The patent speed regulator.
The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo – Charles Deville Wells – was born at Broxbourne in the county of Hertfordshire, England, on 20 April 1841. The law dictated that births had to be registered within six weeks, but it was not until 28 May that Charles’ father finally got around to completing this formality with only days to spare. Charles Wells senior was a man who found it difficult to get around to doing anything much, except hunting, shooting, boating, catching fish and keeping bees. And he only kept bees because, as one of his friends claimed, ‘while the bees were working he could be fishing’.
Charles’ father – his full name was Charles Jeremiah Wells – was born in London in January 1799, the son of a well-to-do merchant. He grew into a striking young man with ‘sparkling blue eyes, red curls, and bluff, rather blowsy complexion … a bright, quick, most piquant lad, overflowing with wit and humour’.
At school, he made friends with another pupil, John Keats, who was destined to become one of the most illustrious of all English poets. Wells had literary ambitions of his own and the two young men talked incessantly about writing and poetry. Wells once sent some flowers to Keats, who responded by dedicating a sonnet to Wells:
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me
My sense with their deliciousness was spell’d:
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea
Whisper’d of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell’d.
As a young adult, Charles Jeremiah Wells gained a reputation as an ebullient, noisy extrovert, whose high spirits sometimes got the better of his judgement. When he was about 20, he played a mischievous trick on John Keats’ younger brother, Tom. He faked a series of love letters from an imaginary girl who is supposed to have fallen for Tom. The prank backfired. Tom’s disappointment on finding that there was, in fact, no female admirer upset him considerably. And there was a complication – Tom had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and died soon afterwards. John Keats placed the entire blame for his brother’s death on Wells.
‘That degraded Wells,’ he wrote. ‘I do not think death too bad for the villain … I will harm him all I possibly can.’ In an attempt to regain John’s trust, Wells wrote an epic poem, Joseph and his Brethren. It is similar in style to Keats’ own writing, and perhaps Wells had intended to flatter his friend. ‘I wrote it in six weeks to compel Keats to esteem me and admit my power,’ he later wrote, ‘for we had quarrelled, and everybody who knew him must feel I was in fault.’ In fact, it seems that John Keats never spoke to him or even referred to him ever again.
Although Charles Jeremiah Wells was set on pursuing a literary career, his parents forced him against his will to train as a lawyer. But he found the work dull and unsuited to his adventurous spirit. By day he worked with covenants, conveyances, deeds and affidavits; by night he caroused with new-found literary friends, who included the poet William Hazlitt. The pair ‘used to get very drunk together’ every night.
Around 1823–24 Wells decided to publish Joseph and his Brethren. But the book-buying public ignored it completely. It was a rejection that Wells never really recovered from.
In 1825 he married Emily Jane Hill, the daughter of a teacher who ran a ‘boarding and day school’ at Broxbourne. No description of her seems to have survived, but a letter that she wrote in later life displays – as we might expect of a teacher’s daughter – beautifully formed handwriting (in contrast with her husband’s spidery scrawl) and equally pristine spelling and grammar. The overall impression we gain is of a pleasant, mild-mannered, and self-effacing woman, perhaps inclined to be a little fussy and preoccupied with detail, accuracy and correctness.
Or to put it another way, she and her husband were two very different individuals. Charles was creative, lackadaisical, unscrupulous, extroverted and sometimes overbearing. Emily, on the other hand, favoured order and neatness, and made her way through life with patience and a quiet, yet strong, determination.
And, as we shall see, their son would inherit a curious mixture of these traits.
By 1831 Charles Jeremiah Wells had given up his legal practice. Around 1835 the couple relocated to Emily’s home village of Broxbourne, which then had a population of about 550. They moved into an impressive house on the main street. (Plate 11)
An inheritance from his father allowed Charles to indulge his passion for outdoor activities, to which he now devoted most of his time. As well as shooting, fishing and beekeeping, he turned his hand to horticulture. According to his wife, he ‘would have been a really good gardener but for his impatient habit of now and then pulling up plants to see how the roots were getting on, carefully putting them back again. He would do this early in the morning, before anybody else was up.’
The couple had three daughters: Emily Jane (named after her mother), Anna Maria and Florence. (Another girl and a boy were also born, but died in infancy.) So now all that was missing from their lives was a son. Every nineteenth-century family yearned for a male heir and they must have longed to fill the void left by the death of their first son. Charles Jeremiah Wells was, by now, around 40 years of age and Emily was in her mid-thirties. It was by no means too late for them to have a son, but perhaps they were beginning to sense that time was moving on.
