Reviving a Victorian Steamer
Deep in the Devon countryside, a remarkable boat-building project is taking shape
Robin and Tom discuss the electric motor that will be used for city cruising.
A decade ago Devon cabinet maker Robin Williams and his son Tom were browsing a back issue of Waterways World when they read All Aboard the Dragon Fly (WW Sept 2013).
The four-page article, by former WW editor Richard Fairhurst, told the story of Henry Rodolph de Salis, the gentleman canal director who built a luxury steam launch to cruise the inland waterways at the end of the 19th century.
Robin was captivated. As a boat-builder himself he was drawn not just to the tale, but also the knowledge that the boat’s plans had been published in a 1895 issue of The Engineer, the magazine of British manufacturing industry. As a lifelong craftsman he was also attracted to the precision described in the plans.
He showed the article to his son Tom, who this time was drawn to the article’s sign-off: “It’s perhaps not too far-fetched to imagine that Dragon Fly could be reborn as a modern replica, with the aid of the plans published in The Engineer. Could there be a more fitting boat for the dedicated canal explorer?”
The original Dragon Fly III on the Thames at Abingdon, near Davis’s boatyard where it was built.
Challenge accepted
Robin and Tom decided to rise to the challenge and commissioned noted boat designer Nick Branson to turn the plans for a new Dragon Fly into modern templates for a Devon-based water jet cutter firm. The result was steel plates cut precisely to de Salis’s design, and a couple of years ago Robin and Tom began the slow assembly. I visited them recently to see the progress they have been making.
What’s first startling is the remote location, on the edge of Dartmoor. The replica is being built in the garden of Robin’s cottage, a converted Victorian cider-making barn. It’s at the end of a mile-long single-track farm road, and then up a vertiginously steep private driveway.
Although flat-bottomed, Dragon Fly has a rounded bilge to allow it to moor closer to the bank in shallow sections.
Adjacent to the barn, a home-made scaffolding shed serves as the main assembly site, while another small barn across the courtyard is the workshop for the steam engine they have sourced; it came from an old American steam funfair.
They decided to build the 58ft boat in two separate halves. To be realistic, that’s the only way they’ll get it out of the shed, down the hill, to the end of the narrow lane and out to the world.
