MY GRANDFATHER took a great interest in family history, long before researching family trees became fashionable. It was not names and dates that excited him, however, but stories and colourful personalities, which my eccentric ancestors seem to have no difficulty in providing. One of them became an elephant trainer in a circus. Yet my attention was really caught by a sentence in his notes about my great-grandfather: He and his friend Bob Ridley paddled a Canoe from Weybridge, via the Riuer Wey, the Wey and the Arun Canal, and the River Arun to Littlehampton in the 1890s -the last uessel to make the journey before the Canal became impassable, he claimed.
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