Until a few years ago, if you walked east down
Borthwick Street you couldn’t get to Deptford Creek. You had to turn right at the end and go down
Deptford Green until you got to the church, then turn left and left again into
Stowage, and you were alongside the Creek. Today – with the building of a new
housing estate there is a cut through from Borthwick Street and you can carry
on walking parallel to the river. Now we
can go into Glaisher Street and follow it round as it curves round to meet
Creek Road.
So, the next section of the Greenwich riverside goes
from Borthwick Street to the mouth of the Creek. It is now the site of a new(ish) housing
scheme and Glaisher Street is the main road through the new estate. It is
called after James Glaisher who was a distinguished member of the Royal
Observatory staff. The only other road name on the estate is Basevi Way – Georg
Basevi was an architect. Are they really the most appropriate names for an area
which, as we will see, had a distinguished and interesting past? Nowhere is there any mention of the ship
building industry which was once here - in fact the estate layout does not actually
begin to reflect the historic land use patterns.
Up the 17th century the land on the west
bank of Deptford Creek as it emerges into the Thames here, was marshland –
although it may have already been used for ship building. It was called Church
Marsh and owned by the City of London's Bridge House Estates. In 1614 they leased
it to the East India Company. We have
already seen how this Company, then newly formed, leased Stone Wharf, slightly
up river in the 17th century and then moved to a larger site here. The lease followed protracted negotiations
with the City's Lord Mayor and Common Council and it is clear that the East
India Company wanted a site where they could not only build ships but equip and
provision them too.
The early 17th century map of Deptford
shows the East India Company works on the western edge of Church Marsh and a
long way from the Creek. They built “a dry dock and slipways, an iron foundry
to make anchors and chains; a spinning house to make cordage; a slaughterhouse
for the killing, salting and pickling of pork and beef; storehouses for timber
and canvas; and an isolated powder house to store gunpowder. “ They are said to have employed 300 men and to
have built thirty ships before 1820. However, despite their investment in the
site the East India Company gradually withdrew from it, with little built here after
1626.
Throughout the rest of the 17th century the
dockyard and dry dock were leased out to a variety of ship builders. Most of them were fulfilling government
contracts for warships and private merchantmen were probably built here too. Passing this area on the River then would
have given a view of a fine sight of great ships, party built, on slips along
the foreshore. The National Maritime
Museum has many examples of impressive paintings by artists who must have been excited
by what they saw and left their views of it for us to enjoy.
In the 1630s the yard was leased to a John Tailor
and then during the Commonwealth to Peter Pett – the leading shipwright of his
day and a Commissioner at Chatham Dockyard. Eventually, in the 1690s, it
was leased to members of the Castle family.
William and Robert Castle were well known
shipbuilders in the late 17th century who are mentioned in Pepys's
Diaries. William Castle an expert in building naval vessels as well as being married
to the daughter of the Surveyor of the Navy. There are also suggestions that
they were forerunners to the later Castle ship breakers. In the 18th
century the site was leased to a number of ship builders and impressive lists
of vessels built here have emerged. Several of these ships were built as ‘fire
ships’ or ‘bombs'.
In 1788 the site was taken over by members
of the Barnard family. This dynasty of successful shipbuilders had begun in
Ipswich and Harwich. They extended the site and it became known as Deptford Dry
Dock. In the early 19th
century the senior partner in the firm was a woman, Francis Barnard. On her
death in 1825 her surviving son carried on as an absentee owner of the yard and
at his death in 1851 a mountain of debt and mortgages ensured closure.
One of the most interesting 19th century shipbuilders here was
Charles Lungley who built ships with iron hulls –not wood like his predecessors.
He is also thought to be the person who persuaded the Admiralty to use the new
system of screw-steamers for mail ships. He held a patent for unsinkable ships with
watertight compartments and also designed steam engines
which were built here in Deptford. His ships were usually modest in size
although his designs and workmanship were of high quality and were ‘very smart
vessels’. In 1864 he became involved in building
biggest and most famous ship on the Thames – Brunel’s Great Eastern. In a deal with Millwall Iron Works, where
Great Eastern was built, he became what appears to have been their managing
director and thus oversaw the construction of Brunel’s huge ship.
Later Lungley returned to
Deptford where he had one of the largest dry docks on the Thames – he held a patent
for a dry dock which could be divided up as necessary with a system of gates.
After he left Deptford his dry dock became known as the Metropolitan Dry Dock
and was also associated with General Steam Navigation – more about them in a
moment...
In the 19th century some of this large site began to be used
by industries not connected with ship building.
At the southern end of Lungley’s works, at Deptford Green was the
Kamptulicon works belonging to Harry Taylor.
Kamptulicon, had been first made in Greenwich High Road and as a sort of
predecessor to linoleum for floors using rubber instead of linseed oil. Taylor
blended the rubber with a gum in a process which is said to have been
discovered by a doctor when dealing with a patient with head injuries. It was
advertised for use in ‘floors, knife boards, lunatic’s cells and horse boxes’.
