Woolwich in 1780

 I have been thinking but I ought to write up all the research i’ve done over 40 years on the man who built the Greenwich railway – the first powered railway in London - George Landmann. He had been a senior and  early Royal Engineer with an extremely interesting local background. He was a civilian when he built the Greenwich railway and it was not his only innovative project

However there are huge gaps in my knowledge of his life and but I really don’t think I’m going to be able to fill some of them at all them at all - so perhaps I should just go ahead and write up the bits I do know about.  Its the 200^th anniversary of the Greenwich Railway in 2036-8 but I am now so very very ancient that I think I had better do it now!!

So, I must apologise if I sometimes try out ideas here of what could go into a book about George Landmann.  To start with he was born in Woolwich in 1780 on the Arsenal site.   I thought perhaps I should say and say something about what Woolwich was like in 1780.  It’s not that easy because we don’t have - or i’m not aware of - relevant maps which would fix what thev town was like at that time The best I can come up with is the 1746 Roque map which shows Woodwich town centre. I rather suspect that Woolwich was one of the most highly industrialised towns in England at that time though I don’t have comparative figures.

I used to always enjoy going to talks where the origins of some industry or other was discussed and the late Professor Ray Riley was there. At the mention of ‘industrial revolution’ he would get up and point  to the size and complexity of the Royal Dockyards two hundred years before the supposed revolution began apparently  around 1780. In 1714 a thousand families were said to ‘belong to the Dockyard’ in Woolwich -  - and where did they live Add where were the facilities Which they would have needed.

I think we can name the area as North Kent Riverside and  it is the area of hillside between the River and the Dover Road. There is marshland between a series of Riverside settlements;- Rotherhithe, Deptford; Greenwich; Woolwich, Erith and ultimately Gravesend. One feature is that on that hillside are numerous excavations and pits – everything from dene holes  to the 1960s cement factory complex at Swanscombe.  In Woolwich  there are several pits right in the town centre. One example is in the land between St Mary’s parish church and the dockyard where concerns about the church’s stability date from the 17th century.

These riparian towns all had a very typical riverside  - fishing,  boat building, barge repair,maybe a ferry. The only exception  is Greenwich where the Palace was on the Riverside while  In Woolwich the Royal Dockyard formed one end of the  riverfront.  In 1780 the national press was full of stories about the need for more ships and thus expanding  the Royal  Dockyards citing Woolwich as the ‘mother’ dockyard  and describing planned extensions there. These extensions, undertaken over the next decade, included the Clockhouse and the gateway, still in place.  The primary ship launched in 1780 at Woolwich was a frigate called ‘Minerva’ – and so built for speed and action rather than size.  However  I don't think there is any reference to Woolwich Dockyard in George Landmann’s  autobiography  which is extraordinary since he must have seen it  every day at a time when the Navy near it's peak of its world leading assurance and effectiveness

Another major works in central woolwich was the Gover reply nment rope yard =  something which I have never written up here although I probably ought to. The rope walk was set up in the mid Tudor period  in order to provide rope for the Navy - every warship used several miles of it, all of which needed to be renewed on a regular basis. It is a very interesting institution In that it was the government owned factory at such an early date. The rope yard was on the line of what is now Berisford Street with a path called Ropeyard Rails running parallel and to the north.

 These two  big important workplaces must have dominated the Riverside in Woolwich in 1780 but George Landmann mentions neither. He does talk a bit about another such workplace - the Arsenal along with and in particular the Military Academy.

To the east of the dockyard and the rope walk lay what became the Royal Arsenal and, rather to my surprise, I find it was not designated as such until the early 19th century but I was very aware that it grew as a number of organisations were brought together. It is also important that this happened under The Board of Ordnance, a body which had been set up by under The Tudors to look after the nation’s military establishments and oversee supplies of armaments. A couple of weeks ago I wrote briefly about the establishment and ideas behind the Royal Military Academy and before that we had a speaker at Greenwich Industrial History Society, Mark Thompson talking about the rise of the scientific soldier along with Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers in Woolwich.

So , in 1780 the Woolwich Riverside was dominated by big government institutions – all of them ‘security’.  The Royal Dockyard was to the west going roughly from the Charlton boundary to what is now the Ferry Approach. To the east is the area which in 1780 had yet to become the Royal Arsenal  - it runs east from the point where the riverside path crosses the Arsenal wall as today. These big industrial sites didn’t leave very much space for the town to exist, particularly when we add in the rope walk on the line of what is now Beresford Street -- Where was Woolwich in all of this? I decided I didn’t know and so I emailed Julian Watson because he knows everything. Julian said: “Good question. Rocque shows it best, squashed between the Dockyard and the Arsenal and overlooked by St Mary Magdalene Church. Crammed into narrow streets leading off Woolwich High Street and Market Hill. Hog Lane with its Medieval houses which was later Ferry Approach… A small but densely populated community of great antiquity with an Iron Age/Roman fort at its heart by a similarly ancient Thames crossing.

South of Woolwich town is Woolwich Common along with Charlton and Plumstead Commons.  There is a whole history to the fate of these Commons but basically Woolwich Common was taken over by the military and actually purchased by them in around 1800 plus a Parliamentary order. This move was not popular and there were many complaints about the behaviour of the military On the Common - something which has not really gone away, since many conservationists  in Woolwich complain  about neglect by the military who still own it

North of the Common and to the west of the town were larger estates owned by the Bowater family. A great deal of that area is now housing. On a site purchased from them is huge range of Royal Artillery barracks built in the mid 18^th century by the Board of Ordnance and currently for Sale. There is also a considerable of amount of  open land around the barracks.  Further to the West is Repository Wood which again was purchased from the Bowater family.

