I have been writing articles based on an imaginary walk working down the east (Greenwich) side of Deptford Creek. The last article described Creek Road Bridge and crossed Creek Road. Nowadays the way south along the Creek is via Norman Road where the first site is Brewery Wharf but first there I a wide road entrance at the turning off Creek Road – where Haddo Street and Thornham Street meet Bardsley Lane. Bardsley Lane is the real old road here and in the past it was called Lamb Lane and it was once the main road down to the Creek from Greenwich. It was also the road where the Greenwich copperas works was – and I guess that would have to be near the waterside so the works area probably ran from the end of the lane down to the Creek.
I’ve written about the copperas industry in Greenwich Weekender before - I did two articles in 2019. One of them was about the famous and important works on the Deptford side the creek and I will have to get back to that later when I start writing about the Deptford bank side of the Creek. The other article was about Elizabeth Pearson who kept a diary in the early 19th century about her family who then owned the copperas works on both sides of the river and who lived some of the time in Greenwich where the family had a home as well as ones in Whitstable and in the City of London.
Copperas was a useful substance which was made extensively in riverside areas throughout England. It was used principally in the production of sulphuric acid – then known as ‘vitriol’ or ‘Green Vitriol’ but it was also used to make dyes and mordants, and much else. The copperas stones – iron pyrites - were picked up locally around the Thames estuary, placed into troughs of water and left for some years. The liquid was then boiled for many days. It was all very dirty and very smelly. It was also an important industry locally for other reasons – one would be in the development of making and using coke for heating to high temperatures by various industries?
I thought – as I am at the exact point in my Creek side perambulation at the end of Lamb Lane - to put dow what I know about the copperas works on the Greenwich side of the Creek. It has been rather eclipsed by the fame of the Deptford works. I only discovered its existence when I was researching the Deptford works and it has been very difficult to find anything out about it at all. I hope this article is not going to be a continuous bleat about how difficult it has been to write it but it really hasn’t been easy!
The first reference I have for a Greenwich copperas works is from 1695 whne Sir Samuel Thompson is said to have started the works in Lamb Lane. He has proved very, very elusive. I think he was probably the Sir Samuel Thompson who was High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in the 1690s – but that is an awfully long way from Greenwich. It’s the sort of job which goes to local wealthy bigwigs who are well meaning but have nothing else to do – loyal and not very bright. He may have lived in Clapham - but even then the account I found has no detail and makes no sense at all. Some accounts say that he was also a Sheriff in the City of London in 1688 – which is clearly an important and politically sensitive job. However he doesn’t appear in the official list of City Sheriffs for that date or any other date. I think that he may have been a Royal appointment as Sheriff and was only in place, probably about a week, and never actually did anything - and it was all part of the aftermath of what became known as the Popish plot (that’s the baby in the warming pan scandal). I have no idea what is interest his role city politics was or more impotantlywhat his interest in copperas was – which is what we really want to know.
By 1718 the Greenwich coppers works was in the hands of somebody called Joseph Moore. I know nothing about him – and (this really is a bleat on my part) in 1718 there were vast numbers of men called Joseph Moore and most of them seem to live in Greenwich Connecticut, which doesn’t help on Google searches . This Joseph Moore was a Quaker merchant who lived in Greenwich, Kent. He left the works to his grandson, Samuel Vandawall along with Ravensbourne House.
So, in the 1740s the Lamb Lane works was in the hands of Samuel Vandawall - who also lived in Greenwich and was also a Quaker. He married the widow of a slave-owning Mr. Neate and was a friend of Bevan, the pharmacist whose 18th century shops evolved into the giant GLAXO chemical manufacturers. In 1751 he bought Lindsay House, Lincolns Inn Fields from the Duchess of Somerset – and that makes him very wealthy but perhaps not overly ostentatious (or he would have bought a house in the West End). He owned a lot of property in Finsbury on the City boundaries. I can’t imagine he was very hands on with our copperas works though. So are these people all speculators while the works was run by an anonymous local management?
