In these articles I am still going down Deptford Creek looking at the histories of the various wharves. Last week I wrote about Stowage and said that on this stretch of river bank these are the last few sites left on this mammoth journey –although there are so many I have missed I am sure I will need a supplement! But here I have two interesting wharves right at the start – the second one in this article exceptionally so. Read on!
Let’s start with the first after Creek Road Bridge and the more ordinary. For many of these smaller sites along the Creek the default use was coal transshipment with the occasional other ‘’interesting’ use in between.The first wharf we come to, after the mysterious Frogham Wharf, which I mentioned last week – was Crown Wharf. Crown Wharf is quite small and today is the site of what I think is an office block, right up against Creek Road Bridge and the littlebridge operating cabin –barely on the Creek itself at all. I’ve found a more modern photograph which shows a building there in the road but also with steps down to the wharf and a big advert for Crown Wharf on the site.
In 1852 it was being used by a John Pretty who was a fisherman, which makes sense, and later by a bricklayer and by a painter. But by 1861 it was a coal wharf and its owner James Corrall was involved in prosecuting one of his employees for theft. This was his ‘collector’ whose job it was to go round and collect money owed to the business. He earned 30s; (£1, 50) a week, plus his rent and coals. One day James Corrall went up and foundhim still in bed and accusedhimof not accounting for the money collected. The man replied ‘that he would do anything I liked to work it off'’. But he still ended up in court.
Soon after this Corrall was advertising that coal prices were ‘considerably reduced’ and that they supplied it at the ‘lowest price possible.’Soon after Smith Withers & Co. were offering the opportunity to invest in a coal company. They described Crown Wharf - most importantly it had a COAL HOIST – and they mention it frequently in the advertisement, and always in capital letters. It was ‘fitted’withan eight horse power steam engine which could shift 250 tons of coal a day and had been‘erected at very great cost’. There was space to store 1000 tons of coal, there were offices, a house, stables, workshops, a chaise house, large coal pens, and a 125 feet Creekside footage with ‘a well sheltered Bed for shipping’, and, of course the COAL HOIST.
In the 20thcentury as the use of coal declined the wharf seems to have defaulted to the scrap trade. Indeed the photo I mention above shows piles and piles of it. Hundred and twenty years later we learn from the South London Press about Big Don Crawley who built up the London Iron and Steel Company and employed 200 men here and elsewhere on what is described as ‘export’. This means the removal abroad of scrap - detritus resulting from the demise of British industry – and I guess the COAL HOIST went that way too.
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The next wharf down was larger than Crown Wharf
– which was also not very big; Like
Crown Wharf it had a frontage on Creek Road and then stretched down Stowage to
take in Hoy Inn Stairs with a small section on the far side of them. From the
very early 1850s – and maybe earlier – it was a marine boiler works owned by an
engineer called James Mitchell.
I know nothing about James Mitchell except that he was married.in Bath in 1925 which means he was not a young man when he was in Deptford. A James Mitchell had been involved in a Glasgow boiler works and left it in the early 1850s but it is a very common name and there is no indication that it was the same man. In Deptford in 1860 he got permission to erect a chimney on site – and that is all I know about his works. There is no sign of the chimney on the insurance plan thirty years after.
What is shown on the 1890s insurance plan for that wharf has turned out to be very interesting and unusual indeed. It is marked as the ’One and All Wharf’ owned by the Agriculture and Horticultural Association and described as a ‘chemical manure works’. As we have seen there were many chemical manure works on Deptford Creek in the late 19th century and to be honest I didn’t take much notice thinking it was just someone else on that bandwagon. But this was something more.
There seems to be a vast amount of information about the ‘One and All’ much of it published by themselves .and I can see little in it about chemical manure. But there is so much more. This was an s ethical venture, an attempt to change the way things were done, maybe to confront capitalism – to help the poor and working people in general to take action themselves to improve their standards of living, and the wholesomeness of their food while providing for a leisure activity - and it does appear to have been a success..
It was set up by Edward Owen Greening. I had come across him before when I wrote up the 1889 gas workers strike for my MPhil in the1970s. He was one of a number of local ‘do-gooders’ who offered to try and achieve a conciliation in the strike between Livesey and the Gas Workers Union –and like all the others he failed. Greening is seen in the Manchester based histories of the Co-op as one of their heroes and indeed Lewisham too have taken him on and put up a plaque to him on the site of his home in Belmont Grove in the nicer bit of Blackheath - but this wharf was in Greenwich – and Woolwich was the home of the Royal Arsenal CooperativeSociety. However Janet has just reminded me that there is a ‘Greening Street’ on the Co-op Estate in Abbey Wood.
