Another visitor to our class told us about his Grandfather who had been born in Cheshire in 1878.
He was so very good at Art that he went to a special Art school when he was just 5 years old. When he was old enough, he returned to live in Staffordshire near to Stoke on Trent. He lived near to the Woods Pottery and worked for Andertons who owned canal boats. He worked as a canal artist.
Life on the boats was very dull and drab, so the canal boat owners gave their boat people money to have their boats decorated by artists. The canal boat homes were about two metres by three metres and in this small area all the family would live.
Canal boat artists were known as Knob Stick painters. The gentleman we heard about was married and had eight children. They lived in a cottage near to the canal. As a child our visitor could remember going to visit his grandfather and, when they heard a put-put sound they knew a boat was coming and would run to the canal. He also remembers that the people always seemed to look rusty coloured because they spent so long out in the fresh air. Quite often the boat people would visit his grandfather and leave things to be painted. Most surfaces in the living areas of the boats were decorated, as well as items like buckets, stools and other furniture. They could not hang pictures in their rooms, so sometimes they had the artists paint a picture on the cabin wall - complete with frame, string and nail !
Our visitor remembered that his grandfather never wore overalls to paint. He can remember seeing him in his suit with waistcoat and jacket coming back from painting on a boat with splashes of paint on his clothes and smelling of linseed oil.
His grandfather was a famous canal artist who retired in the 1950s but was still painting when he was more than 70 years old. Out of his eight children only one child, a daughter, grew up to be an artist.