John Hudson meets author Joan Tucker, who has catalogued the history of West Country ferryboat communities

J oan Tucker's love affair with river ferries goes back to her girlhood in Nottinghamshire. And if you've always seen that as an old landlubber of a county, you've obviously reckoned without the mighty Trent, which has traditionally both divided it with its waters and united it with the various crossing points along its course.

Joan's brother Ken Butler remains a man of the Trent through and through, operating a former Thames pleasure boat for hire from Newark. It's a vintage craft, Sonning, built for the Oxford-based operator Salters in 1904, and although it is no longer steam-powered, it is still full of character.

As for Joan, Gloucestershire is now very much her home patch, and for decades she and her husband Alan were among Stroud's best-known citizens, as owners of the town's bookshop. She has ventured into local history publishing before, but this time, with The Ferries of Gloucestershire, she really has produced a labour of love.

"One thing I'm trying to do in the book is assert the ferry's place at the heart of so many communities," says Joan. "You tend to read little or nothing about local ferries in books on the Victorian countryside.

"You will read about the village church, the manor house and its home farm, and maybe the pub. But in many cases, the ferry is older than the church, and because of it, river- side communities have grown up together and become inter-related.

"It's well known that some of the remote North Devon coastal communities felt closer to the south Wales ports with which they traded than to neighbouring towns and villages just a few miles away by road.

"Not long ago we met a man in Leominster whose wife shared our surname of Tucker. It's a North Devon name – and, sure enough, it had crossed from there to Swansea, where she came from."

The scope of Joan's book does not stretch as far south as this. Almost all her ferries are on the Severn, from Aust Passage up river to Twyning Fleet, on the Worcestershire border.

New Passage, Shepperdine, Purton, Newnham, Framilode, Minsterworth, Ashleworth, Haw Passage, Chaceley Stock, Lower and Upper Lode, Twyning Fleet; the character of the crossings varied greatly as they moved up-river, while there is further variety in the brief chapter on Gloucestershire's Wye ferries, in and around Symonds Yat.

The only ferry Joan remembers seeing in action is the Beachley-Aust crossing, beneath the first Severn Bridge of 1966. Talk about there being a crossing here in Roman times is vague, since scholars say the main embarkation point on the east side of the river at that time could have been anywhere from Sea Mills, up the Avon, to Littleton Pill to the north.

Other services came and went on this stretch of river, but when the young Chepstow-based entrepreneur Enoch Williams started his ferry in the General Strike of 1926, and built on it over the next few years, the river's most famous crossing was set on a firm footing.

Up to a point, anyway, since it could still be a hazardous undertaking, at the mercy of the weather. A study of five days' operation in January 1960, showed that on the first day, at Aust, 52 cars were waiting for the first ferry of the morning at 8.30.

In the event, fog persisted all day, and eventually every one of those cars had to work its way up to the A38 and reach its destination in Wales or the Forest of Dean via Gloucester.

The following day brought better conditions, but some early morning passengers were left behind when ferrying stopped for the tide at 10.30am. On the Wednesday, with two vessels operating, some vehicles waited one-and-a-quarter hours to cross, and the observers reported that in summer the wait could be for up to two hours, even with three boats running.

By 1960, of course, the bridge was already taking shape above Enoch Williams's scurrying little boats, and the survey seemed to serve little purpose other than to confirm the glaringly obvious – that a more reliable way across the river was desperately necessary.

Most of the other ferries had died out in the early years of the 20th century, by which time men were less inclined to while the day away on the off-chance that somebody might come along and call upon their services.

"At Twyning Fleet in the mid-Sixties, it cost West Country Breweries £680 a year to run the ferry, and receipts were only £48 3s," says Joan. "In the entire month of February 1965, just 1s (5p) was taken, and the only regular passenger was a woman who crossed twice a week."

As in one or two other cases, there are sometimes pleasure boat trips from the jetty in summer, but no more than that.

Joan is happy to see some last vestiges of ferry life surviving in the pubs that used to serve them. True, many of these have passed from the scene as surely as the boats they once served.

But there's still the Lower Lode Inn; the Yew Tree at Chaceley, now trading as the Old Ferry; the Boat at Ashleworth; and in Arlingham, the Old Passage, now best known as a fish restaurant with rooms.

Like country railway stations, all of them have the air of outposts of a wider world, part of their immediate community but equally, in some intangible way, apart from it.

And along with Joan Tucker, we can rejoice that in them, and in other fleeting vestiges of paraphernalia, just a hint of the spirit of the ferry age still lives on into this new century.

Ferries of Gloucestershire, by Joan Tucker, Tempus, The History Press, £17.99.