Delta Metal

 Continuing with our riverside walk – going down river from Hanson’s on Victoria Wharf - and – here’s a golf driving range.  I sometimes wonder about golf balls in the river, but I'm sure they’ve thought of that too.  There used to be a bit of posh riverside walk here, down a little passageway, disconnected from the rest, and I wonder if it’s still there?

The golf course is on what was called Delta Wharf – home of Delta Metal Co. I can claim a bit of personal knowledge here – but not much.   I worked at Delta in 1971 as the typist in the laboratory. Not that I ever got  much knowledge of what the works was actually making or doing. No one was going to tell a low form of female life like me anything at all; - they couldn't conceive that I might eve have been interested.   In fact most of them didn’t speak to me at all. (I exclude from that two nice guys who were the professional research chemists).

‘Delta Metal’ is an iron, zinc, copper alloy which was developed by George Alexander Dick and the alloy was named as D for ‘Dick’.    Delta later became the registered trade mark for many alloys and the original ‘Delta’ became Delta Bronze No. IV. Dick had looked for a cheap method of producing brass rod and had thus developed an extrusion process.

George Alexander Dick had an interesting and unusual background not only as a resourceful metallurgist but also as a linguist.  He had an English mother, a Scottish father and he was born in Offenbach am Main. He was educated at Heidelberg University, worked in Bilbao and set up an engineering works in Paris.   In 1870 he came to England and set up the Phosphor Bronze Company. Neil Rhind has written in his book on Blackheath and its Environs that for a while Dick lived at 41 Lee Road in Blackheath and is said to have installed an early telephone there. He also set up companies in Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Belgium but I’m going to stick with his British Companies here. His son succeeded him as Company Chair from 1937.

Delta was a big company by the 1970s and became larger still later. The Greenwich factory wasn’t their first or only British works either. Development work on his process was originally carried out partly in Birmingham and then at Pomeroy Street in New Cross – where so much engineering development work was done by all sorts of people.  Dick  opened a Birmingham factory in 1900 and then the Greenwich works in 1905. I know very little about the early years of the works and would be interested if anyone knows anything, or has relics – and I appreciate that years have gone by when people who worked there might still have been around.  In the 1950s Greenwich Council, attempting to describe local industry, said, of Delta ‘little is seen or heard locally by the general public’ – and this despite the fact that a senior manager there, Mr. Bartlett, was a prominent local historianitn who wrote almost the first history of the Peninsula.

The Greenwich works expanded gradually over the years – buying up the defunct Lino works site and buildings in the 1940s and subsequently using it as their head office.  The works was said to produce ‘mainly raw material for other industries’ but this was to make them a key industry in the Second World War.   It was said that throughout the country every possible place ‘when every repair garage of any size’ was turning out metal parts for the war effort. Frequently the raw materials they used came from Delta Metal. .... fuses and primers for shells, parts and fittings for guns and torpedoes ... searchlights... radar apparatus  ... scientific instruments ... aircraft parts... engines.. fuselages.. ship fittings for battleships to launches...tanks..  lorries.. speedometers...lighting equipment . They all had their ‘origin in a brass or bronze bar made in East Greenwich’.  Delta Metal was in Pluto and Fido and Mulberry. The Company was routinely consulted by the Admiralty, the Ministry of Supply, and Ministry of Aircraft production.

In the Second World War there were 1,250 staff on site, many of them women. In September 1940 in the heaviest bombing raid the office block was burnt down. This included the canteen and the cook produced hot meals for staff over open fires in the yard.  Weeks later the factory building producing ‘small rods’ was burnt out by bombing. Specialist machinery was dug out of the ruins, rebuilt and repaired and was running again within a fortnight.

Those who write about the two World Wars could do well to look at the work of local industries without whom the war effort could not have succeeded.

After the war Delta Metal went unto domestic items as housework became mechanised in the 1950s – refrigerators, electric clocks, radios and cars – and much else

My own memories from 1971 are probably pretty useless.  I was, as I said, the typist in the lab – given virtually nothing to do, and bored silly. And I’m sorry that I never saw more of the works than the entrance and the room I worked in. The only bright spot was the day the two research chemists set up crucibles in the yard, asked me to come and look, and explained what they were doing.

 In the next room to me was a spectrometer system which analysed various samples of brass and bronze as it was manufactured.  There were screens and four bored and taciturn men who watched them all day.  I have no idea how this worked and - thinking about it - my memories of the screens make me think they might have been some sort of digitised system. It was pointless asking the four watchers since they didn’t communicate with women and – it occurs to me now – probably had no idea themselves beyond what they had been told to look out for.    The head chemist analysed the figures every day but on what basis I do not know.

Two other things stand out – one is that I was told by someone that the whole point of much of the research carried out in the Greenwich lab was to find a brass/bronze alloy which could rival stainless steel. I don’t know if this was true, and I guess such an alloy was never found.  The other thing was – to my amusement – that I was told that once a week and dirty lorry was loaded up with zinc oxide, which was a waste product in the factory. This went over to the Yardley cosmetic works in Stratford for use as a raw material in their creams and lotions.

Delta was a big big company. Another London factory which they owned was the Enfield Rolling Mills – and this brought them into cable manufacture. In 1964 they took over Johnson and Phillips – and people may remember that eventually their Victoria Way site became the Delta Factory.

In the1990s trying to research Delta for the first edition of ‘Greenwich Marsh’ I visited their head office.  This was No.! Kingsway, which I thought was an amazingly prestigious address.  They were very friendly there and very kind to me but they had absolutely nothing about the Greenwich works – although there was a largish Johnson and Phillips archive.

Since then Delta has been taken over, or has taken over others, and/or been split up.  I have looked in vain on the net for a company website. Delta were probably one of the biggest and most important works on Greenwich Peninsula and they have lef