Canal Boats - still OT

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 1554

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Denise" <drohlede at n...> wrote:
> Rita. Brook, and others,
> 
> Am I right that there used to be an entire class of people  -- 
> watergypsies, who lived on canal in UK like the caravans of 
> gypsies do/did on land?  

According to the article in SMITHSONIAN, there did use to be an 
entire class of people who lived and raised their families on the 
narrowboats. I forget what they were called. They differed from 
gypsies in that they had a central role in the nation's economy, at 
least at first, being the main way of transporting bulk goods (like 
coal to the iron foundries and iron goods away). They made their 
living from the payment for transporting things. As time passed, two 
trends went hand in hand: the boat people became more in-bred, 
socially isolated from the land people, and kept wearing their early 
Victorian styles while everyone else's fashions changed, and the land 
people became more and more scornful of the boat people and said that 
they were thieves and mentally retarded.

This is not totally unrelated to the wizarding world: when I read 
the SMITHSONIAN article, my first reaction was to search for it 
on the Web (sorry, didn't find it) in hope of posting its URL 
on HP e-mail-lists, because the narrowboat revival has the same 
kind of charm that made adults fall in love with the first couple 
of HP books.