The area of common and military open space has created a big green area to the south of Woolwich town. There are also several features of some interest - probably a great deal of it  in Repository Wood. One feature which should be noted Is the ha which goes along Ha Ha Road

There are of course numerous other military buildings in Woolwich and far more than that have been demolished over the years

John Day last days at the Arsenal

 

And so – I have reached the last couple of episodes of John Day’s memoirs which I’ve been following on and off for the past year. John Day was a premium apprentice in The Royal Arsenal in the 1930s; and  I’ve been using extracts from a lot of autobiographical material which he gave to Greenwich Industrial History Society Newsletter in the early 2000s. In them he describes how he was continually moved from Department to Department in the Arsenal with perhaps only a few months at each place at one time. So I’m afraid this last episode is going to be a bit fragmentary in that John is clearly just jotting down a few last points and ends up with when he eventually left the Arsenal.

 

In the last section of my previous episode- he was at ‘The Tinman’s Shop’ – another department near the Plumstead Gate.  He explained that the Tinman’s Shop was, among other things, responsible for making ammunition boxes used to keep detonators and fuses dry in humid atmospheres. These were often nearly two feet long and, he says ‘it was an education to watch a seam – which ran the length of the tin – being made neatly with one stroke of a soldering iron’. The irons used for this were made of heavy copper with a blunt end; while, he says, ’thin irons like the ones used for D.I.Y were known as ‘winkle pickers’.’

 

Everywhere he went in the Arsenal there were always people doing ‘private’ work and this included John himself.  ‘During my stay I made a “Brooklands” silencer, presumably for his motor bike, from sheet steel and had it dipped in tin on the night shift for a packet of cigarettes.’ He explained how the silencer was developed because neighbours of Locke King, who built the Brooklands motor racing circuit on his land, complained about the noise.I found a blog site which explains the background to the 1924 legal action against noise from the circuit and about the silencer

https://simanaitissays.com/2014/05/24/brooklands-and-its-silencers/

 

John continued with a  story about guns “One morning when I came in, there was a terrific row going on in the foreman’s office. This was because the barrel of a 3.7 inch gun was about 14 feet long and during production had about an extra foot less on manufacture. This was done on the night –shift and on this occasion the two feet had been sawn off the same end. The foreman said, amongst other things ‘What are we going to do with that gun now?’ to which the reply was ‘You can always put it a foot nearer the enemy’.”

Another month or two, between polytechnic term times, was spent in the Shell Tool Room doing odd jobs that included the design and manufacture of a lathe slide rest. John explained that all the tool rooms had a blacksmith to do odd bits of forging and lathe tool making. The one in this shop had been apprenticed to an ornamental smith and “ one day he showed me a rose that he forged as his test-piece. It was beautiful, even down to the veining in the petals and leaves.”

One Christmas was spent in the Forges with another apprentice, who’s name John had forgotten. There was a hearth next to the south wall and near the door. The first thing each morning they lit the fire with paper and wood and put some coal on top to roast into coke which produced a clean fire. Then, it being winter, the tools were warmed since a sudden blow on cold thin steel could find it shattered. He said “There is something fascinating about forming red hot steel which has the consistency of cold lead”. The two main occupations were forging pairs of tongs and making templates. When there was a complicated forging to be done, it needed a template of thin plate to check the shape against and an apprentice was the stooge to make it ....”but someone clever could avoid this.”

 

He describes how they made themselves a toaster comprising a 4” square slab of steel about ½ “ thick with a long handle. “This, heated to red heat in the forge, was the best and most even toaster I have come across for cooking toasted cheese” and “at Christmas we decorated the forge and extended our menu to include kippers cooked the same way.”  And he adds “it may be the only cookery that many men ever undertake - but it’s about adapting their tools to do the work of the chef.”

Also “in-front of our forge was a small steam hammer worked by a rather dour individual. We soon discovered that it was not as easy as it looked to take down a square section, keeping it square. With the slightest provocation, it would go into a diamond shape and it needed strong wrists to hold the diamond edge on to get the metal back to square. High speed steel, worked at less than near white heat would split like bamboo.”

Back to Christmas “as usual short of cash, we collected a number of old files and forged them into scrapers and screwdrivers for some of the awkward jobs we knew existed in the fitting and assembly shops. We went round these shops selling them and taking orders for other special tools.”

One day I went to the heavy forge and sat up on the crane gantry watching the forging of a part of a big gun barrel. To see a lump of red hot steel, some four feet square and ten feet long, being squeezed to shape under a huge hydraulic press is something never to forget.”

“Just behind our forge was a 1000 ton hammer made by James Nasmyth; it was dusty and neglected even then - what a lot of our treasures have been lost”. Yes, What did happen  to many interesting devices remaining in the Arsenal when it closed? It was always my understanding that everything was junked.

The last shop John worked in as an apprentice was Miscellaneous Machines situated at the Warren Lane end of the site.  John, writing in 2001 said it was sited ‘near where the new Museum of Artillery will be’. He wasn’t to know that the ill fated Firepower Museum lasted just a couple of years and I think the building he mentions is one of the ones used by the entertainment group, Woolwich Works.

At Miscellaneous Machines John worked on what he thought must have been a rejected export to Russia just after the Great War.  All the wording on it was in Cyrillic and, what was worse, all the feed handles worked the “wrong” way - because for a fixed handle to move a slide away by clockwise turning, the thread has to be left handed.

John also made bits for a printing press which the foreman was building for himself -all the apprentices well knew that if they got a drawing on an odd sheet of paper, it was a 'foreman’s foreigner'.

He said there was a first year apprentice in that shop who asked about a difficult screw cutting job. “I lent him, grudgingly, my special screw cutting tool with instructions not to let it get blunt. When he came back it showed signs of heavy use, so I told him to take it to the shop blow pipe and harden it, but not to get it too hot. He came back, very hang dog, with a shapeless blob of metal to the delight of the rest of the shop who knew that the tool was made of lead !”.

