Frank Hills and the purification process

 

Last week I wrote a bit about Frank Hills and his chemical works. So, thought I ought to say a bit more!    He took over the Beneke chemical works at some time around 1840.  We don’t hear much of him for a while in Deptford, although I know he was pretty busy.  His father, Thomas, had bought a lot of waste ammoniacal liquor from various gas works, as had Beneke who had founded the Deptford chemical works.  Frank bought from them too and was also involved in research on gas industry waste and already embroiled in what was to become years of litigation on it. 

There is little enough about Frank Hills in the local papers throughout the 1840s but in 1853 we suddenly find the local authority taking an interest in some of the noxious smells in the area.  Visits were made to Creekside and Dr.Leeson was commissioned to investigate. This was Henry Beaumont Leeson who was a medical doctor with a laboratory in an old mill on the riverside at Middle Watergate in Deptford.  They went to various works on the creek – and I’ll come back to what was said about the other works in later articles -  but at Hills’ works they found 'evaporating pans and sub liming pots from which odours of the most nauseous character were exhaled ....  small chimneys from which offensive odours were exhaled'.  The committee decided that legal proceedings must be taken. The case went to Maidstone Sessions and the parish authorities took eleven witnesses to Maidstone to support the indictment.    The works was visited again and ‘the nuisance was not in the slightest degree abated’. The final verdict was not reported.

Four years late in 1857 the Deptford Medical Officer reported to the authority about the various works on Deptford Creek. He reported that every means had been adopted to prevent the escape of effluvia.  The committee were not impressed – one member describing it as the ‘most namby pamby report he had ever heard’.

In 1849 there is a press report of a serious explosion which resulted ‘in great damage to the chemical works’.  This turns out to have been caused by the old fashioned method of going into an unventilated chemical store with a lighted candle. Only fourteen years earlier Old Kent Road Gas Works had been almost completely demolished by the same method.  The chap who took the candle into the store was terribly burned and immediately taken,  by train, to St. Thomas’s hospital where he was reported to be ‘going on favourably’ despite the extent  of his  burns.

It’s not until the 1860s that we begin to get an idea of what was being made at the Deptford chemical works through constant and increasing advertising. These early adverts are all for manure ‘chemical and artificial manure works’ – and this included the works at East Greenwich and at Stratford.   F.C.Hills sold ‘turnip and wheat manures and ‘superphosphates’.  This is particularly interesting since superphosphate manures had been developed by John Bennet Lawes whose works was a few yards further down the creek.    I don’t know – and Hills advertisements do not say – what the situation was with patents held by Lawes or by anyone else.   I would put nothing past Frank in the area of patents and patent protection.  It seems very likely that J.B. Lawes knew Frank Hills – and indeed twenty years later the Lawes works at Barking recorded transactions with him for sulphur and other items. However manure was what F.C.Hills advertised intensively from the 1860s onward. He clearly worked through agencies and advertisement in various parts of the country advertises sales by local traders.  There is often a particular emphasis on agencies in Ireland.

An interesting advertisement from 1864 is for ‘Hop Sulphur’ and ‘Genuine Virgin Roll Brimstone’.  This was of course of particular interest in Kent where hop growing was intensive and Frank Hills must have known many hop growers. The Greenwich coal merchant and developer Coles Child grew hops near his home Bromley, now in London, and in Kent – and took part in an annual ‘race; to get the first hops to the Hop Exchange near Borough Market. Just by London Bridge station the Exchange was almost on Frank Hills’ doorstep and the sulphur was clearly a speciality

It is not until the early 1870s that we get more of an idea that the Deptford works was producing something other than manure. . The Deptford works was now a ‘sulphuric acid, ammonia and chemical manure works’.

I am sorry if I am repeating here what I have written – I am afraid written many times – before.  I have certainly outlined Frank Hills' relationship with the gas industry and the efforts to ‘purify’ town gas so it smelt good enough to use in people’s homes. 

Frank Hills was closely involved in the development of a process which cleaned up coal gas. There is a long, long saga about the development of this process some of which I have outlined originally in my PhD thesis and later in my book ‘The Early East London Gas Industry.  Frank actually held the patent on this ‘purifying’ process but he had acquired it by very dubious means. Apparently one day scientists were demonstrating the new process at the Westminster Gas Works when they saw Frank standing outside in the Yard. ‘Shut the door’ one of them said ‘or Frank will immediately patent it’.  Too late!  Frank already held the patent and would ruthlessly exploit over the next years. He claimed that much of the research on this process was carried out at Deptford by a German chemist who worked for him using the facilities at the next door gas works – which had been the Greenwich railway gas works,

 

Frank’s energy was enormous. I have seen many, many gas company records from all round the country. All of them seem to have been visited by Frank so he could sell his purification process to them. He required them to buy a license from him to be allowed to use the system; he would then sell them a mixture which would clean the gas; for another fee he would remove the used mixture.  He could then process it to remove the chemicals which could be sold.  If a gas company deviated from this agreement they would quickly find themselves in court.  He made a vast amount of money out of this.  Even in those dry old company minutes the desperation of the director’s seeps through to you.

 

The litigation on the purification issue between Frank the gas companies and the other inventors of the process went on for years and years from the 1830s inwards. Much of the evidence is incomprehensible and there is a suspicion that he and the other chemists were trying to bamboozle judges and juries who they knew wouldn’t understand any of it - and so they would win their case.   One of his main rivals – Angus Alexander Croll – also had a works in Deptford but I don’t know where it was.  I could do with a excuse to write about him because he was a bit of a character, to put it mildly.

 

In 1871 Frank become a director of the Thames Iron Works which was on Bow creek opposite East Greenwich. One of the world’s premier shipbuilders in 1869 they had built The Warrior - the great ironclad warship which is now a tourist attraction in Portsmouth Harbour.   Frank was effectively in charge of this works when it was at its peak as a builder of great warships in the late 19th century - they built not only for the Royal Navy but for the navies round the world. Frank is said to have been always most excited as a new ship was launched and set off down the Thames at with him on board.   It is this works which was passed to his son Arnold in the 1890s.

 

Frank died in 1895 at his home, Redleaf, just outside Penshurst. St. Luke’s church in Penshurst remains as a memorial to him.  His death was followed closely by the death of his two eldest sons and his huge industrial legacy was broken up and passed into the hands of Arnold and the husbands of his daughters, Constance and Annie.

 

The Deptford chemical works passed into the management of Thomas Herbert Hills – Frank’s nephew and the son of his brother Thomas.   By 1907 the works was bankrupt and was closed down

 

This has been a very very short summary of Frank Hills who built up this vast fortune and empire out of a network of works belonging to other family members and a colossal amount of litigation. I have always found Frank fascinating and engagingly wicked.  He is one of our great 19th centaury industrialists but no one (but me) knows about him.

 

To finish with something cheerful.  In July 1890 workers from Hills’ factories at East Greenwich and Deptford were taken by a special train ‘with marked punctuality’ to Frank beautiful estate at Redleaf. They saw the Orchid House, and the Fernery and had dinner and tea in tents in the garden. There was boat racing, running and cricket. The day ended to a brass band as they assembled in front of the mansion.  Well, all very nice. The house at Redleaf was pulled down many years ago but if you go up the hill north from Penshurst village you pass the gates with the grand gate piers which Frank put up.  I used to go down to Penshurst to see his great grandson – Patrick – a very nice man living much more modestly.  ‘I don't know where all his fortune went' he used to say – 'I never got any of it’. By my standards Patrick was pretty posh but I knew what he meant.