Fishermen on Bentley Canal, Wednesfield, England, 1988

When I wasn’t mixing sulphurous potions with my chemistry set in my (made in Canada) cedar shed laboratory (a gift for my 8th birthday) I was most often found at a nearby bog, collecting frog, newt, water boatmen, and other biological specimens.

I buried an old porcelain sink in the back garden (my first “water feature”) to hold the captive creatures. This was far superior to the indoor goldfish bowl, though I had recently replaced the deceased carp, bartered from an itinerant “rag and bone man,” with frogspawn, watching the miraculous transformation of the gelatinous mass into tadpoles and eventually little froglets, whereupon they jumped out and occupied the living room. For weeks afterwards the desiccated amphibians would turn up under cushions and rugs.

But back to the sink pond. A fishing excursion to the Bentley Canal, which ran through Wednesfield village, returned a couple of fair sized gudgeon and a stickleback or two, all caught on a bent pin, baited with worms. 

Freed from the murky waters of the canal, these were going to be wonderful additions to my nice, clean aquatic menagerie … or rather replacement for the newts who easily escaped. 

Bentley Canal in its Heyday

The gudgeon, perhaps unused to clean water, were soon pushing up the daisies. For some reason known only to my adolescent self, I put the ex-fish in a wheelbarrow and covered them with a tarpaulin.

My father, who hadn’t a stomach for anything bloody or purulent, nearly lost his lunch when he came to use the wheelbarrow a week or so later, only to discover a mass of writhing maggots and attendant stench. 

I made the photo above on my first return visit to Wednesfield, 23-years after emigrating to Canada, in 1988. I viewed the scene through the lens of more recent experiences in my adopted country. Within weeks of my arrival in Canada, in 1965, my uncle Dick, whose family was already in residence in New Westminster, introduced me to salmon fishing, in Howe Sound, off the coast of British Columbia.

The experience banished all homesickness and set me on a path of wilderness adventures over the next decades, including the exploration of pristine mountain streams and lakes, angling for Dolly Varden, rainbow and cutthroat trout, arctic grayling, and Kokanee.

Sitting on their wicker baskets, the two men fish a remnant of the Bentley Canal where it joins the Wyrley and Essington. It once moved the products of Black Country collieries, smelters and factories that lined its serpentine banks. Those industries had also disappeared, leaving behind a wasteland of derelict buildings. The cast-iron tow bridge behind them is listed by the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (Historic England).

The site is a stone’s throw from the foot of Graiseley Lane and the Bentley Court apartment tower, where my late nan lived and I made the photo featured in the previous Journey Back Home post. I’m old enough to remember the last coal barges to pass under Bentley Bridge, before the canal, opened in 1843, was closed in 1961, when I was 9.

These days, England’s historic canals, once industrial highways, are most often used for leisure activities — barge tours, historical attractions and … fishing.

Liesure, Dudley Canal, England