 

There were traditional joke messages that the younger apprentices would be sent on - caught by the old favourites of “a long weight” or “a right hand cuff”, but Woolwich had a special trick that was foolproof. “Going to the stores to borrow a tool, one would be told that 'Bill Starbuck' had it, but was 'not using it at the moment'  Enquiries about Bill’s whereabouts landed one in a far corner of the shop asking again, only to be told he was working in another building and to go there. The other building either denied knowledge or moved one on another wild goose chase!”

It all had to come to eventually. John became 21 and could no longer be an apprentice, so when the term at the Poly finished, he went back as a journeyman fitter for a few months.  He was engaged in fitting drum brakes to Great War equipment which was being resuscitated:. When he left he was not allowed to take with him  ‘a very nice set of single ended spanners up to 1 inch, which had arrived with a new electric motor and had never been entered in the books, so I reckoned they did not belong to Woolwich!. There was quite an argument.”

John left the Arsenal  and I understand most of his career was in the Patent Office.  He wrote all of this in retirement and I never actually met him although I know he did a lot of            work in the Royal Artillery library.

more small firms

 

A few weeks ago I started series of articles which I hope will look at lots of the little small firms which we’ve had in Greenwich and Woolwich. Most of them are too small and their history too uneventful to do a whole article on them.  I explained that when we started Greenwich Industrial History Society an old chap called Ted Barr used to send me the names of what he said were small engineering firms in the borough. I thought perhaps it was about time that I started investigating some of these and last week I took a  number from  Ted’s list and  It turned out that some of them were not as small as all that.

Right.  Next on Ted’s list, and first for this  week is  ‘Cook, Troughton and Simms’. Well, that was hardly a small firm - after all they named a road after one of its main partners. It’s a firm I’ve thought about writing up before - and I would have done so except that the rather expensive book on the firm’s background was sent to me by Royal Mail  -  which is fatal – unable to deliver it.  So I never wrote them up  – but I understand another local historian has considered doing it. Happily John Smith’s History of Charlton devotes four pages to them – this will be a very, very brief summary.

Troughton and Simms were optical instrument makers ‘of world wide repute’. In 1864 they  bought two acres of land on the south side of Woolwich Road west of Charlton Church Lane and erected workshops and transferred their optical equipment manufacture here from Fleet Street.

The origins of the company go back almost 200 years before they  moved here which can be somewhat confusing .  Very very briefly in 1688 there was an instrument maker in Fleet Street  who in 1704 was taken over by mathematical instrument maker who, in  1720, was taken over by the Royal clock maker and made orreries.  In1748 they were  taken over by a  maker of scientific and measuring instruments. - In 1782 they were taken over by a John and Edward Troughton.

Edward Troughton specialised in astronomical instruments. His company merged with that of William  Simms who made instruments for the East India Company. They also merged with Cooke who made telescopes and much else. Eventually in 1864 it was decided to set up a factory in Charlton and astronomical instruments were made for observatories all over the world here. In the 1920s the firm began to do less well and was taken over by Vickers. In 1925 their buildings were sold to Johnson and Phillips.

It is important clearly that we can hear a lot more about Troughton - if for nothing else for work they did for the Royal Observatory. I think Greenwich Industrial History Society would be very interested in anybody who has been studying the company who might be prepared to come and talk to us about them.

And  we should have told Ted, when he was doing his list of small firms,  that a small firm is not one that for 400 years was selling specialist instrumentation  internationally

Next      Ted listed Custance and Thomson, Meadow Court Road, Lee. He said they were long established and ‘all through World War II, they were on repetition machine parts’.  In 2006 they are listed at  Unit 49, New Lydenburg Commercial Estate, SE7 and closed down in 2010. 

 

In Meadow Court Road their building was just round the corner from Lee Road, next to the car repair business and it appears they left in the early 2000s. Their buildings are still shown in even the latest Google Street View although in other use but they received planning consent for demolition a couple of years ago. It is a relatively small set of buildings .

They are described as a ‘precision engineering company but it is unclear exactly what they were doing None of the reports give any details and there don’t seem to be any advertisements,  beyond a few advertising for staff. They seem to have been running for what appears to be 70 or 80 years. ‘Custance’ is apparently a fairly well known name in the Blackheath village area where there have been several distinguished family members. 

J.M.Dangerfield. In his list of small firms Ted gave no details at all about Dangerfield, other than saying they were plant engineers based in Trafalgar Road.  

John Manners Dangerfield was born in 1855 in West Bromwich where his father was manager of a chain works. He seems to have come to Greenwich at some point in the late 19^th century having lived in Reading where he worked as a carpenter and married. In Greenwich he worked at – or maybe set up - the Magdala Works at 514 Woolwich Road in Charlton -roughly opposite where the Troughton Works was. From 1900 he was involved in a number of local charities and various good works organisations – including, for example, a Wesleyan School and much else. Later this included more political bodies like the Woolwich Chamber of Trade. In 1911 was the wedding of his eldest son, Arthur.

There is remarkably little information about the work at the Magdala Works and their advertisements imply that they dealt almost entirely with transport issues and they clearly employed a fair number of men. In the 1920s they advertised ‘All kinds Motor repair work’ and continued to do this for the next 50 or so years. They advertise the use of Acetylene for welding and cutting. They mention a number of garaging facilities including space for large commercial vehicles. For hire were a ‘2 ton lorry, a delivery van and a touring car.‘

John died in 1942 at the age of 87 when he was living in Glenluce Road in Blackheath. He said that he had been retired for some time and I’m assuming that one of his sons had taken over the works. It continued to always be referred to as J.M.Dangerfield.  I do not know when they closed.

