Getting into Steam, the 60s and 70s.

STAR at Wopleston with the living van and water cart after a long day's steaming in the hot summer of 74.

When I was at school at Frensham Heights in Surrey UK, I became friends with a certain Chris Edmonds. Chris lived in Buckinghamshire and owned a Singe Crank Compound Traction Engine, a Burrell called MAJESTIC.

As our friendship blossomed, I was eventually invited to his home for the weekend to have a couple of days steaming. It was cold winter, but we got things working and I learn't the basics of lighting raising steam and driving a steam road locomotive.

I was hooked!

From that moment on my whole life revolved around things steam. I had always been a practical person, quite good at making things work and the challenge of the combination of boiler, steam, water and mechanical bits that fly round was just so great for me.

Let's move on a bit, I left school and got married, had a house and garden of my own. What was missing, a steam engine!

I had had Land Rovers, since I had my driving licence along with sundry other vehicles and stationery engines, Even a Foden Timber Tug like this one.

Things came and went. I remember a David Brown 25D farm tractor and plough that I resurected, burn't nearly as much oil as diesel, but it was great fun; I even won a couple of ploughing matches with it. I was the organiser of a number of steam engine rallies in our area for the Three Counties Steam Preservation Society, Liphook along with the Liphook Fire Station organisers, Frensham Steam Festival and Syon Park's two Ages of Steam.

One evening a neaighbour Alex Bicknell came in and asked me about my hobby, we got discussing steam engines and the fact that recently I had managed to buy a Wallis and Steevens 1904 single cylinder 10 ton roller from Charlie Russell at Bordon in Hants and that with a friend Roland we were gradually taking it apart ready for boiler works at Charlie's sandpit.

This is how I bought Star, when she was in a Chichester Scrap Yard, now covered over with the by-pass.

Of course Alex got caught by the bug. It wasn't too long that he had bought a Wallis Advance roller and we had both of them in his garden getting on with the renovation. The single cylinder Wallis that eventually got called "STAR" was in a very bad way when we worked on it. The front tube plate, tubes and smokebox had to be remade and replaced, the top of the firebox needed building up around the fusible plug, All the motionwork was cleaned and polished to gleeming steel, a couple of firebox stays needed replacing. We did this all in Alex's back garden, both engines went for their first run around haslemere for a local fête, After that we spent a couple of years on the road at weekends going from one rally to another, we both had living vans, mine an Eddison, Alex' a bedford van chassis on which he had built a wooden living van.

Also at Frensham Heights I met Stephen Hubbuck who caught steam from Chris. He managed to buy a lovely Wallis from Passfield from the local mill owner. He did this up and eventually when he moved down to near Blandford Forum he suggested that I and Roland should take his engine and my living van from Blandford to Battersea where he had booked the engine in to a very large steam rally in the middle of the capital, London, but that is another story!

Pat