Barge that ended rat race now heads for new home

Now nearly 40 years on, John William, one of the Humber’s last sailing barges, is sailing towards a new horizon.

Mr Hutchinson died soon after the couple had made the difficult decision to sell the boat.

“Eric died very suddenly in Hull Royal Infirmary on February 11. The one condition he made was that he was not to be cut up for scrap,” she said. “I lost my husband of 39 years and boat of 38 years in one day.”

Mrs Hutchinson says she wouldn’t have missed her life on board John William – which will be heading down to Kent as soon as the weather comes right for a new life as a liveaboard – “for the world”.

But she does wish now that she had greater faith in her husband’s seafaring abilities.

“I would have changed a couple of things. I didn’t appreciate that Eric was so able. I was slightly apprehensive because I wasn’t a boating person. If I had full trust in him we could have done so much more. I didn’t have my full faith in his abilities till it was too late.

“To any youngster I say: ‘Live for the moment.”

The couple’s escape from the rat race began one rainy night in 1975 when they first set eyes on the rusting hulk of John William in Stanley Ferry, then just a backwater of the Aire and Calder canal, just outside Wakefield.

She remembers being “absolutely speechless” while “Eric was in raptures; the torch was going left, right; his face was beaming like a bairn who’d been given a bumper-full of toys. I was thinking, what have I let myself in for?”

They paid £1,750 for the boat, and sailed it, hugging the coast, 400 miles to their Scottish home.

The self-sufficiency and frugality which was to become a byword of the years ahead as they moved from port to port was first put to the test when it came to fitting out the boat. Even in 1976 the quote for the masts alone was £9,000.

Fortunately Mrs Hutchinson knew a man who owned a forest: “He said go onto the forest, find what you want, mark them and come back and tell me, and I will cut and chain-saw them.

“We got them out of the forest and borrowed the back end of a chassis and trundled them across the road and down onto the beach. We put them on either side and the trees that were going to be the yards, seven of them, on deck and we trundled back off to Inverness.”

Life on board has had its ups and downs. In 1982 the couple helped find a Wellington bomber in the depths of Loch Ness.

A year later a lack of money forced them to leave John William in the Caledonian Canal, Inverness, while they lived in a council house in Shropshire with furniture donated by a charity.

One of the lowest points was Boxing Day 1985 when they returned to find the boat had been squatted in, ransacked and then set on fire.

“After 10 years of hard work and dedication and a lot of input we were left with less than we started with in 1975,” she said.

Repair took the best part of a decade – but they moved on to Beverley, Goole, and Portland before setting sail for Brittany, where they spent five happy years afloat, before coming full circle back to Goole.

She says economy about everything, “water in particular” has been one of the great lessons life as a “sea gypsy” has taught her along with the special camaraderie among the boating fraternity.

She is now thinking of moving back to Cornwall and catching up with her many friends she and Eric made over the years.

She said: “I am standing here looking out at Loch Ewe, there is not a boat in sight. The thing I have realised over the last week, the thing I missed was the boating fraternity, the boating camaraderie. It is rather like the travelling fraternity, call them gypsies or whatever.

“Travelling people, any group of people who do something slightly different, out of the norm, seem a close-knit community.

“I don’t want to be a hanger-on. You can’t be a hanger on to life. In a lot of the boatyards there’s an old-timer, a man who has been at sea all his life and he’s there looking on from the sidelines. I now know exactly what he feels. I can’t be that man.

“If I am down where boats are I can look on my own - and just be an anonymous person looking at boats.”