DeVille Brothers.  Ted said they were ‘”Sited on the corner of Royal Hill and Gloucester Circus and run by retired Royal Navy 'Tiffies'. They had a well-equipped workshop, and traded as general and motor engineers. During the Second World War  they made parts for PLUTO - valves and control gears.” 

I am told that ‘tiffies’ is slang for Navy ‘artificers’ - but apart from that it’s been very difficult to find anything much out about this works at all. The address on Royal Hill appears in some newspaper reports.

There are other newspaper reports about a William Lawrence Deville but nothing about any brothers. The main reason for the report  was the theft of Mr Deville’s car from the garage at 51 Royal Hill. The car is said to be worth £1000 which - where I come from - in 1946 was very, very  posh, so whatever the Devilles were doing must have been very profitable

E.Dello.  Ted said ”General engineer working from Sun Lane Garage. They had traded from other addresses and did general repetition work – “in the Second World War it was of a munitions nature”. I had not found the smallest reference to a workshop at Sun Lane or indeed any reference at all to anybody called Dello. I have assumed that Dello is a mistake for something else -but I think it’s a very long shot that it could really be somebody by the name of ‘Dale’. Anyway I found the following story in a Kentish Independent newspaper from 1965-  and I thought even if it isn’t Mr Dello that you might find it interesting.

“AT the top of Sun Lane, Old Dover Road, Blackheath, there stands one of the district’s oldest workshops with many interesting links with the days of hansom cabs, a cycling community ... It provides the working environment for 63-year-old Mr. Edward William Dale, a craftsman-machanic of the old school whose skill at the bench and machine has gained for him a big local reputation as a cycle and motorcar repairer”.

The article explains that Mr. Dale lives in Royal Parade, Blackheath, and has been employed in the shop in Sun Lane practically since his boyhood, working with his son, Michael Raymond, on motor-car and motor-cycle repairs. Surrounded by racks of tools and ‘spare parts, benches and machines, the KI reporter thought “there was an old-world look about the building with its ancient timbers, a lathe and drilling machine which showed evidence of constant use, rather indifferent lighting.” He said that ‘these days’ in 1965 – ‘It is mostly cars and motorcycles.’

Mr. Dale said he bought the business in 1937 from the late Mr. A, F Romboy, for whom he worked as a lad. “Years ago we made our own cycles in the shop and we had many well-known Blackheath residents as customers. There were some good cyclists in the district in those davs.”

 

Middle Kidbrook - the playing fields

 

A few weeks ago I started another episode in the history of Kidbrooke.  I have been following the route of the three Kid Brook streams – and this is now the second article on the Middle Kid Brook.

In the first article I said that the stream rose where the Brook Hospital stood until recently. It then ran down Shooters Hill Road and turned south at Belgrave Court flats. From there it flowed south to what was once Arnold’s Farm and from there continuing south to what is now Kidbrook Park Road. As evidence for the route of the stream Ken White, in his booklet on the Quaggy, quoted residents’ comments on wet patches. One saying how his garden in Wricklemarsh Road was always damp, and another how in wet weather a stream of water would flow into Farjeon Road from the Shooters Hill Road sports ground at the rear of The Fox Under the Hill pub.

In its early stages the Middle Kidbrook turns south from Shooters Hill Road, and passes through what was farm land some of which became sports fields in the late 19^thand early 20^th centuries. Some of these were for local factories or colleges  -perhaps another result of industrialisation. The recreation ground between Shooters Hill and Farjeon Roads is now the London Marathon Playing Fields but was previously the Royal Naval College Recreation Ground. It closed when the college moved from Greenwich and prevented from being sold for housing development by The London Marathon organisation’s funding.  The Hervey Road Sports Ground, previously for staff of Harvey’s Greenwich engineering works, was described in my piece on the Upper Kidbrook. On the 1920s OS map the Harvey  sports ground is not shown but  north of its later site are allotments at the rear of the Shooters Hill Road Cottage Hospital. South of these to the south west is a small  ‘athletics ground’ with a pavilion and to the south east on the east side of the Middle Kid Brook is a ‘tennis ground’ with a pavilion. These areas are now housing – but sports grounds are a feature as Kidbrook.

Arnold’s Farm probably stood somewhere near the centre of Merriman Road  but by the 1860s it had already become a brick field -  bricks are very much what would have been wanted in then in Kidbrooke and in the early 20^th century. In the 1890s the farm is shown as three ponds, or, more likely,three flooded excavations.   The whole of what were farm fields here in Kidbrook is now housing.   South of Wricklemarsh Road it is posyt war council housing but to the north between Wricklemarsh and Shooters Hill Road -  the area through which the middle Kid Brook will have run was run – was developed in the 1930s by Kidbrook Estates Ltd. private developers.

These houses are predominantly three-bed semi detached. I can compare them with the three bed  new build terraced house vwhich my parents bought at around the same time in Gravesend. In many ways they are very similar - three bed, garden front and back, separate bath and toilet upstairs, Crittal windows, Ideal boiler. Yet these houses built near the South London border with Kent, were more than double the price which my parents paid in Gravesend. The critical difference is that they had a  garage. Gravesend factory workers could get a mortgage for a house but would never aspire to own a car. These Kidbrook houses were either for city workers or management grades in local factories.

The 1860s OS map shows the parish boundary going  South East and then looping to the south west. This line is followed by Dursley Road and Kellaway Road which fronts onto a line of open land. This was farm land which remained unsold to the developers of the Kidbrook Park Estate.

 

In October 1942  No 141 Gliding School for cadets was set up here  east of the parish boundary. It provided initial training using  rudimentary "primary gliders" to make short, low-altitude hops along the grass to practice basic take-offs and landings. It trained young air cadets  aged 16 the fundamentals of airmanship and trainees did not soar over London. Gliders played a critical, spearheading role in the Normandy landings because they were silent and could deliver intact, but the role of the Kidbrooke training  was to provide initial, elementary aviation training for teenage air cadets—not combat glider pilots. The scheme moved to Gravesend airfield in December 1945.

