Camborne Cheers Trevithick Day
On the last Saturday in April, the streets of the Cornish mining town of Camborne are alive with the sight and sounds of brass bands, dancers and the hiss and whistles of steam engines. The townsfolk are celebrating their most famous son, Richard Trevithick.
Trevithick was born on 13th April 1771 at Pool, within sight of the rocky granite outcrop of Carn Brea. The location of the miner’s cottage in Station Road is now marked by a memorial made of Cornish granite. At this time Camborne was only a village, experiencing the growth to its present size in the mid-19th century. In 1772, the Trevithick family moved to a cottage in the village of Penponds, which is today in the care of the National Trust, and known as Trevithick Cottage. At the age of 18, Richard followed his engineer father into the tin-mining industry and such was his aptitude for engineering that he became a consulting engineer two years later. This was despite having a poor academic record at school! His father died in 1796, and a year later he married Jane Harvey, also from an engineering family, with whom he went on to have six children. Known as the “Cornish giant” he was 6 feet 2 inches tall and powerfully built. It was not surprising that, besides engineering, he had a reputation as a wrestler.
Following James Watt’s earlier patents, Trevithick was the first British engineer to experiment with high-pressure steam. By the turn of the century, when Watt’s patents expired, he was well on his way to developing the world’s first steampowered road locomotive capable of carrying passengers. This had its test run on Christmas Eve 1801, when it made its famous ascent of Tehidy Road in Camborne. This event is forever immortalised in the Cornish folk song “Going up Camborne Hill Coming Down”, beloved of male voice choirs and rugby teams alike! The engine earned the nickname “Puffing Devil” and an exact replica, completed in 2001, is the star turn in the steam vehicle parade on Trevithick Day, including the ascent of Camborne Hill. Watching the driver and his helpers try to steer this unwieldy contraption through the town’s narrow streets lined with onlookers gives us a clue to the origin of this soubriquet! In 1803 he demonstrated a second steam carriage in London, but lost money on the venture.
Trevithick followed his road locomotives with a rail locomotive in 1804. This hauled a load of 10 tons of iron and 70 men for nine miles at Pen-yDarren Ironworks near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. It has been said that this event heralded the beginning of the railway age.
In 1808 he built what was to be his last steam railway locomotive, which he named Catch Me Who Can. He took the engine from Bridgnorth, where it was built, to London, where he had set up a circular track near Euston Square. Here the engine and carriages were demonstrated against horse power in a “steam circus”, but again he had to halt the venture, this time due to a derailment. Nonetheless, he had successfully run the world’s first fare-paying passenger train. The Severn Valley Railway at Bridgnorth in Shropshire is currently building a replica of Catch Me Who Can, and holds, an annual “Rally in the Valley” inspired by Trevithick (http://www. catchmewhocan.org.uk).
Trevithick then turned to civil and marine engineering projects, including an attempt at a tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe. This failed when
the tunnel flooded and he narrowly escaped drowning. By now living in London, his next idea was a steam tug design followed by a number of other marine projects, but none was successful. Disaster struck in 1810 when he contracted typhus and was forced to return to Cornwall. The following year, recovered from the illness, he was declared bankrupt.
For a few years he worked on Cornish pumping engines and in 1813 he received a visitor from the Peruvian silver mines interested in his high-pressure steam pumping engines. So it was in 1816 that Trevithick set sail from Penzance to Peru, and spent the next 11 years travelling around South and Central America. During this time he had many adventures, including a stint in Simon Bolivar’s revolutionary army, and was almost devoured by an alligator. Most of his money spent, he returned to Falmouth in 1827 with only the clothes on his back. He had been fortunate enough to have met fellow steam pioneer James Stephenson in Costa Rica, who gave him enough money for his fare home.
Trevithick never again built road or railway engines, and his last project was a commission to work on a new steam turbine in Kent. After a year on this project, lodging in Dartford, Trevithick fell ill with pneumonia and died in his hotel room on 22nd April 1833. He was penniless and no members of his family were present. He was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in St. Edmund’s burial ground, Dartford. The burial ground closed in 1857 and he is now remembered by a plaque on the wall. In the years that followed his death, his contribution to steam engineering has been commemorated in several places, including Westminster Abbey, where a stained-glass window was erected in 1888. This depicts nine Cornish saints with Trevithick himself as St. Piran, Cornwall’s patron saint. There is also a wall plaque at University College in Gower Street, close to where Trevithick held his “steam circus”. In 2007 a blue plaque was unveiled on the wall of the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel in Dartford, where he died.
Of course he has also been remembered in the town of his birth. As well as the birthplace monument and Trevithick Cottage, a magnificent statue outside the Passmore Edwards Library in Camborne was unveiled by the Duke of Kent, Prince George, in 1932 in front of 10,000 people. Sculpted by L.S. Merrifield, it depicts the “Cornish giant” holding a model of his locomotive and a pair of dividers. As a living memorial, in 1984 the Trevithick Society planned the first Trevithick Day which was held on 28th April. Special dances were devised, with the morning dance consisting of girls dressed as “bal maidens”, women who used to work on the surface dressing the tin ore, and in the afternoon the Trevithick Dance, with the women wearing the Cornish colours of gold edged with black. The highlight is a parade of rarely seen steam vehicles, latterly including the appearance of the replica “Puffing Devil”.
Sadly, Trevithick’s achievements were not recognised in his lifetime. However, the annual celebrations in Camborne have helped to rectify this, and have spread farther afield, to South Wales. The townsfolk of Merthyr, where his railway locomotive was first demonstrated, held their own Trevithick Day on 21st February 2014, the 210th anniversary of the historic event. In Camborne, meanwhile, organisers worked hard establishing funding to secure future events after wet Cornish weather on Trevithick Day in 2014 kept the crowds away, leading to heavy financial losses. They have been successful so far, and I have a feeling that the spirit of Trevithick will not be allowed to die!