Hart Massey

 

Barge Date:  06-24-2022

Hart Massey

As many of you know, our boat was once owned by a gentleman who wrote two books about the travels he and his wife made with Lionel. Hart Massey and his wife Melodie began coming to Europe and traveling the canals in 1975. From that enjoyment they ultimately purchased this barge I am on in 1982.

Hart Massey was from a very influential and wealthy family whose history in Canada goes back more than 150 years. He was educated at Oxford and in 1939 was the cox on the losing eight man team to Cambridge. During the war he was a lieutenant in the Canadian Air Force dealing with intelligence which meant choosing places to bomb. Following the war he became an architect, an artist, and a man who did a lot of different and varied things.

In 1982 he purchased this boat and he, his wife and their Dalmatian dog Joss traveled Europe until 1990 or 1992. His two books are interesting reads and when compared to other books written by people traveling European canals it is easy to see that his Oxford education allowed him to write quite a bit better than the other travelers of the water. He enjoyed life.

We have tried off and on to learn more about the man but it would appear that he was very private. Well, as private as a Canadian Massey can be. Other than the information gleaned from the two books there is not a lot we know about Massey and his wife.

Just recently I began rereading the two books and was doing so in the wheel house just a few days ago when someone came to the door and said “Hello, I knew the man that used to own this boat.” We had always hoped to run into someone that knew Hart Massey but it seems like it would not happen until this gentleman rode his bike up to our boat.

His name was Peter and he grew up in Holland around boats which became his life. Divorced in the late 70s he moved to France and became a French citizen and was using his boat experience to be a pilot on the rivers for hotel and restaurant barges mostly in and around Paris. He met Hart Massey in Auxerre in 1982 or 1983. Peter was never mentioned in any of the Massey books but he claims to have introduced Massey to a woodworker from Holland who would work on the interior of the boat they had just purchased. Interestingly, this man, by the name of Vic, was something I had just read about maybe 10 minutes earlier from one of the books. 

Peter went onto describe some events that joined the two men but I didn’t get the impression that they were actually friends. He thought the two Masseys were more interested in their dog Joss than in each other but I am not sure that is the case having read the two books. Peter seems to be down on his luck in recent years and perhaps didn’t have a kind word to say. He is living on a boat in Sens and has another one on land and he hopes one day to work on it. 

Regardless of what Peter says about the Masseys he is the first person we have ever run across that knew these barging people from Canada. So this adds just a little to the knowledge we have about the Masseys but it was fun to actually speak to someone who knew them back when.

In the two books that Hart Massey wrote there are no pictures of them, only caricatures drawn by a friend. In searching for information about Massey I have only located one picture taken in 1939 as part of an article written about Massey and his crew of the Oxford eight. Below is that picture. Nothing ever seemed to get in the way of this man and as you can see he might’ve had excuses to make. But not once in the book did he think of himself as anything other than capable of doing anything. He would’ve been someone that you would like to spend some time with.

I spent some time thinking about putting this only picture I have of Massey on the blog. Am I trespassing on someone’s privacy? So I thought about this overnight and have decided that there is a good reason to have this picture as part of our blog. If the picture says anything it is that Massey could do anything he put his mind to, be it the cox on the 8 man team or the captain of Lionel. He was 21 in this picture.