After the war, Dursley Road, Holburne Road, Corelli Road and other side-roads were built on part of the site of the glider school. This also included Kidbrooke School, opened in 1954 and the first prototype comprehensive.   The school was renamed Corelli College in 2011 and then Halley Academy, part of the Leigh Academy.

‘I wrote an article about the school a couple of years ago as-one of my Weekender pieces. The manuscript version of it is on my blog at https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/2024/12/kiobrooke-school-and-dome-of-discovery.html; In the article I was keen to talk about its relationship with Festival of Britain constructions and try and identify its Indian architect, B.K.Chattergee. I also wanted to describe the school not just as the first ever comprehensive but also as a pioneering school for girls.

South of the school is a wide swathe of open land surviving from farmland which lay between the Middle and :Lower Kid Brooks. These were once fields called Pear Tree and 16 Acres and the northern boundry follows the cart track between Middle and Hill Farms. 13 acres are used by Kidbrooke School  as their sports fields and  beyond  them open land is used by others for sports; The Northwood Ground  is the home of non-league Long Lane Football Club and community sports  hub for local grassroots football with club buildings and spectator stands. Other areas are used by Samuel Montague Boys Club  . The Old Askean Sports Ground was the home of the Old Askeans Rugby Club and a venue for Kent County Cricket, but the grounds were sold for redevelopment

All of these organisations and some structures stand in the area through which the Middle Kid Brook  flows. On the mid 19^th century map it all looks so easy - there is a line representing the stream going from Shooters Hill Road to Kidbrooke Park Road, or its predecessor.  Now it is far from simple it has become an area of small roads intersected by both the A2 motorway and the earlier Rochester Way alongside it. The route of the stream is only clear on the far side of Kidbrooke Park Road . This area needs to be looked at in detail since it may, or may not be, the site of what may have been an actual early mediaeval village

I assume that the Middle Kid Brook is underground  as it nears the motorway, but whatever it is it has come through the various sets of playing fields to encounter Woolacombe Road. Apparently 90-100 Woolacombe Road is the site of Manor Farm in the early 19^th century- a farm which lay on the south side of the brook. If the stream ran to the north of the farm then it could well have passed down what is now Dursley Road and which is the cul-de-sac which goes just to the motorway. Wherever it crosses  the Kid Brook must go in some sort of pipe.  This section of the M2 motorway opened in 1988. It is in a deep trench and at a time we understood that it was done In order to cut noise and that this was the result of much campaigning by the ladies of Greenwich Communist Party.

A bit further down the motorway there is a bridge across it and  a footpath leads which goes to the parade of shops which has everything you could including a post office and buses. To the rear of the shops is a great deal local authority and it is thought to be the site of the mediaeval village.

111-114 Brook Lane is thought to be the site of early parish church, first mentioned in 1207  In 1358 it is called Saint Nicholas but by 1428 there was no priest.  In 1494 it is called Saint Blaise and said to be in ruins. Ground at the southern end of Delme Crescent may be the site of the burial ground to the mediaeval church.There is some speculation that this village was wiped out in the Black Death – but it is so near both Greenwich and Woolwich but surely we would hear from them if contagious were so near and also to mention its proximity to Eltham where the Royal Palace was in use

Next we need to get to and cross over Kidbrooke Park Road. It is easy to  find the Middle Kid Brook since there is a small section visible. It is on the other side of the road to the catholic St. John Fisher church

 

 

 

 

 

 

George at them RMA

 

A year or so ago I wrote some articles here about the Greenwich Railway builder, George Landmann, who wrote a very entertaining autobiography of his Woolwich childhood . My articles covered some of  his childhood and later in Canada and his life as a serving Royal Engineer . I also covered a few aspects of the early Greenwich railway. However I thought now I should begin to fill in even more of the gaps in his life and perhaps I should start this week with his education at The Royal Military Academy.

The Woolwich building Involved in George Landmann’s his young life and also his education, is that now described as Building 40 on the Arsenal site and used by the Acosta Dance Centre –‘ international - uniting dance-creative practitioners with industry professionals, and the community’. It was built in 1823 on the site of and to replace Tower Place, the original Tudor  mansion used as offices by the Board of Ordnance. building, its construction is associated with Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor.  The Royal Military Academy was founded here in 1741.By some strange chance it was founded on the day Issac Landman was born – something George would remember a hundred years later when he laid the first stone of an extension to the Greenwich railway viaduct.

The Academy was to train young officers for the Ordnance’s two newly formed ‘scientific’ corps, the artillery and the engineers. This institution had been launched in August 1720 and  funding  arranged through a South Sea Company subscription, secured by Secretary of State, James Craggs, the Younger, with family connections to Charlton.

The Royal Military Academy was formally opened in Woolwich 1741. The curriculum focused on mathematics and scientific principles and teachers were civilians: The rapid industrialisation of warfare forced Woolwich to adapt but the academy's goal was never to train theoretical scientists; rather, it sought to produce efficient, adaptable officers capable of problem-solving in isolated colonial outposts. It was also thought planning was crucial for surveying enemy lines and colonial landscapes and Woolwich hired top civilian minds – and members of the Royal Society-to occupy its academic Chairs. Own to become the leading educational establishment for technological subjects in the country.

It was to this end that Isaac Landman seems to have been head hunted by the Government to a post in Woolwich. He had been teaching at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, but, following reorganisation there was reduced to tutoring 'the art of war’ privately to young French gentlemen. Sir Thomas Page, a cartographer and friend of Landman, was sent to Paris, under Royal Command, with inducements to get Landman to come to England. Once in Woolwich he was given accommodation in or adjacent to the RMA building and moved there with his wife, Catherine Helene and in 1780 George was born into must have been something of an academic hothouse.

