Today – Tuesday 27th September – Greenwich Council has announced that they have told the developer on a riverside site to demolish the tower blocks which have been built without the proper planning consents. By the time you read this article this case will no doubt have moved on. I am writing about the family whose boat yard preceded the tower blocks on the site.
Well before this news came out I had decided that I should start writing about some of the river industries. Greenwich was home to a many barge and tug operators and other trades and owners and their crews mostly lived locally. I had just written I had just written an article for another publication about John Taylor Beale and I noticed that after his death a Cunis family member had moved into his old house. Cunis were barge owners and boat builders who had lived locally. So why not write about them.
I have since realise that Cunis family members have been involved in local industry until very, very recently - and maybe still are around locally. So I need to apologise to them and say that I hope you don’t mind me writing this and that I have got it right.
The history of the family in the early 19th century is confusing as generation after generation named their eldest son ‘William Ryan Cunis’. They all give their occupation as ‘lighterman’ which could mean anything from basic labourer to ship-owner. However an indication of their early status comes from 1791 when the current William Ryan Cunis signed a letter to the Board of Trade urging that Navy press gangs stop taking apprentice fishermen. The other signatories include the Enderbys – prosperous whalers and factory owners. So was the Cunis family their equals? Their births and marriages in the early 19th Century are all in Lambeth and the family appears to own a spritsail sailing barge, the William and Mary, probably built for them on Bankside in 1826.
In 1835 William Ryan Cunis aged 24 joined the Navy spending his time on HMS Russell, posted to Lisbon. Was he pressed? Returning in 1839 he applied for the Freedom of the City of London, apparently to get membership of the Association of Fellowship Porters who controlled who could load and unload goods in the Port. He married and the next generation of William Reid Cunises was had arrived. The family lived at Cottage Place which was in the area to the east of St. John's Church in what is now Waterloo Road and very near the Southwark and Lambeth border. He is also described as a boat builder and lighterman on Broadwell - roughly the area we would now call ‘Bankside’ and close to Cottage Place. In these years a number of spritsail barges were registered with an office address at Seething House, Great Tower Street in the City.
In a court case of the 1870s W.R. Cunis described himself as a ‘master barge owner’ while always describing himself as a ‘lighterman’ on the census. Specialist web sites show an impressive list of 65 spritsail sailing barges registered to Cunis at various times. This list is likely to be very far from complete and it is difficult to work out how many barges the firm had at any one time - since clearly barges were continually being bought and sold, sadly lost, rebuilt or converted. They must also have had many lighters and small work boats and must have eventually used tugs. One of the earliest steam tugs on London River was Watkins’ Monarch as early as 1833. Surely Cunis had tugs too.
In the later 1860s they had a site at the end of Anchor and Hope Lane in Greenwich where a small dock on the site of today’s Vaizey’s Wharf is shown on maps. On later maps this site is marked as ‘barge building, sand and gravel contractors’..
Further down river Cunis had taken over a site at Tripcock Point previously operated by G.A.Fuller and known as Fullers Wharf. Here they had a rubbish and mud chute. Tripcock Point today is in the still undeveloped marshland areas at Thamesmead. It is where the northbound riverside path turns eastwards and is marked by a red painted lighthouse and an information board
Cunis had another site on the Essex bank of the River at Great Coldharbour. This was operated as a dredging business. They extracted gravel and ballast here, filling the worked out areas with refuse from London which they had barged down the River
At their office in Great Tower Street they described themselves as ‘rubbish chute proprietors, lightermen, steam tug and sailing barge owners, builders and repairers, sail makers and sand and ballast contractors’. When they operated tugs they would be identified having a white funnel with a black top and a broad red band separated by a narrow white band,
So, what is all of this to do with Greenwich? Occasionally before 1900 they give their address as 41 King William Street in Greenwich. This must think been office of some sort although they still continued use the office in Great Tower Street. Then in 1902 the then senior family member, a very elderly William Ryan Cunis, moved into the house in Westcombe Park Road built by John Taylor Beale who had recently died. He died only a few years but was surrounded by the homes of his sons, nephews and eventually, grandsons. A younger William Ryan Cunis was already living yards away in Coleraine Road, in what is apparently one of the original houses in the road. Another son, Horace, was living in Vanburgh Hill but was eventually to move into an adjacent house Coleraine Road which had been designed for him by architect, Alfred Rogers. Arthur Cunis was living some distance away in a Belmont Hill as was Ralph Cunis living in Hervey Road.
Perhaps most interesting is William Edwin who lived in Beaconsfield Road and stood for Greenwich Council as an independent in 1900. His was a very short political career, in contrast that with his wife Nora, who stood and won for Municipal Reform - another name for the Tories - but later was a Labour Councillor. Nora Cunis is a whole story in herself and rather than try giving any details here I may do a special piece about her later on - she was certainly a ‘character’. In my own short political career on Greenwich Council if I had behaved in any way like Nora it would have been a whole lot shorter. Perhaps things were different in the 1900s – we tend to think all middle-class Edwardian ladies were proper and repressed!
One of the oldest parts of Woolwich Dockyard was sold by auction in 1872. It is the site which is now covered by a number of blocks of orange and black flats; and known as Mast Quay. In the 1870s this was Royal Dockyard Wharf used by E. Arnold & Co., timber and slate merchants. They had steam sawmills and roadside offices. Tenants came and went but from 1919 W. R. Cunis Ltd, dredger, tug and barge owners had the site. By 1968 other adjacent wharves and their slips had been taken over by Cunis for building and repairing of tugs, trawlers and coasters.
In 1971 it became Cubow Ltd, a joint venture for Cunis with Hay’s Wharf Ltd., including Greenwich boatbuilders Humphries and Grey and Bowker and King Ltd. One slip was covered, for building boats ‘the like of which were not being made anywhere else on the Thames’ – yachts, fishing boats and other vessels up to a thousand toms. One example in 1973 was the sail yacht Eagle which could accommodate 14 guests and six crew members ‘waiting on their every need’. Another boat from 1973 was Suffolk Monarch built as a fishing trawler and then chartered by the Ministry of Defence as HMS David and converted into a minesweeper - eventually renamed Britannia Monarch she was scrapped in India in 2011. One of the last ships built here was a cargo vessel, Ambience, operated by Crescent shipping and sadly scrapped in 2012. There were many others. Beagle – built in 1973 which today- offers trips round the Galapagos Islands.
There was a last brief revival of repair work here in the early 1990s. I well remember this revival and seeing a boat on the slips. I also remember how many people seemed so happy with this and saying to each other that ‘we are building ships again on the Thames’
As I write this I read a tweet to say that Bateau London is closing. They have used Cubow's 1980 built Naticia for “elegant, unforgettable evenings to relaxed Sunday lunches - dining cruises on the River”. I dare say she will survive as a party boat in different ownership.
As I write this I have picked up a press release from Greenwich Council. It says that developer built flats on the old Cubow site must be demolished because they didn’t have the right planning permission. By the time this is published things may well have changed.
And, also, I would never be surprised if somewhere somebody is beginning to get themselves together on London River to build ships again -starting small and working up. But boat builders belong on the riverside, don't they?
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