DRUGS, GUNS
AND HIGH FINANCE
This is a
story of big money, big guns, drugs,
slavery and treachery. It is being highlighted here because of its
relationship to one of the sites which will be covered by the Millennium Dome
but much of it happened elsewhere – sometimes elsewhere in Kent.
In the late 1850s a Mr. William Dent bought Bickley
Park, near Bromley, from the estate of William Wells. He was an ex-director of the East India
Company and suitably rich. He didn't
stay long at Bickley Park but retained an interest in the area along with his
Chairmanship of the Mid-Kent Railway Company. His brother, Thomas, also lived
in the area having built a large house
in the Bromley area. Other family
members lived in Lee and Bromley and moved in the innermost circles of
international high finance in the City of London.. Like other rich men they looked for investment opportunities in
the industries which grew up along the river Thames in Greenwich and
elsewhere. Their nephew, John Dent, was
to be the backer for one of the most interesting companies to move onto the
Greenwich peninsula – albeit one which was very short-lived.
Alexander Theophilus Blakely was a Royal Artillery
Officer, born in Ireland, and educated at the Royal Military Academy in
Woolwich. From the start he seems to
have been interested in the manufacture of heavy guns. He developed a number of
proposals for improvements and, after he had retired from the army, patented
some of them and began to try and interest the authorities, both in Britain and
abroad, about his ideas.
There has been a great of interest in Blakely
recently in ordnance history circles – including an exhibition at Fort Nelson
near Portsmouth. There have also been
a number of articles written about Blakely which discuss his ideas about
gunnery and his attempts to get them accepted.
It has been suggested that he discovered the principles 'on which guns
are made ….. his patents covered virtually all the major improvements in
ordnance in the fifty years after his death and his influence is still
apparent'.[1] It has been said that his ideas were
misappropriated by William Armstrong – who was not a major arms manufacturer
but held an important government
appointment concerned with arms procurement. Armstrong made a fortune and became a
national figure while Blakely died bankrupt in Peru.
Spurned by the British Government Blakely began to
make his guns himself and to try and sell them where he could. At first the guns were made by a variety
of companies but in the early 1860s
Blakely set up his own factory, initially in Southwark. At some point he met John Dent who was to
back financially. They set up a
partnership called the Blakely Ordnance Company. The international arms trade has never been
a particularly nice business and in this case the source of the finance was not
derived from, perhaps, the most ethical sources. There is no reason to believe
that the Dent family were anything but the most respectable people. Opium was
of course legal in the last century although the massive trade which grew up
whereby it was sold to the Chinese in return for silk and tea was increasingly
being seen as discreditable. In the 1840s the Chinese had begun moves to
stop the trade and at one point had threatened to arrest on the leading British
opium traders, Lancelot Dent. The
ensuing warfare, as British gunboats pounded Chinese ports in order to enforce
the opium trade, is now seen as one of
the least edifying episodes in British history. John Dent seems to have been largely in charge
of the family Chinese interests and some of these reports have survived which
detail silk, tea and opium prices on a monthly basis.
Blakely meanwhile was selling guns all around the
world – except in Britain. The great
fortress of Kronstadt in Russia was armed by Blakely. One of his guns stands on the ramparts at
Charleston and fired the first shot of the American Civil War. Off Cherbourg a Blakely gun has recently been
retrieved from the wreck of the Alabama – a warship secretly built in Liverpool
on behalf of the Confederate states.
What, however, has any of this got to do with Greenwich?
Blakely intended to build a major manufacturing
complex, on the tip of the Greenwich peninsula. The area was, and still is,
known as 'Ordnance Wharf' works, and in
1998 houses the site offices for the Millennium Exhibition Dome - it will
eventually be a major part of the exhibition site. In the 1880s the area became part of the South
Metropolitan Gas Company's East Greenwich Works, which used it for a factory for tar-based chemicals.
Adjacent and still in occupation in early 1998 are some 1950s houses known as
'Blakely cottages' – they stand on the site of workers housing built for the
Ordnance works. Once they are demolished all reference to Blakely will disappear
from the area.
Morden College were the ground landlords for the
site and their archives first record negotiations with Blakely for a site in
November 1863 and a lease was signed in
1864. In January 1865 Blakely applied to the College for permission to build a wharf and at the same time he approached the Greenwich
Board of Works for approval to close a
footpath which ran through the site.
The works itself is shown in a set of photographs
deposited in Southwark Local History Library. One of these shows the new jetty
built off Ordnance Wharf while another
shows the half-built works together with a group of men, one of whom is
probably Blakely. One of the other men seems to resemble the steel magnate,
Henry Bessemer. Bessemer's relationship is very mysterious
and his role at East Greenwich will be the subject of another article.
By 1865 Blakely was in trouble. His collapse was involved with problems in
China which led to the downfall of Dent's financial empire there. It is far from clear exactly what happened –
perhaps someone somewhere has studied the Dent family and the end of the China
trade but I am not aware of this.
Reports in the press of the day – still reeling from the major banking
collapse of Overend Gurney – give little in the way of clues. They variously blame frauds in China or
Blakely himself. The China House of Dent
was the second business in the trade and it seems difficult to believe that
investment in Blakely could have brought about their downfall. After this financial ruin Blakely went abroad
and died in Peru in 1868. There has
been some idea that he was perhaps inconvenient and that he was simply disposed
of. Who knows? His family certainly
fought on for many years to get his name and his discoveries recognised and today
there are a number of historians who are keen to defend want he did and to
speculate on the truth of his demise.
What happened to the Blakely site after the company
had collapsed? The lease continued to be
in the name of the 'Blakely Ordnance Co.
and this persisted into the 1870s. It has been suggested that Josiah Vavassuer,
whose works he had shared in Southwark,
developed his work. Vavassuer himself lived in Blackheath, at 99
Blackheath Park, and called this house 'Rothbury'– an obvious echo of William
Armstrong's great house at Cragside, now in the stewardship of the National
Trust.. South of the Blakely site in
Blackwall Lane is an eccentric, much minaretted, congregational church – today
in use by an arts project. It is called
'Rothbury Hall' and was built and funded by Vavasseur.
Over the next fifteen years part of Blakely's
Greenwich site was leased to a ship builder and some to a guano company. Much
of it area seems simply to have remained
untouched. In the early 1880s an enquiry
was held into the South Metropolitan Gas
Company's plans for the then very large new gas works on an adjacent site. The
company was subsequently required, by the House of Lords, to purchase the area of the Blakely site.
They found it littered with the half-built remains of 'great guns'. These were
carefully piled up and made into a feature at the gate of Ordnance Wharf where they remained until sold for scrap in
the 1970s. The gas company also took over the housing, which Blakely had
intended for his workers but which had never been finished together with
'coffee room, reading rooms, etc'. These were occupied as site offices by
Docwra while the gas works was being built and subsequently let to local
people.
There seems to be far more to the Blakely story than
appears on the surface – this article has only touched on some of the
points. International finance, big guns
and drugs always were a recipe for something extraordinary,.
No comments:
Post a Comment