This film was made by Charles Chislett, a skilled amateur filmmaker from Rotherham. Chislett produced a considerable number of exceptionally well made films over a period spanning from 1930 to 1967. The Charles Chislett Film Collection held at the YFA consists of over 100 films, mostly directly relating to Yorkshire, but also including many holiday films from around the world. Chislett made many types of films: documentary, fiction, and family portraits. Although Chislett was not a professional filmmaker, he brought to his films a lot of thought, great passion and considerable expertise that he built up over the years. Several of Chislett’s films can be viewed on YFA Online, including Men of Steel in 1948 documenting the work of the Park Gate Iron and Steel which might be seen in this film.

 

A large number of the places that are seen in Is Rotherham A Seaport Town – many of which are identified in the description – have now vanished.  Not least the two cooling towers at Tinsley which were demolished in 2008. In 1959 the river would have been heavily used by the pits and other local industry lining the Don.  A trip along the same route today would reveal a quite different picture with much less goods being transported and more leisure boats.  It is unclear whether the boat trip in the second half of the journey from Rotherham is a regular leisure trip or a special booking. Included in it though is Chislett’s daughter Rachel, sat at the front of the boat with the other young women, who can also be seen on YFA Online in Rachel Discovers the Sea, at a somewhat younger age.

 

But the canals and the River Don remain, and like much of Britain’s canal network and rivers, have been considerably spruced up. In 1983 the locks all the way from the New Junction Canal to just short of Rotherham were extended by about 20 feet so that large 700 tonne barges and butties could use the locks together. The Sheffield Basin, (AKA Victoria Quays) was revamped in the 1990s, with the warehouses being restored and the Sheaf works becoming a pub.

 

The use of waterways as a means of transport goes back into pre-history, and the alteration of rivers, better to enable navigation – with weirs and locks – really got underway in Elizabethan times. There were even some very early canals, but interest in the building of canals only really developed following the English Civil War in the 1660s, when there was about 685 miles of river navigation. The first modern canal wasn’t built though until 1757 with the Sankey Brook (St Helen’s Canal). From then on the interest in canals, inspired by those on the continent, grew from the need to transport coal, raw materials and other goods that were beginning to be manufactured through the industrial revolution. 

 

During the Napoleonic War canal companies started up to raise the large sums of money required to build canals, and to campaign for Parliament to pass the Acts which were necessary for each canal project (to buy up land and so forth) – often against great opposition. The building of the canals had a huge impact on many aspects of life, and not least in creating a new breed of worker before the railways and the roads. Those who dug the canals were originally called ‘cutters’, by the 1790’s ‘navigators’, and from the early 1830s, ‘navvies’. The building of the canals also gave rise to civil engineers, who had to work in a situation where the first ordinance map of England – part of it at least, from a line between Hull and Preston – didn’t appear until 1844.

 

In Yorkshire the keels that were used on the canals were 60 ft long, 15 ft wide and could carry upwards of 80 tons. These would often be pulled by men where no towpaths existed for horses or donkeys. An invaluable sourcebook for the canal system at the close of the main canal building period is Joseph Priestley’s – not the more famous radical chemist who died in 1804 – Navigable Rivers and Canals (1831). At the turn of the twentieth century Bradshaw’s Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales (not its original name) provided a very detailed guide. 

 

There was already a navigable link between Tinsley and Goole from 1751 when work was completed on making the Tinsley section of the River Don navigable. Therefore Rotherham had had a navigable connection to the sea, and hence was a ‘seaport town’, via the rivers Don and the Ouse from the mid eighteenth century.

 

The Sheffield and Tinsley canal was given Royal assent in 1815, linking with the River Don (Bradshaw has it as ‘Dun’, Priestley as ‘Dunn’). What is seen in this film is the four miles of the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal as it goes into the Don at Tinsley, possibly along the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation, and thence onto the Stainforth and Keadby Canal at Bramwith Lock, for the last 3 miles to Thorne – a total journey of 33 miles.  The Stainforth and Keadby Canal was built in 1902 to take the journey away from the choppy tidal waters of the Don to the less treacherous tidal waters of the Trent.  From Thorne the Canal goes onto the River Trent and thence to the Humber at Blackfoot Sands.

 

There is another way from Rotherham to the sea by waterways. Instead of taking the Stainforth and Keadby Canal, one could take the New Junction Canal and on across the River Went to join the Aire and Calder Canal and hence to the River Ouse at Goole, which in turn becomes the Humber – classed as both a river and an estuary – where it meets the Trent. In fact one could also take the Dutch River at Stainforth Junction, created in the 17th century by Dutchman Vermuyden, on to Goole. There are other, more circuitous, ways of getting to the sea from Rotherham: finding them might prove an absorbing project for a school geography class! But remember, although Rotherham might be connected to the sea by waterways in various ways, there is at present no legislation that permits navigators general access to rivers in England in the way that ramblers have access to the countryside.

 

The YFA holds a collection of documents relating to the life and work of Charles Chislett. This includes many letters relating to his films and other matters, working notes on some of the films. There is also an obituary which gives a fuller account of Chislett’s work, with a list of the charities and other activities that Chislett was involved in. These can be viewed at the YFA. Rotherham Archives also holds a Collection of material on Chislett (Archives & Local Studies Service, Central Library, Walker Place, Rotherham, S65 1JH). 

 

Joseph Priestley, Priestley’s Navigable Rivers and Canals, David and Charles Reprints, Newton Abbot, 1969 (a reprint of the Historical Account of the Navigable Rivers, Canals, And Railways, throughout Great Britain, 1831).

Bradshaw’s Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales, compiled by Henry De Salis, Redwood Press, 1969 ( a reprint of A Handbook of Inland Navigation for Manufacturers, Merchants, Traders and Others, 1904).

Charles Hadfield, British Canals: An Illustrated History, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 4^th edition, 1969.

This provides a photographic journey along the route of The Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation, along with its connection to other waterways.