Greenwich and whaling

 

Over the past week or so I have quite inadvertently been reading quite a bit about whales - I mean whaling--  the slaughter of hapless creatures  in the southern oceans during earlier centuries In order to provide oil for various purposes in our cities.

I thought I could write something about whaling in relation to Greenwich this week. Over the years I’ve seen things which suggest Greenwich was a whaling port – which it absolutely wasn’t!  Those claims are most of them based on the presence of the Enderby family in Greenwich – and I’ll come  back to them in a moment. The other thing is the discovery few years ago by Pre-Construct Archaeology of a whale skeleton down on Bay Wharf on the Peninsula – it was cleaned up and studied and put on exhibition but it was nothing to do with the local industry. Like many others the poor creature was lost, or ill,  and died on the foreshore. I seem to remember that one whale skeleton was an arthritic old lady - and , goodness, I do sympathise! Some beachings in the 17^th century led to some fairly lurid pamphlets -  and please don’t think people were any better behaved towards these creatures then than the worst would be now!   Hundreds of people came to sightsee, climbing all over it, injuring it, tormenting it and behaving badly all round.

I’ve also been reading a book by somebody who was nothing really to do with Greenwich  - just that his brother lived here.  He was a young chap who went out on whaling ships working as a ship’s doctor -and I’ll come to him in due course.

Clearly the most important thing about the whaling industry and Greenwich is the Enderby  family who lived here and who had  factory on the Greenwich peninsula. But their presence here is less to do with whaling than we think .    Some years ago the Docklands History Group had a conference on whaling. London and the Whaling Trade . Thames & Docklands History Group. Events & Publications.   There were several papers given there of great interest but in particular one by Charles Payton. "The Enderby Family and Their World". In it he traces Enderby family business activities through several generations of tanners and later as oil merchants in inner south London and the City.  He also describes their activities and business ownership in pre-independence  America and how it was decided to move the business over into London because of possible instability  in America. He covers much else in a ground breaking account.

In the late 17^th and early 18^th Enderby ships hunted in the southern oceans; opening up new areas, recording them too.  Their Greenwich riverside factory opened in 1830 to make rope – there was an existing high quality rope walk on site -  and canvas - and to explore new technologies. Street lighting by then was increasingly fuelled by gas – with several attempts to found gas works which used various oils rather than coal. And whales were getting scarcer.

Some other works on Enderbys are by Greenwich authors.  Stewart Ash wrote the ‘Eponymous_Enderbys’  while active in the Enderby Group - which had been set up by members of Greenwich  Industrial History Society in order to try and promote the history of the Enderby Wharf site to the public –The book includes a great deal of detail on the work of the Enderbys and the voyages which their ships undertook. Stewart is primarily a historian of the cable industry and a version of his Enderby book is on the incredibly detailed Atlantic Cable website, History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy - Enderby's Wharf  where there is also a great deal of other information about Enderby Wharf’s  history and what has happened there. Read it for the detail and the gorgeous pictures Stewart has been able to put online.

 

 Eventually  not only did the Enderbys open their groundbreaking factory in Greenwich but  gradually more and more of the  family lived in our area, becoming involved in local communities. It all ended of course with the disastrous attempt to found a colony in the otherwise uninhabited Auckland Islands, deep in the southern hemisphere.  Much of this story was covered by Barbara Ludlow in two important articles published by the Greenwich Historical Society.

 I am sure that many of the people are reading this will probably remember Barbara who was the Senior Assistant at Woodlands Local History Library - in the days when we had a local history library!! She was also very involved in lots of  local history projects and everybody knew her. She came  from a well known local family  (remind me that I have promised to write an article here about her Uncle Charlie sometime!)  She worked very, very hard on her Enderby studies and in fact eventually went to New Zealand to further the research she was doing on them. Her articles are both called ‘Whaling for Oil. The Rise and Fall of the Enterprising Enderbys’. They are in the Journal of the Greenwich Historical Society, Volume nos 5 and 4, 2007 and 2008. Sadly they are not on line, so I honestly can’t tell you how you can get hold of them quickly and easily.  I guess all you can do is book an appointment with Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust.

I’m far from sure how far have much of this information leads us to the realities of the whaling industry. We know a lot about the Enderby family but not about their most famous means of income  The slaughter  of all these creatures is to get oil to use as a fuel. One of things which the Enderbys investigated in Greenwich in the 1830s was the use of coal oil, naphtha,  for lighting and other uses.

Another use which some of their ships were put to was to contract with the government to transport convicts to Australia - and I’ve always understood that they used the same methods of transport  as the slavers. Was this so? And were there really special transports of young women to provide wives for transported convicts?

The Enderbys lived in many beautiful houses in Greenwich and Blackheath- they had big families. One Enderby grandchild became a national hero – Charles ‘General’Gordon.  Their factory at Enderby Wharf was built to make rope and canvas; and where the brothers dabbled in various bits of new tech and it was eventually burnt down in 1845.  They never seem to have returned with any enthusiasm but built Enderby House – now the pub – to live in.  The rope walk, which pre-existed the Enderbys,  seems to have continued  as did Joshua Beale’s foundry on a site next door, which was leased from the Enderbys.  Barbara Ludlow described how Enderby family members took themselves off to the Auckland Islands where soon enough the whole project floundered despite the fancy uniforms. In the end all you could say was that they produced some very interesting additions to Antarctic geographical knowledge.  Enderby wharf went on to become  a groundbreaking cable factory which would transform the world.