The birth of Charles Wells in the spring of 1841 put an end to these concerns. They gave him the unusual middle name of Deville in honour of one of Charles Jeremiah’s friends – a man named James Deville who lived on the same street. Both men had connections with the parish church in the village: Wells was one of the overseers of the poor, while James Deville served as a church warden.
On 30 May, the infant Charles, and his sister, Florence, who was now nearly 4, were christened in a joint ceremony by the Reverend Francis Thackeray. Shortly afterwards, 6-week-old Charles and the rest of the family were officially recorded in Britain’s first census. This shows that Emily’s brother, Robert Hill, and his family were living at the same address, and the household includes either three or four servants.
Broxbourne would have been a splendid place for young Charles to grow up, but a few weeks after he was born, the family moved out of their home and auctioned off many of their most valuable possessions. A partial list of the goods they sold gives some impression of their comfortable lifestyle up to that point: a pianoforte by Robert Wornum, the eminent maker of musical instruments, together with two other pianos; a phaeton coach with a ‘handsome black pony’ and harness; bees, and a beehive; a four-poster bed; other beds and bedding, furniture, carpets, ‘kitchen and culinary articles … and many other valuable effects’.
What we see here are the trappings of a wealthy family being turned into ready cash. It is unclear whether they had run short of money, or whether there was some other compelling reason to move away from the area. Charles Jeremiah Wells – although he apparently did no work – had managed to live the life of a wealthy country squire, surrounded by luxury goods which most of the villagers could never dream of owning. But after giving up this carefree existence, the family – including Emily’s brother, Robert, and his wife, Mary Anne – crossed the Channel to begin a new life in France, the country where young Charles would spend most of his life.
The French département of Finistère – (literally, Land’s End) – lies in the extreme north-west corner of France, in Brittany, nearer to the south-west coast of England than to Paris. The people’s roots are remote from the rest of France, too. The railway had not yet reached these parts and communications with other parts of the country were extremely difficult. It comes as no surprise then that this isolated region had developed its own culture. The Breton language – widely spoken when the Wells family arrived in the mid-nineteenth century – has direct links to the Cornish tongue. And locally the region is known as Cornouailles – a name sharing the same origin as Cornwall.
The landscape is rugged, with rough, jagged summits and abrupt changes of gradient and elevation. The slopes are wild and featureless, often bare but sometimes dotted with heather. In winter storms batter the coast, and even in summer the weather can be capricious.
The region being so remote and lacking in the comforts that the Wells family had grown accustomed to, it is hard to fathom quite why they chose to move here in the first place. But Charles Jeremiah Wells and his extended family settled in the town of Quimper (pronounced ‘camp-air’), the principal town of the region. What they found here was an ancient community with many mediaeval buildings, where the streets had curious names, such as Rue du Chapeau Rouge (Red Hat Street) and Ruelle du Pain Cuit (Baked Bread Alley). The River Odet flows through Quimper, and although the town is some 9 miles inland, it had a thriving fishing port based on the quay near the town centre.
By any measure, with its 10,000 inhabitants, Quimper was small. Only about 100 of the inhabitants were classed as ‘foreigners’ – though a good proportion of these were in fact French-speakers from Switzerland, Belgium and elsewhere. So when a complete family of English people turned up and settled in a house near the centre of town it must have caused quite a stir, as only two other English people lived in the community.
The Wells family settled in the Rue Bourg les Bourgs, not far from the river. We can well imagine father and son taking a pleasant riverside walk along the bank of the Odet, shaded by lines of elm trees. At the quay near their home the fishermen landed their catches of sardine, mackerel, anchovy, lobster and crab, while seabirds circled overhead filling the air with their shrill, persistent cries. Small merchant ships of around 100 tons sailed around the coast from other ports and came inland as far as Quimper to load and unload cargo.
Charles senior, the passionate angler and boatman, must have found it heavenly. And his enthusiasm was infectious: beginning in boyhood and throughout his life, Charles junior inherited his father’s love of fishing, sailing and the sea. But there was a difference. While the father appreciated the poetic beauty of scenes such as this, the son was intrigued by how things worked. Interspersed among the many sailing ships, a few steam-powered vessels were gradually beginning to appear on the scene. These mechanical monsters, belching smoke and steam, smelling of coal and smoke and grease, their engines hissing and clanking, fascinated Charles Deville Wells, and triggered in him a lifelong fascination with machines, engines and all things mechanical.
These, then, are the surroundings in which Charles grew up – the foundations of his first memories. At home with the family he lived the life of an English lad, while outside he was a young Frenchman in the making. And, while we cannot be certain, the possibility exists that this sense of ‘not quite belonging anywhere’ could have shaped his personality in adulthood.
