The last lockkeeper

At the top of the Tinsley Flight, a series of 12 locks which slowly descend to where the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal meets the River Don, a pipe gushes a steady stream of clear water into the still, murky waters of the canal. Two million litres of water are pumped around a mile in distance and 93 vertical feet from the river into the canal every day. The water level above the top lock never seems to get any higher, but without this constant replenishment it would dry up in just a few weeks. The process is akin to filling up a bathtub that is constantly leaking, except the bathtub is five miles long.

For the past 36 years, the person responsible for filling the tub on the stretch of canal from Victoria Quays to the River Don has been one man: Dave Walker. Living in a purpose built house a few metres from the water’s edge, he watches over the locks: marshalling boats up and down, maintaining the berths and marinas, and managing the water levels to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. After doing something for four decades he says the link between him and the water is almost psychic. “I can go to bed at night and listen to the water coming over that lock and know if I’ve got enough,” he says.

At the moment he knows he hasn't. Leaks at the Victoria Quays end of the canal and low water levels in the River Don due to the prolonged drought mean Dave is having to conserve as much water as he can. This means at the moment he’s only able to open the canal for a few days every week. Still, that’s much better than in many places including the Leeds-Liverpool Canal where long stretches have been all but closed for weeks due to a lack of water, leaving boatholders stranded.

As I arrive, Dave greets me in the car park of the Tinsley Marina, a wide, open stretch of canal which is home to a staggering array of boats of all sizes, shapes and colours. He’s smartly dressed in a light blue crew neck jumper adorned with a Canal and River Trust nametag. A few wispy strands of hair struggle to cover his largely bald head. Now 68, Dave has been the lockkeeper on this stretch of canal since his early 30s. Before that he worked as an engineer, and then briefly tried his hand at photography. However, when a vacancy came up for his current job in 1989, he applied thinking it was something he could do for a few years until he found something else. 36 years later, he’s still here.

Having a team of volunteers is all well and good but it’s no substitute for contracted staff. Dave administers a WhatsApp group where he puts out calls for volunteers, but there’s no guarantee there will be any takers, especially if the weather isn’t good or it’s at a time when lots of people are on holiday. Dave, however, has to be there day in day out, rain or shine. “Living on site everyone always wants some of your time so you’re never really off,” he says. “It’s not really a job, it's a way of life.”

But it's a way of life that is slowly dying out. He is now one of only two residential lockkeepers in Yorkshire and one of only a handful across the country. When he retires, the Canal and River Trust have said they won’t employ another, relying instead on a team of volunteers managed by just a handful of full-time employees. Dave is, in a very real sense, Sheffield’s last lockkeeper.

36 years is a long time, but it’s only the most recent chapter in the story of the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal. In the early 18th Century, the upper reaches of the River Don were off limits to boats, so goods had to be hauled by land into the city from Tinsley. The solution was the 3.9-mile-long Sheffield and Tinsley Canal, built at a cost of £55,000 (just under £4 million in today’s money). Work began in 1814, with the first freight journey taking place on 15 July, 1819. On opening day, a general holiday was declared in Sheffield and a crowd of 60,000 people crammed into Victoria Quays to greet the first flotilla of 10 boats to the city centre. 

However, as freight declined after World War Two, eventually stopping for good in 1973, the canal fell into disrepair. In 1963 it was transferred into the ownership of British Waterways, where it would stay until the Canal and River Trust was set up in 2012. The idea was that by making the entire canal system a charity they could allow it to generate money for itself, a bit like the National Trust. However, unlike the National Trust, the Canal and Rivers Trust doesn’t have a collection of stately homes they can charge people £12 to get into.

As the Canal and River Trust’s government grants have steadily dwindled during austerity, the organisation's financial problems have become increasingly acute. These pressures have led to job losses, more volunteerism and, more recently, a massive sell off of assets. Last year the Trust sold the arches and Straddle Warehouse at Victoria Quays. Elsewhere, they have also tried to sell the land they own adjacent to the Royal Armouries in Leeds, although so far they are keeping hold of Canary Wharf in East London.

