The man who is master of a caravan, says a writer, enjoys that perfect freedom which is denied to the tourist, whose movements are governed by the time-table. He can go where he likes, stop when he lists, go to bed at the hour which suits him best, or get up or lie a-dreaming, knowing there is a not a train to catch nor a waiter’s convenience to consult.
“If the neighbourhood does not suit the van-dweller, all he has to do is hitch the horses and move to more eligible quarters. The door of his hotel is always open. There is no bill to pay … In a caravan one has all the privacy of a private residence, with the convenience of being able to wheel it about.”
There can be few readers who haven’t been on a caravan holiday (or several!) at some point, and some of you reading this now will be caravan owners. Or perhaps you’ve gone all posh and got a motorhome?
Others may have not-entirely-pleasant childhood memories of family caravan holidays, cramped in with the rain hammering down on the roof, but there’s no arguing with the numbers. There are well over half a million caravans in the UK. And when you add in the almost quarter of a million motorhomes, you can see how this is a trend that’s not going away anytime soon. Indeed, if the situation in the Gulf of Hormuz isn’t sorted soon, we could be looking at a bumper year for UK “staycation” holidays.
You can go onto the M5 any day of the week and spot plenty of caravans and motorhomes, and if you do it on the weekend the school summer holidays start they’re likely to be your companions in the traffic jams.
And it’s all thanks to (or the fault of) the Bristol Waggon and Carriage Works and of an eccentric Scottish doctor named William Gordon Stables. The quote above is from his 1886 book, The Cruise of the Land-Yacht Wanderer, an account of the first ever caravan holiday. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was about to start a craze.
Stables (1840-1910) was born in Banffshire, Scotland into a modestly prosperous farming family. He studied medicine at Aberdeen University (after deciding against theology and a church career) and qualified in 1862. While still a student he was fond of adventure and apparently travelled to the Arctic twice. On the first occasion his ship, stuck in ice, was reported to have been lost. He returned home to find his father and sister in mourning clothes.
Stables was proud of his Scottish roots and often favoured Highland dress(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
“Who’s dead?” he asked.
“You are,” they said.
Though he aspired to joining the army, he felt unable to afford it and instead was commissioned into the Royal Navy as an Assistant Surgeon, serving initially on a frigate. He saw much of the world and took part in the Navy’s anti-slavery operations off West Africa, but this badly affected his health – it was probably malaria – and he invalided out of the service on half-pay. He spent a few more years as a merchant seaman before coming ashore.
He was living in Bristol in 1874 when he married Elizabeth McCormack, daughter of a Welsh sea captain, at St Peter’s church, Clifton, then the most fashionable society church in the city. The couple soon after settled in Berkshire and would go on to have four sons and two daughters.
There was no way the family could survive on his naval pension and Stables took to writing to make a living. He wrote a lot about animals, being a leading authority on dog breeding. As a doctor, he also wrote on medical subjects – he was even a regular contributor on health matters to the Girls’ Own Paper. He doubled up with an advice column for the Boys’ Own Paper, recommending cold baths, hot porridge and long walks as the cure for most ills.
He hated drugs of all sorts, mostly on account of his struggle to overcome his own addiction to chloral hydrate, a now-forgotten drug which is banned in many countries though is sometimes used in the UK to treat chronic insomnia. It’s a sort of forerunner to the benzodiazepines used nowadays.
In Victorian times, though, it was something of a wonder-drug, a sedative that was also used as a painkiller and even anaesthetic, but was administered extensively in lunatic asylums. How and why Stables became addicted is unclear; perhaps it was used to treat the “jungle fever” he contracted while in the Navy, or perhaps he used it to treat the pain after some accident?
But it was as the author of adventure stories for boys that he came into his own, producing a prodigious quantity of novels and short stories in which plucky British lads, often from humble backgrounds, succeed against the odds through courage and self-reliance. Many of his yarns had naval settings, or took place in exotic faraway parts of the world which Stables had been to.
While few have heard of him now, and no-one reads his stories, he was hugely popular among young men and boys in the later years of the 19th century. He also ventured into tales of the future, the genre that made the fortune of his contemporary Jules Verne. In a poll of Boys’ Own readers in the 1890s he was rated far more popular than the Frenchman.
(Although the story goes that while he was a prolific author, he was a terrible writer whose editors had to work hard to add some flair to his prose.)
He supposedly caught the caravanning bug when he saw a group of gypsies and fantasised about their supposedly carefree existence. The reality was nothing of the kind, of course, but the late Victorian period saw a sort of minor fetish for Romani and their culture. It was at this time that a lot of Romani terms made their way into English slang – “cove” for a male person; “wonga” for money and, above all, “pal” for a friend.
William Gordon Stables’ design for the caravan he commissioned may have been influenced by his experience aboard cramped Royal Navy ships(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
Stables was obviously doing well enough from his writing to commission the Bristol Waggon Works to build him a caravan of his own design. This was to be an altogether grander affair than a small gypsy caravan. It would be a vehicle weighing two tons, much of it based on his naval experience. So there would be a parlour with a sofa/bed, table and a stool and at the back a “galley” for the cooking, complete with stove and sink. It would cost him £300 – the equivalent of ten years’ wages for a working man at the time.
The Bristol company has now faded from living memory – it closed in the 1920s. But in its time it was a major local employer, based on a massive 13-acre site at Lawrence Hill, and building everything from coaches for the gentry to farm carts and grocers’ delivery vans. At the prestige end of the business it also made railway coaches, some of them very luxurious.