We can say with rather more confidence that his father’s unusual character influenced him to a great extent. Charles Jeremiah Wells had long been viewed by others as a powerful, almost intimidating, figure: ‘it is probable that he had some kind of mesmeric power over people,’ to quote one writer. ‘He had only to see a man to make him do anything,’ another claimed. And his son, Charles, certainly seems to have inherited his extraordinary powers of persuasion.
Not long after they settled in Quimper, Charles Jeremiah Wells seems to have undergone some form of spiritual conversion. The whole family relinquished the Protestant faith and joined the Roman Catholic Church. Wells senior began to make extraordinary claims that he was able to perform miracles and on one occasion, after a young woman of noble birth had died, Wells is said to have caused a great sensation among the population by raising her from the dead. On hearing this news the writer Theodore Watts-Dunton drily remarked, ‘I cannot recall any other poet who has had a success of this kind … [it is] a faculty which is, I think, rare among modern poets.’
In 1846 a census took place in France, and it shows that, while the basic family structure was similar to that of 1841 at Broxbourne, some important changes had also taken place. In particular, Charles’ two elder sisters are no longer present. Emily Jane would have been 19 years old at the time. Perhaps she had already gone back to England. (It is even possible that she had never come to France in the first place. We know for a fact that she was married in London four years later.)
The second sister, Anna Maria, was 17. She became a nun at Morlaix, and, as young women were allowed to join religious orders from the age of 16 with their parents’ consent, she was probably already living at a convent elsewhere at the date of the census. In their absence, Charles is likely to have become especially close to the last of the sisters, Florence, who was nearest to him in age.
The census return also provides us with a few clues about the general language barrier experienced by this English family in France, and by the French people who encountered them. The census enumerator has evidently struggled with their names. As Charles would find when he was a little older, he would often need to spell out his surname, Wells, because the letter ‘W’ does not naturally occur in French. The official has then started on the Hills, initially spelling their name with a ‘W’, too, before correcting it to an ‘H’. Finally, Mary Ann Hill is recorded as ‘Marianne’, the French equivalent.
Such details may at first seem trivial, but although Charles became thoroughly assimilated into the French way of life his foreign-sounding surname must have got in the way when meeting new people or conducting business. (As we shall see, though, there were times when this apparent drawback worked to his advantage.)
Charles and Florence grew up knowing no other country than France. Charles learned to speak French perfectly, without any hint of a foreign accent, and no doubt it was the same with his slightly older sister. In these situations it often happens that the children speak French to each other, and English to their parents. In this way an exceptionally close bond was probably forged between the two siblings, while at the same time distancing them somewhat from their parents.
As an adult Charles was short in stature and this suggests that as a child he was probably of slender build, small and perhaps delicate. We know that in later life he suffered from bronchitis, and as respiratory illnesses such as this often begin in childhood, we can be reasonably certain that he had chest problems from an early age. The illness will not have been helped by the intemperate climate of Brittany, where the winters can be exceptionally cold, wet and windy. His health would have been a cause for considerable concern on his parents’ part, especially as they had already lost a son and a daughter. However, his mental abilities made up for any physical weakness.
As the family’s only male heir, it is probable that Charles was cosseted – ‘spoiled’ might perhaps be a better word. And this, again, will have had some influence on his personality in later life.
Initially Charles Jeremiah Wells seems to have spent a good deal of his time on leisure activities as he had in England. However, the family’s financial circumstances forced him to earn a living and – with reluctance, no doubt – he took a job as a teacher of English at a local school. It is very likely that his son, Charles, attended the same establishment. In addition to his teaching, Wells senior wrote two long articles, ‘Boar Hunt in Brittany’ and ‘Love-passages in the Life of Perron the Breton’, in about 1846–47. Evidently he was attempting to revive his writing career, and things started to look hopeful when both works were published in Britain by Fraser’s Magazine.
Encouraged by these small glimmers of hope, his wife Emily made the difficult journey to England, hoping to persuade publishers to reconsider his works as a whole. Emily’s sister was married to William Smith Williams, the acclaimed literary editor who had ‘discovered’ Charlotte Brontë: her debut novel, Jane Eyre, was a runaway success at just that moment. However, even with such a first-rate connection, Emily found it impossible to get her husband’s work published. In fact, Smith Williams regarded Wells with a certain amount of trepidation, claiming on one occasion that he was ‘a most dangerous and insidious person’. Emily returned to France empty-handed.