Staff members in this period included Thomas Simpson.a mathematicion who had 'revised the elements of Euclid'. and laid foundations for ‘Simpson’s Rule’ in numerical integration. Simpson was self taught and had been a weaver. He had married a woman thirty years older than himself with two children.  After  Simpson’s death she lived in the Tower with her son 'a poor tailor' for twenty years. When Tower Place was demolished the tower itself remained and was 'considered unsafe'. Young George saw it rocking to and fro in a high wind.- Isaac showed him how to carry out tests on what he had seen by 'suspending a plummet to the ceiling' - and, yes, the Tower did rock two inches either way

Teachers at the early RMA include Paul Sandby, the artist, was appointed Drawing Master in 1768, and was a founder member of the Royal Academy. His career had begun as a  military artist working in the Tower. In 1773 Charles Hutton was appointed Professor of Mathematics. He was a mathematician from a humble background in Newcastle, who performed the calculations necessary to work out the mass and density of the earth. John Bonnycastle & Olinthus Gregory were both notable authors of textbooks which standardised mathematical education across the British Empire.

By thev time George was old enough to be a cadet the Lieutenant Governor of the Academy was Lieutenant Colonel Stehelin of the Royal Artillery. He was supported by three military officers and Captain Phipps, a retired officer of the Corps of Engineers was the Inspector of Studies. Staff included Doctor Adair Crawford, an Irish physician and lecturer on chemistry. His assistant, later professor, was William Cruikshank  - both had a series of important discoveries.

Michael Faraday is often mentioned as having an academic appointment at the Royal Military Academy but his tenure was very considerably later,  in 1830 – over 50 years after George Landman’s residence there.

In order to get a place at the Royal Military Academy George was required to pass the examination for admission when he was thirteen. This was easy and he already knew his way round most pf the syllabus,  no doubt tutored by his father.

.......”the first three systems of Vauban with  Cohorns and Cormartagne’s systems ....the attack and defence of fortified places and field fortification  ... mining, counter mining, as also estimating ... construction of various pieces of ordinance both of Iron and  brass ... howitzers,  mortars and carronades ..  and their travelling carriages  ... the whole of practical geometry, solids and conic sections ... the first six books of Euclid, squared cube root, menstruation, logarithms. trigonometry, algebra and quadratic equations ....landscape painting in watercolours  .. map drawing ... some knowledge of the French language  ... chemistry ... dancing ...fencing ... use of the musket ... the management of field guns ...”

George described lectures taking place in what he calls the ‘laboratory in the Warren’ - I assume that that one of the rooms in the Royal Military Academy building - he also says however that behind the speaker were ‘furnaces and forges, tanks and stills’. These were all under thebcare of a of an artillery Sergeant.  The Lieutenant Governor always came and sat at one end of a long table and his son,who was also in the Royal Artillery was at the other end of the table. Specimens were passed around so that all cadets could see them and handle them.

Cadets completing their studies and wishing to leave and get a Commission were examined in public by a board of eminent luminaries  including men like the Master General of the Ordinance, the Chief Royal Engineer and the Astronomer Royal. Sessions were conducting with ‘pomp and ceremony’ and open to ‘all well dressed persons’. Inevitably the cadets themselves were not always respectful  and the eminent Dr Hutton was known as ’Old Crump’ and Isaac Landman, then Professor of Fortification and Artillery, was ‘’Old Snout’.

In 1795 the Royal Military Academy was required to supply to the artillery 30 educated cadets for an additional battalion to be formed.   George was  by then Head of the upper Academy and ‘first in every branch of the studies’ – but destined to enter the Royal Engineers’. So as other cadets went off to join the Artillery   he was left at the Academy virtually alone to pursue the remainder of

the course of instruction. Soon after he was examined alone with very little publicly by the Master General, the Marquis of Cornwallis. Having answererd satisfactorily ‘I received a Commission as a Second Lieutenant in the corps of Royal Engineers’ – but without passing through the Royal Artillery as was required.  He was told however to spend some time with the Artillery to acquire some knowledge of the work of that service.

Soon after and possibly by chance George and his father Isaac crossed the Thames by an unusual method. They were going to see the  Royal Horse Artillery at Warley Common in Essex.  Firstv they went to Gravesend and crossed the river in the same boat  with Captain Bloomfield who was to be the Artillery commander’.

It. is the means by which they crossed the river which is of interest - a ferry which had been set up to convey the Horse Artillery who had been ordered to use it.  George described it “ a rope was made to pass over the bows of the barge on a friction roller ...... by which means the exact position to the barge In regard of direction of the tide could be regulated .  The boat was placed in a slight degree across the tide which acting on the same principle as on the flying bridges The barge was propelled towards the opposite shore. The operation took about 54 minutes”.

George was then told h=rvhad been appointed to Plymouth – and a whole new world as a Royal Engineer.  He was not yetv sixteen.

John Day memoirs incomprehensible machinery

 

I have reached what should be the last couple of episodes of John Day’s memoirs which I’ve been following on and off for the past year. John Day was a premium apprentice in The Royal Arsenal in the 1930s; A premium apprentice was a school  academic highflyer 

 recruited to the Arsenal to be trained for a future in top management of some sort or another. I’ve been using extracts from autobiographical material which he gave to Greenwich Industrial History Society Newsletter in the early 2000s. In them he describes how he was continually moved from Department to Department with the perhaps a few months at each place at one time. His job was to learn how things were done and how the place functioned

The first place he mentions in the chunk of his text I’ve taken out this week to use is the ‘Light Gun Shop’. I have been unable to discover exactly where this was on the Arsenal site, or indeed to find out very much about what it did at all. I appreciate that ‘light guns’ must have been made in vast numbers which implies it might have been a big building - but I can’t see it on the plan or find out anything about it. Or, more likely, I can’t see it on the plan for looking.

