Working down the Lewisham bank of Deptford Creek we have reached a point where there is a sudden bend in the creek and where the orientation of the various wharves changes. It is in this area that the oldest and most famous industry on Deptford Creek was located, partly on the Creek side and partly slightly inland - this was the manufacture of a chemical, copperas, from the 17th Century.
I have already written four articles about copperas for
this series in Greenwich Weekender. Back
in 16th June last year I wrote about the slightly later Greenwich
works on the east bank of the Creek. Earlier, on 27th February 2019
I did an article about the early days in the 17th Century of the
Deptford works. On 21st August 2019 I did one about the continuation
of the Deptford industry until the mid-19th century under the
Pearson family, and one on 28th August 2019 about the life of
Elizabeth Pearson who was the sister of the owner of both the Greenwich and
Deptford copperas works in the early 19th century. So you need to look at them to get the
detail.
However as we’ve got to this point on our travels along
Creekside I thought that I ought to saying something about copperas because it
was such an important industry - but I don’t intend to repeat myself if I can
help it.
Very briefly copperas is a chemical used in dyes and to make other
chemicals and it is made from ‘gold stones’ picked up in the Thames
Estuary. The Deptford works was started
by Sir Nicholas Crispe, a Hammersmith based entrepreneur.
I would like to flag up that Crispe had a fairly eventual life
and did many, many things – including that he was one of the people most
involved in promoting the transport of people from Africa and the exploitation of
their labour in parts of what we would then have called ‘the new world’. Many of the people locally who have been
identified as being involved in slavery had sometimes become so because of the
actual activities of others – they had inherited a plantation, or something
similar. But Crispe was very directly
involved himself.
While I’m on the
subject of slavery can I put in a small plug for a free Zoom talk run by
Greenwich Industrial History Society on 17th May. This will feature
a speaker from the Deptford based Museum of Slavery and Freedom. Booking arrangements will be advertised on
the Greenwich Industrial History Facebook page, as usual.
The copperas industry in Deptford became well-known because
of a very detailed contemporary article about the works in the Transactions of
the Royal Society in 1678. However there were copperas works in various parts
of the country. There were others quite close by - I was recently approached by
somebody researching a works at Blackwall, just the other side the River. There is also a
long term project based in Canterbury which is looking at works in Queenborough
and Whitstable. They produced an excellent book ‘Copperas. An account of the
Whitstable Works’ which tells you all about the industry in those areas and gives
a good general introduction. It is worth noting that by the 19th
century the Deptford and Greenwich works were in the same ownership at the
works at Whitstable – the Pearson family.
Crispe was one of a number of men who had been Royalists in
the English Civil War and who had sometimes - like John Evelyn - lived abroad
for many years and I come back with many ideas for what was in effect an early
wave of industrialisation. I wrote a couple of weeks ago how in the mid-17th
century Deptford and East Greenwich put together were one of the largest centres
of populations in the country and how Royalist entrepreneurs set up industrial
workplaces.
It was not only copperas - there was something else which is
very, very important in industrial history and this is the manufacture of coke.
By ‘coke’ I am not referring to drinks or pharmaceuticals but about coal which has essentially been
distilled too remove oils and other ‘chemicals’ and used to make a concentrated
fuel which will burn at higher temperatures – very necessary for many manufacturing
processes. Of course in China they were making it in the 4th Century
but if you read the conventional
histories of coke manufacture in this country they will run through few patents taken out in the 16th
and 17th centuries and then start going on about Ironbridge and
Abraham Darby – and etc etc. Never any
mention of the huge Kent and Sussex ironworks, of course, either.
