STABLES!

Scotsman William Gordon Stables (right, 1840-1910), a born wanderer and thrill-seeker, found himself in a plethora of roles including surgeon for the Royal Navy, journeys to remote and inhospitable lands both as a tradesman and as an ardent adventurer. His abundant and thrilling overseas expeditions became a natural inspiration for his many children's novels, mainly geared towards younger boys with their maritime and historical fantasy settings and backdrops of ships, guns and dramatic land and sea capers.
Stables, toward the late Victorian era, became very much taken with the idea of creating his own 'travelling home', after observing local Roma camps and, with their permission, obtaining an inside view of their living quarters. Stables hastily sketched out his plans and in partnership with the Bristol Wagon Company, his nomadic ambitions were realized. He bestowed the name 'The Wanderer' on his travelling horse-drawn home, with its exceptional and well-appointed interior, and was hitting the roads by the 1880's in what is generally accepted to be one of the first 'leisure caravans'.
Stables employed his own coachman, made his first major trip in The Wanderer to Scotland accompanied by his dog, a cockatoo, a cutlass and a fine revolver, and from there he head out for the open roads and invigorating British countryside.
Ever proud of his Scottish heritage, Stables was often seen traversing the landscape in traditional Scottish dress, and in the depths of winter took respite from his itinerant ways to publish books on the natural world and his fictional children's tales.
Stables is seen here in front of 'The Wanderer' in the 1890's. And this glorious rig is indeed still of this world, for it now resides, after staying with the Stables family into the 1960's, as the property of the Caravan and Motorhome Club of the UK.