In connection with this Department, John commented that ‘Guns, particularly in the breech, use a lot of odd, large size countersunk screws’. These were not popular with the regular workers ‘as they did not rate well in the piecework stakes’ and were left for the apprentices to deal with. However, John says, ‘but the saving grace was that an apprentice had the right to refuse to make more than twenty three of any one thing’ and concludes ‘It was realised that they were there to learn and not to take part in production’.

One problem with some bits of John’s memoirs is that he talks about various machine tools apparently thinking that we all know what he is talking about.  Most men these days work in other fields – whereas in the 1930s most boys would go into productive industry- and so now have no idea what he means’.  So, he describes work in the ‘Light Gun Shop’ using with a ‘number of Morse taper sleeves of the larger sizes’  - can someone explain what this is or was ??   ‘It cannot be something he has learnt to make himself on site since ’Morse’ is a trade name. He says it meant ‘that the internal taper hole was longer than the travel of the lathe top slide .... apprentice’s lathes did not have the luxury of taper turning attachments.’  So apprentices in the Arsenal only got to use old and outdated equipment, then?

John says he complained to the foreman about this and “he knocked me out of the way, did one, and then said you will do the ****** rest ..... another lesson”.

Next, John spent six months in the Mechanical Engineering Department’s drawing office. He then went out ‘on my own’ doing drawings of machine tools and details of their installation.

One such was a large vertical slotting machine to be installed in the Light Gun shop - there were already three such machines in place there.  A vertical slotting machine (also called a ‘vertical shaper’ or ‘slotter’) is used for cutting internal features like keyways, spines, grooves, and complex metal profiles. Unlike a horizontal shaper, its single-point cutting tool moves vertically up and down to shave material away incrementally from the piece being worked on.

It seemed to John that it would be a good idea if the new machine should be installed in line with the existing three - so he did the drawing accordingly. Several weeks later he saw the new slotter in place but ’it was two or three feet in-front of the older ones - not where I had wanted it put’ .  Then ’the ganger’ explained that when they put it where John had suggested ‘the counterweight at the back had fouled a piece of shafting’ so they had moved it forward. ‘He said that he had seen my name on the drawing and, as my father was the manager of the department and the gang had had double time for moving it, it seemed silly to mention it’.

Another ‘interesting bit of plant layout that came my way was the installation of an autofrettage plant’. He explained that ‘this is a process which increases the strength of a gun barrel by subjecting it, internally, to a hydraulic pressure which exceeds the elastic limit of the metal’. It consisted of two bed plates, one with the pressure generator while the other was just a support and a stopper for the other end.

Another description of an autofrettage plant is ‘an industrial facility or specialised testing rig used to pre-stress thick-walled cylinders. By applying extreme internal hydraulic pressure (sometimes up to 15,000 bar), it forces the inner metal to yield. When pressure is released, the outer elastic metal compresses the inner wall, creating residual compressive stress that drastically increases the component's fatigue life‘.

As the new machine had two lengths of barrel to be processed, John did a drawing showing two sets of studs cemented into the floor – done so that the other bed plate could be picked up by the crane and set down over the appropriate studs. The chief draughtsman looked at his drawing and said “fine, sooner or later somebody will trip over the spare studs, put in a suggestion, get £5 and they will be sawn off”.

John next describes a session in the North Mill un-mothballing the gun lathes. He says it was a ‘mucky job since they were coated in a thick oily varnish that had to scraped off’and had been untouched twenty years and had had time to harden out. He commented ‘at least we were beginning to get ready for World War II in 1938!’

Next he was at ‘The Tinman’s Shop’ – another department near the Plumstead Gate. He said ‘it made a change. One job there was setting presses for stamping out ammunition containers.  He explained: ‘The top and bottom tools had to be very accurately set, both for position and material thickness, because when the presses ran there was quite a large force involved.‘

The presses worked with a single revolution clutch which had a latch coupling the big flywheel to the crankshaft - and it was controlled with a pedal.  When this was depressed the clutch engaged but releasing the  pedal, even momentarily, meant that the flywheel did at least two revolutions for one of the crank.

Unfortunately some of the operatives working this machine thought they were fast feeders – but if they were actually slow it resulted in a jam-up because the second piece of metal arrived before the first piece had cleared. John was given the job of sorting this out. He says ‘there was a way to rectify the tools by gently peening (hammering) the edges and then using an oil stone to restore the proper clearance.’

Throughout this narrative John’s involvement in various workplaces is mainly with a relatively small number of skilled staff - of which of he would have been counted as one. The vast numbers who worked in the Arseal presumably, as part of their daily lives, also only relate to those immediately around them. We should look at a plan with all the various workshops and factory areas labelled  - and there is such map on the Royal Arsenal History web site. It will show just how many such workplaces there were and how close together they all were to each otherb - hundreds of different buildings and facilities are shown.

On site there were a number of facilities available to all workers - however badly managed they may been. John talks about the canteen facilities and also the rather primitive medical services available.

John said that as far as he could remember there were four canteens for the use of the workforce on the Arsenal site. They all reeked of a strange mixture of boiling fat, cabbage and cheap soap - and he kept out of them - but they were well supported during the day for tea as well as during the official lunch hour.

The surgery was presided over by “Septic Sam”. As now, all injuries had to be reported and sent to the surgery but such was the treatment meted out that small injuries were kept quiet. John went once and had a memory of a mid - Victorian standard of equipment and hygiene. The surgery backed onto the boundary wall and a couple of hundred yards from the main gate nearby was the apprentices club. It’s main attribute was a table tennis table which was heavily used lunch times and evenings.

