ALEXANDER THEOPHILUS BL
AKELEY – AN ADDITION TO THE DEBATE
A recent article in Ordnance
Journal on the subject of Alexander Theophilus Blakeley has thrown some
light on this largely forgotten ordnance designer.[1] This article, while hoping to add something
to the debate on Blakeley, is written from the perspective of a local historian
rather than an expert in Ordnance. In
the course of research on the history of the Greenwich peninsula – the
Millennium Dome site – some additional local information on Blakeley has been
found. It is hoped that this will give
some pointers for future research on a fascinating subject.
Greenwich does not appear in current articles as a
location for Blakeley's works. The site on which he intended to build a major
manufacturing complex, on the tip of the Greenwich peninsula, has been well
known to historians of the area for many years.[2] The area was, and still is, known as
'Ordnance Wharf', after Blakeley's works,
and in 1998 houses the site offices for the Millennium Exhibition Dome.
It will eventually be a major part of the exhibition site. In the years since Blakeley's demise in the
late 1860s it has had a number of uses and in the 1880s became part of the
South Metropolitan Gas Company's East Greenwich Works, which used the site to
locate a factory for tar-based chemicals.[3] It was this area that became most famous for
pollution when it was announced for the New Millennium Experience. Adjacent to
the site and still in occupation in early 1998 are some 1950s houses known as
'Blakeley cottages' – they stand on the site of workers housing built for the
Ordnance works. Soon, they will be demolished and all reference to Blakeley
will disappear from the area.
In the early 1860s when Blakeley moved onto Ordnance
Wharf the western riverside of the peninsula was under intensive industrial
development. Most of this area was, and
is, owned by a local charity, Morden College, founded in the seventeenth
century. Trustees of the college were
appointed by the East India Company and latterly the Corporation of the City of
London. One such City based trustee with a local interest was Thomas Baring, of
the banking house of Baring Brothers. The charity was thus run by those at the
pinnacle of international finance and it seems likely that they have had an
interest in securing long term benefits to the area and a steady return on
their investments.[4] It seems likely that some of the industries,
which found sites here, were helped by contacts within City financial circles.
Morden College archives first record Blakeley's
interest in the site in November 1863. They note that negotiations with him
were underway [5]
and later there is a note of an agreement with Blakeley ' of Bear Lane in Southwark, manufacturer of
Ordnance' dated 1864.[6]
There is also note to say that the original lease has been lost.[7] A plan included with the 1864 agreement gives
a rough sketch of the area included in the lease.
In January 1865 Blakeley applied for permission to
build a wharf.[8]
Around the same time he approached the Greenwich Board of Works describing his
plans for laying out the site and asking permission to stop up a footpath which
ran through the site. [9] The works itself is shown in a set of
photographs owned by the London Borough of Southwark. [10]
One of these shows the jetty off Ordnance Wharf and the site has now been
clearly identified by historians with who have the expertise to recognise
buildings on the north bank of the Thames shown in the photographs.[11]
Another picture shows the half-built works together with a group of men, one of
whom is probably Blakeley.[12] It would be interesting to know who the
others were – one seems to resemble Bessemer.
In 1865 a local paper ran an advertisement for a pub
in Blackwall Lane which boasted of its nearness to 'Messrs. Bessemer steel
works, and close to .. the Blakeley Ordnance Co., and several other large
works'.[13] We should note Bessemer in this context. The existence of a Bessemer plant in
Greenwich has been suspected by Greenwich based historians, but has otherwise
gone unremarked. Bessemer's convoluted
autobiography[14]
hints at his relationship with Blakeley and describes how he was spurned in his
attempts to install his process in Woolwich Arsenal. It was left to his son to add the last
chapter, which notes the existence of the Greenwich plant. Blakeley is mentioned elsewhere in Bessemer's
autobiography but not in connection with this Greenwich works. In the archives for the area Bessemer is
elusive. A map giving Bessemer's name on
a site is appended to a local road plan.[15] It seems to be that shown as the 'London
Steel and Iron Works' on Ordnance maps and hence rather to the south of
Blakeley's Ordnance Wharf. Bessemer's
autobiography says that the works closed after only a few years and this does,
indeed, seem to be shown in the records.
However Bessemer appears again in the Greenwich Rate Books in the early
1880s [16]
and although the sequence of unnumbered sites are not always easy to follow it
seems that this is Blakeley's site. This
suspicion is confirmed by a Morden College record that Bessemer took over a
lease from the college in 1873[17] - well after he is supposed to have left
Greenwich.
