IWA National Festival

The tradition & historical record

The IWA National Festival & Boat Show run by the Inland Waterways Association is one of the key annual events on the United Kingdom's inland waterways. Generally referred to as the "National" it serves several functions: ¹

As a publicity vehicle for the IWA and inland waterways in general To raise funds for the IWA As a social gathering for boaters from around the country As a campaigning event The four functions of the event are to some extent conflicting and in recent years the campaigning aspect has been somewhat separated by the creation of an annual "Campaign Cruise". Arguably it is as a gathering of like minded people that the National has been most influential. The festival brings together people from all over the country who do not meet in numbers except on the festival site. The original decisions to form both the Waterway Recovery Group and the National Association of Boat Owners both arose out of informal discussions held at the National. ¹

The first festival was held in 1950, inspired by car rallies which Tom Rolt, one of the founders of the Inland Waterways Association, had attended prior to the Second World War. It was held at Market Harborough, as the location was not restricted to narrowboats. The rally was called the Market Harborough Festival of Boats and Arts. The arts element of the festival was an addition made by Robert Aickman and was one of the elements that led to the eventual split between Rolt and Aickman. However, the festival was a success, and one of Rolt's innovations was the awarding of trophies for impressive service or performance, a practice that continued. The A. P. Herbert Trophy was awarded to the person who had traveled the furthest to get to the rally, and was won by Stan Offley, who had covered 220 miles (350 km) and had passed through 156 locks. His route from Ellesmere Port had used the Manchester Ship Canal, the Bridgewater Canal, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the Aire and Calder Navigation, the River Trent and the Grand Union Canal. The much shorter route using the Trent and Mersey Canal was unavailable to him, as his boat was 7.5 feet (2.3 m) wide, and the Trent and Mersey locks were only 7 feet (2.1 m) wide. Like many of the early rallies, that of 1962 was essentially a campaign to highlight the poor state of a particular waterway, in this case, the Stourbridge Canal and its connecting waterways. The decision to hold it at Stourbridge Basin was taken in late 1961, and David Hutchings, by then chairman of the rally committee, approached British Transport Waterways, the operating arm of the British Transport Commission (BTC) to ensure that the Stourbridge Branch would be dredged, to allow the boats to reach the festival site. ¹

In 2014 IWA launched a new event, called IWA Festival of Water. The Festival takes places usually over the August bank holiday weekend and is held at a new location each year. ¹

The statistics below are mainly taken from the IWA website but are incomplete. Some of these were called rallies rather than festivals and not all were national events. The final column shows the overall membership of the IWA in the year in question. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “IWA National Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

IWA National Festival is annual event in the UK, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²