Steam Punk - the search for Great Uncle Walter

Steam Punk is a close but older relative of Engine Punk. I don’t want to get bogged down in defining differences right now - I aspire to breakdown barriers not reinforce them - but with the exciting prospect of the Steampunk Kernow party in Falmouth, with its nautical theme and evocation of the age of exploration, I’ve indulged in some ancestral delving into the first generation steam punk activities of my grandfather's favourite uncle.

From an ancient scrapbook, I am fortunate to have this watercolour self-portrait of Great Uncle Walter. On the same page were very small photos of gondolas and heavily flooded streets.

Great Uncle Walter is world famous in my family. Like me, he was a man of many parts, except that most of mine are old car and bike parts. Great Uncle Walter was an artist, a photographer, sailor, entrepreneur, founder member of the Falmouth volunteer fire brigade and inventor. His portrait of the Mayor of Falmouth still hangs in the civic chambers. Among his surviving photographic prints, mostly of a nautical theme are also some of Romanian peasants and what could easily be Dracula’s castle. He broke several ribs riding a penny farthing round his studio and devised a piano that had a rainbow of colours for each chord and key. Experienced pianists never forgot their surprise when they sat down to play and lifted the lid. Black and white pianos? Very retro.

He was involved in an illustrated newspaper called The Pictorial World and has left us some scrap books containing his sketches, photographs, engravings and articles. He also built a very early catamaran – which Great Uncle Walter called a duplex boat – and sailed it in precarious circumstances up the English Channel from Falmouth to London where he used it as his house boat and studio.

We are fortunate in knowing all this because his niece, Winifred Scott, wrote down the oral history provided by her grandmother, Susanna Truscott, neè Williams, born at Crowan in 1821.

Great Uncle Walter died suddenly in Venice in 1890 at the age of 39 and is buried there. His mother felt the loss keenly but said, "He could never have borne to grow old," which for many years I mis-read as, "He was never born to grow old." Another member of the family visited the grave some years later and found fresh flowers on the grave. My South Devon relations have some of his watercolours of that city and also some of a very pretty Italian woman.

So you can see why my grandfather and his sister Winifred came to lionise their mysterious, energetic and romantic Uncle Walter.

Among the papers left to us by my grandfather was an extraordinary drawing of a ship that had been folded up and stuffed down the back of the draw.

By that, I mean the drawing, not the ship.

Great Uncle Walter's Duplex Boat for exploring the Nile (go on - click on the image for a bigger picture)

It shows (or perhaps that should be shews) a double hulled paddle steamer or duplex boat with curious derricks overhanging the bow. These carry two steel cables with hooks along their length that are driven by the steam engines powering the paddle wheels.

A long copperplate description accompanies this design drawing and one day I sat down to decipher it. I was amazed to find that this was Great Uncle Walter’s design for a boat for exploring the Nile. The grapnels and “tractor gear” are for when it encounters rocky bottoms or “sudd.”

I thought I’d mis-read "sudd" but in the end looked it up in a dictionary and learnt that sudd is the name of floating clumps of vegetation on the Nile. Great Uncle Walter’s idea was that his boat would either pull itself bodily over the sudd or shred the floating vegetation up.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is his reference to the Thetis, a small duplex boat that he had built in Falmouth. Apparently when beached on a sand bank, Great Uncle Walter was able to re-float the Thetis much more easily than a conventional single-hulled boat. 

Was the Thetis a prototype from the outset or did the idea of a duplex vessel to explore the second most famous river in the world after the Tamar occur to Great Uncle Walter afterwards?

We will never know.

I tried to find evidence of the Thetis and have visited Greenwich and the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth but to no avail. I did discover that very early catamarns were indeed being built at about this time, most famous of which was the Castalia.

Castalia was the name of a nymph who was turned into a fountain by Apollo. Mortal men would've just put her on a pedestal. Her waters were said to inspire poets.

The Castalia was built in 1874, plied between Dover and Calais and had two double ended hulls under a common super structure. Between the hulls were two paddle wheels in tandem. This layout was supposed to limit the effects of mal de mer and avoided the need to turn the vessel around whenever entering port but the Castalia was too slow to be entirely successful. A similar ship, the Calais-Douvres was built in 1877, which was faster and a better sea vessel, but there the concept foundered.

Among the papers from Great Uncle Walter that have survived we have a cartoon of "a hospital ship, late the Castalia". If you look closely under the hospital it has two hulls….

Can you spot the twin hulls? In another parts of Uncle Walter's scrapbook is a photo of one these paddle-driven tugs.

So Great Uncle Walter is the inspiration of my forthcoming Steam Punkery. I intend to depict his triumphant return by the sea from Darkest Africa.

However, does anyone out there in the great interweb know anything about very early catamarans or duplex boats?

In a note on one of the typewritten manuscripts of Susanna Truscott’s biography is a note that an article entitled An artist’s houseboat on the Thames appeared in The Pictorial World but, beyond the few scraps held by my family, all copies of this august periodical have disappeared.

Could this houseboat have been the Thetis and prototype for Nile exploration? And – if so – does an image of it survive?