Who We Are...
Great Granddaughters of Captain WH Richards
Cunard passenger list showing WH en route to New York for his USA tour with Eric, 1929
The future
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We are two cousins, Deborah Richards in the UK and Andrina Richards now living in Italy but brought up in Canada and the USA. We grew up several thousand miles apart meeting only once as children. Through our Grandfather W.E. Richards and our fathers, brothers George and Peter Richards, we were aware of a unique shared family history - one that has recently brought us closer together in a joint search to uncover an intriguing mystery which has driven us to explore our roots.
n 2012 we discovered that we had been individually researching our Great Grandfather’s lost robots Eric and George. Since then we have met regularly and have been working together to create a shared archive and research the lost story of Captain W H Richards and his robots. This has resulted in many hours of research, skype and email communications and the cataloguing of materials. New information becomes available all the time thanks to improved data on the internet and digitized archives and so we are able to add to our research.
In 2012 Andrina made an important connection with Ben Russell, curator of Mechanical Engineering at the London Science Museum who was most interested to learn more of Captain WH Richards. After a series of meetings with Ben and his colleagues we are delighted that Eric Robot is to be recreated and will feature in the forthcoming blockbuster Robots exhibition to be first held in London, opening 8 February 2017 following a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The replica is being built by expert roboticist Giles Walker in London and will tour the UK and other various world exhibition venues for five years and then be added to the Science Museum’s permanent collections. We have also jointly co-written a 4000 word chapter in the Robots publication accompanying the exhibition telling the story of our Great Grandfather and our research so far. We are hoping that the considerable interest in Eric Robot created by the Robots exhibition and new links made through this will keep our project alive for some time to come. We plan further research and promotion of Captain W H Richards achievements by telling our unique family story potentially through talks, exhibitions, publications and film. |
We would love to hear from you! Please email:
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If you have any information relating to Captain WH Richards, WE Richards or Eric, George and Robert Robots we would love to hear from you as there are still so many gaps in the fascinating story of WH and his robots- not least the whereabouts of Eric and George or Robert!!
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