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Way back in September 2004 D.C.T celebrated the 70 thb Birthday of the BCN tug 'Bittell'. It was soon after the Parkhead Boat Gathering that I was contacted by Alan Barnes, who was researching the sister tug 'Pacific'. The long term plan was to get the two historic tugs together after being apart for about 45 years.
I then started looking into our own archives, my own collection of information and photos etc. of 'Bittell' and also 'Pacific2. A few months later both tugs were featured in a steam magazine called 'Old Glory' (Feb 2005). To my surprise they featured four whole pages.
John Pattle, who now owns ' Pacific' which is located in a barn at Watford, has been frantically busy restoring the tug. (He keeps me informed of his progress) He would like to put the tug in its orginal livery of Stewarts & Lloyds but has not got the time to do the research on the correct colours. So he asked me if I would do it. I must admit I didn's know the corect livery of the tugs but I did know that Bittell was not exactly correct, so it got me thinking. He would like to finish the tug sometime in the summer of 2006 and get it back into the canal.
Christmas came and went and I already decided that it was time to sort out Bittell with some well earned jobs. After arranging a date with Ian Kemp we got Bittell down to Dadford's shed to have its timber replaced on the bow. Ian replaced the old split timbers with a hardwood called keppel with a very dark stain to preserve it. All done in a week! The bow now looks as it did in the late 1930's.
After getting Bittell back to Parkhead it was time to think about the rest of the livery. The correct sign writing was fairly easy to find out. In that lovely photo of the two tugs together in front of a pile of scrap in Bilston around 1940 you can clearly see the tall writing on the cabin sides, but only with no's 4 & 5(note no names in those days).
The next job was to find the correct green that borders the cabin. The problem is, as most of you know, that most photos taken of the working are black & white and I didn't have any coloured ones, so I started to ring round some canal historians to see if they could remember the correct colours. We have had three different shades of green on Bittell over the last 15 years and not one of them was correct. So I was determined to find the right green this time.
An avenue to explore was Stewarts & Lloyds road transport. The factory didn't close down until the latec1960's so they must have had commercial lorries running about delivering tubes etc. I phoned a few historic commercial people that I knew. They could remember them but hadn't got any colour photos.
By this time 2 weeks had passed and I still hadn't the correct shade of green. Just then, as if by magic, a knock came at my door, it was Francis Stapleton just popping round to drop an entry form for Bittell to attend the working boat gathering at the Black Country Museum in September. So over a cup of coffee we started talking about boats, as you do... I then explained my difficulty in finding the correct shade of green for Bittell's cabin. " No problem", he said, "if you go to the Black Country Museum and locate the old wood shed in the boat yard you will find a 100 year old wooden tiller which was used on a Stewarts & Lloyds Tube Joey boat and its got some of its paint on!" I couldn't believe my luck. So the next day Gavin Lawson & I went to the BCLM armed with a handful of colour chips and a bottle of "T" cut to clean up the very faded paintwork. "Got it at last! Stewarts & Lloyds livery colours - bright pillar box red, grass green with ivory border". Then armed with the correct colours I ordered the paints fron Phil Speight - coach enamel in a satin finish, I do hate glossy historic boats. We then spent the next 4 weekends rubbing down, back to bare metal i places, several undercoats (red oxide) and then 3 coats of top coat all over. I did manage to put the ivory border around the cabin myself, but I wasn't clever enough to do the sign writing, so the Trust got Dave Perks to do that job. Three days later we had the large letters back on the cabin of Bittell and it looked just as it would have done back in the 1930's. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Gavin Lawson and Heidi Yardley. ( & I think Steve needs a big clap too! Ed)Friday 13th turned out to be a lucky day for us, it was it's first towing job with the new paintwork, to Hawne Basin Open Weekend. I couldn't resist taking some photos of Bittell towing two boats past it's old factory, or what is left of it. Over the very hot weekend several hundred visitors attended. The highlight of the whole weekend, for me, happened on the Sunday when we were approached by 2 ex Stewarts & Lloyds workers who had both remembered the boat working. One man worked in the furnace area most of his working life, whereas the other worked on the boats when he was 16. His job had been to make tea in the front cabin of Bittell for the men on the tug and to work the locks. Occasionally, if he was good, they would let him steer one of the Joey boats that were being towed by the tug. He commented that the colours now on Bittell, or tug no .5. as it was called then, were the same as he had remembered. - "That really made my day!" I was so pleased with myself that I couldn't resist giving him a ride on Bittell past the old factory that he worked at 45 years ago.
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