In
the last few months I have worked my way from the Thames all the way up the
east, the Greenwich bank, of Deptford Creek and the Ravensbourne River and,
following my piece on the Anchor Brewery last week we are nearly at Lewisham Bridge.
I think it’s now time to turn round and
work back down the Lewisham bank of the Ravensbourne, the west bank and get
back to the Thames and I hope it’s going to be an interesting journey.
Let’s
start off with the first big site coming down the river . That was a factory
making a lot of interestingly new tech, although it was quite an old firm .They
were in the huge Century Works - in the triangle of the Ravensbourne where
there is now newish houses along what is now Armoury Road. When Century Works was
built this was previously unused marshy meadow and the firm built it was something
to be reckoned with.
Arpound
1965 I was working as a copy typist for the Buyer in a Dartford factory. The Buyer
was a nice young chap who was always telling me about the Rolling Stone whose
parents lived just down the road from him. As ever I was told nothing about the
Company I was working for – no one in these offices can ever comprehend that
the ‘girls’ - the typists - could ever
be interested in, or understand such things. I had the impression that what
they made was deckchairs - and I’m sure that these were much more profitable
than the technical instrumentation with which the company had made its name and
then still claimed to make and sell. However
a rumour went round that we had been taken over by another company. One day the top manager came in with a lot of
forms which he said we would need to complete in the future. He was moaning and
moaning about them, on and on - about how the new owners were making them do
these silly extra jobs. Quite honestly
it was all very basic management stuff but he was confused – and so resentful. I later
learnt the firm who had taken us over and was going for efficiency was called ‘Elliotts’.
One
of the industries that gets a bit missed out in accounts of the ‘industrial revolution’
is the making of instruments - the many devices which keep the world measured
and monitored; makes it work and keeps it under control. Around the turn of the
19th century there were several firms which were set up to make all sorts of clever
bits of equipment. One, of course,
particularly relevant to Greenwich, was the making of telescopes, and also
navigation instruments – for istanxe sextants were made in their thousands in
New Eltham by Stanleys, and every naval officer had to have one,
William
Elliott had opened his first shop in 1817 describing himself as an ‘instrument
maker’ in Goswell Street, north of the City in London. By 1824 he was in St.
Martin’s Lane in business as an optician. This was quite a common way of
starting and skills learnt with lenses could be transferred to other devices as
necessary. In due course William took
his two sons, Frederick and Charles, into partnership - hence the company was
to become ‘Elliot Brothers’. He died in
1853 and his sons began to make instruments for surveying railways and related applications.
For instance they were advertising a patent ‘electric galvanic pocket battery
for personal medical use’ and as the 1850s progressed, other electrical
apparatus.
Elliott
Brothers moved to Charring Cross to an ‘excellent and commanding shop’. This
was a double fronted shop with a counting house and workshops. They were then described as mathematical
instrument makers and advertised the invention of a wooden drawing board with a
means of preventing it ‘warping and twisting’. Frederick patented "an improved case for aneroid barometers for
marine purposes.’ They exhibited in Paris a range of ‘mathematical, optical
and philosophical instruments’.
By
1870 Elliotts were employing 150 men but still described themselves as
‘opticians’. At an 1876
"Conversaziones" of the Society of Telegraph Engineers they exhibited more than seven
different instruments. These included - condensers designed by a
Royal Engineer, an Electrometer adapted from Sir William Thomson’s original,
and a Replenisher, for use with quadrant electrometer, Resistance Coils for use
in India, a Strophometer, for showing and recording the number of revolutions
of machinery – and this could to be used on the paying-out gear of a
cable-ship. Clearly this was an area important to workers in the Greenwich
based telecommunications industries. The
exhibits were
said to show ‘all the scientific
accuracy and beauty of workmanship for which that firm has so great a name’. Elliot’s had established a works to produce telegraphic equipment in
Saint Martin’s Lane off Charing Cross. Eventually this branch of their work was
to be transferred to Siemens
By
1882 the Elliot brothers had both died and although the firm continued to keep
them in the company name there no more Elliotts involved. By 1894 the firm was
involved in specialist military and naval work and were making electrical
signal equipment for warships. The list of the devices which they made and sold
had become much longer..
In
1900 they moved to purpose built premises in Lewisham – Century Works. Here they produced instruments
for telegraphy, electrical engineering, surveying, metrological, marine and more. They had a staff of about 300 and around the
same time acquired a Royal Warrant.
The
company began increasingly to concentrate on instrumentation for military
systems – as well as for vehicles in general.
I note advertisements from the
1900s for ‘speedometers’ for road vehicles –something we would regard as an
essential device speedometer. These were offered for sale and included an
encouragement to people to buy them for Christmas presents for the motorist in
your life.
