The Ports and the Canals

The Docks and Inland Waterways Executive was a Siamese-twin organisation. The only reason for setting up one, rather than two separate Executives for the ports and the canals seems to have been that the canals were considered too small a business to justify separate status. The railway ports were certainly important: in 1948 they produced gross receipts of £10.8 million, but the canals earned in total only £2.1 million, or less than one-half of 1 per cent of the Commission’s total receipts; they were also in net deficit to the extent of nearly £300 000. Yet the canals represented a form of transport which had once been very important, and which quite a number of people considered had been unjustly neglected. Lumping them in with the ports seems to have been some form of administrative convenience, rather than any question of principle. (It was to be reversed in 1962, with the creation of the British Waterways Board.) It was sometimes suggested that the two components of the Executive had little in common except water.