So, briefly, to describe how the whales were hunted, there was a young man who did draw attention to the brutalities of the whaling industry.  He did not sail in an Enderby ship - although he appears to have known Charles Enderby, and the firm subscribed for three copies of the book. He sailed in the ships of Thomas Sturge who was a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement, to whose work our young man pays tribute in his preface.  Sturge, by the way ended up in the Northfleet cement industry and I see a Facebook page about saving Sturge wall plaques from developers.  The big house he built became Northfleet Urban District Council Headquarters, where my husband worked for some years. Sturge subscribed for ten copies of the book.

So, this newly qualified  doctor, age 22, with a wife and child took himself off on a whaling ship for some years. He came back to write a very detailed description of the physiology of a whale  - thus making it clear that this was a complicated, sentient creature. I assume he was able to study their anatomy while they were being cut up on board ship in order to be transported back to England. He described the process of hunting them and their terrible deaths.  To this is added  the political background to the employment of these whaling ships

He later describes his travels and adventures in the lands the ship visited him.  I always say I don’t read fiction but  the most popular current novel  is accidentally in my hands – and it does go to considerable lengths to discuss the adjustments needed by professional sailors in the 19^th century when ashore. As well as the ice and uncharted seas.

“ In 1788, the grand mercantile speculation of sending ships around Cape Horn into the Pacific, in order to extend the sperm whale fishery was reserved for the bold and enterprising mind of Mr. Enderby, ... bringing home the enormous cargo of 139 tons of sperm oil     so that several ships both from this country and America immediately followed in her track, .................... ....................If these huge but timid animals happen to see or hear the approach of a ship or boat, their fear is all cases is excessive.” Dr.Thomas Beale. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale.

 

knackers and chargers

 

I thought this week I should get back to my long long list a small factories and workshops in Greenwich borough. I’m still taking them in alphabetical order from the list which Ted Barr published in Greenwich  Industrial History Newsletter and on that list I’ve only reached letter ‘h’.

So , lets start with Harrison Barber slaughterhouse - specifically horse slaughter.  I assume they were extremely busy in the early years of the 20^th century as huge workplaces full of horses were disposed of with the incoming internal combustion engine.  I’m afraid I’m unable to find a map which specifically marks the slaughterhouse site - although I’m sure I’ve seen one in the past. As far as I’m aware it was in Blackwall Lane round about where now the fly-over crosses and then there’s the big roundabout. Charles Booth’s Survey of London Poverty mentions it in his Greenwich section where  he says that it was just south of Marsh Lane – then that was the name of the road the Pilot pub was in. In those days it was a turning off Blackwall Lane, going down to the river. and was later called ‘Riverway’.  The slaughter house site was called ‘Holmdale’ and it included  a house where the site foreman lived.

Before the mid 1880s the site seemed to belong to a family called ‘Ribbins’ who lived in Roan Street. Thomas Ribbins, described as a ‘cat’s meat dealer’ was in his sixties in the 1800s. His son Joseph was described as his ‘assistant’ and as a ‘general dealer’. The family had a business of some sort in Deptford -  I am aware that Trundleys Road was once known as ‘Knackers Lane’. However in the 1880s they had a business seem in Bridge Street. Pressure was being put on them by the Board ofv Works to move out of that area and they eventually gave in and moved down to Marsh Lane at in the 1880s. So, a business considered too rough for Deptford was acceptable in Blackwall Lane!

It must be said that local newspapers seem to have a numerous stories about members of the Ribbins family . This includes numerous prosecutions for pub based petty violence, gambling and so on. There are also several prosecutions for what we could see as the ‘dodgy horse trade’ – buying stolen horses and turning them into cats meat before they could be identified. There are some very upsetting cases of cruelty and so on. They were required by the police to collect any horse  that had died in the street and this also is the subject of some very upsetting press stories. 

In 1874 An Act of Parliament had prohibited  any future horse slaughtering business  to be set up in London. Harrison Barber had operated in east London with manure and glue works at Forest Gate and at Sugar House Lane, Poplar. They were gradually taking over any London slaughter houses which were at risk of closing down.  In 1887 Ribbins along with some others set up a company which could rival Harrison Barber because,they complained, they  would soon ‘take care of everything in London’.  It was a very shortlived organisation and predictably  Harrison Barber soon took over the Marsh Lane works – as it turned out it was one of their smaller works.

 Clearly in the first quarter of the 20^th century vast numbers of horses must have been killed just because their existence was inconvenient. For instance on the site which is now Greenwich Power Station a 1000 horses were once stabled for the horse trams. All of them must have died before  their time. Later they used the captive bolt system – as did also suicidal employees.

The Greenwich  branch advertised itself as selling pet food,  the ground up remains of the unfortunate horses. The Forest Gate branch sold manure and glue.  In 1925 a Harrison Barber  decorated float took part in Greenwich Shopping Week Celebrations. I would be riveted to know what decorations they put on this float.