By the middle of the 19th century what was then called ‘Stowage
Wharf’ was used by the Patent Fuel
Company. At that time there were a number of companies making 'patent fuel' and
as many recipes as there were factories. They usually made up a combination of dust,
tar , rubbish and whatever would stick them together to make briquettes which would
burn as fuel. This Deptford works may
have used ‘Warlich’s method’ – a combination of coal dust and oil. They held a demonstration of a ship powered
by creosote in 1869 and this might man that they were trying to produce a fuel
for ships. In the early 20th century the site was a ‘sawing and
desiccating works” – but what they were actually doing is unclear. Nearby were
works ‘desiccating’ everything from coconuts to soup – but this sounds like a
process to do with wood.
The most famous firm here was General Steam Navigation who were on the
most easterly section of the wharf, alongside the Creek. Some readers will
remember them. I am sure many of us older
people can remember the Royal Daffodil steaming across to France with day
tripper in the 1950s. Their founder, Thomas Brocklebank, is said to have first built a paddle steamer
on Deptford Creek, then other vessels which were eventually taken over by
General Steam. Eagle in 1820, said to be a wooden paddle steamer, was used on
the Margate Service, followed by Hero, Royal Sovereign, City of London and
Brocklebank. Later Harlequin and Columbine were built here by a Mr Evenden. This Mr Brocklebank was a Deptford timber
merchant and is not to be confused with the Liverpool shipbuilder of the same
name who lived in Westcombe Park.
General Steam dated from 1824 and had been set by a group of business men
including the construction contractors Joliffe and Banks. By 1825 they were had
a fleet of 15 Deptford-built steamers at their yard at Stowage. They used the paddle steamers for passenger
transport and screw drive steamers for their flourishing cargo trade. They
carried mails and in fact pioneered the ‘coastal steamship services on which
England depended’. As freight carriers they imported live cattle and sheep - although
this trade was lost with the opening of the Foreign Cattle Market on the Deptford
Dockyard site. They specialised in links with ports in Britain but they also ran
all those pleasure cruises to resorts down river from Deptford and across the
Channel. By 1837 they had 351 vessels.
Originally in the 19th
century Stowage Wharf had been leased by General Steam from the East India
Company along with the old dry dock but from 1900 parts of the site began to be
leased to the London Electricity Supply Company for Deptford Power Station
expansion. Stowage Wharf was the first site to go.
In the Great War General
Steam’s yard was taken over by the Government and the Company lost 25 vessels
on war service. By the 1940s they had
about 45 ships and early on in the Second World War they evacuated London
schoolchildren. Their vessels undertook a distinguished role at Dunkirk where their
eight ships are thought to have evacuated 31,000 troops. They also evacuated troops from the other small
ports and much else. Deptford Yard was badly bombed on several occasions
including a V2 in the Creek itself. Before D-day 303 smaller vessels were
converted in various ways here including landing craft and anti aircraft ships
After the war vessels
continued to be built at Deptford where there was still a staff of about 300. And
of course there was the Daffodil taking jolly crowds on day trips to France. I
remember plodding across the Channel in a rival concern’s old tub on a trip advertised
as 'Rock across the Channel’ (its juke
box only took kroner). Then the Daffodil came past us at three times the speed
with people waving and dancing on deck, as well as music and a general air of
jollity. It was an institution!
This ended in the mid-1960s and
men were laid off from 1967 and the became a lorry depot. General Steam was swallowed
up into P&O in 1972, and then the last remains of the Deptford Yard closed.
General Steam should, I
think, be better known. They lasted
nearly a hundred and fifty years; pioneered
and provided a long lasting and efficient service. This Deptford site
generally has seen some important and innovative successes. It was the site for the earliest days of the
East India Company – and, whatever we think about them now, they were clearly a
success in their own terms, making fortunes and governing an entire continent,
they affected the lives of millions of people and their legacy lives on. On a much smaller scale Barnard is a good
example of a shipbuilder of the period, building big wooden sailing ships - in an era of 'conquering the world', and
'building Nelson’s navy'. Lungley, I know little about and have no knowledge of
any study of him - apart from an unpublished paper at a London shipbuilding
conference. He seems to have been pivotal as shipbuilding entered a new world
of iron ships and steam.
Walking round Glaisher Street
you will learn nothing of this. The
shipbuilding sites all eventually disappeared under an expanded Deptford Power
Station – and more about that revolutionary structure next time. But I guess very few Deptford residents will
realise what a distinguished ship building site this was. This article hasn’t the space to describe the
individual ships built here – warships, merchantmen and great East Indiamen. All
forgotten with no memorial - unless
someone has planted a few daffodils
Further reading
There are clearly acres and
acres of print about the East India Company both books and online
General Steam – there is
information on line. Locally there is a booklet by Peter Gurnett published by Lewisham Local History Society
Barnard are covered in a very
nice history ‘Building Britain’s Wooden Walls’ by John E.Barnard
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