One of those early patents was taken out in 1636 - which is
before the English Civil War. Thomas Peyton described as ‘of Deptford’ patented
'charring sea coal' – seacoal being coal which has come from the north-east of
England and been brought to London by collier ship. I don’t know exactly who
Thomas Peyton was - there were a number of people with that name – but my best
guess is a Kentish gentleman also involved in the Civil War as a Royalist. After the war in 1656 John Evelyn described a
Deptford coke making works and ten years later in 1666 Samuel Pepys saw the
same works. Both of them said this works
was owned by Sir John Winter. Winter is
interesting, albeit yet another Royalist and a Roman Catholic. His estates were in the Forest of Dean where
he had exploited coal and timber and worked iron which was used for royalist
weaponry in the Civil War. In the 1650s
he had spent some time in the Tower through his involvement with some Irish
nationalists but he seems to have had sufficient day leave to develop his coke
making business in Deptford. Although
this might seem unlikely when I looked up Peyton it seems he too was imprisoned
in the Tower but was allowed out to go and ‘take the waters’ at Tunbridge
Wells.
This is a very big and important example of how Deptford
had become a great centre for industrial innovation
So back to our walk down the Creek to the point where the
copperas works had a wharf. Crispe had
probably set up his Deptford works before the Civil War because he had already
rented a piece of land called Broomfield, Great Crane Meadow. We know very
little about it but it may be that he began manufacturing copperas then. Peyton
could also have been was involved with him because the process needs a good
source of heat for a long boiling and coke would be just the job for this.
We have a plan of the copperas works which is contemporary
but it’s difficult to know how accurate it is - if it’s just a sketch map or if
somebody has done an accurate drawing.
It includes a ’Coppris House’ which looks like a fairly standard
17th-century mansion and it’s presumably where the management lived and where
any office activities took place. Lining
it up with modern maps it would appear that this ‘Coppris House’ nearer the
Creek and slightly south of where St Paul’s Church. The long gone Trinity Arms
houses are actually shown on it. So I
guess it was somewhere in the area covered by ‘Ferranti Park’.
Intriguingly on this old plan of the copperas works a long
thin dock is shown coming into the works from the Creek. It’s about the length of the block between
the Creek side and Copperas Street and it is roughly on the line of the
boundary between the Laban centre and the new block of flats on the site of
Kent Wharf. The dock isn’t there now but
it appears on maps of Deptford until at least the 1920s and I don’t know what
happened to it. In the later 19th century the site of the Laban
Centre was the Greenwich and Deptford Board of Works Depot and they seem to
have used the dock. It always seems to
have been called Copperas Dock so I
assume it was built for the copperas works- and I know nothing about it in the
18th Century beyond a report of a young women who ‘flung herself’
into it in 1743.
The Copperas Dock appears to have been used by a firm of
ship breakers and as early as 1807 it was for sale by them on the grounds that
the construction of Creek Bridge would mean they would be unable to use it. It was for sale with a small dwelling house,
sawpits and crane posts. Strangely the address to apply to for details of the
sale was in Limehouse. The ship breakers still seem to be there in 1811 when
they were advertising the remains of an old warship, Vigilant, for sale. ( It
strikes me that ship breakers had a lot in common with the scrap trade).In 1819
it was again offered for sale – and from the same address in Limehouse. This
time added to it assets were a small steam Engine, a pair of Horizontal Mill Stones, and a pair
of Edge Stones; with rights of Landing and Shipping in the Dock.
No more was heard until
1867 when the local Board of Works began to take an interest. Did the parish have a right use it? Enquires revealed that it had been used about
20 years previously – 1840s, which makes sense since the copperas works had
closed in 1839. It was reported that it was a favourite bathing place for boys
and that salmon had been caught there.
The road going to it was private – but would the dock itself be of use
to the parish. They decided it would be
of use and ordered for it to be refurbished.
The Board of Works depot was next door to it and I assume they took it on.. Later maps show a ‘travelling crane’ running
down the north side of it and I guess
that was installed by the Board of Works.
However it seems to have been forgotten and a later report in The
Mercury expresses surprise that there was a public dock I this area – open to
all residents to use.
I don’t know when the dock was closed but it’s not there now. I wondered if anyone had thought to investigate what is clearly a 17th-century dock when the Laban Centre and then the flats were built. The archaeological report on the flats makes no mention of it but the report on the Laban centre (which is not in any way detailed) says that there was on site ‘the north wall of an infilled 19th century barge dock’ . Well I guess then it must have been rebuilt in 1867 when the vestry took it over – because surely the archae
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