Clearly their  custom was declining as horse transport  ceased. I don’t know exactly when the site closed  but it I don’t think it functioned after the Second World War. I understand that their  activities were eventually confined to a site in Tottenham and eventually became  foreign owned.

 

The next item on Ted’s list was ‘Haybeerd’ – he said they were somewhere near South Street and made transformers, chargers and other electrical gear.  The only problem was that I could find not a single website which had that name with that weird spelling. After trying many many different alternatives I came up with’Heayberd’ and from then on it was really quite straightforward.

Eventually I discovered Fredric Cecil Heayberd who was born at in Tranmere, near Liverpool, in 1887. His father was apparently a retired sailmaker from Portsmouth. At the age of 24 he was living with his mother, still in the Liverpool area and working for an electrical engineering company as an instrument maker.  He spent the The Great War in the mechanical transport division of the Army Service Corps.  Immediately after the war he married Margaret ,from the Liverpool area, and then they moved south.

Fr ederick Heayberd apparently founded his engineering business in the early 1920s and` for whatever reason he came to London with ideas for an electrical engineering business. I do not know what they were or how he started – he will have needed capital and some skills in getting customers and so on. Initially, in 1922. they had as central London address at 10 Finsbury Street – in an area ofv the City  which in the 19^th century had been used for specialist manufacturing but by the 1900s was let in multiple units to mainly clerical firms. Finsbury Street is a possible location for a new electrical engineering firm, although I would guess expensive and I suspect that this was an accommodation address only .

In the early 1920s he was advertising for sale a ‘safety alarm jewel case’ from a residential address in Manor Park, Lee. The first mentions of his Greenwich factory are from the mid-1930s although they may well have been there  earlier. The address is usually given as ‘Guildford Road’ which was an earlier name for what is now Guildford Grove.  Sometimes the address is 114 Greenwich South Street-  a building still in use as a business premises. Alongside it is a gateway leading through to the back of the shops which in the 1930s will have gone to a site now only accessed from Guilford Grove. This is now a gated housing estate called Admiral’s Gate – which I guess sounds more like maritime Greenwich than ’Battery Charger Gardens’ or something or other.  When the new housing was built the site had been in use by an electronics company called Texel, started by ex employees of Elliott Automation. But I don’t know how long they had been there.

In 1937 Hayberd were at a British Industries Fair  and advertised their products as : ‘Battery Chargers; Rectifier Units and Plant; Transformers; Radio Components; Motor Accessories. Automobile Compasses’. I suspect their main products were electrical chargers of various sorts. They seem to have continued with a central London office although I assume they were bombed out of Finsbury Street. In 1946 they had offices at 28 Russell Square – a property soon to become part of London University.

Frederick Heayberd  died in March 1960 in hospital in Bromley.  I  assume that he ran the company himself until then. It presumably continued in the ownership of his widow, Margaret , forva few years and later closed.  It has not been easy to find out this much about what was obviously a considerable business in West Greenwich and which must have employed numerous people. Was it taken over and moved? ‘’  I guess people still need battery chargers.

.----------------------

The next firm on Ted’s list is Sykes Pumps and they are not a small firm. They are still functioning as far as I’m aware, on a site on the Greenwich /Charlton borders and there is a more than adequate site history on their website . https://www.andrews-sykes.com/about-us/#t1

 

Kidbrook Station

 

 

I thought this week I should do something about Kidbrooke Station.  I’ve been doing these articles about the various Kid Brook streams for months - and I’m halfway through doing the Middle Kid Brook. It struck me that Kidbrooke Station is halfway between the Middle and Lower Kid Brooks and doesn’t really come into the area covered by either of them.   But I clearly should do it.  In the past I’ve done articles on local railway stations – So why not add Kidbrooke to them?

There are three railway lines which go to Dartford from London Bridge. First in 1849  there was the North Kent line which went from Blackheath through the tunnel down to Charlton Station and on to Dartford. Then in 1866 the Dartford Loop Line  going via Sidcup opened. The line which goes through Kidbrook opened in 1895 was the Bexleyheath Railway. That name of the line gives you a clue - it was built to serve the Bexley area and Kidbrooke was just somewhere  you passed through to get there.

The Bexleyheath line resulted from lobbying, and some finance, from prominent people in the Bexleyheath area. Basically it was about land owners in that area trying to raise value of land  holdings suitable for commuter housing. The company got its Enabling Act in 1883 but, as ever, there were various difficulties and work on the line did not start until 1891.

The opening of the line was delayed. According to most histories this was because of a landslip just outside the tunnel which takes the line from Blackheath Station to Kidbrooke. I can find no newspaper report of this land slip and the Board report to shareholders says “the tunnel at Blackheath presented difficulties ...the workmen encountering a large shell bed and considerable quantities of water”. The tunnel goes underneath part of the posh and private Cator Estate. There appears to be minimal information about this tunnel-= it doesn’t appear in lists of rail tunnels in the area, and a webpage apparently devoted to it consists of only three words!. There are some hints that local landowner, the Earl of St Germans, wanted to develop his land and “get even with Cator”. Whatever!  

