How would you fancy owning a 135-year-old houseboat, as SHEILA FINNEY has done for nearly the past two decades? Lovely old Tedders being permanently moored just three or four berths down from our Dutch barge Karanja at the Thames & Kennet Marina, she and her husband Doug kindly invited me over for tea and a chat.

Tedders started life in 1882 as a haulage vessel on the Thames, probably being pulled by horse along the river. Around 1920, she became one of the Oxford barges – each of the University colleges had one to serve  as a change-room for its rowing team.

And the name? “Teddy”, “Ted” or “Tedders” is short for Edward or Edmund, explains Sheila, and it was the St Edmund Hall College rowers who used her for that purpose.

Grand Old Oxford College Barges

Traditionally, these boats were brightly painted and sported ornate prows, she says. Moored up at the annual Henley Regatta, for example, they made for a colourful and picturesque sight.

Tedders is a service barge, smaller than the other Oxford barges that belonged to colleges the likes of Corpus Christi, Oriel, Hereford, St John’s and Magdalene. There were only ever four of these smaller barges, and she is the last one remaining; the other three sank on the Isis, a tributary of the Thames River.

Why a boat? – and why this boat?

There are many reasons to to buy a houseboat. For Sheila, after the end of her first marriage, it was both an interesting and relatively affordable option, she says: “Being a bit of a hippy at heart, I loved Tedders the minute I stepped on board.”

For the first ten years, she was moored in a private backwater near Mapledurham, approximately five miles as the wild goose flies from where we are now at Caversham.

How she and Doug met

“We met at a laundrette,” chortles Doug, and he isn’t joking. They struck up a friendship in a Henley laundrette about 19 years ago, and that’s where they continued to meet; but it wasn’t until six months (and who knows how many spin cycles) later that they decided to go on a date.

“He arrived with a breadboard that he’d made specially for me,” fondly recalls Sheila… and that, it seems, was it.

They’d come from very different places. Originally from Cheshire, and a commune-dwelling hippy in his youth, Doug is a former tree surgeon. Sheila, from Bournemouth, started her first career, in the police, some 50 years ago, often working undercover, she says, because her profile did not fit the public’s image of the force in those days. Other careers followed: “I should be properly retired now, being 71, but having four grandchildren keeps me busy!”

On board

Tedders has an immediately warm, cosy and welcoming feeling, and the open plan of the interior means that every bit of space is available.

“We brought very little from our previous homes,” says Sheila. A chest of drawers and a desk belonged to her late mother; the solid,  heavy vestry table came from her church; and “people have donated” interesting odds and ends that add to the charmingly eclectic mix. Doug himself built the several low wooden tables. Well-loved books, piled precariously on a shelf, sit above a nostalgic tea-set and retro glassware.

A traditional wood-burning stove keeps Tedders cosy throughout the winter, even when the river freezes. That happened a couple of winters ago, says Sheila, who recalls seeing a fox trotting across the ice.

Waterfowl are common visitors year-round, but last winter a duck laid nine eggs in a plant-pot on Tedders’ deck, where she sat on them almost continuously for the long weeks they took to hatch.

That sinking feeling

In 2004, while Tedders was in the private mooring at Mapledurham, she sank. The same thing had happened to the other three of the smaller Oxford houseboats over time – they all had the same design fault, and they all sank while unattended.

“A ferocious storm had filled the well of the boat,” explains Sheila, “and the bilge pumps had failed to kick in.”

Unlike the others, which sank without a trace in much deeper water, Tedders sank in just three or four foot of water, and it proved possible to raise and restore her with the help of the local fire brigade – to Doug and Sheila’s massive relief. “We love her to bits, and we felt we owed a responsibility to her, as she sank while under our care.”

A new lease of life

After five months of painstaking repairs at Sheila’s expense, including the fitting of an aluminium hull,  Tedders came back to live at the T&K Marina.

In 2014, she was again lifted onto the hardstanding for the fitting of a new roof and some restoration of her exterior – again at Sheila and Doug’s expense. What’s more, Doug has beautifully refurbished the interior floors in polished ash.

A grand old lady of the river, a doughty survivor, the last of her line, but – above all – the magnificent Tedders is a much-loved sanctuary for Sheila and Doug.