In the early 19th century the copperas works was owned, like the one on the Deptford side of the Creek, by Charles Pearson. He was a young man from Northampton, a Glover by trade with a City of London based haberdashery business and he was steadily buying up the Thames estuary based copperas works.
The Pearson family would eventually take over most of the copperas industry around the Thames Estuary - Not only the Greenwich and Deptford works but also works at Whitstable, Queenborough and Walton on the Naze and others. We know a lot about their domestic life in Greenwich through the diary of Elizabeth Pearson and from what she says it is quite clear that the house the lived in was somewhere in Greenwich – mos probably I was in the area of today’s Thornham Street. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
In trying to track down Ravensbourne House it would help to have the official record in street order. Sadly the closure of Greenwich Heritage Centre means I’m unable to check the ‘rate book’ – the historic lists of residents in street order which tell you where they lived and if they had paid their rates or not. By the time of the first census in 1841 the Pearsons were living in Maze Hill. Newspaper reports are helpful but often don’t differentiate between Greenwich and Deptford. If they report that ‘copperas grounds … are near the soapworks’ that’s easy because I know where the soapworks was (in Deptford). So where exactly were Ravensbourne House and the Greenwich copperas grounds.
One of the best piece of evidence I found as to where the copperas grounds were in Greenwich was a report of a trials when a lady gave evidence about a robbery she had seen in the 1850s. She said she had seen it happen from her kitchen window in Charlotte Street. Charlotte Street would have been newly built when she lived there and it was in the area now covered by the Thornham Street flats and it ran into Norman Road very near to no 43. There are also many many advertisements for coal sold by Shepherd and Adams on “Old Sun Wharf, Copperas Grounds, Greenwich’ – and that would have been at the end of Charlotte Street. So the copperas grounds themselves would have been on the Creekside about half way down Norman Road.
From other reports it sounds if it was by then a very derelict and unpleasant place. There are various complaints about flooding and accumulated filth. So by the 19th century the site was derelict and unpleasant. There is also the famous story – outlined in a pamphlet of the time – of Mr Hack, the celebrated Greenwich miser, who died after getting stuck in the mud at the copperas grounds’. By the time we get the earliest maps of the area in the 1860s the area between Greenwich and Norman Road as been developed with little houses. Ravensbourne Street - which is now more or less Norman Road - was the main road going down to the Creek from what they called ‘Bridge Street’ but which we now as Creek Road. Houses have been built in Claremont Street, Union Street, Charlotte Street and Pearson Street – called after the Pearson family. The area was cleared again in the 1960s and the current council flats built
So although we can discover where the actual Greenwich copperas works was located none of this helps us find Ravensbourne House which is where the Pearson family lived. The family were wealthy and they had a lot of visitors and so they would have lived somewhere pretty nice and so it would have been quite big so it’s strange that it doesn’t seem to be marked on any map which I’ve seen. It is said to have been Tudor but I think it is more likely that it dated from the time of Samuel Thompson in the 1690s. There was apparently a pathway going to the ‘Copperas House’ from Greenwich vicarage which would have been behind Saint Alfege’s church. I am as beginning to realise that we are not really sure if there was one or two houses – Copperas House and Ravensbourne House.
Elizabeth Pearson gave some detail about the house although it’s not clear if this is the place the family actually lived in Greenwich - she said it was ‘in Deptford’ and of course we are looking at the Greenwich copperas works which is in Greenwich not Deptford - and I’m quite sure Elizabeth knew which was which. She says it was burnt down in January 1797 and had only just been insured with a Phoenix fire insurance company but the directors very honorably paid though the policy had not been completed (I see ……hmmmm). The house was rebuilt and in 1804 she said the house was almost finished and the eagles and lamps on the front had been replaced and old-fashioned glass put up again ‘notwithstanding great opposition’. She says the work was all done by Samuel Grimwade ‘father’s manager in Deptford’. Why is it can find no newspaper reports of the fire or the rebuilding??
By the 1830s the Pearsons had moved to Maze Hill and the house was probably demolished in the 1840s. And where it was, and if there was one house or two I really don’t know.
So – this is all I know about the Greenwich copperas works. I know who owned it and I know where the works was. But that is the barest possible outline.
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