The line was finally opened on 1st May 1895. The opening day was marked by a brass band at Bexleyheath and there is no mention of Kidbrooke in newspaper reports. By 1900 the Bexleyheath Railway Company had been absorbed into the South Eastern and Chatham Railway Company and thus in 1923 became part of the Southern Railway. The future of the line in the 20^th century was that most of the land around the railway as it went into Kent was used for commuter housing but the land around Kidbrooke Station became a large industrial site owned by the Royal Air Force. I’m covering this site and its multiple uses in various articles here.

So what did Kidbrooke get in the way of a station in 1895?. Somewhat to my surprise the Kent Rail website says it was ‘a delightful country station, demonstrating charm and antiquity”. What!. Sadly there is no sign of any pictures of this station. Kent Rail say the stations along the line were ‘standard wooden constructions and   ‘the main building only featured bricks in the chimney stacks’. It had sash window and an arched roof. There were ‘swan neck’ lamps with ‘barley sugar twist’ posts and Southern Railway "Target" name signs.

 

In its early years the station appears to have been very quiet and, while eventually surrounded by government buildings, remained peaceful. Most of its users would have been workers in the government complex coming to work every day rather than, as everywhere else, local residents going off to work elsewhere. There are newspaper reports of petty crime and reckless behaviour as it’s true of both stations then and now.  In the 1930s the station made national press coverage for some weeks following the discovery of a headless woman’s body on the lines outside the station. This turned out to be a respectable married woman who had been in a first class compartment – screams had been heard by passengers in other compartments.  As far as I’m aware her attacker was never identified despite intensive police work and stories in a wide newspaper coverage.  He had almost certainly left the train at Kidbrooke.

 

The original station buildings remained in place here although other stations serving this area were rebuilt in 1931, where timber main buildings were replaced by ‘sturdy red brick’. The Southern Railway electrified these suburban lines in 1926  on the third rail scheme – which remains in use today. but steam did not entirely disappear from these lines until the early 1960s.. In 1949 in order to meet demand for the increasing number of passengers, double-decker carriages were introduced. They were not a great success – I remember them well and how unsafe and uncomfortable they felt - but they were used until 1971. In 1954 platforms were extended in order to accommodate ten car trains

In 1972 at Kidbrook the main station buildings from 1895 were replaced by ‘dreary CLASP’ prefabricated ones. This in turn was replaced in 1994 by a brown-brick construction with a tiled pitched roof. A new interim station building was opened in 2014 along with a waiting shelter, bike racks, and a toilet, and a brand new station building was opened on 3 April 2021.

Originally passengers could only from one side of the station to the other by walking  over the rails and Kidbrooke’s first footbridge was in prefabricated concrete.  In March 2014  a new metal footbridge was lifted into position.

There was a goods yard, busy, particularly in wartime because of the adjacent military depot. It was closed, along with others on the line in 1968. There was also a signal box built north west of the ‘up’ platform.  It was two-storey with a timber top and a brick base. it was taken out of use in 1970. It had overlooked the only siding, which trailed off the down line.

Extensive sidings and a narrow 2 foot gauge network once served the huge government complex. The depot could only be accessed from the "down" line and the single-track link was protected by a gate, beyond which were a multitude of standard gauge sidings. A locomotive used on the site has survived and is in Leeds Industrial Museum. Its history and some pictures can be found at https://preservedbritishsteamlocomotives.com/manning-wardle-works-no-865-raf-no-111-aldwyth-0-6-0st//  I will try and cover this site in more detail in a future article.

 

APOLOGIES AND CATCH UPS

lead to a lot of additions here

 

I’ve noted the need to do more on the internal rail system on the RAF site as well as its implications for Kidbrooke station and I will put these as part of a future article

I am very grateful to Marion Kennet who wrote to me about the post office site at Kidbrooke, after which Old Post Office Lane is named and which I had to say in last week’s article that I could find very little about. Marion has been kind enough to send some photographs and that again I will write up specially

Quite a bit of last week’s article was about the Kidbrooke Barrage balloon site and I was not aware when I wrote that that Peter Sydenham - who had been in touch with me in some detail about the site = had written a book about it, published in Australia. I have just received a copy and intend to do a brief review of it which will go on the Greenwich Industrial History Facebook Page –once I’ve had time to read it. And I will to add something else on here.

GRAFTONS AND MORE

 

This week I thought I should do this week’s article from the list of small firms  in Greenwich. I had started out a few weeks ago with ones taken from Ted Barr’s list  but I’ve been adding to that from elsewhere and it really is no longer is just his list.  But the ones I’m doing  this week will all be ones that Ted suggested.

EASTCOMBE MEWS

I’m starting with one which is a complete mystery and which is yet another one which I’m asking for help with.  Ted listed it as ‘General Engineers of 156 Eastcombe Mews’.  Now,   number ‘156’ seems to imply quite a big road -156 is a lot of buildings - but I’m totally unable to find anything called ‘Eastcombe Mews. The only hint I have is a couple of directory entries - one for a garage to let - and another for a horse to sell. Both of them say ‘ Eastcombe Mews, Westcombe Hill.’

Neil Rhind’s’ book on Westcombe Park deliberately only covers  the west side of Westcombe Hill - which means that this site is likely to be on the east side and so may have been something destroyed in the 1960s by the  motorway. But I can see nothing relevant on any old map.

