Early services by steam road vehicles in Greenwich - Hancock and Era- and some others

 

Last week I wrote about some of the first powered road vehicles and how experimental vehicles went up Shooters Hill to demonstrate what they could do, including that of Samuel Brown.  I also mentioned some of the earliest steam propelled vehicles.

Steam carriages like that of Burstill and Hill were experimental and none of them ever ran a regular public transport service. This changed in the late 1830s when new carriages came on to the roads which were designed to hold fifteen or more passengers and run an 'omnibus' service.  

At this time there seems to have been considerable interest in providing a fast, safe and regular service between Greenwich and London. The eventual winner was the London and Greenwich Railway, built in 1836 and still running. Many people will have used the river boat services but Shillibeer’s horse drawn omnibuses on the road were competition for river transport and speculators hoped steam road vehicles would also be competitors for this market.

 Shillibeer’s horse drawn ‘omnibuses; appear to have running between Greenwich and London Bridge in the early 1830s in what was a growing market.  Advertisements stress their comfort and safety.  However from newspaper reports it is clear that Shillibeer was in financial difficulties from the early 1830s, well before the railway opened.  There are also reports of problems with bus drivers - one report in particular describes the driver of a horse bus so drunk that the police of the day tried to prevent him from continuing and tried to remove him from the driver’s seat.  He took off at high-speed to evade them only to crash the bus which killed one of his horses

 Another Company running a horse bus service between London and Greenwich was Wheatleys. I know very little about their origins but in 1838 they were was licensed to run eight vehicles a day from Woolwich to Charing Cross and sixteen to Greenwich and in 1849 this was expanded to running six vehicles from Woolwich to Deptford with stops at Greenwich and Charlton.   They rented fields on the Peninsula from Morden College for grazing and rest for their horses.

 One of the most successful builder of steam road vehicles, whose carriages made long regular runs, was Goldsworthy Gurney. He seems to have had no connection with Greenwich but some of his carriages were adapted for a proposed run here.  He had built a carriage in 1826 which was about 20 feet long and would take six inside passengers and fifteen outside. It will be seen that these were on the same principle as a stage coach and designed for carrying passengers on service routes - not as individual private transport.

 Gurney's carriages were being used in the Gloucestershire area by Sir Charles Dance where the service encountered a great of opposition from both stage coach proprietors and the Turnpike Trusts.  A Parliamentary Committee examined the subject of steam carriage services and found in favour of them, but a Steam Carriage Bill could not be got through the House of Lords.   It must, however, have seen likely that suburban services were a better possibility.

 In 1831 Dance went to the engineering firm of Maudslay, Son and Field, then based at Waterloo - they later opened a ship building and boiler works on Greenwich Marsh. Dance asked Maudslay to make Gurney’s carriage more powerful and this was done.  During the autumn of 1833 this rebuilt vehicle made a number of test runs from Maudslay's works in Waterloo. With a party of fifteen observers on board they went to Merstham on the Brighton Road and visited Beulah Spa and some other spas in the Sydenham area. Whether they strayed into Kent during this period must be a matter for speculation - the vehicle was, however, intended for Greenwich roads.

 In October 1833 Dance's new carriage ran for some weeks between Waterloo Bridge and Greenwich.  It was said that it was not intended that this should be a proper public transport service so ordinary people were deterred from using it by the price of tickets - 'half a crown for tickets each way'.  ‘Half a crown’ was an eighth of a pound – about 12 ½ pence.  That was the end for this brief omnibus service which did not continue and there seems to be no record of what happened to the carriage.  The service must have failed for reasons which were not made public.  However it is the only recorded steam bus service between London and Greenwich which actually ran and which was well-publicised with pictures and narratives of how successful it had all been.

 A year or so later another omnibus service ran between London to Greenwich using coaches built by John Scott Russell.  Russell was Scottish and these carriages had been designed and built by him in Edinburgh. They had been used for a service between Glasgow and Paisley but in the summer of 1834 one of the carriages had overturned.  It was later said that this was because the turnpike trustees in Glasgow had put extra thick layers of stone on the road to stop his carriages running. As a result five passengers were killed and the Scottish Courts forbade him to run the carriages again in Scotland.   So, unable to use them in Scotland, Russell sent two of the carriages by ship to London for use in trips to Greenwich, Kew and elsewhere.

 For this service on these, rather compromised, carriages the fares were kept cheap. The vehicles had to haul a tender full of coke along the road with them and pick up water at places along the way as they went.  Scott Russell himself came to London to live in 1838. He was to become an important ship builder - he designed the Great Eastern - and he eventually lived in Sydenham.  It does not seem to have persisted with the omnibus service to Greenwich and after an attempt to sell the carriages no more was heard of them.

