Yachting and Boating World forums: Lock Keepers' Wives

Well done to the wives of the Thames Lock Keepers who went on BBC Radio Berks this morning to explain to listeners how it feels to have their homes ripped out from under them in the latest miserley attempt by the EA to plug the funding gap from the government and save money.

The EA Management insist that service to us Boaters' will remain unchanged and will, in fact, be improved during the busiest times of the summer because they plan to recruit more temporary staff - given that the pay for these positions is so appallingly poor, one wonders how they are proposing to accomplish this especially, as in recent years, they have been unable to fill all of the summer assistant positions until way, way into the season. Perhaps, they hope to attract some of the elderly "little helpers" that currently assist so kindly (and freely) at the National Trust. I'm sure I cannot be the only boat afloat to experience unmanned locks both in and out of the boating season - we do, after all, pay for an annual license (are we to expect a rebate) which entitles us to a reasonable amount of assisted passage through the locks. Another boaty friend told me that last week he was on the river and didn't see a lock keeper for six locks!!!

I feel certain other Boaters were as astonished as I to see that the EA, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to unhouse four locks in a row below the point where the Jubilee River enters the Thames meaning that there will not be enough staff able to quickly respond for wier operations in an emergency out of hours. Good grief did they not have enough egg all over their faces with the fiasco of the 2003 floods. The only people to be consistently praised in last year's July flooding were the lock keepers with their help to stranded boaters, and their invaluable local knowledge. Heaven knows what will happen to the thousands of homes on the EA flood map without the locally placed lockkeepers. It's not even a year since the Prime Minister said more money must be put into flood defence and the first thing on the ground that we actually see is a reduction of lock keepers between September and May when historically all the flooding happens.

"NO MAN IS RICH ENOUGH TO BUY BACK HIS PAST".......Oscar Wilde

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