Richard Stephens and the Clevedon Motor Cars- William Fairney
In the pits of 19th-century Wales, the boywonder Richard Stephens learned how to maintain steam engines and to drill rock for ore. As a young man, his skills took him round the world and brought acquaintance with two of the greatest engineers of the day: Ranson Olds (of the Oldsmobile) and Thomas Edison. Returning to England with his Somerset-born wife and a growing family, Stephens took work driving a steam roller on Clevedon’s roads and, in his free time, set about building a bicycle in a small workshop. He showed moving pictures on an Edison phonograph, carrying it around the Somerset countryside and, in 1895, opened a Kinetoscope parlour at 2 Park Street, Bristol.
And then, in 1898, from his Clevedon Motor Car and Engineering Works (on the Triangle in Clevedon), trundled the first Stephens motorcar. Autocar described the prototype as like a ‘dogcart’ (with its back-to-back seating) but was impressed by the quality of engineering and the ride.
Locally, the sight and sound of a horseless carriage caused a sensation and soon Stephens was offering pleasure rides to Cheddar and Burrington Combe. In 1900, he built a six-seater taxi for Bath. Stephens made 12 vehicles in all, each one of them hand-built by himself and his team of three or four apprentices – the pistons and rods, springs and crankcases, even the seats were turned and crafted and fitted on site. The wheels came from John Starley in Coventry; the independently sprung suspension was Stephens’ own invention.
In Richard Stephens and the Clevedon Motor Cars, author Bill Fairney writes about the Stephens cars, his bicycles and other inventions from the perspective of an engineer accustomed to making things and making them work. He offers a short history of steam power and moving pictures, pneumatic tyres and internal combustion engines, and places their inventors in the workshop, with grubby hands and a pencil behind the ear.
As an engineer, Fairney, like Stephens, wants answers to particular problems. Stephens’ patent engine turner (essentially a giant rotisserie for rotating an engine in a workshop) is described not as a stroke of genius, but something that works. The Stephens’ collapsible stretcher for ambulances – a device that saw action on the Somme – fulfils a need. We are not told how Stephens spent long nights gazing into the fireplace or tinkering with bits of metal, but we get to see the results of his restless, inventive mind.
A clue to Stephens the man is in his bankruptcy. Sir Edmund Elton at Elton Court – potter and inventor – sees in Stephens a like-minded soul, and when his business wobbles, offers to underwrite his work. The two work together and – in an episode that the book catches neatly –devise and manufacture a means of turning on and off gas lights remotely, putting Clevedon’s gas-lighter out of work. Do you know how it’s done?
Elton and Stephens feature in a photograph standing on top of the little clock tower in Cleveden – the jolly aristocrat and his pal. In other pictures, Stephens’ kindly, avuncular face shines like an invitation to tea in the workshop. And its in that workshop that this book mostly stays. There are contributions from Robin Loder, who owns the two surviving cars, and some excellent photographs covering 80 years of the cars in action. Car and man – they don’t build ’em like they used to.
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