 There were probably several inventors trying to design steam road carriages. In 1834 Francis Maceroni - more of him in a future article - gave a list of steam carriage builders whose vehicles ' would not move at all'.  This is just a list of names without details and many have not yet been traced.  One who may have a Greenwich connection was ‘Mr. Joyce’. William Joyce owned an engineering company at the Kent Ironworks in Greenwich where he designed and made a successful steam engine. Kent Ironworks was situated on the first site on the right after crossing today's Creek Bridge from Deptford.  Joyce probably started in work in Greenwich in 1841 when he acquired part of an old gas works site but whether he is the Mr. Joyce mentioned by Maceroni and whether this abortive steam car was made in Greenwich is not known. 

 The most successful of the steam carriage builders of the 1830s was Walter Hancock who designed and made vehicles in Stratford, east London.  Hancock was one of a most interesting family - his brother, Thomas, has been called  'the foremost rubber technologist in England' and was a partner of the, better known, Mr. Charles Mackintosh.  Another brother, Charles, was responsible for the first use of gutta percha which was to revolutionise Thameside cable manufacture.  Walter Hancock was happy to advertise his brother's products by his 'flexible tubing' to suck up water for his steam road vehicles

 Walter Hancock was the only one of the early road vehicle inventors who designed a locomotive which could go through crowded London streets on busy days.  Some of his coaches may have run in an omnibus service to Greenwich - but accounts of what happened are often confusing and contradictory and I am afraid that I now think a service to Greenwich was unlikely, and must apologise for having said in previous articles that he did run a service. Hancock's coaches all had identifying names - one was even called 'Autopsy'.  A coach called 'Era' is shown in illustrations, dating from 1832, apparently and advertising a service between London and Greenwich.

Era was built by Hancock for a body called the London and Greenwich Steam Carriage Company.  It appears that separate companies had been set up to run omnibus routes - onof them, for instance, was the London and Paddington Steam Carriage Company. These companies, ostensibly different, all seem to have had most of the same people behind them.  The London and Greenwich Steam Carriage was not a Greenwich based company but a body set up in London which wanted to run an omnibus service to Greenwich and I must admit to not being able to find a contemporary source reference to it.

A number of writers have said that the engineer of the London and Greenwich Steam Carriage Company was D. Redmund, who was based in City Road, Islington and there are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened. Redmund is said to have ordered a different vehicle - called Enterprise - for Greenwich from Hancock.  When Enterprise arrived Redmund took it to pieces and noted down all the dimensions. He then began to build another carriage himself - called Alpha - which was an almost complete copy of Enterprise.   The vehicle ran some test runs but never seems to have gone into service. 

Hancock himself is said have made 'Era' for work in Greenwich. It may be that the problems which Hancock had with David Redmund meant that the vehicle never acts of actually ran a service. ‘Era’ carried sixteen people sitting inside and two outside. In addition there was crew of three - the driver, the engineer and a lad.  There were two engines for the engineer to manage.  The 'lad' stoked the boiler with 'common gas coke ' - that is coke bought from the gas works. 

Hancock also built a carriage for a London to Brighton service and made several well publicised trips to Brighton. He seems to have worked with Moses Ricardo – brother of the economist -and with a Mr Busby, a local builder. This seems to have eventually come to nothing but some authorities say that the coaches only ran as far as Greenwich; again I can find no press reference to this and in any case Greenwich is not on the route that a vehicle would take in the 1830s between West Ham, where Hancock’s workshops, were and Brighton.

Potential passengers, worried about a boiler explosion, were assured that ' the only parts of the boiler which can be dreaded are the sides - but good ties will keep them together'   and, as for the rest of the boiler 'its power of doing mischief is not worth notice'. The drawing of 'Era' shows a comfortable looking vehicle with a driver at the front and the engine completely shielded from the passengers. There is a grand crest on the side of the coach which perhaps meant to imply some sort of aristocratic patronage. 

Hancock made a number of very successful steam omnibuses some which on service routes for some time. However he seems to have made little money and gave up work in the late 1830s.  It is to be hoped that 'Era' did see some service on the road to Greenwich but it is more likely that she never got beyond the stage of running trials.  In 1832 the line which was to become the London and Greenwich Railway had already been surveyed and, when complete, may well have provided competition which Era could not have met.

 By the end of the 1830s steam road transport was a reality. Kentish roads had already seen some experimental vehicles and attempts to run public services.  The first years of the next decade would see attempts to make vehicles in Greenwich and witness their first trials around Kent.

 GW