Bethell - tarred wood road blocks

 

Continuing to go down the riverside path on the west side of the Peninsula – and remembering what I wrote about tar some weeks ago – we get to a site used by John Bethel, near where the golf course is now.  At the same time I am busy working up a lot
of stuff round Deptford Creek and thinking about Creek Bridge – and the traffic!  People are all talking about road closures, and I sort of remembered back in 2001 when Blackheath Hill was closed and all the heavy traffic was going over Creek Bridge.  The road surface on the bridge was getting worn away and Greenwich traffic engineers were desperate to redo it.  Do I really remember it was worn down to a series of parallel metal slots?  There is a reason why I am asking this, now?

In the 19^th century there was a great deal of concern about methods of wood preservation. Wood was used for all sorts of applications out of doors for which and a method of preventing rot was important. Perhaps the most successful process was that pioneered in the 1830s by John Bethel  a barrister from Bristol. He was the brother of Richard Bethel who became Lord Chancellor.

 

John Bethel took out a patent in 1848 for 'preserving animal and vegetable substances from decay'. Using an apparatus first designed in Paris, the dried timber was put on iron bogey frames, which were run into a strong wrought iron cylinder, and the air exhausted.  The preservative was then forced in. Bethel issued licences and specified a number of preservatives including 'gas-tar.

 

He set up a tar distillery in Battersea in 1845, which may have been a creosote distillery; another tar works was opened on Bow Common in 1844 and, in the early 1850s, a Chemical Works near Blackwall Point on a site leased from Morden College. A range of workers housing was built adjacent to the East Greenwich site and the factory consisted of a wharf with buildings, tanks an Dan engine and boiler house, ere was a  drying house with a chimney well as a  office.  This Blackwall Point works seems to have made a general range of chemicals. Bethel is listed in directories of the 1840s as an 'oil of vitriol manufacturer', implying a much wider range of chemical manufactures than merely wood preservation – and the work included vitriol chambers and also an alum maufacorin section .

 

Bethel seems to have experimented with a number of other coal gas related chemical processes. In the 1850s he offered the Chartered Gas Company a purification process but this proved 'unsatisfactory'. Methods of wood preservation by tar remained his main interest.  He said, in 1851, that he had got the idea of preservation by tar from examination of an Egyptian mummy. In preservation with coal tar pitch as used 'in the Mediterranean', ammonia should be distilled away, because that would cause rot.

 

When Bethel died in the 1870s his wife, Louisa, continued, to own the East Greenwich works. Mrs. Bethel lived in Bath and the company was managed from an address in King William Street, City of London. The works seems to have specialised in tarred wooden blocks for paving and in the 1880s it became the Improved Wood Pavement Co.

 

So – tarred road blocks became increasingly used. Wheeled vehicles – bicycles in particular need nice smooth road surface, whereas horses were happier with paved flags.  Paving roads with wood blocks had started in the 1840s. Work done was by various companies, like the Metropolitan Paving Company or the General Wood Paving Company, in many central London streets and in various forms and layouts. It was then reported on and evaluated in the press. An article in the Journal of the great London Industrial Archaeology Society outlines the work  William Haywood, engineer and surveyor to the City Commission  of sewers and his work on evaluating the efficiency of these systems http://www.glias.org.uk/journals/9-a.pdf

 

There were also problems with different kinds of wood and eventually wood was imported from Australia where types of hardwood were discussed at length in the press.  One Australian paper reported “the Sheffield municipal authorities have  .....just decided to spend a sum of £110,000 on street-paving, only a very, very small proportion of which is to be of other than wood....... a special committee has been appointed to consider the relative merits of hard and soft wood. The Sydney City Surveyor toured Britain in the 1880s to discuss the relative merits of red gun blue gum and turpentine for road paving.

 

Sherlock Holmes himself said “can tell which streets are covered in ............. timber blocks ....................... A few moments ago we were on a road covered with, if I am not mistaken, Jarrah wooden blocks from our antipodean colonies. Jarrah is an Aboriginal name for Eucalyptus marginata. This hardwood has a density ten times that of the Swedish deal that covers some of our other streets.” And down in Greenwich on the riverside walk  Walter Besant noted the ‘pitch and tar works .. with their open-air manufacture and pungent odours, are very noticeable, whilst next to these is the yard and works of the Improved Wood Paving Company, who import the wood’.

 

So what has this to do with Creek Bridge? I was researching the bridge and  leant that it had to be rebuilt a an emergency after the Second World War  because of bomb damage.  I was fascinate to find a paper where a number of very elite Civil Engineers were  discussing the use of wood blocks to pave the new bridge.  The engineers discussing this in the 1950s were very critical of it because of the weight and because of the slipperiness of the surface.  So – I wondered were those blocks still there in 2001 and was that why the bridge was so worn – and what was it repaved with? If any Greenwich traffic engineers read this - I would love to know.

 

And a disclaimer. I am saying here that the wooden road blocks were made by a successor company to the Bethel tar and wood preservation works – because that’s what the archive record seems to suggest.  But I am aware that some authors on the subject have said that the company was set up and run by Mowlem – well, maybe.

 

Finally, I do have a wood block at home which I have at times to taken to show the audience at lectures. It is a much more complicated and structured item than you woud think – not just a featureless block.  I picked it up on a rubbish heap behind a pub in Kemsing.  Not as far from the Greenwich riverside as you would think.