LADY ASTOR'S ELECTRIC CANOE

Originally costing more than a typical house, Liddesdale was something of a luxury item. She is back to her former glory and ready once more to take passengers silently down the river

- BARRY PICKTHALL

A 25ft (7.6m) wooden, electric-powered canoe commissioned by Lady Nancy Astor after the First World War has been fully restored for the National Trust to provide visitors to Cliveden, the former Astor family estate on the Thames, a taste of aristocratic life on the river during the 1920s.

Liddesdale was one of a number of these clinker canoes built by the Ray Motor Company and other boatyards on the Thames, mainly to service the fastgrowing popularity of day trips on the various parts of the river intersected by train lines. Teddington, Waltonon-Thames, Chertsey, Weybridge, Marlow, Maidenhead and Henley all had rowing skiffs for hire, and these powered canoes were the crème de la crème of the hire fleets. At a time when the typical house cost £300, a car £250 and the average wage was £161, these canoes represented power and wealth for those who could afford one. The first electric canoe built by The Ray Motor Company in 1920 was Aris, and cost £460. The three-year project to research and restore Liddesdale has cost nearly £150,000, much of it raised from donations started with £9,000 to buy the boat, from two benefactors keen get the project under way.

Nowadays, at a time when it’s hard enough to find a charging point for electric cars between London and Oxford, it may surprise readers to learn that back in the 1920s there were 36 charging points on the Thames between Teddington and Lechlade, with more than 400 electric boats registered on the river during that time.