Comment by leoc
21 hours ago
Via "Coates" on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/oddthisday.bsky.social/post/3lvzzmj... at at Medum https://mulberryhall.medium.com/odd-this-day-5b1cfd1fdb32 who provides some other information:
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Other relevant context: sections of UK canals being unintentional drained isn't particularly unusual, although the culprit is usually a paddle left open on a lock gate or a leaky culvert rather than a plug being pulled. Whether that inconveniences anyone for any length of time depends mostly on how full the reservoirs at the top end of the canal are...
Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...