by Christopher Hoare-2013

The first consideration for my novel "Steam and Strategem" was that it should feature a young woman of Regency Britain with a very anachronistic career, and that she would be pursued by several eligible bachelors. The career should be in one of the primary disciplines of the Industrial Revolution. She would be a commoner and at least one of the bachelors should be the heir to an aristocratic title so that the novel featured some of the social conflicts of the age. And to pay homage to the 'Britain that ruled the waves', she had to design steamships. 

The protagonist of the novel is Roberta Stephenson, the fictional daughter of George Stephenson, called The Father of Railways. She is the manager and chief designer of his steamship yard on the Clyde and is producing steamships to defeat the new French invasion plans that use steamships to nullify the British superiority in sailing warships. Napoleon's steamships are a development of the vessel built by Marquess Claude de Jouffroy in 1783 and are called pyroscaphes in honour of that promising experiment. Napoleon also has a larger steam powered ironclad constructed in secret, designed by the American, Robert Fulton, who actually built a submersible for him in 1801.

In order to have both practical steamships and Napoleon's empire meet in Regency times the novel had to use a steampunk device and concertina thirty years of steam development into a puff of wind. The first real steamship crossing of the English Channel was by the Clyde-built "Margery" in 1816...and she took 17 hours. My protagonist's "Spiteful" of 1814 can cross the Channel at ten knots. I also speeded the development of railways by the same thirty years so that the Middleton Railway of 1812, the first to use a steam locomotive, was cheek by jowl with the Liverpool and Manchester of 1830 and the South Eastern Railway (that my characters ride from Dover to London) which opened in1842.

Roberta's warships are technically called rams, that became popular with navies after the Battle of Lissa in 1866 when an Austrian flagship sank the Italian one by ramming it. I prefer, and sometimes use, the much older term galley, as the vessels of Athens, Rome, and Carthage also carried a reinforced metal prow to attack enemy ships with; but the Royal Navy called them rams. The Royal Navy lost their enthusiasm for ram bows when HMS "Victoria" was rammed and sunk at Tripoli, Lebanon, by HMS "Camperdown" in 1893 due to confusion in following an admiral's order. Roberta's rams re-ignite a new flame of the 'Nelson touch' and have a much more honorable record.

Christopher Hoare was born in Britain three months before WWII started. Later, that resulted in a scholarship place for secondary education under the Butler Education Act and eventually to some engineering training at a Ministry of Supply establishment. While he appreciated the training, he really wanted to be a writer so he left halfway through the course for a stint in the Artillery, and then in the N. African oilfields, followed by a move to Canada and work in the Arctic and Northern bush. He had intended moving on but met his wife of 43 years and is still here–diligently writing.