Harborough in August 1950, a meeting place open to boats wide and narrow from south and north of England and off the busier commercial routes. 120 boats and 50,000 visitors attended and this laid the birth of the highly successful rallies that have been a feature of the IWA ever since. Unfortunately, this was overshadowed by a row among the organizers. Tom Rolt had resigned as secretary some months before because of the pressure of his other work as a writer, though remaining an active member. His next book, The Inland Waterways of England was also due to be published in August, though Rolt claims that it was a coincidence as he did not tell the publisher of the rally that had been organized. Aickman, through Eyre, attempted to prevent Rolt from attending the rally and promoting his book but this only led to the publisher Philip Unwin also attending. There had been personality conflicts with Aickman which had led Charles Hadfield to resign his position as vice-chairman as early as 1946, and disagreements over policy. Aickman wanted to campaign to keep all of the waterways open, whereas Rolt had more sympathies with the traditional canal workers and realised that it was necessary to prioritize which canals could reasonably be kept open. Aickman engineered a change to the rules to require all members to conform to agreed IWA principles and in early 1951, Rolt, Hadfield and others were excluded from membership. Stemming the flow During most of the 1950s IWA was campaigning in an era when the British Transport Commission (BTC) saw the commercial use of the canal system as its main goal. The country did not have enough money to spend on canal maintenance let alone restoration. The canals, particularly the narrow system, had become inadequate for modern commerce and slowly dropped into disuse. Early attempts at involvement in saving a canal, when the Basingstoke Canal had come up for sale in 1949, were flouted when a canal committee set up to save it saw their contributions used to support a private bid from their nominated bidder. A more hopeful start was made on the lower reaches of the Warwickshire Avon, a river where commercial navigation had long since been stopped because of perennial flooding problems so it was not part of BTC's remit. Learning from the experience of the Basingstoke Canal, IWA advised the formation of a charitable