2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the object that helped to create not only a Museum, but also a project tackling social exclusion and a familiar sight on the inland waterways of Yorkshire – our Humber Keel Sobriety.
The Yorkshire Waterways Museum is committed to tackling social exclusion, with the overall aim of using the heritage, arts and environment of the Yorkshire waterways as a resource for learning and regeneration. Our organisation is unusual in that the Museum grew out of a social inclusion project – not the other way around, and the Museum is still governed by ‘The Sobriety Project’.
After retiring as a coal carrying barge, the future fate of Sobriety was sealed when in 1973 a local business man gave the Keel to Goole Secondary School, where our Director Bob Watson MBE was teaching. Bob took up the challenge of making the somewhat dilapidated Keel into a school resource taking groups of children on residential trips. The project soon took on a life of its own, building what is now the Museum as its land base and taking groups of disadvantaged people out on trips with volunteering opportunities for people from local prisons. The Project started to acquire objects and collections, and was officially registered as a Museum in 1995.
Sobriety in the sun!
Fast forward to 2010 and Sobriety is still taking out groups, after a major refit to bring it up to modern standards in 2008. Not only this, but every week the Museum has up to 10 volunteers from Moorlands Open Prison, 25 placements for young people at risk of exclusion or offending , as well as young apprentices and adults on the Work Related Learning Programme. Add to that our 30 strong learning disability craft class, trainees, the small army of general volunteers, another five boats, five allotments and two satellite community boat organisations, and you will see that The Sobriety Project and the Museum tie up like a figure of eight knot – nobody quite knows where one finishes and the other one begins!
After kick starting all this activity Sobriety deserves something special to mark her 100th birthday, and we were very pleased to have received Heritage Lottery funding to carry out the ‘Centenary Sail’ project. For the project our young volunteers are researching the history of Sobriety – both its working life and its passenger carrying life – and are creating a travelling exhibition that they can take with them on their residential outings to show other youth groups. Then, in July we are having a ‘Berthday Weekend’, but I can’t guarantee there will be much ‘Sobriety’ amongst the staff at the party (I had to get that pun in somewhere!).
[Yorkshire Waterways Museum - see www.waterwaysmuseum.org.uk/]
Rachel Walker
Museum Officer
The Yorkshire Waterways Museum