There is a small enclave of industrial buildings on the east side top of Westcombe Hill and which I know very little about . Is there anyone out there can confirm that they are actually called Eastcombe  Mews?  Or that there is another place, or was another place, called that?

So, the next one is ....

GRAFTONS

.... And it looks to be quite complex....

The next one is ‘Grafton’s’ which used to be over in Eltham, in Footscray Road, on the site which is now the B&Q Store. They had the most eccentric factory there - designed to look like a battlemented country house building.  It was demolished by B&Q in order to build their store. Graftons has come to the attention of many industrial archaeologists and historians through Aubrey Wilson’s classic 1960s book on ‘London’s Industrial Archaeology’. Wilson highlighted a classic planing machine by Whitworth which he had photographed at Graftons works. It had come from the Westcombe Park works of Arthur Martin – yet another works which has led to me spending quite a bit of time in these columns complaining that I can find nothing about it! Graftons has been a lot easier.

 Finding out about Graftons has taken quite a bit of research and I’m glad to say that I’ve managed to resolve a number of problems, although others have come along. The factory was built and operated by Walter Patrick Grafton who actually died in 1939. He was the youngest of a large family -and I will come to back to them in a moment. The ‘Grafton’ name seems to have been adopted by Walter’s grandfather in the early 19^th century and previously they had names which could be identified as Jewish .

Walter’s father was Henry Grafton - – born Henry Soloman – he is described as a ‘mechanical engineer’ holding several patents and apparently working in the Fulham area of west London’. In an agreement on the tenancy of a property in Chancery Lane in central London he is described as a ‘philosophical instrument maker’. His eldest son was Alexander Grafton who was to manage Appleby Engineers Greenwich works for many years. He eventually founded the Vulcan Engineering Works in Bedford which specialised  in large mobile cranes –initially steam cranes, but later they were the first producers of electric cranes. Four other brothers all seem to have had careers in engineering – Henry, Philip,  William and Hugh.

Walter Patrick, born in 1861, was the youngest of the Grafton brothers and he is listed as a draughtsman in the 1891 census . His Grafton Engineering works was set up before 1901. Like his father and brothers he held a number of patents  –for example his brother Alexander manufactured very large pieces of equipment in a large and successful works.  I wonder how common this was in the 19^th century for a family of several boys to take off individually and found some successful works.  By chance i’m currently rewriting a long piece on Joshua Taylor Beale who had an engineering works on the Greenwich Peninsula. He had four brothers and it was with some surprise that I realised that Dr Thomas Beale who wrote an important book on whales was Joshua’s brother.

Walter Grafton was the youngest of six brothers and he was to specialise in the small and sometimes quirky end of the manufacturing world. For instance in 1907 he patented and manufactured a ‘swinging thermometer’. It was designed to ”achieve a rapid return of mercury to the bulb by the use of centrifugal force and also to avoid the risk of the thermometer slipping through the holder’s fingers.” He held other patents for what were mainly small gadgety things.

As far as I’m aware the building he first used locally as a  factory was the remaining central building of the old Charlton waterworks in Woolwich Road on the corner Penhall Road. I don’t know if this exhibits a  taste for eccentric workplace buildings but he set up home in an unpretentious terraced house in Elliscombe Road. As late as 1950 there was still a Grafton engineering works at 735 Woolwich Road described as ‘ General engineers and cabinetmakers’.

By 1919 he had designed and built the crenulated  factory at 102-142 Footscray Road which became a local landmark. From the road the building looked like an old country seat with a high stone wall, twin gateways, and crescent-shaped driveway.  The facade spread in dignified symmetry on either side of a low, central tower, and the whole of the front elevation was covered with a mass of creeper. The Second World War meant the lawn became allotments, cultivated by employees. I was unable to find a picture of the works to illustrate this article and I’ve come aware during my search of other people who have looked for such a picture and been unable to find one – via Greenwich Industrial History Facebook page. If you have one or know of one please let us know and I’m sure other people would be grateful.

Graftons were Britain’s sole representative in the competitive worldwide business of making precision ribbon spools for all makes of typewriters, time recorders, adding  printing and duplicating machines in the world .They made Zipp fasteners and ‘Compact Efficiency numbering machines with safety devices.

Their trade name was ‘Walligraph’ under which they made, for instance, the ‘ zonalight task lamp’.  Described as ‘wall mounted 'RADIALITE" with a scissor mechanism which gave enormous reach and could be folded away after use. They were produced from steel with an anodised copper finish which  showed a degree of patination to the metal revealing the attractive copper finish beneath and the cast iron of the wall mounts.

Post Second World War the Walligraph Social Club. had its first annual sports meeting. when an ‘extensive programme of events was successfully carried through’.  A free tea was served in a new dining hall, to nearly two hundred people and there was ‘ a hat-trimming competition for men, a tug-of- war for girls, and the catch-the-train and obstacle races. Also a fancy dress parade;

 In 1952 the canteen was turned into a concert hall for the annual staff panto which was ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ -  ‘ as the management tries to keep the employees happy, many forms of entertainment are encouraged.’

They also made  post war metallic Christmas decorations and the ‘shimmering all-silver metal Angel Pine Christmas trees’ for 1965. These fire-resistant trees—some were 14ft. in height—had needles that never dropped off and special facets to reflect light. There are a number of Facebook and reminiscence web sites where residents feature their Christmas trees used annually since the 1950s - often with themselves in period appropriate clothing.