What happened to the Blakeley site after the company
had collapsed and Blakeley had died in 1868?
The lease continued to be in the name of the 'Blakeley Ordnance Co. and this seems to have
persisted into the 1870s.[18] It has been suggested that Vavassuer
developed his work.[19] In the photo archive at Southwark there are
also pictures of Vavassuer, and, intriguingly, records show that the collection
itself was sent to Southwark from somewhere in Newcastle.[20].
Vavassuer himself lived in Blackheath, at 99 Blackheath Park, and called this
house 'Rothbury' [21]–
an obvious echo of William Armstrong's great house at Cragside. South of the Blakeley site in Blackwall Lane
is an eccentric, much minaretted, congregational church – today in use by a
theatre project. It is called 'Rothbury
Hall' and was built and funded by Vavasseur.[22]
Despite a presumed input into the site from either
Vavasseur or Bessemer, or both, it does not seem to have been used for gun
founding. Part of it was leased to a ship building company, Stockwell and
Lewis, who built a dry dock there.[23] Another occupant was a guano company, holding
an underlease from the Blakeley Ordnance Co. –granted as late as 1877.[24]. Much of the site area seems simply to have
remained untouched. In the early 1880s
the South Metropolitan Gas Company began moves to build a very large new gas
works on an adjacent site. Following an
enquiry into objections to the Company's private bill, they were required, by
the House of Lords, to purchase the area
of the Blakeley site.[25] They found the site littered with the
half-built remains of 'great guns'.[26] These were carefully piled up and made into a
feature at the gate of Ordnance Wharf [27]where
they remained until sold for scrap in the 1970s.[28] The gas company also took over the housing,
which Blakeley had intended for his workers but never finished together with
'coffee room, reading rooms, etc'.[29] These were occupied as site offices by Docwra
while the gas works was being built and subsequently let to local workmen.[30]
Adrian Caruana has commented on Blakeley's partner,
John Dent, and said that 'nobody had really found out anything about
Dent'.[31]
In 1867 the Times published a number of new items about Blakeley and the fall
of the House of Dent. Some of these items speculate that Blakeley's misfortunes
were caused by the Dent's failure, or that Dent's fall was due to investment in
Blakeley.[32] The Dent family were powerful, prominent City
merchants, whose banking interests were in the partnership of Dent, Palmer and
McKillop. Thomas Dent had even been
considered for the Governership of the Bank of England in the late 1850s. [33]
They were well established within the small inner circle of the City of London.[34].
It is possible to connect these important financiers
with Blakeley through a Morden College underlease on the Greenwich site. This
refers to Wilkinson Dent of 8 Fitzroy Square. A trawl through the Internet on
'Wilkinson Dent'. led me to Flass, near Penrith, and a very large, partly unsorted, archive in
Kendal Record Office.. There is no apparent personal information about John
Dent in this archive although he is sometimes mentioned. He was a member of a younger generation of
Dents, nephew to Wilkinson, Thomas, and Lancelot.
I am surprised that the Dent family are not better known. Wilkinson's brother Lancelot
has recently been highlighted in a Chinese feature film 'Opium War'.[35] This partly tells how Lancelot was threatened
with arrest in the early 1840s by Chinese authorities desperate to stop the
opium trade. The resulting action by the
British was, in the end, to prove the downfall of China. The Kendal archive includes copies of the firm's
monthly bulletin from China – silk (sold through Dewhurst), tea and opium.[36] It has been said that Dent was second only to
Jardine Matheison in power and wealth of the China trade.[37]
It seems unlikely that a business of the size and
importance of Dents' China House would have been brought down by a single
investment. I am not aware that their
failure has been analysed –another part of this saga that would make an
interesting study. They may of course,
have been caught up in the backwash of the Overend Gurney affair – as were many
other business of this period, and, just as relevant the failure of the Agra
and Masterman's Bank in which they were certainly involved. [38]
The story put out by the firm at the time was of fraud in the China office.[39] Much of the Kendal archive is taken up with
the a vast collection of papers relating to a Chancery Case which must rival
anything which Dickens described in Bleak House – weakening and damaging the
family through a whole generation.