Greening camefrom Warrington and lived in Manchester. By the age of about eighteen he was a wire drawer and had started his own business. He became involved in local radical causes, founding the Manchester Manhood Suffrage League, and so became immersed in the co-operative movement. In 1867 he set up a journal ‘The Industrial Partnership Record’ and began to organise cooperative conferences and events in Manchester and beyond. He stood for Parliament in 1868 for the Reform League. He then came to London. He had set up a number of unsuccessful cooperative ventures but with ‘One and All’ he had a big success. Once in London he founded several co-operative bodies, many of which are still going.
This was a world I used to know a lot about and could well havestudied itrather than local industry. We hear very little of this world of 19thcenturyradicals. 19th century life seems to be stuck between the colonialists, the industrial inventors and entrepreneurs and the hapless poor - but bubbling away under the surface were a mass of social movements –the Co-op was just one of them. I have recently been looking at the temperance organisations in South London –in connection with, of course, my work on George Livesey and the gas industry in Peckham– but goodness the temperancemovement really was quite something! The size of it, the huge numbers of residents involved and its power as a social force was amazing. It wasn’t just anti –alcohol but about how you –the poor person –the worker –could take charge of your own life and change things. It’s about aspiration and it has ties with the friendly societies, like the Buffaloes and the Odd Fellows, the building societies and of course the trade unions. It has strong links with ideas of 'back to the land’…. 'grow your own food' - every man an independent producer in touch with nature, sort of pre-Green greens. Which is where I guess 'One and All' came in and flourished.
The organisation was set up as a limited company in 1867 allegedlybacked by John Ruskin, Thomas Hughes and other well-known public figures. It had a headquarters in Covent Garden - EndellStreet- and in Long Acre.They were in the old St.Martin's Hall which they ‘filled with seed packing machinery’. The Deptford wharf was their ‘works’. Greening was the Managing Director. Its aims were to ‘aid rural revival and back to the land in a practical way’. Dividends were limited and profits were to go to employees, customers and good works generally. An advice service was free of charge. They published endless books and magazines. They had 300 staff. There were lectures, music, dancing and football. The produced a ‘high quality and reliable source’ of seeds, fertilisers and other necessities for farm and garden culture…in small quantities for allotment holders and cottagers. They could boast gold medals and Greening was a ‘Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, Life Member of the Royal Agricultural Society, and founder of ‘many great cooperative organisations
I have a report of a co-operative festival at Crystal Palace at some time in the 1890s. 34,800 people attendedand it had half a mile of exhibition tables. Trade unionists were there 'having decided to forge an alliance with co-operators' and this included Ben Tillet and the ‘redoubtable' Tom Mann. Over 100 co-operative societies were there with exhibits of all sorts – like textiles, jewellery and furniture. There were some delegates from Europe, and there was a grand concert with 6000 singers and a new Labour song specially composed for the day.
The event was summed up by one of the speakers “what do we want? ... good music, the love of flowers, the appreciation of the domestic arts, the practice of athletics, the desire for culture, association in employment… when every just man who pines with want shall have a moderate and beseeming share of that which lewdly pampered leisure now heaps with vast excess”.
‘One and All didn’t survive the Great War and closed in 1915.Greening continued with his work for a while and lived to oppose, and then support, the new Co-operative Party. But now he and most of his ideas are forgotten. He died in 1923 and is buried at Hither Green Cemetery.
Woolwich as I said had the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society – in its day huge and massively powerful (it had its own seat on the Labour Party’s National Executive!). But RACS is now forgotten and if you ring Manchester CWS HQ they have never heard of it. However the Royal Borough of Greenwich is now a ‘Cooperative Council’. Greenwich now has itsown very successful branch of the Co-op Party and its Labour councillors are mostly ‘Labour and Co-op. Most of all it has Greenwich Co-operative Development Agency - an immensely successful organisation - but not quite getting 34,000 to its events - well, not yet!
And -like I said –Deptford Creek had all sorts of surprising things on its banks!
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