Walter died in 1939 - His wife had died some years previously. By then he was living in a big double fronted house in Eltham  facing the park. It’s a nice house but not nearly as big and grand as I would normally expect a factory owner  to have.   There is also a report of him living in Devon with his housekeeper.

The works was left to his children, Rowena and Eric. who continued to manage it. It closed in 1988 following Eric’s death – and was demolished for B&Q.

 

THE BATHS

The next item on Ted’s list is: “Greenwich new baths, Trafalgar Road, had an engineering workshop driven by our old friends line-shafting, belts and pullies.”  It was people of Ted’s generation who would describe the “old baths” as the “new  baths”. The building  which we would call ‘The Arches Leisure Centre’ would be ‘new’ to them because in the 1920s it replaced the ‘old’ baths built in the 1850s. 

Ted may have been right and there may well have been an engineering workshop there but I think I have no way of knowing or finding this out. I would be grateful if anybody who knew the internal arrangements at the baths would let us know? Post something on the Greenwich Industrial History Facebook page.

I would be surprised if  anything which was there at the which survived through to the days when the baths were actually closed. Although they must have had some sort of technical workshop there I’m not sure of anything on any scale. I would have assumed that for the sake of economy  if any major work was to be done it would be done down at Tunnel Avenue  depot and somebody sent from there to sort out any problems.  I would also expect that when Greenwich Council was taken over by Woolwich in the 1960s that there would be moves to consolidate into  one workshop covering Greenwich. Woolwich, Plumstead and Eltham baths.  

I look forward to hearing from someone who knows about this.

 

Middle Kidbrook - barrage balloons

 

A couple of months ago I did an article about the source and early stages of the Middle Kidbrook stream as part of a series on Kidbrooke and the streams which gave it its name. I must apologise for how long it’s taken me to get through to this second one and taking some easy options instead. This Middle Kidbrook article has meant I needed to look up various things and so has been much more time consuming. So, anyway, here we go ...

I left the previous article at St John Fisher’s church in Kidbrooke Park Road, having taken the Middle Kidbrook down from Shooters Hill Road where the private house which was once a pumping station stands in front of the site which was once the Brook Hospital. Michael Egan, who wrote so much about Kidbooke commented about St John Fisher’s Catholic church that it has a very suitable name for a church next door to a little stream! Cross Kidbrook Park Road and then amazingly the stream  runs out in the open air.  You can’t really see it because it’s behind a fence and it runs along the boundary between housing and Thomas Tallis School and I guess if you want to see the stream itself you need to be able to get into the grounds of the school to have a look -  but I’m not even sure you can see it then.  But it goes along out in the open for a short distance really down to the Casterbridge estate which I will get to eventually.

Back in Kidbrooke Park Road - on the other side of the fence to the north of the stream, and the school, is a continuation of the line of semi detached houses which have been a feature of the road. However the detailed analysis of these buildings which is in Neil Rhind’s book, Blackheath 2 ,does not extend down Kidbrook Park Road past St James Church. However on the other side of Kidbrook Park Road from St.John Fisher and adjacent to the Middle Kidbrook are the new buildings of Thomas Tallis School.

Thomas Tallis school was rebuilt in 2011 on a different site slightly to the north of the original buildings as part of the Greenwich Building Schools for the Future programme. The school was officially opened by David Miliband in May 2012. The architects were John Mcaslin and Partners and there was an aspiration in the design of the school to express the ambitions of the old school through exhibitions on the walls. It has over 2000 pupils and supports autistic children and also has a support centre for integrating deaf pupils into the general life of the school.   The original comprehensive school buildings, which have now been demolished, were to the south and it had been opened in 1971.  The school is named after Thomas Tallis the 16th century English composer who wrote music for the court and undertook a number of other music related initiatives.  The school was recognised from 1998 as a specialist arts college and was awarded Leading Edge status in this field and was part of a creative partnership network of schools. In 2000 it was awarded the very rare status of a ‘School of Creativity’.

The school was built on a site which was the northern section of a large stretch of land owned by the Royal Air Force and previously had been fields of Lower Kidbrooke Farm. It was established in 1917, as a Royal Flying Corps storage depot, situated on both sides of the railway line close to Kidbrooke Station.

I will return to the Royal Air Force area when I get to write about the Lower Kidbrook stream but here i will stick with the site of Thomas Tallis School and it's predecessor organisations. It is thought likely that there was once some sort of Great War prisoner of war facility on the site of the school although there seems to be little known about this. It is said that the prisoners of war were used to construct the Royal Air Force buildings.

 

The school site itself was previously used by what became the Joint Services School for Linguists which operated out of the RAF Kidbrooke site between 1949 and 1953. This highly secretive Cold War military program was established to rapidly train British servicemen and women in Russian; prompted by the need to provide greater numbers of interpreters, intelligence and signals intelligence officers due to the Cold War, and, later, the Korean War.