Ted's small engineers

 

In the early days of Greenwich Industrial History Society we used to do a newsletter which came out every other month. After some years it ended because I was so busy with other things and because poor Steve was doing all of the send outs each month on his own - and I thought that was a bit unfair. Anyway, in those days we used to have in membership a lot of elderly men who had worked in local industry all their lives and who wanted to tell all sorts of stories about their lives and what they ‘d seen and done. An awful lot of them had been engineers of various sorts.

One of them was a very elderly man called Ted Barr. He originally started by telling me he  was writing a history of United Glass.  GIHS has never published anything about United Glass - which had the biggest glass works in Europe based at the end of Anchor and Hope Lane. Ted never did submit a manuscript on UG, and I’m sorry about that. But he said lots and lots of other things. One of them was occasionally sending lists of small engineering firms that he thought he could remember in Greenwich  and see if anybody else could remember what they did and who they were.

What I thought I would do - and it will take many, many episodes  - is to list them down along with anything  I can find in addition.

Ted eventually moved from Greenwich and went to live up in North Yorkshire where he was very involved in the local preserved railway.

So here are the first on the list of firms listed by Ted:

Adams Door Spring Works.  In Anchor and Hope Lane. I can find no trace of this company in Charlton  or indeed any where in the borough of Greenwich at all. The Adams Door Spring Company seems to originate with an 1890s patent  for Robert Adams. At the turn of the century they were at 105 Union Street in the Blackfriars area of Southwark. They are one of the firms shown in stained glass windows in Christ Church, Black Friars Road. It’s perfectly possible of course that they had an unadvertised presence in Charlton.   And I have no idea what a door spring is but it appears to be complicated

Antifouling Composition Works.  In Anchor and Hope Lane. ‘Antifouling’ products are designed to combat growth of various sorts on the hulls of ships. The works in Anchor and Hope Lane is particularly associated with a blue plaque to Italo Svevo who lived at at 67 Charlton Church Lane 1903-1913. Italo Svevo was the pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz, who lived in Trieste where he was a friend of James Joyce. He worked for the Trieste based anti-corrosion composition works firm of his parents-in law, Gioacchino and Olga Veneziani and  became a partner in 1902. He negotiated a contract with the Admiralty the for the Company’s Moravia Anti-Fouling. Composition -  made from a secret family recipe - but he could only get the contract if they set up a works in Britain.  The factory in Charlton was built in 1903 and remained through the Great War. In the 1920s they moved to Surbiton.

Arthur Martin.  Tool Maker of Plaxtol Place, Westcombe Hill.  I included something about the Arthur Martin company in an article I did here in March 2023 about Westcombe Park. https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/2024/12/blackheath-vale.html; 

 It was one of a number of businesses in a small area north of Westcombe Park Station and accessed from Westcombe Hill. One of the first books on our local Industrial Archaeology was ‘London’s Industrial Archaeology by Aubrey Wilson. He describes an old and interesting Whitworth planing machine owned by Grafton’s of Eltham says that ‘Grafton’s acquired the machine around 1900 and it was thought to have been sold to them by the famous tool and cutter makers, Arthur Martin’.

Arthur Martin & Co may have been famous to Aubrey Wilson in 1967 but to me they are bit of a mystery.  They closed, I think, in 1961 but they were still advertising for staff “a permanent position offering advancements’ in 1959. I appealed locally, and more widely, for information on the firm. No one ever replied and I know no more.

British Oxygen Co.   Clearly not all the firms which Ted listed were small and local. British Oxygen was and is a large multinational (BOC). I wrote an article on the Greenwich Depot in Weekender in July 2024. https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/search?q=british+oxygen

In Greenwich British Oxygen was on an unimpressive site at the southern end of Tunnel Avenue. My article quotes from their national advertising  but all I found locally were a number of accidental explosions. Ted gave no detail. His chatty notes say “formerly Brin's Oxygen Co. Our Science Master at Invicta always used the old name.  They were among the 'lesser big boys' but employed many people. Bill Faulkner, an area technical engineer, was my workshop tutor at the South East London Tech. I remember one evening he arrived a bit hot and bothered because he had spent all day in Ashford Loco Works showing the locals how to repair cracked cylinder castings of up to 3 tons apiece. He reckoned he had been chased all the way home up the A20 by flying bombs! This would have been 1944.”

British Ropes. Anchor and Hope Lane. This was another big firm on a prominent site and I have no idea why Ted put it in his list of small engineering firms – may be they had a specialist engineering workshop?  ‘Bridon’ were on a large site down the west side of Anchor and Hope Lane. I wrote an article about rope making as one of the first I did for Weekender and was advised by the late John Yeardley, who had been manager there.  Later I did an article based on a booklet about Frost’s ropeworks. https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/2024/12/frosts-ropeworks-briden-charlton.html

One remains of the factory is the Bridon Ropes Football Club. https://www.bridonropesfc.com/

Case Developments Co. Ted commented on this firm ‘I never knew what they did’. Well, I know what they did but I can find no reference to that South Street address –which today is a Turkish barber. Where did Ted get his information from?  Case Developments were in Kangley Bridge Road which runs between Lower Sydenham and Beckenham and was once the site of many factories. In the 1950s they advertised vacant jobs for ‘toolmakers with experience of Bakelite’. There are also a number of reports of health and safety infringements  - but no information on what the Bakelite was used for.

Colloid Mills. Woolwich Road, ‘near the tram graveyard’ – the ‘tramatorium’ was on the corner of Penhall Road. Close by was a National School which closed and in 1928 the site was bought by Guy Hurrell.  He had a works in Blackheath where he refurbished machines and manufactured the Hurrell Homogeniser – a type of colloid mill.  The firm flourished and Hurrell invented several more useful things. The works was bought up by Stones in 1946 and Hurrell moved to Strood. The firm still exists in Strood and still makes homogenisers.

More small works to come in a future article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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