Bow Gas Works

 

ANOTHER OBSCURE GAS WORKS

 If I have any regular readers they may remember that in my article on Hawes' gas works I promised to come back and explain more about oil gas and oil gas works in East London.  Here is a brief account of the Bow Oil Gas Works - a subject which, if properly written up, would take up much more space than the Newsletter will allow me. Here are some of the highlights:

 We tend to think about 'gas works' as plants producing gas from coal. This has never been entirely true, gas for lighting has been made from all sort of material. In the early 1820s a number of public supply gas works oil as a raw material. The process was patented by John Taylor in 1815. Taylor is one of those Georgian engineers/entrepreneurs who set out to exploit, and change, the world in a variety of ways. (A recentish biography:  Roger Burt John Taylor, Moorland Books, 1977) He has been described as 'the foremost mining engineer in Europe' but he sometimes described himself as 'manufacturing chemist of Stratford'. I have never been able to track down his Stratford chemical works - any information gratefully received - but the actual inventor of the oil gas process was his brother Philip, who lived, before 1824, in Bromley by Bow and was a chemist with a string of patents. There were several other brothers, all in key positions.

In the gas making process any oil could be used and it was thus useful for scrap from the soap and other oil based industries, including oils and fats which coal gas had made redundant as the raw materials of street lighting. The oil was liquified and trickled down a hot metal pipe. The resulting gas was cooled and collected. It then went through a red hot iron pipe to a gas holder.  Oil gas lacked the sulphur compounds found in coal gas, it thus was not thought not to need purification and it was promoted as both safer and cleaner.

John Taylor and his partner, John Martineau (with relations at Whitbread's brewery), had an engineering works at Whitecross Street just north of the City, moving to Winsor Ironworks in the City Road (I would like more information on that). They made a range of equipment, including steam engines, printing and sugar refining machinery - chapters could be written about all of these. Oil gas making equipment was produced and supplied on a franchise basis - mainly in whaling areas, Edinburgh, Hull, Bristol, Liverpool, and so on. 

London was, of course, a major whaling port and a public supply gas works was set up near Philip Taylor's home at Bow. It is not clear exactly where this works was - a caption to an illustration in a Co-partnership Herald helpfully describes it as 'behind the houses in Bow Road'. The rate books list it as the first premises in Old Ford Road at the Bow end. It was clearly on the Lea.  My guess is that it was on the piece of land which is today between Payne Road and the Bow flyover roundabout, shown as a chemical works on later maps.  It was managed by Dr.Moses Ricardo (brother of the economist) and had been built to supply lighting for the Whitechapel Road. An Act of Parliament which allowed for gas lighting but, unusually, not the works had many local industrialists among its subscribers together with some scientific associates of the Taylors and John Martineau.

An account of 'goings on' at the Bow Oil Gas Works would take up far more space than I have here. I have taken recently to starting lectures with an account of the events of the night of 5th May 1825 when Henry Holman went out to supper and followed his nose back home. Moses Ricardo was not the most effective manager in the world!

Taylor and Martineau wanted to build an oil gas works to supply Westminster. This was challenged by the coal gas interests and the subsequent public enquiry spread over two years.  This is in itself a saga from which emerges a strong story about the rights and wrongs of gas purification methods.  What also emerged was a rats nest of scandals at the Bow works. The enquiry stopped abruptly, probably because the Bow works had been taken over by someone or other, probably some of the less respectable elements of the Imperial Company. 

 Stewart (Gasworks in the North Thames Area) says that it became a coal gas works and was taken over by the British Gas Light Co. in 1829, who sold it in 1852 to the Commercial Co., who closed it down.  It would be interesting to check that with the records of the British Company if they ever come to light.  My only comment is new management doesn't seem to have changed things much.  In 1831 they were ordered by Bow vestry to glaze their windows because of the 'quantities of deleterious matter being emitted' and to 'remove refuse' because of the cholera outbreak.

Sources for this article not already mentioned are Minutes of the London and Westminster Oil Gas Enquiry, M.S.Cotterill The Scottish Gas Industry to 1914, P.J.Rowlinson, Regulation of the Gas Industry in the early Nineteenth Century, 1800-1860, Sir Arthur Elton The Triumph of Gas Lights

 Thank you to Michael O'Connor for sending me a cutting from The Times quoting a 1946 report about the Marsham Street citadels. I see that this refers to 'site of' old and new gasholders which implies that excavations for the holder tanks were used as a basis for the citadels rather than the tanks themselves.