Vic still hopeful over caves fight

Growing up in the late 1950s, Vic Smallshire persuaded his father to build him a boat to tour the Black Country canal network, but found the Government was closing them quicker than he could discover them.

This started him on a 45-year campaign to save the canals, and ultimately resulted in the Black Country Urban Park bid which missed out on a £50 million People’s Lottery Award.

He says the campaign to reopen the limestone caverns at Dudley’s Wrens Nest is far from over.

“The bid for Wrens Nest is based on 40 years of volunteer effort, and that volunteer isn’t going to evaporate just because we haven’t won a big prize,” he says. “I think the scheme will happen, it may be delayed, and it may have to be watered down a bit, but there are still people who believe passionately about the industrial heritage of the Black Country, and they won’t stop believing in it because we haven’t got the money.”

None of this would have been possible if a 17-year-old Vic had not decided to challenge authorities in 1962 by stopping closure of the Dudley Canal Tunnel, which provides access to the mines.

With the nationalisation of the railways in 1947, the British Transport Commission became unwilling custodian of the Black Country canal system, and in order to close what it saw as an unnecessary drain on funds, the commission had to prove that the canals were not being used.

One day Vic, an apprentice mining surveyor, led colleagues on a “busman’s holiday” through the Dudley Canal Tunnel, and found a message in a bottle urging the finder to get in touch.

“The outcome was a meeting with Cliff Sherwood and a group of his friends who spent their weekends exploring the Dudley limestone mines,” he says. “Having made a whole host of new friends, we made a point of navigating through Dudley Tunnel on my boat most weekends. Our motivation was knowing there were people in high places who didn’t want us to. We knew it would only be a matter of time before some way would be found of stopping us, but in the meantime being a thorn in the side of officialdom was great fun.”

One Sunday morning in 1962 the group found the tunnel portal blocked by a huge timber beam spiked into the ground at both ends. Vic wrote to the Inland Waterways Authority asking what law would be broken if they removed the barrier.

“The reply was surprising,” says Vic. “It said that the Minister of Transport Ernest Marples was on record as saying although the canals would be abandoned, there would be nothing to prevent people using them at their own risk. The removal of this obstruction would be entirely in accordance with the minister’s statement.”

“Accordingly, with great ceremony and the application of pulley blocks, wedges and sledge hammers, the obstruction was removed the following Sunday morning.”

Vic was invited to write an article for the Inland Waterways Authority magazine, which led to letters of support from all over the country, and the Dudley Canal Trust was born. Canal afficionados met at the Gipsies Tent pub, Dudley, and got an old coal boat to run a few trips.

One was organised for the Workers Educational Association by Dr John Fletcher, who advertised it as the last chance to see the Dudley Tunnel, and 400 people turned up. He was instrumental in putting the trust on a more professional footing, before leaving in 1970 to form the Black Country Society and becoming a leading light in the formation of the Black Country Museum. Vic is hopeful that £110 match-funding raised during the submission of the lottery bid will still be available, meaning that £18 million will need to be raised for the cavern part of the scheme.