By the beginning of the 1850s the family had left Quimper – but without Florence. Although she was only 13 they left her behind, and in the 1851 census we find her living near the quay ‘in the care of’ a Monsieur and Madame Bonnemaison. A little later she followed the same path as her older sister, changed her name from Florence to Marie, and became a nun at a convent at Isère, in the Rhône-Alpes region of eastern France.
For Charles Deville Wells, now about 10 years old, it must have been a wrench to be parted from his sister and to turn his back on the town where he had spent his childhood. But now there were just the three of them – Charles, his father and his mother. Abandoning the craggy hills of Finistère, they made their way right across France to the warm breezes and calm waters of the Mediterranean and the city of Marseille.
The contrast between their former home in Brittany and this new city would have been overwhelming. With a population of around 200,000, Marseille was twenty times larger than Quimper. It was France’s third largest community and the third largest port in the entire world.
The train bringing them to the city arrived at St Charles Station, high above and a little outside the limits of the city. From here the view stretched across the rooftops to the old port where the masts of the sailing ships resembled a forest on the water. Further still, to either side of the harbour mouth, stood two fortresses of cream-coloured stone – the Fort St Nicolas to the left, the Fort St Jean to the right – which looked as if they might have been uprooted from the Middle East during the Crusades and set down in nineteenth-century Marseille.
Just around the headland, beyond the Fort St Jean, vast new docks were being constructed to cope with Marseille’s ever-expanding trade with the world beyond: timber from Odessa and the United States of America; rice from Italy and India; wax from the Levant; tobacco from Greece and Turkey; sponges from Tunis and Cyprus; and lead from mines in Spain. And from here commodities and finished products were sent out to every Mediterranean port, to the furthest outpost of the Empire of France and to the world beyond.
Perhaps the first difference Charles would have sensed was in the climate: the cold, damp winds that troubled the Brittany coastline never reached this far south. Instead Marseille shared sunshine and hot, dry air with the deserts of Tunis and Algeria, a day’s journey across the sea. If we are correct in thinking that young Charles suffered from a bronchial illness, the warm Mediterranean climate is likely to have brought about a rapid improvement. Indeed, this may be the reason why the family moved so far south. Charles Jeremiah Wells took up another teaching post: perhaps the offer of a better paid job was another factor in their decision to relocate.
Charles’ interest in boats and ships – especially steamships – was further stimulated by the sights and sounds of Marseille’s docks. When the family made the city their home in about 1850, steamships were quite rare, with just thirty of them based at the port. But the next decade witnessed spectacular growth in the adoption of the new technology. By 1860 the number of steamers had quadrupled, and the average vessel was nearly three times as large. As he grew older Charles witnessed these developments at first hand, and by the time he was in his twenties, he had a job connected with engineering or shipbuilding at the local ironworks and dockyards.
He was a dark-haired, moderately handsome young man, if rather small in stature. People were drawn to this quiet – some would say very retiring – young man with his polite, gentle manner. From his speech no one would guess that he was anything but a Frenchman, and it was only his rather difficult foreign name that betrayed the fact that he was English. From his father he inherited a somewhat verbose style of writing, and a rather idiosyncratic approach to spelling and punctuation. He spoke ‘with great abundance’, and if he had a noticeable fault, it was his tendency to exaggerate, a habit for which the people of Marseille also have something of a reputation.
His understanding of machines was comprehensive. As an employee, he was painstaking, with a confidence in his own abilities that was amply justified by his success in practice. He never shirked from getting his hands dirty – something which inevitably happened when dealing with oily, sooty steam engines – and often he wore rather shabby clothes as a result. His leisure pursuits focussed on the sea – boats and fishing – but he also loved music and had learned to play the piano and the organ well. He very seldom drank alcohol, and never smoked.
Eventually the family had settled in the Boulevard Notre Dame, within sight of the Old Harbour. One of their neighbours, Madame Thérèse Jartoux, was a widow who had moved to that part of town following the death of her husband, a merchant, the year before. Her daughter, Marie Thérèse Joséphine Jartoux, was about the same age as Charles, and the two of them were soon engaged. The wedding ceremony took place on 8 May 1866. Their first and only child, Marie Antoinette Florence Charlotte de Ville-Wells,1 was born at 4.00 p.m. on 31 March 1867.
In the register recording her birth, it appears that Charles has adopted an entirely new forename: he is shown as Louis Charles de Ville-Wells, and it seems that this was the name he was known by within the family. The register also shows that he has changed jobs in the year that has elapsed since his marriage, and he is now described as an ‘engineer at the factories of la Nerthe’ (a suburb to the north-west of Marseille). This is almost certainly a reference to the cement works, which employed many local people. However he doesn’t seem to have stayed in this post for very long, and soon he was back at his old haunts in the dockyards. In common with many of his contemporaries, he almost certainly had no formal qualifications from a technical college: instead he would have learned his trade through practical experience. In France this class of engineer was called ingénieur civil.
