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The boiler had to be retubed and the entire dredger was refurbished and rebuilt on site. The dredger was then dismantled again for transportation to the Basingstoke Canal. Restoration took hundreds of hours to complete.
The project also saved an interesting steam-age antiquity; only one other simliar working vessel was known to exist, in the Exeter Ship Museum. Built for the Grand Union Canal Company (GUCC) in 1934, the 70ft long hull was constructed by James Pollock and Sons of Millwall at a cost of £812. The steam crane was supplied by Grafton Cranes of Bedford for £1,639.
The dredger was registered No 14 in the GUCC's fleet of maintenance craft used for modernising the main line of the Grand Union Canal. In 1947 it was transferred to the British Transport Commission and ended its working life on the Shropshire Union Canal. The Kennet and Avon Canal Trust bought it but hardly used it and was happy to sell it to the Society.
The "Iron Coot", as it was dubbed, arrived at Colt Hill with a police escort on 29 July 1974. Two and a half tons of pig iron, used as ballast, had to be removed before the hull could be lifted from the water. The move took twelve hours of continuous work to complete, at a cost of £1,000 sponsored by brewers Watney Mann, owners of the New Inn, as the Waterwitch at Colt Hill was then named.
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| The canal was so silted up
that an area alongside the wharf had
to be excavated by Hymac before the hull and the pontoons
could be launched for assembly. Then the boiler was replaced.
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While the method of dredging was clear enough, silt disposal was a more vexing problem and it was estimated that the 2,750 yards of the canal to Greywell alone contained 27,500 cubic yards of silt, or 2,750 large lorry loads..... Alternatively, if the spoil was dumped on the canalside, the weight of silt would be equivalent to half that of the liner QE2, and cover a 3-acre field - multiplied by 8 to clear all the way down to Ash Lock.....
While Hampshire CC sought suitable riparian fields and farmers willing to accept tons of oozing black mud, railway enthusiasts Stan Meller and John Peart hatched an idea to lay a towpath railway to transport silt to riparian dump sites.
On 9 February 1975 the dredger crew held a public steaming at Colt Hill as the vessel went into service. But the celebration was short-lived and frustration set in. The first dump site, fed by an Emmett-style railway layout, soon filled up and work was forced to stop for 3 months while Hampshire CC negotiated for a field near Lodge Farm Bridge.
The process of dumping tons of squelching black mud on a green field was hard to reconcile with the claim that the ground would soon revert to its natural state. The fact is, it does: after draining and levelling the fertile material encourages the growth of whatever is planted. Any sign of dumping soon disappears. Unfortunately the days of simply talking to a landowner and reaching an agreement now seem far away. Today the task of finding suitable new riparian sites is subjected to planning consent, pollution controls and possible objections from one body or another.....
By December 1975, "Perseverance", as the dredger was now called (formally), had reached only Lodge Farm Bridge, but it was now in steam every weekend, with a towpath railway and man-handled skips taking silt to a riparian field.
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| Now the dredging fleet grew. Johnson Wax of Frimley contributed £1,000 to buy two Bantam tugs, a couple of mud barges were bought and an old dragline crane was discovered in a household garden in Fleet.
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| Working through areas of solidified silt, the hydraulic operated steam powered grab was fitted to drive the excavating bucket deep into the black stuff. | |
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Perseverance finally reached the Whitewater winding hole, the extent of its westerly progress, in December 1976. In February 1977, 4 months before the hull of the John Pinkerton trip boat was delivered, the dredger was back at Colt Hill clearing the wharf.
Perseverance was aptly named as it clanked and hissed its way forward at the rate of two lengths a weekend if the going was good.
In March 1993 "Perseverance" reached Pondtail Bridge, east of Fleet. In October of that year, its work on the canal finished, it was taken by road to the Canal Museum at Ellesmere Port in Cheshire, where it was to be refurbished and maintained as a working exhibit.
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