On 01/12/2018 11:39, Bob Eager wrote:
Some of it was still in place when I visited the house many years ago,
including the cast iron turbine - which I remember as it surprised me as
I'd been expecting a water wheel would have been used in (I think) 1902.

The restoration was actually in the 1970s. I think the turbine is still
working.

Thanks. I've worked out that I visited in 1971 so very probably before
the restoration.

And with apologies for yet more on Kipling, I checked my copy of his
autobiography which had much more in the scheme than I'd recalled:

"The House was not of a type to present to servants by lamp or
candle-light. Hence electricity, which in 1902 was a serious affair. We
chanced, at a week-end visit, to meet Sir William Willcocks, who had
designed the Assouan Dam €” a trifling affair on the Nile. Not to be
over-crowed, we told him of our project for declutching the water-wheel
from an ancient mill at the end of our garden, and using its
microscopical mill-pond to run a turbine. That was enough! €˜Dam? said
he. €˜You dont know anything about dams or turbines. Ill come and
look. That Monday morn he came with us, explored the brook and the
mill-sluit, and foretold truly the exact amount of horse-power that we
should get out of our turbine €”€˜Four and a half and no more. But he
called me Egyptian names for the state of my brook, which, till then, I
had deemed picturesque. €˜Its all messed up with trees and bushes. Cut
em down and slope the banks to one in three. €˜Lend me a couple of
Fellahîn Battalions and Ill begin, I said.

He said also; €˜Dont run your light cable on poles. Bury it. So we got
a deep-sea cable which had failed under test at twelve hundred volts €”
our voltage being one hundred and ten €” and laid him in a trench from
the Mill to the house, a full furlong, where he worked for a quarter of
a century. At the end of that time he was a little fatigued, and the
turbine had worn as much as one-sixteenth of an inch on her bearings. So
we gave them both honourable demission €” and never again got anything so
faithful.

--
Robin
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