The company also had a flourishing export business, and Gordon Stables’ caravan was partly based on its “Bible Wagon” design. Perhaps this is the most bizarre footnote in the firm’s history; it made caravans for use by travelling preachers around the world, including America’s Wild West. There is reportedly even a Bristol-made Bible Wagon in a museum in South Africa.
When all was ready, and after a few trial runs with his family, he took his caravan, which he named The Wanderer, on an epic journey from his Berkshire home to Scotland and back again.
He did not go alone. He engaged a driver who he simply calls “John G.” whom he described as a solid, dependable fellow.
There was also Alfred Foley, aged 20, and whom he had known since he was a boy. He considered Alfred an honest and God-fearing lad who did as his mother told him and was unlikely to get himself tangled up with any of the lasses they would meet along the way.
Alfred was to be his valet, cook and outrider. This last role was very important – he would ride ahead of the caravan on a tricycle to check the roads and bridges up ahead would be able to cope with the two-ton Wanderer.
The Wanderer was pulled by two horses, Cornflower and Pea Blossom and accompanied by a large Newfoundland dog called Hurricane Bob, though he was to be called Robert on Sundays and Bank Holidays.
Stables with two of his children, plus his dog Hurricane Bob and caravan the Wanderer. That’s probably Alfred Foley on the right(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
Inside the caravan in a cage was a cockatoo called Polly, who spoke a lot and was an accomplished mimic. She would only eat her seeds after dropping them in her water first. “When frozen one day last winter I found her throwing the seeds on top of the ice and saying ‘Poor dear Polly!’ in a most mournful tone of voice.”
And off they went on their 1300-mile adventure, which Stables wrote up. In the days when people moved around less and when roads were sometimes dusty/muddy tracks this was an adventure. The Cruise of the Land-Yacht Wanderer also makes it clear that while they usually attracted a lot of kindness and even more curious children wherever they went, they often also attracted ridicule and even resentment.
One night Stables awoke to hear strange noises of someone trying to break in. Being a former Navy man he had equipped himself to fight in the time-honoured Navy way, with pistol in one hand and sword in the other. But the culprits ran off before he could bring them to battle, and most modern caravanners go on holiday unarmed.
The book, published 140 years ago this year, was a success, inspiring imitators who could afford it to become “temporary gypsies” themselves. One of the early customers for the Bristol firm’s new line was the Duke of Newcastle, who commissioned a vehicle he called ‘The Bohemian’ for a trip to Europe.
Others followed, and by 1907 there were enough enthusiasts to form the Caravan Club of Great Britain and Ireland. William Gordon Stables accepted the vice-presidency of the club though he does not seem to have played any active part in it.
By this stage he was in poor health, and he seems to have attached more importance to his work for the Sea Birds Protection Society and the animal welfare Humanitarian League.
He was a familiar figure at dog, cat and agricultural shows, usually turning up in full Highland dress.
He died at Twyford in 1910, while the Wanderer remained in the family’s hands. His daughter Ottoline donated it to the Caravan Club in the 1960s, and they in turn found a home for it in Bristol.
Wanderer was here for over 40 years. Most readers who visited the old Industrial Museum at one time or another will remember it.
It was even taken out for a spin once more in 1982 to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Caravan Club. “Operation Wanderer” was organised by the Caravan Club and Bristol’s museums service. The Wanderer, complete with Labrador and cockatoo, was drawn by two horses all the way from Bristol to the Reading Horse Show.
In 1982, the Wanderer travelled from Bristol’s Industrial Museum to Berkshire, complete with a man in a tricycle re-enacting the role of Alfred Foley(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
It also visited Windsor where it was inspected by the Duke of Edinburgh, who narrowly avoided a painful nip from the bird.
When the Industrial Museum closed to make way for M Shed, Wanderer was handed back, following some loving restoration work by museum staff and volunteers, to the Caravan Club.
In 2007, to mark the Centenary of the Caravan Club – nowadays the Caravan and Motorhome Club – Wanderer even paid a visit to Buckingham Palace. It’s currently at the club’s Broadway campsite in Worcestershire.
In 2007 – Wanderer is invited to Buckingham Palace to mark the centenary of the Caravan Club(Image: Lewis Whyld/PA)
Meanwhile, caravanning fell into decline after the First World War, and it was really only with the appearance of new lightweight caravans which could be towed by car that it revived. Now, though, it had become the domain of the middle classes and, in the decades after the Second World War, working people as well.
So really, technological change – cheaper cars and cheaper, lighter caravans – and the inter-war American craze for “tin can tourism” are the real foundations of modern caravanning.
And indeed, the manufacture of caravans – and now motorhomes as well – still goes on here. Bailey of Bristol (www.baileyofbristol.co.uk) in Bedminster, have been in business since 1948.
But William Gordon Stables, with the help of the Bristol Waggon and Carriage Works, got there first:
“And the Wanderer is steered up a narrow lane and safely landed in a tiny meadow o’ergrown with rank green grass and docks and sheltered with fine elms and ashes. And here we light tonight.
“Supper will soon be ready … then beds will be made, shutters put up. I will read and write, while Foley in his cabin will write up his road-log, and by eleven every one on board will be wrapped, we hope, in dreamless slumber.
“This, then is a true and faithful account of one day in the life of a gentleman gipsy. Quiet and uneventful, but very pleasant and almost idyllic.
“Do you care for the picture, reader?”