Mary's Write: blakely DRUGS, GUNS, HARD STEEL AND HIGH FINANCE

Working down the west side of the Peninsula I have nearly reached Blackwall Point and the gas works. There were a number of interesting and important works in this area but I thought for the New Year I would tell you about one of the most astonishing and of them - maybe double back for the others after. This is the site more or less occupied by the new hotel and was previously the gas works’ Ordnance Tar Works.

Why was it called ‘Ordnance’ ?? We will see. In the 1860s industries on the Greenwich Peninsula took off with astonishing speed. Suddenly big names started to arrive. First it was shipbuilders but then steel works and big guns moved in. With these industries, as with some others of the same era, financial backers came from the world of international banking.

This was a time when some major companies moved to the west bank of the Peninsula. Some of them seem to have been unduly secretive and it is also clear that there was a measure of liaison between at least two of them. I have already written about Henry Bessemer and his secret steel works. I think we need to ask what was Bessemer really doing at East Greenwich? Historians have suggested that his steel making process arose from his interest in making guns, something that, of course, would draw him to Woolwich and the Arsenal. The position at Woolwich was further complicated by the appointment in 1859 of William Armstrong; the Newcastle based arms manufacturer, to the position of Director of Rifled Ordnance at Woolwich.

When Bessemer was first considering gun manufacture he had sought out the holder of a particularly important patent. This was Alexander Theophilus Blakely, an Irish Royal Artillery officer, who has been described as 'the most significant British gun designer yet'. Blakely, like Bessemer, had been rejected by the military establishment and the Royal Arsenal and no doubt both of them felt aggrieved. Bessemer was impressed with Blakely and later said that 'he must stand as the originator and father of modern built-up artillery'. Bessemer henceforth became Blakely’s steel supplier.

Blakely is well known in America where some of his guns are exhibited. For example, in Grant Park, Galena, Illinois a cannon stands on display as ' the Galena Blakely' and projectiles fired from it are shown at the US Military Academy. This gun, they will tell you, fired the opening salvo of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861. - It was 'the piece that really worried the beleaguered garrison. It was the sound of the future'. In many American military museums Blakely guns are exhibited and their role in the Civil War stressed.

One of the best known episodes concerns the Confederate warship Alabama, built illegally under a different name by Lairds in Liverpool. Her principle cannon was a Blakely ‘heavy long range 100 pounder 7 inch’. Alabama cruised round the world and is said to have destroyed at least 65 Union ships, most of them merchantmen. In 1864 emerging from Cherburg, following a refit, she was intercepted by USS Kearsarge and in the ensuing engagement she was sunk. In 1994 her Blakely cannon was salvaged from the wreck – it is now in a US Navy Heritage Centre in Washington. There are many many web sites about this incident with many many pictures of the guns. Although I have yet to find one which mentions that the cannon were British made.

Blakely’s guns, however, were all made in Liverpool because he did not have his own manufacturing base and guns were made for him at a variety of foundries. In 1863 he said that 400 of his guns had already gone abroad. It appears that the British Government was not prepared to adopt Blakely's system of manufacture. He thought his guns were required to meet what were said to be unrealistic standards in testing. In 1859 Armstrong gave his patents to the nation and was knighted for his efforts. There has been more than a suggestion made that these patents incorporated elements of Blakely's designs.

Blakely’s original patent concerned ‘adding successive jackets or rings of differing hardness’s of forged metal to an inner barrel permitted the construction of great guns.’.

Blakely was in contact with Morden College in 1863 and in 1864 signed an agreement with them. It might be noted that Thomas Baring, a trustee in the 1860s, had supported the Confederates - to whom Blakely supplied guns - through Baring's Bank. In 1865 Morden College gave Blakely permission to build a Wharf on the site of what later became Ordnance Wharf. It has been said that “the East Greenwich works were clearly established ... for finishing ordnance. There were no foundries on the site for casting metal, no mill for rolling plate and only a single, relatively small, steam hammer .... it was intended .. to be an assembly not a manufacturing plant. However, Blakely, and his still unfinished works, were in financial trouble and the Phoenix Gas Company noted that he was unable to pay for the gas supply they had laid on to the new works.

Contemporary newspaper reports say that Blakely was financed by a John Dent who sold his holdings in the company in 1865 and then went to China. The deeds of the Blakely site show that his backer was a Wilkinson Dent. Wilkinson Dent was the brother of Lancelot Dent, the man held ransom by the Chinese at the start of the first Opium War in 1841. Dent Brothers were opium traders - second only in size to Jardine Matheson, the bankers. For many years the Dent family were involved in the Chancery case on which Dickens may have based the story in Bleak House. The collapse of the China House of Dent also led to the collapse of Blakely.

In September 1866 Blakely wrote to Morden College giving his address as 11 Pall Mall East - just off Trafalgar Square, and a prosperous sounding location. At the same time a petition of bankruptcy was being filed against him and a winding up order was announced in July. Meanwhile most of his Greenwich factory remained unused and unfinished.

He died two years later in Peru having been involved in a scandal concerning a society divorce – an infection killed both of them,

It does not stretch the imagination too much to think that Henry Bessemer built his steel works to supply Blakely with steel for guns and that the idea was to build an arms manufacturing complex at Greenwich and ‘The new Ordnance Works was to be part of an inter-connected, riverside industrial complex built on a greenfield site’. It is more than likely that by the time Bessemer died he no longer wanted to make public his keenness to sell big guns to foreign powers.

When the East Greenwich Works closed there was said to be 100 completed guns left on site together with many tons of associated parts. The half made guns remained there for many years while the site became the South Metropolitan Gas Company’s Ordnance Tar Works. They were used as a feature at the tar works gates and were eventually sold for scrap in the 1970s. Every one of them would now be a valuable collector’s item worth a considerable sum.

Any remaining assets of the Blakely business seem to have been taken over by Josiah Vavasseur who re-established the works in Southwark. He eventually merged this business with the Armstrong works at Elswick, joined the Armstrong Board and became a very wealthy man. Armstrong’s house, Cragside, is famous and is based in the small town of Rothbury in Northumberland. It may be a co-incidence that just up Blackwall Lane is an old church hall, now in use by an arts organisation. It is called ‘Rothbury Hall’ and the foundation stone says it was founded by Josiah Vavasseur.

Mary's Write

Thursday, December 26, 2024

blakely DRUGS, GUNS, HARD STEEL AND HIGH FINANCE

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