Cow Gum

 

This article is dedicated to all those office juniors of 30 years or so ago who when sitting innocently at work would be handed a tin – ‘sniff this’ the senior person handing it to them would say. So they would sniff it and sent reeling across the room. Cow Gum - I wouldn’t be surprised if cow gum was registered as some sort of workplace hazard which you needed to be protected from – like site boots, or something. There were many who were fans of its fumes but also of the way that you could make the stuff up into a little ball and play with it for weeks and weeks as a sort of stress reliever.

 

I said last week that before I finished I ought to write about some of the Deptford Creekside industries which I had missed on my way up and down Creekside. So this is one of them and it’s the story of a Deptford boy who went off somewhere lonesome and made his fortune somewhere other than Deptford.

 

Peter Cow was born in what is now Albury Street, Deptford in 1815. He was the son of a John Cow who said to have been a master artificer at Woolwich Dockyard.  He was eventually yard foreman and author of a book ‘Remarks on Fitting Boats for Ships of War and other Transports.

 

At Peter was apprenticed to a linen draper in Chelsea and went on to work for a number of West End drapers. He opened his own shop in Bishopsgate in 1842 selling lace and baby clothes. Strangely he became a member of the Loriners Company - whose members are supposed to be people connected with the manufacture of various bits of harness and so on for horses

 

He eventually moved to the shop of Macintosh company in Cheapside, leaving the Bishopsgate shop to be managed by his sister Katherine.  Although Charles McIntosh was still alive in the 1840s I suspect that the word ‘Macintosh’ was by then just a trade name.  Briefly, Charles Mackintosh was a Scottish chemist who had developed a way of processing natural caoutchouc with naphtha to enable use in a wide range of applications. He also had links within the gas industry and with European companies, in particular Michelin. I’m being a bit hesitant here because I don’t want to write a long essay on him and I’m aware that popularly he is supposed to have invented the ‘Mackintosh’. I’m also aware that his use of naphtha was paralleled in London by Thomas Hancock and that they had come to some sort of agreement about sales and the naming of products.  Hancock - who I can’t see mentioned anywhere in the story of Peter Cow - had produced a very wide range of clothing and all sorts appliances using his technique for processing rubber.

 

Peter Cow seems to have taken over Mackintosh’s Cheapside shop and eventually in 1851, as P.B.Cow Rubber Manufacturer, opened a factory on Deptford Creek. I am not sure exactly where this factory was - which is why I’ve been a bit hesitant about writing all this up. His business is described in an advertisement as having a frontage on Deptford Creek and a lot of ‘substantial brick built warehouses with four floors’, and folding gates into the works from Copperas Lane. Also it was a few minutes’ walk from Deptford Railway Station. There were a lot of wharves which could be described as ‘a few minutes’ walk from Deptford Railway Station’ - some of them possibly in Greenwich.

 

He moved to live in Deptford with his wife and young family to a house which I think was on the site of the old Burton’s shop in Lewisham Way.

 

While he was at Deptford that he is said to have specialised in making ‘waterproof tweed’. I’m not sure what this is.  Some accounts of ‘tweed’ say that it is waterproof anyway without further treatment. The clientele for weather proof tweed today is made up of the upmarket shooting and hunting fraternity – as I guess it was then,  I suspect that what he was making was using tweed  and putting a with a rubberised backing on it.   P.B.Cow actually won a prize for this product at the 1851 Great Exhibition.

 

I’m going to have to admit that he was in Deptford for only five years but I think this is such an interesting story about the use of rubberised fabrics that I tell you a bit more about him and his factories –which I am afraid was in Streatham

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In Streatham Peter Cow was involved in the Lonesome Chemical Works. Unsurprisingly there is actually a part of Streatham which is called ‘Lonesome’.  It’s some distance down Greyhound Lane as it runs from to Mitcham from the A23. The Lonesome Chemical Works made and sold a wide range of chemicals – coal tars, sulphur and ‘chemicals for pyrotechnical purposes.  They also produced rubberised cloth during the Crimean War for waterproof clothing and groundsheets.

 

P.B. Cow moved their entire production to a site in Streatham on the A23 and was to stay there for over 100 years - managed by succession of sons, and grandsons of Peter Cow.   The site was bought up by Sainsbury’s in the 1980s and is now the site of a large store. If you don’t know Streatham I would recommend going to this shop (to have a look at it and the area – I’m not advertising here for groceries). It is on the south, the Croydon, side of Streatham . Round the back and used as a coffee shop in the Sainsbury complex is an 18th-century silk mill. I originally learnt about P.B.Cow because there was a big campaign to save the mill in which GLIAS was involved.   

 

Also to see nearby - if you go down Greyhound Lane and find Connors Road there are some fabulous waterworks buildings  (and if Mr. 853 Blogger reads this it was his photographs that made me go and find that waterworks).  Lonesome itself is further down Greyhound Lane and the site of the chemical works is now, inevitably, all housing. But there is still a Lonesome Primary School.  Very close to the Sainsbury’s on the A23 is what was the Beehive Coffee Tavern built in 1870 for Peter Cow, who, as a keen temperance advocate ,was happy to commission posh architect Ernest George to design it.

 

Peter Cow died in 1889 of heart failure - but his sons were already running the business by then. He was remained interested in Deptford. He was on the building committee for St.James Hatcham and contributed to other ecclesiastical charities locally.

 

P,B .Cow made lots and lots of different items using rubber in various forms. In the 1940s they were particularly famous for lilos` – inflatable waterproof beds.  In the Second World War they are said to have made imitation tanks out of rubber to fool the enemy and were the world’s largest manufacturer of air-sea rescue equipment – ‘Mae Wests’ – and rubber dinghies.  Otherwise it was toothbrushes, hot water bottles, and anything else you can think of.

 

And of course that wonderful product – Cow Gum.   It is however interesting that none of the papers I have found about P.B.Cow mention it. I don’t know who developed it for them and when they started selling it.  Perhaps they were embarrassed by its later reputation.  It is rubber cement, made from elastic polymers . There are endless websites from people who remember it and say how much they loved it. It’s frequently described as part of the basic kit of any graphic designer or layout artist before computers took over – a ruler, a pen, some scissors and your Cow Gum and you were away!  There are also, I’m afraid, descriptions of some of the other activities it was used for in the afternoons, back at work from the pub.  And you could always fiddle with a lump of it if you were bored.    It’s one of the reasons I wrote this piece – and I accept most of it isn’t about Deptford – but – come on! Cow Gum – I mean, it was a product to love.

 

 

There are numerous weh sites and face book pages about the Cow works I Streatham. Nearer home are two articles about the wider family Freda D. Neale in Lewisham History Journal Nos 18 & 21.  I note that the article on the Cow family – in which Peter Cow is only briefly mentioned – has as its frontispiece a photo of a tin of Cow Gum.