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Celebrating 100 years of tethered hydroplane racing
H. H. Groves, record breaker
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In Dec 1911, a daughter was born to Herbert and Florence whom they christened Irene, and from then on, Groves’ boats would carry her name. ‘Irene 1’ was the first metre boat that Groves built and for some reason he ignored the design trends that were evolving to produce a narrow, stepless hull with two small outriggers near the bow. The power unit for the first 'Irene' was the horizontally opposed twin that had seen service in another of his aeroplanes, a biplane pusher canard. |
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With its very steeply raked shaft and minimal planning surfaces the boat, was extremely fast, but completely unstable and persisted in ‘diving in’ or capsizing on almost every run. 'Irene I' was therefore abandoned, and the hull given to 18 month old Irene and a playmate.
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In order to overcome these tendencies, ‘Irene II’ was a new design, working on lines similar to Teague and Delves-Broughton’s ‘Folly III’. The single step hull was rectangular in plan; one metre long and around eight inches beam with steeply inclined front and rear planes. |
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Initially 'Irene II' was fitted with the engine from the first 'Irene', but this was intended to rev at around 2500rpm and Groves wanted nearer 4000 for high speed. The twin vibrated excessively at the higher speeds and so a new engine was designed specifically for use in the boat. |
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The new twin cylinder motor was fabricated from steel sheet and tube, brazed together. A simple peg gear drove a rotary valve between the cylinders acting for both admission and exhaust, although there were a set of drilled ports in the cylinder wall, effectively creating a uniflow configuration. The motor along with the pumps on a separate frame was laid horizontally in the front half of the boat, with the steam generator occupying the rear half. A single burner blowlamp was mounted in the middle of the boat with the fuel tank alongside mounted fore and aft.
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The design, layout and construction of the boat and steam plant were so successful that ‘Irene II’ produced a record-breaking run of 21.9 mph in 1913 that also won a silver medal in the ME Speedboat Competition. |
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This was to be the boats swansong as it was so severely damaged when the steel line broke, that Groves scrapped the hull and transferred all the equipment to a new and identical hull that became ‘Irene III’. This boat also had a very short lifespan as it in turn was destroyed when the pole it was tethered to toppled over. Another new hull, with slight modifications was quickly built and the steam plant that had now survived two accidents went into ‘Irene IV’.
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The new boat again proved that the design and engineering was spot on, setting a new record of 24.25 mph in 1914, but this would seem to be the end of Groves’ competitive involvement with tethered hydroplanes for a while. Herbert Groves and Fred Westmoreland had become very good friends by this time, probably through meeting at the Victoria Club where Groves was a committee member, and Fred freely admitted that he based his record breaking ‘Evil Spirit’ almost precisely along the lines of ‘Irene II and III’. Indeed, in September 1915 when he had finished building his own powerplant, he visited Groves, and they put it into Irene’s hull for a test run. Right: Victoria Model
Steamboat Club circa 1920. Fred Westmoreland is seated 3rd from left |
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On 29th September they had taken Groves’ flash steam monoplane to Blackheath where they met up with Leonard Slatter, another model aircraft pioneer. Slatter was the last winner of the original ‘Wakefield’ contest and gold trophy and later became a highly decorated RAF Air Marshall. |
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After several attempts to emulate ‘Fokker speeds’ they eventually managed to wreck the 5ft 8inch span canard when it hit a bank and broke the ‘chassis’. Following the test runs, Fred returned to Salford to complete ‘Evil Spirit’, and after many trials and tribulations broke Groves’ world record with a run of 25.06 mph on Boxing day 1915. |
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Both Fred and Leonard Slatter joined the Royal Naval Air Service serving to the end of hostilities, while Groves moved in 1917 to the nearby Woolwich Arsenal, working for the rest of the war as a tool and gauge maker. In April 1918 Irene gained a brother when a son, Herbert was born by which time Herbert senior was concentrating his skills on model aircraft again.
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Indeed, it was to be one of his flash steam planes that brought about a change of career and eventually, a move from Greenwich. Around 1918 he had entered his aeroplane into a competition and was pitted against a compressed air driven machine, built by Charles Desoutter.(seen left) The quality of the engineering, allied to the superb performance of Groves’ plane and steam plant so impressed Desoutter that he offered Groves a job with his company, Desoutter Brothers, probably better known for making artificial limbs and air driven tooling than the aircraft that carried the company name. |
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There was yet another addition to the Groves family in July 1920 when a second son, Kenneth, was born. Earlier that year, the Model Engineer had lamented on the lack of entries in the annual Speedboat competition and urged their readers to consider participating. This fired Groves’ imagination, but although he still had the steam plant from ‘Irene IV’, the hull was long gone. He came up with a new boat, based on the construction and design of the original ‘Miniature Hydroplane’ using sheet Dural riveted together to form the metre long hull. The same twin cylinder motor that had done such sterling service was fitted, along with a more efficient twin coil steam generator and twin burner blowlamp. He named this new boat ‘Berti’ after his son Herbert. The boat was displayed on the South London Club stand at the 1922 ME exhibition and in the Speedboat Competition that year, ‘Berti’ recorded 21.6 mph in class D. Right: HHG photographed on Wimbledon Common in the early 1920's |
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