President was built in 1909 at Fellows Morton & Clayton’s Saltley dock for about £600. The distinctive “Josher” hull — riveted wrought-iron sides and elm bottom — takes its name from director Joshua Fellows. FMC operated a fleet of company steamers between 1889 and 1928.
Steam years
Compound steam engines and coke-fired boilers were powerful enough to tow unpowered butty boats on fly schedules (day and night) between London, Birmingham and other Midland centres, but they consumed cargo space. Steamers typically carried less than horse boats yet could keep long non-stop timings on the London–Braunston corridor with coke fuel drawn alongside canal water for the boiler.
Bolinder years
The compact Swedish Bolinder crude-oil engine solved much of the space problem. Archive notes place President’s Bolinder period from 1925 to 1932 — part of the wider conversion of FMC steamers to oil engines that reshaped working canal power in the inter-war years. Photographs from those years remain among the most evocative Bolinder-on-canal images in the collection.
Some archive photographs on the old site carried third-party photo credits. This page uses educational framing only and does not invent copyright notices.