With the government scientist, H.E.Wimperis,
they began to manufacture an
accelerometer which he had invented and which measured acceleration and became
an important device for testing locomotive and motor-vehicles. By 1912 they were
supplying flight instrument panels and aircraft instrument to the War Office
and others. Through
this they began to be involved in aircraft instrumentation working on a gyro
turn indicator and increasingly developed equipment for aircraft engines. They
undertook experiments for devices for use in aerial bombing and patented an
optical speedometer, an aircraft rate of roll indicator, and a bomb sight for
the Admiralty. They produced equipment for ships'
logs, gyro-compasses for use on battleships, Wimperis accelerometers and gradiometers,
all kinds of speed indicators, recorders and switchboard instruments, telegraph
apparatus etc.
Today
we look at the days of the early aircraft and tend to see its development in
terms of the shape of the aircraft and the techniques of the actual
flight. But this instrumentation was
vital for its success and tends to be taken for granted. They produced tachometers advertised for
aircraft engines - one of which Tommy Sopwith used on a 1910 record flight to
Belgium. Their expertise in making
barometers let to the development of an altimeter. They worked with Short
Brothers, who had established the first aircraft factory in the world Rochester
where aeroplanes were made, based on Wright Brothers designs. (We all remember
the sea plame moored alongside Rochester Bridge in the 1940s and ‘50s – don’t
we?)
A
panel of Elliott instruments was offered to customers. They advertised in the
new magazine – ‘Flight’ - who enthused about the instrument board and the need
for a standard instrument panel like this for all aircraft. It included an
altimeter, an airspeed indicator, an ascent/descent indicator, a clock and a
tachometer. It seems beyond belief now
that this was not considered essential from the start!
At
Lewisham in the Great War Elliotts produced a huge volume of aircraft
instrumentation and staff numbers rose accordingly. They made airspeed
indicators, engine tachometers, clinometers to Farnborough designs as well as
altimeters and fuel flow equipment. These were produced in their thousands.
They also made machine gun sights to Wimperis' designs. Many staff were employed on naval fire
control equipment. This continued through the 1920s and 1930s with work on Naval
gunnery systems and they expanded into control instrumentation and eventually
computers for every conceivable type of industry.
By
the Second World War Elliot’s were employing several thousand people at the Century
works. They made naval fire control equipment and electrical and electro-mechanical
apparatus for the military and the government departments. In
1940 an additional building was erected on the Lewisham site by the Admiralty -
designed to be bomb resistant. It was used for the design and manufacture of Naval
fire control - gun control systems – and associated equipment. Although they
were surrounded by areas subject to heavy bombing damage to the factory was
limited.
When
the war ended the naval work ended with it and eventually a new set of managers
arrived who were to move the company into the late 20th century.
In
1946 the company opened a research laboratory at Borehamwood. This was a significant force for many new
industries for Britain and it made important contributions in military radar,
industrial instrumentation and the emerging world of digital computers.
People
today will find it difficult to realise that in the immediate postwar period through
into the 1960s Britain was the leading country in the computer industry. The
first business computers were developed in London and many people will know the
story of how Lyons, the cake and ice cream making giant, also managed to invent
and sell the Leo – the first commercial business computer. The world’s first
real-time computer with memory store was built by Elliott’s in Borehamwood in
1947.
By
the 1960s Elliotts were world leaders in manufacturing computers which
conceivably could be used and understood by ordinary people - although these
were huge devices which would take up a whole specially built room. The Elliott
401 was the first working machine to be developed in the UK and was the first
of a series of digital computers produced by the firm over the next 20
years. Elliotts were one of three or
four companies making this equipment but were to be taken over by US based companies
who built on the technology developed in Britain to take over world markets. British
computer development was based on university and related research – while the
Americans knew about business applications like punched card apparatus, and had
marketing know-how. I suppose I could also
add that the same thing happened around the same time with the aircraft
industry where Britain led the world in innovation and manufacture – with, for
instance, the Comet - to see American
giants move in, copy and take over.
In
1953 an Aviation section was opened at Borehamwood. A site at Rochester Airport had been used by
Shorts and 1962 Elliott Automation began to expand there developing airborne digital
systems for Airbus and Boeing. Meanwhile
in Lewisham, through the 1950s, the
electronics division manufactured devices pioneered at Borehamwood and a
Nuclear Reactor Control Division was set up there. This includes specialist computers and
simulators as well as process control instrumentation. Lewisham
Library's archive holds a collection of trade brochures from Elliotts giving
many, many devices made at Century Works after the Second World War. Most of them are for uses incomprehensible to
most people but which involved measurement and process control for industrial applications.
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