This week I’m returning to look at the Charlton Riverside and the ship breaking site at the end of Anchor and Hope Lane - which was the subject of an archaeological investigation by the Museum of London a few years ago. It turns out this is one of two sites which the company concerned was operating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it was the older but smaller of the two. The other was nearby but technically based in Woolwich and I will come back it in a later article.
Shipbreaking – dismantling old ships with a view to recycling their materials - became a big industry in the late 19th century. Clearly old vessels had always been disposed of and in the past, when no longer needed old wooden ships were sometimes burnt or scuttled. Some however were dismantled –broken - and the timbers re-used. This all became more difficult as more metal was used in ships. In the mid-19th century the Navy was changing from sail to steamships and its traditional wooden ships were becoming much more at risk from modern ammunition, particularly shells. So armour cadding began to be used on wooden ships. As time went on it became more and more difficult to find enough suitable timber which made more use of iron in ship building inevitable. Lots of wooden ships were coming to the end of their useful lives and shipbreaking became a ‘market opportunity’ to be exploited. It led to more firms entering the business and it provided recyclable materials, including a lot of seasoned timber. Firms had to negotiate complex purchase agreements with the Admiralty and frequently the metal recovered from a dismantled ship had to be returned to the dockyard.
Castle’s were established ship breakers with a main site at Baltic Wharf on Millbank with an unmissable entrance decorated with figureheads. A lot has been written about the Castle family and there is a detailed website with an attached EBook, as well as various shorter accounts. Most writers have tried to connect the Castle shipbreaking company with the Castles who had a shipbuilding business in Rotherhithe and elsewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries. Despite much research this remains inconclusive. In any case it is not relevant here.
The Castle shipbreaking business appears to have begun with Henry Castle who had work experience in Australia. He had returned as a shipbuilder and repairer in the late 1830s and, in partnership with a William Beech, he began to acquire ships from the Admiralty for breaking. In 1838 he had a business in Rotherhithe including a site at King and Queen dry-dock. In 1843 he moved to Baltic Wharf adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge on Millbank, where, in the 1850s, they broke up Royal Mail Lline ships,. By 1860 he was in a new partnership which included his two sons.
They seem to have opened the Charlton riverside site around 1856. It is at the River end of Anchor and Hope Lane. Earlier this road was known as ‘Great Manor ‘Way. ‘Manor Way’ or, more usually ‘Man Way’ being the traditional name for most of such paths between settlements and the River as causways across marshland. ‘Anchor and Hope’ is the name which relates to the public house on the Riverside - which is still there as a traditional riverside pub..They do huge roast dinners on a Sunday - if you like that sort of thing. There was already a rope works in the area landward of the site. The exact date at which they moved onto the Charlton site is not clear but it is known that in 1861 three ships were delivered to them there for disposal.
Today the site is empty and in use for car parking. On the Riverside roadway it stands opposite an electrical substation which is itself next to the Anchor and Hope pub. On the riverside itself it is between the pub’s garden area and Vaizey’s Wharf flats. The only structure on it is a kiosk with the word ‘Winkles’ written across the front.
The Castle’s yard here has been described as having a connection with the Admiralty. The relationship of the shipbreaking company with the Admiralty is explored in the EBook about the Castles and involved complicated financial arrangements. It appears to refer to some sort of approval plus an element of partnership in disposal of vessels. Some accounts appear to suggest that the Admiralty may have owned a site here. Charlton historian, John Smith, described the site as the ‘Admiralty shipbreaking yard’ and it is also described as this in an advertisement of 1865 issued by Castle’s themselves. However, The freehold of the landward part of the site appears to be the Charlton Manorial Estate and there is no indication that it belonged to the Admiralty before Castle’s leased it. The research done by MOLA implies that it was Crown property. However, a shipbreaking business would need to work on the foreshore which is owned by the Crown Estate, although managed by the Port of London Authority- and it maybe that there was some licensing arrangement for use of the foreshore. Crown Estate is not the Admiralty but it does imply some sort of national and government status for the site.
Timber built ships to be broken up would be moored at Charlton Buoys and work to dismantle them would begin in mid-stream. When the ships had been lightened they were towed to Anchor & Hope Wharf by Watkins tugs and then broken up. About 200 men worked on site here
In the 1860s a major problem at Charlton was theft of items from the yards and Castle’s attempted to set up a security program with the Metropolitan Police. This was never finalised and Castle’s had to supply their own security which needed to be agreed by the Admiralty this arrangement is also explored in the EBook.
Castle’s began in the 1860s disposing of sailing ships and then, gradually, more old steamships until in the 1880s and 1890s they were breaking up armoured wooden battleships and frigates. In 1873 Castle’s took on Long’s Wharf a short way down River where they handled most of the ships being broken. All he site at the bottom of Anchor and Hope Lane was to remain in aquite small
As we will seein a future article Castle’s manufactured various items out of the wood which they recovered but some was still sold from the Charlton site. An advertisement from 1865 advertises the sale of old ship’s timbers ‘hardwood ... fir timber …plank fir wood, et cetera, taken from Her Majesty’s ships’. A press notice of 1872 describes how Her Majesty’s ship Princess Royal, a 91-gun screw-propelled second-rate wal of, ‘lately condemned as unserviceable’ was sold to Castle’s for £8,500 without the machinery or copper . Her wooden figurehead was put on the outer wall of Castle’s yard at Baltic Wharf, where it stayed for the next thirty years.
They also report that Hero ‘a screw-propelled 91-gun second rate battleship’ fetched only £10,500 when it was sold including the machinery, - and commented that the purchaser made £6,200 from the recovered metals. Copper bolts, among other things, were cleaned and packed and sold wholesale, five tons at a time.
Some of the wood from the old ships would remain at the site after Castles left in the 1930s and this has been examined by archaeologists as part of the Thames Discovery Programme. Some of it had been used for various reasons around the site and in the immediate vicinity. It is these remains which has enabled the Museum of London’s Archaeology Service to learn a great deal about the site and also about the construction of warships and much else.
The archaeologists had a watching brief on replacement work to the sea wall. They examined timber from the structure and found among them one which appeared to be a re-used nautical timber. A possible cranebase was constructed around four large re-used vessel timbers. Two of them appeared to be deck beams, probably from a 1st rate ship of the line.
One of the last wooden warships broken up at Charlton was the 131-gun HMS 'Duke of Wellington', the largest and most powerful ship in the world when launched in 1852. The remains of three other large wooden ships are also believed to be among the finds at Charlton. HMS 'Anson', 'Edgar' and 'Hannibal' Each with 91 guns and built between 1854 and 1860 at Woolwich or Deptford Royal Dockyards. These ships became obsolete within a decade because of the development of ironclad battleships and they were scrapped. MOLA comments: "These remains provide our last chance to study the construction techniques used on those vessels, and how they differ from 18th-, 17th- and 16th-century warships’ and “at Charlton we have the only known easily accessible archaeological evidence in Europe of this most remarkable and fast moving petiod In the development of warship construction”.
See website https://castlesshipbreaking.co.uk/
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