By 1868 he was self-employed, selling his skills to local manufacturing companies and shipping lines. He could not have chosen a better time to go freelance. In the fifteen or so years since he had come to Marseille the flow of imports and exports through the city’s docks had nearly doubled. This expansion was boosted still further by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which allowed Marseille-based shipping lines ready access to ports in the Far East, such as Saigon, Hong Kong and Yokohama. Sailing ships, however, were extremely difficult to manoeuvre along the canal, which ran north–south, because the prevailing winds blew from west to east, and steam-powered vessels therefore took over quickly.
The patent speed regulator.
Charles worked with the largest shipping company in Marseille, the Messageries Maritimes, operators of a steamer network covering most of the globe and based at the local docks at La Joliette (Plate 2). He also carried out assignments for the Compagnie Fraissinet, a respected local steamship owner with about fifteen vessels. At the same time he invented a device which he claimed to be ‘an improvement for regulating the speed of marine steam engines’. He applied for a French patent on it, and this was granted on 15 December 1868 (No. 83,451). Recognising, perhaps, that the potential for such an instrument might be even greater in Britain, he also registered the invention in London a year later.
The owners of the Fraissinet Company must have been impressed with his idea because they bought the patent from him for the handsome sum of 5,000fr. – equivalent to five years’ salary. Subsequently he went to Russia and worked for Count Branicki, a nobleman of Polish origins, who owned sugar beet farms and a refinery at Bila Tserkva in the Ukraine. Modern techniques were being introduced to improve output, and it seems probable that Charles’ role was to set up and maintain the new machinery. Over a short period sugar production in the area rose more than tenfold.
His marriage to Marie Thérèse opened up yet more opportunities. His brother-in-law, Henry Jartoux, was also an engineer: he constructed various machines from Charles’ drawings and sketches, including steam engines and a device which Charles had invented for purifying the residue of olive oil. Henry had lived in Spain for a time (one of his children was born there) and it may be through his connections that Charles obtained work as engineer to a Spanish lead mine, where he stayed for a year and a half. His travels also took him to Austria and Italy, and he is said to have acquired a good command of the Italian language.
Towards the end of the 1870s Charles must have been encouraged by the direction his career was taking: he was evidently well thought of by those who employed him, and was successful in his work. And the money he had earned from the sale of the patent had put him on a sound financial footing – if only temporarily. His parents moved to a large detached house at 2 Montée des Oblats near Notre-Dame de la Garde – the landmark cathedral which towers over the city. Their move to this property may well have been funded by Charles.
Charles himself, with his wife and his daughter, lived for a time at the home of his mother-in-law, but by the late 1870s they had moved to St Tronc, on the south-eastern outskirts of the city. From this address he applied for another patent in early 1878 – this time for a ‘hygienic ice-cooled jug’.
It was in that same year that Paris hosted the 1878 Exposition Universelle, – the largest event of its kind that the world had ever seen. The showgrounds occupied a 190 acre site beside the Seine, a mile or so from the Bois de Boulogne, and were so extensive that a walk around the perimeter – even at a brisk pace – would have taken well over an hour. The fair opened with great ceremony on 1 May, and by the time it closed in November, 13 million visitors had passed through its gates, witnessing many stunning innovations, some of which would lead the way into a new technological era. Among them were Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone; Thomas Edison’s phonograph; and early examples of the refrigerator, the typewriter and the passenger lift. There was even a prototype aeroplane. The head of the Statue of Liberty was on display (this was later shipped to America with the other parts of the figure, and the structure as a whole was assembled on Liberty Island, New York).
Although there is no positive proof that Charles Deville Wells attended the show, we know for certain that he visited Paris at this time. But for a man so closely involved with engineering and inventions it is unthinkable that he would have made the eighteen-hour journey to the capital without seeing the exposition: indeed, it was almost certainly the main purpose of his trip. The major industrial powers, France, Britain, Germany and the United States, had all tried to outshine one another with their exhibits of engineering leviathans. Thirteen immense boilers, housed in five separate buildings, supplied steam to the static and marine engines on display. For Charles this was heaven on earth: a place where he could walk around the pavilions for hours on end, talking to the engineers and inventors, making contacts and inspecting the huge array of machinery on show.
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1 Her middle name is undoubtedly a tribute to Charles’ sister, Florence. On some later documents the name is written ‘Florine’ but this is no doubt a mis-transcription. Incidentally, this is the first example of the family name ‘de Ville-Wells’ in this exact format.