating skills and working boats with her parents, her married life as a Mum of four children working afloat and the demise of trade on the canal when they were forced to move onto the bank.

Rose and her husband Jack spent their retirement years travelling around the waterways again. What an interesting life and a truly amazing woman.

In this splendid photograph of Rose and her daughter Joyce she is standing on the Butty with the Ellum in her hand.

Photo taken by Robert Langdon at Hawksbury Junction, nr Coventry.