RAF land south of the Middle Kidbrook and north of the railway was the site of the Barrage Balloon centre.  In 1937 the Kentish Independent reported the opening of this unit by referring to the beginnings of the Royal Navy locally and the Woolwich district as the ‘present day centre of Great Britain's armament production’.  It would now also have a ‘special place in the all-important scheme of defence against air-raids’ as the ‘ first centre for the organisation of a balloon barrage for the air defence of London. The object of the balloons being to force enemy aircraft to a higher altitude  than they would normally go’.

No 1 Balloon Centre was established at Kidbrooke in 1937 and operated throughout the Second World War.. It was equipped with new hangars and workshops to maintain and repair the balloons, along with winches and gas equipment. There was a large open space for training and test inflation’ They also managed, trained and equipped Auxiliary Air Force Balloon Squadrons to0 be based in the local area, each with five flights of nine balloons on sites spread across SE London. Initially staffed by men, from late 1941 a majority of the staff were women. Hydrogen gas for the balloons was supplied from the local gas works with specialist equipment, and conveyed in cylinders by a fleet of lorries.

 

On 18^th June 1944 two direct hits by  V1 rocket bombs led to many deaths. The first  landed on the HQ hut of Sqadron 901 standing on the site now covered by the allotments. Photographs taken of Kidbrooke Park Allotment site at the end of the war show a crater in the narrow road at a spot that is now in the allotments area. Five days later a second V1 made a direct hit on the HQ of ‘E’ Flight Squadron 901.

In this part of the RAF site there was also an Installation Unit for Chain Home Radar masts. This was the code name for the ring of coastal early warning radar  installations used to detect and track aircraft.  This was the first early warning radar network in the world and the first military radar system to reach operational status. It had a  major affect on the Battle of Britain and other aspects of the Second World War.

Writing this I have become very aware how long ago this all is. To me – and  I was a war baby - barrage balloons and V1s are only too familiar.  In connection with this article I talked to the people I deal with every day at home - mostly people in their 40s and 50s or younger asking what they know about barrage balloons or V1s. Not a single one of them had any idea what I was talking about!

There is, hopefully, a blue plaque at Thomas Tallis School recognising local RAF connections, in particular the RAF Linguists' Association, which was unveiled in 2008 and re-dedicated in July 2014. Also there is hopefully a memorial to the No 1 Balloon Centre, and the 40 servicemen and women who gave their lives in service there, set up by the Barrage Balloon Reunion Club, in Royal Aeronautical Society Heritage.

After the war part some of the Balloon Squadron buildings were acquired by the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich for storage of exhibits.  Visitors were frequently told by staff that the buildings had originally been an emergency war hospital. I am reassured by senior staff from the museum that there is absolutely no evidence for this but it is a story which persists. More recently, the high-tech Prince Philip Conservation Centre was built on the site by the National Maritime Museum and opened in 2019.

And so - back to the open stretch of the Middle Kidbrook as it runs westwards from Kidbrook Park road between thevschool site and the sports fields of Blackheath High School for Girls – a private school founded in 1880 as part of the Girls Public Day School Trust.

Further south down Kidbrooke Park Road there is a right turn into Old Post Office Lane which runs roughly parallel to the south eastern border of the school site.  Much of this route is  commercial buildings on a large trading estate.  Why is it called Old Post Office Lane when there is no sign of a post office down it and now indication that there ever was? I understand that Greenwich Council assessments of the site say that there was some sort of warehouse near Kidbrook Station where parcels and so on were dealt with and I vaguely remember something about this myself.

More importantly further the lane, past the trading estate is the site of the Greenwich Council owned Kidbrooke allotments. The Kidbrooke Park Allotment Association dates back over  30 years and evolved from the Kidbrooke Park Allotment and Garden Society. The allotments are managed  by a voluntary committee of plot holders who set and use the rental income to run and improve the site and act quickly if the need arises. The demand for sites is so high the waiting list is closed to new people.

 

CHOLERA

 

 

CHOLERA

I have been doing a lot of work on the Kent Water Company in Greenwich over the last couple of weeks leading up to a talk one evening.   When I was going through my records – and I know I’ve written a lot about The Kent Water Company in Weekender -  I could no article specially  about the two small outbreaks of cholera in our area. So I thought I would do that this week and hope that my records are accurate  and I haven’t done it before.

The first cases of cholera appeared in London in 1831 but it was not then recognised that it was caused by bacteria in the water supply.  There was however growing concern at the quality of water supplied by some companies –although our  Ravensbourne water from Brookmill was seen as particularly good.

From the early 19th century water companies began to install methods of cleaning river water by passing it through a sand filter.  This was first developed in London by the Chelsea Water Works in 1829.  Kent Company at Brookmill  constructed a filter bed and began to supply filtered water from 1844 – but they had to take out a mortgage on the works to be able to afford it. Later more filter beds and a settling reservoir were added and sited across Ravensbourne from the Brookmill works. The Company’s clean and sparkling water led to increased custom and eventual great prosperity.

There were more cholera epidemics in 1837 and the government appointed Edwin Chadwick to undertake an enquiry info sanitation.  He showed the link between poor living conditions and disease. Medical thinking of the day attributed infection to foul smelling air.

There was another cholera epidemic in 1848.  

In 1849 John Snow a London-based physician, published a paper ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera’, in which he suggested that cholera was not transmitted by bad air but by a waterbourne infection. Little attention was paid to him.