One letter in the Kendal archive describes to a
young family member how the fall of the China House led to the loss of a 'great
deal of money'.[40] Despite this there is no sign in the archive
that anything disturbed the comfortable life of lives of the Dent family at
Flass and elsewhere. They also reveal
the lives of several family members living in Bromley and Lee with clear links
to Blackheath and Greenwich. Visits to
Manor House, Lee, are mentioned – home of Lord Northbrook, Thomas Baring. A set of diaries at Kendal records sixty
years in the life of a resident of Widmore, near Bromley and it may be
significant that each day starts with 'two pipes'.
Although Dent's China House fell in the mid-1866 it
seems unlikely that Blakeley alone could have been the cause of it. John Dent went
away because his business was in trouble.
Adrian Caruana's has suggested that there was a political motivation
behind what had happened to Blakeley – but this is ruled out if the Dent's
collapse was real.[41] The idea that Blakeley's downfall had a political
dimension should not however be entirely discounted because there may be other
elements beyond Armstrong. For instance, Blakeley guns were sold to the
Confederate Cause, secretly supported by many British industrialists and
bankers, including the Barings. It may
be, for instance, that the sinking of the Alabama in 1864 was attributed to the
range of her Blakeley gun.[42] There were, of course, likely to have been
other factors which are not immediately apparent. It may have been that Blakeley had become
enmeshed in a web of conflict within the circles of government and high
finance. He would have been seen by them
as entirely expendable.
This article has strayed a long way from the sites underneath the Millennium Dome. There seems to be far more to the Blakeley story than appears on the surface. John Day and Adrian Carauna have drawn attention to discrepancies in his relationships with William Armstrong. I would like to point that there is also something undiscovered about Henry Bessemer and the whole structure of Blakeley finances through the Dents. I suspect that further research will lead from heavy ordnance, through drugs and, perhaps to slavery – and where else?
[1] Adrian Caruana 'Alexander Theophilus Blakeley', Ord. Soc. Jrnl. 4
[2] For eg: W.V.Bartlett, "The River & the Marsh at East Greenwich", Trans. Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarians, Vol.7, No.2, 1964-5, pp.68-84.
[3] Co-partnership Journal, 1904, p.120
[4] Patrick Joyce, Patronage and Poverty in Merchant Society. The History of Morden College, Blackheath. 1695 to the Present. Gresham Books. 1982.
[5] Morden College Minutes, 18th November 1863
[6] Morden College, Deed Collection.
[7] Morden College, Deed Collection, note appended to indenture to Christopher Wegulin.
[8] Morden College, Minute Books, 11th January 1865
[9] Kentish Mercury 28th September 1865
[10] LBS Local History Library, Blakeley photograph collection
[11] Bob Aspinall & Chris Ellmers, Museum in Docklands, Rosemary Taylor, local historian
[12] Info. Adrian Caruana
[13] Kentish Mercury, 28th October 1865. Advert for 'Star in the East.'
[14] Sir Henry Bessemer, FRS, An Autobiography. With a concluding chapter, London Offices of 'Engineering', 1905.
[15] Plan for the New Road, nd.
[16] Greenwich, St.Alfege Rate Books, 1880.
[17] Morden College Minutes 24th July 1873
[18] Morden College Deed Collection
[19] Caruana, op cit
[20] LBS Local History Library
[21] Neil Rhind, Blackheath Village and & Environs 1790-1970. Vols. 1 & 2. Blackheath, 1983, p. 99
[22] Ibid
[23] Morden College deed collection
[24] Ibid
[25] House of Lord Enquiry into S.Met. Gas Co. 1881. In LMA, NTGas Collection
[26] Journal of Gas Lighting, March 1884
[27] Picture in Co-partnership Journal, op cit
[28] Info. Kay Murch, English Partnerships
[29] Morden College Minutes 2nd January 1881
[30] Co-partnership Journal, April 1911
[31].Caruana, op cit.
[32] Times, 9th May 1867
[33] David Kynaston, The City of London. Vol.1. A World on its own. Chatto, 1994. p.201
[34] Info. Malcolm Whiteside (current owner of Flass)
[35] This was shown on one night in 1997 at the Screen on the Green, N1.An account of Lancelot's arrest can be fouind in Brian Inglis, The Opium War, Coronet, 1975
[36] Dent Archive, Kendal Record Office, Box 12
[37] Inglis, op cit
[38] Morden College Deed Collection
[39] Times, 10th May 1887
[40] Dent archive, Kendal Record Office, Box 12
[41] Caruna op cit
[42] Comments at http.//www.nlbarnes.demon.co.uk/civilwar/alabama.htm#/britain
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