Unfortunately it’s a no boat day, meaning I’m not going to get the chance to see him guide someone up or down the flight. Still, he takes me through the whole process: opening the gates, lifting the sluice, guiding the boat in and equalising the water levels. He says it isn't a complicated process; the difficulty comes with conserving water, with millions of litres lost every time they are used. This means they try to double up when they can (meaning two boats share the same lock), although this can go down badly with people who don’t want to damage their new boat or a fresh paint job. The locks themselves needs replacing around every 20-25 years. In the past it was unheard of for a lockkeeper to see more than two sets at any one gate. Dave will soon be on his third set on some.

However, maintaining the locks is just one part of the job. As it turns out, trying to look after all the people who want to use the canal — or “stakeholders” as he corrects himself with a slight grimace — is at least as important, possibly more. These stakeholders are myriad and various. Firstly there are the boaters, both the “live aboards”, who reside in their boats full time, and the “leisure boaters”, who don’t. At the moment Dave is having to deal with a “live aboard” boat which has half sunk at the marina (the boat owners’ insurance company are currently quibbling about who should pay the £12,000 it will cost to raise it again).

And then there is everyone else who uses the canal from people who fish in it (this includes people with rod and line hoping to catch actual fish as well as people with magnets hoping to find metal) to all the walkers, runners and cyclists who use it and the homes and businesses which sit alongside it. 

In the two hours or so I spend with him walking down the canal, we meet pretty much every single one of his multiple “stakeholders”. As we chat at the top of the flight one of the Ethel Community Trust barges arrives with a group of young carers and tries to do a three-point turn, with mixed results. The barge is one of two run by the trust which has since 1988 provided canal and river experiences for disadvantaged groups in South Yorkshire.

Further down we bump into two PCSOs, who now visit regularly after Dave successfully lobbied South Yorkshire Police to add the canal to their regular beat. Anti-social behaviour isn’t that much of a problem, but there has been a spate of tit-for-tat graffiti wars along the canal and the locks themselves with “Free Gaza” slogans being replaced by “Fuck Gaza” ones, and, most recently, “Fuck Starmer”. Dave says that with paint and a wire brush most can be got rid off pretty easily. Later, a magnet fisherman shows us a picture on his phone of a machete he found the other week (thankfully, he handed the blade into the police).

And then there are dozens of walkers, runners and cyclists who come past us (each of whom get a personal greeting from Dave: “How far have you come? “Where are you off to?”) and the office workers trying to clear their minds by the water for a few minutes on their lunch breaks. I run along the canal several times a week (or at least I did until I fractured my elbow running back along the river a few weeks ago). My regular route, a 13km or eight mile circuit down the canal and back up the river is known as “The Blue Loop” and is the best (only?) flat run in Sheffield. 

As it turns out Dave has been in the wars too. A few months ago he snapped the ligaments in his knee in a non-work-related accident, and then caught the MRSA superbug in hospital, which “almost killed him”. But despite his pensionable age, he’s not ready to call time on his career as “a locky” just yet. “My children all want me to pack it in but my grandchildren want me to carry on,” he says. “They enjoy coming down here.” It’s clear that Dave does too.

As we walk back along the towpath back to the marina, the heavens open. As the rain hammers down on the canal’s surface and thunder rumbles in the distance, two young women from one of the local businesses run for cover under a nearby tree. “That’s the second time you've been caught this week,” he says with a smile.

The Sheffield and Tinsley Canal can seem like a relic of a bygone age. But that’s not quite right. It might have a different role today, but the canal is as busy now as it ever was in its industrial heyday. So many people use it, and yet it’s treated almost as an afterthought to be run by volunteers or else parcelled up and flogged off to solve the Canal and River Trust’s cashflow issues.

“It’s a great asset and a shared space,” says Dave. “You can see why it is going to be difficult for me to let go.”