Many improvements were undertaken at Brookmill  in 1850 following an enabling Act of Parliament which allowed then to increase capital to spend on engines, reservoirs and filters. The two filter beds were supplemented by a settling reservoir- which was on the same side of the river as the mill. Further land was purchased at a great price.

In November 1850 the Kent Company agreed to pay the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers £5,000 to prevent them throwing the sewage of Sydenham into the small river Pool, a feeder of the Ravensbourne. They also paid the Board for a new sewer to remove all house drainage from the Ravensbourne

In 1851 a Government commission was set up composed of ‘three chemical gentlemen’ – Professor Thomas Graham FRS, W. A. Miller FRS, and Professor A. W. Hofmann FRS. Their report detailed the chemicals found in the River Thames water.  They also pointed out the problems of contamination in the Thames within the tideway and they said extraction from it should cease. They also complained about  the ‘hardness’ which they found objectionable. Kent Company’s engineer, William Morris, said he was ‘well acquainted with their report’, Professor Graham had analysed the Kent Company water and reported it as ‘always delivered bright and clear.

In 1853 there was another cholera epidemic. 

There is the famous story of how John Snow removed the handle of the Broad Street pump thus isolating and removing a major cause of cholera and proving that the infection was water bourne. There is even a Wetherspoon’s pub named after him. What had happened was that in August 1854 cholera broke out in part of Soho.  Within three days 127 people on or near Broad Street died. Many people fled the area but within a week more than 500 people were dead. Snow talked to locals and found they had all used the public water pump on Broad Street and he persuaded the local parish authorities to remove the handle of the pump and as infections subsided he had proved his point that cholera was water bourne from a specific source..

CHOLERA IN DEPTFORD

At  around the same time John Snow did a study in Deptford where the water supply was from the Ravensbourne and supplied by the Kent Company.. Around 90 people had died within a few days - but the river water was known to be clean, and there had been no previous outbreaks of cholera here.

Snow said “I went to Deptford, to make inquiries respecting a most fatal outbreak of cholera .... being confined to two streets’.  His investigations showed that this outbreak was caused by an accidental contamination of the drinking water, which had happened ‘in an unusual manner’.  

 People in the two streets where about ninety deaths from cholera occurred in a few days, used water supplied by the Kent Water-works.  Residents had told Snow that over the past few weeks the water generally smelt highly offensive.  They had therefore thrown away a few pailfulls and only used what was pumped later - which was pretty clear. Snow concluded  that some leakage had taken place into the pipes - there were no sewers in these streets, and the refuse of all kinds saturates the ground in which the water pipes were laid.

This problem was dealt with but soon there was  a terrible problem in Charlton

Lower Charlton seems the most unlikely place to have a water works.but in  1857 a deep well was sunk at North Charlton alongside the Woolwich Road by another new water company –Charlton Pure Water  Co. - - who. built a pumping station and installed a ‘Cornish Engine’ -  a steam engine from Harvey & Co. of Hayle in Cornwall.. It was soon‘pumping its daily supply of water from the chalk well on the margin of the marsh’. It was ‘built it appears by speculating builders on land entirely unfit’. .. ‘on the marsh and the water soaking from the tidal ditch is seen through the floors .. market gardens covered with the foulest manure ..... deep wide cesspools’. There are vivid descriptions of houses where the water supply had been cut off.  Soon problems with the new company led it being taken over by the Kent Water  Co

In 1866 cholera struck.“A middle aged man from one of the cottages ... his wife is ill and a young lodger has just died of cholera ...............a West street six or seven deaths ......... a man and woman are quarrelling ......... a dead child has just been carried from the house’..a ‘few doors on is a decent woman in a clean house whose son, a young gardener, was attacked by cholera in the morning at six o clock and died before noon -  his two boys were running about and the mother was from home’.

In West Street and Harden's Manorway  ‘men were ill in great numbers, and several died within a few days. Men were sick at home’ and sudden deaths by cholera caused “inconceivable consternation among the women”.

Nearly every house in this district used water from the Charton Works. This came from a stand pipe which functioned for a short time every day; and people collect the water in ‘vessels of various kinds, dirty or clean’. There was no water supply to outdoor toilets and in many cases the water had been cut off ‘because the landlords or the tenants have at some time or other neglected pay the rate’.

It was said that this would not do because Woolwich ‘is one of the principal military stations of England. There is large force of artillery, amounting to more than 5,006 men. The dockyard employs many men; the great arsenal of the empire full of artisans in Government employ.’ Thus ‘the health of the place in time of war is of vital importance.’

So  the almost new pumping station  was taken out of use because the well was ‘becoming   contaminated with river water’ 

The waterworks pump house was not demolished until the 1950s. Photographs show a tall ‘Gothic ‘ building looking very much like a waterworks, with a tall chimney. It was leased to a builder’s merchant’s and subsequently to other industries. By the 1950s when it was demolished it had been  in use by the Grafton Engineering Co.

 

This terrible episode seems to have been the only time the Kent Company  were closely identified with an outbreak of cholera   perhaps in the same way that they couldn’t really be blamed for the Deptford outbreak, it wasn’t entirely down to them.  Kent Company water became a standard of purity for all London and cholera would not be an issue in their area.  What a pity that it happened at all;