Stained-glass panels at Warfleet Lodge with, at the top of the windows, the royal coat of arms in honour of Edward, Prince of Wales, far left, and the Dartmouth coat of arms (see also title page), left. Valerie Wills by courtesy of Mr and Mrs Otto Koeppen
Warfleet Lodge, the entertainment wing of Warfleet House built in 1882-83 by the Freakes, who lived at Warfleet House until 1933. Sir Charles and his son Thomas were friends of the Prince of Wales. Photo: Valerie Wills; by courtesy of Mr and Mrs Otto Koeppen
The idea was straightforward: running water cools hot surfaces. The engine-rooms of
wealth, but in general they were used to success and risk. Many established inventors were drawn
steamships were furnaces, with temperatures reaching 150 degrees as stokers opened
to Dartmouth – Sir James Douglass, builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse over 1878-92, William
stokeholes to feed fires to keep engine speeds up. Red-hot engines and funnels were
Froude who developed revolutionary hull designs in testing tanks in Paignton – but local self-taught
surrounded by wooden bulkheads and decking, and fires were frequent. Holdsworth’s water
inventors attracted by jobs in marine engineering were to make a substantial difference to their fields.
bulkheads encircled the engine room and funnel with a narrow metal casing through which water circulated, hot water flowing out and cold in. They were used, inter alia, by the navy,
Bidder, a colleague and friend of George and Robert Stephenson, Brunel and Joseph Locke, and
and fitted in British and Russian royal yachts, bringing engine-room temperatures down by up
like them a celebrated engineer at a time when engineers were driving the nation’s innovation
to 60 degrees. ‘I strongly recommend’ says G.T. Gordon, Commander of Her Majesty’s steam
and prosperity, was already a successful man in his fifties when he started to visit Dartmouth. He
vessel Cormorant, ‘That all Her Majesty’s steam-vessels, particularly those destined for a
came in his two-masted schooner, the May Fly, and it is thought that it was from the yacht that
tropical climate, should be fitted with this simple but invaluable apparatus.’ 2
he first saw Warfleet and the house Paradise, which he bought in 1860 and renamed Ravensbury. He came most summers after that, and within seven years was spending almost a third of his
With the Yacht Club and the Prince of Wales came a new breed of investors. George Parker Bidder
time there, long enough to be a town councillor and harbour commissioner.
and later Francis Charles Simpson – both Yacht Club members – were among outsiders who stimulated and financed what became a remarkably modern shipbuilding industry in Dartmouth on
And to get involved in the business of the town. Bidder was a man of prodigious energy and
opposite sides of the Dart at Sandquay and then Noss in the late 19th century. Like Bidder and his
pragmatism. With the fortune he had already amassed from investments in his projects –
local partner Samuel Lake, they could be self-taught men, or like Simpson could draw on family
railway shares, the Electric Telegraph Company, domestic and foreign gas companies, collieries
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