Last week I wrote about the Beneke family’s chemical works on Deptford
Creek. I am not a hundred per cent clear
where exactly where it was – but by the 1890s a chemical works owned by
F.C.Hills stretched more or less from the Greenwich railway south to Evelyn
Wharf. Clearly this was a much expanded
and a bigger site than Beneke’s but it was a works which had begun as theirs
and which had grown and grown.
F.C.Hills of Deptford. So often in the many years I have been
researching Frank Hills I’ve come across a local chemical works in some town in
England which had been taken over by F.C.Hills and always the comment will be
that F.C.Hills was an otherwise unknown chemical company based in Deptford. Well it isn’t unknown to me but Frank Hills
managed to keep a remarkably low profile seeing as how b usy he was. When he died in May 1893 his death was reported in two or three lines
in local papers. Then in 29th July the Times carried a report of his
will. This unnoticed south London chemical manufacturer had left a personal
fortune £1,942,836, 11s. 11d. He was one of the 50 richest men in England.
Frank Hills did not inherit great wealth – no will has been traced for his
father - so his accumulation of wealth must indicate some remarkable individual
enterprise.
So – where to start?
Mr. Beneke of Deptford has been referred to earlier as perhaps the
largest buyer of ammoniacal liquor – a waste product of coal gas manufacture - from
the early gas industry. The second largest was probably a Thomas Hills who once
refused to buy liquor from the South London Gas Company because he had 'got enough from a country works',
which indicates that he was buying from a much wider area than just the
gasworks in London.
Thomas Hills appears to have moved to Bromley by Bow just before
1810. Every time you go through the Blackwall Tunnel you will pass very close
to where Thomas Hills’ chemical works stood. You must know Bromley by Bow Station
– cross the Mway (there is a tunnel under the road – don’t try walking across, you
will die!) and there is a road leading off the motorway; on it is fairly newly
built Bow School. There used to be a council estate on the site- The Coventry
Cross Estate - which was pulled down 10-15 years ago. The river Lea runs at the back of the site although
you can’t see it from the road. That is where I think – well I’m pretty sure – Thomas
Hills had the Bromley Steam Mills.
In the early 1800s Bromley by Bow was a busy industrial area where
Mr. Currie had the biggest alcohol distillery in the country. It was, and is, full of mills: Three Mills
still stand behind Tesco in the 2020s –and you can visit the House Mill, details
are on their web site. Three Mills is a
tide mill but Thomas Hills's mill was ‘Bromley Steam Mill' and had a steam
engine installed for earlier millers, C. & J. Milward. It was taken over by
Thomas Hills in 1811 and as well as grinding corn there he made chemicals with ‘a kiln house with reverbatory furnace, tartaric
acid and boiling house, coke ovens, drying houses, colour mill and machinery,
laboratory...'
In 1818 Thomas Hills patented a way of making sulphuric acid jointly
with a Uriah Haddock. Haddock was a 'chemist of Holloway' with an interest in
early gas manufacture. Hills and Haddock’s patent was the first to use of
pyrites instead of brimstone to make sulphuric acid and it is described as ‘revolutionary’. There was, however, was later a court case
for infringement of a patent by Thompson and Hill from Liverpool. Thomas Hills’ son Frank was to face many
challenges on his infringement of other people’s patents.
Like Beneke, Thomas Hills was buying a lot of gas industry waste
ammonia and what he did with it I don’t know.
Thomas Hills left the Bromley mill in about 1827. He had a large
family of children who seem to have mostly had their own chemical works. Thomas, born in 1804 is described as a ‘good
practical chemist’ and worked with his brother, Frank in Deptford and Greenwich.
Frank born 1807, is the subject of this and other articles. Edwin born 1809 has
a chemical works at Warsash near Southampton.
Arthur, born 1811, had a chemical works at Woodside, Croydon and on the
Isle of Dogs, and, later, at Brownhills and Wepre in Flintshire. Henry, born 1818, had a chemical works at Almwch
on Anglesey, and an interest in a Cheshire salt works. George, born 1820,
worked with Frank and held patents on the manufacture of both sulphuric acid
and sugar. A second generation of their
sons also had chemical works in various parts of the country – there were works
in Newcastle for instance as well as mines in Wales and Spain. Frank was the dominant brother and they seem
to have worked together with him as a network – with the possible exception of
Edwin.
Frank began to contact the London gas companies giving his address as
the Deptford Chemical Works – the works I described last week owned by Beneke. Initially he seems to have been renting it or
had leased it continuing their business or he may even have been their employee.
Frank lived in North Terrace, Camberwell Green – reasonably near to the Beneke
family in Denmark Hill. By the mid-1830s
he was approaching various London gas companies offered to sell them his
manufactured acids and to buy their waste tar or ammoniacal liquor with which
he could manufacture ammonia salts for them.
In 1836 the London and Greenwich Railway was built across Deptford
Creek, and included a gasworks which lay alongside the line on its north side –
and I will write about both in a couple of weeks time. When the gasworks became
independent of the railway it was said that Frank had financed a mortgage on it
and that he used it as part of his experimental work in Deptford. Family
sources told me that he was 'always
experimenting in the laboratories and the engineering workshops'.
Frank married Ellen Rawlings in 1842 – and used money from the
marriage settlement to buy a large site at East Greenwich. I covered this site in my article on the
Greenwich riverside in Weekender in March 2021 and gave a great deal of
information there about Frank Hills and his chemical works, particularly in
regard to his use of gas industry waste.
He also had a site in Stratford – I am not sure exactly where –which is
described as having ‘extensive waterside frontage’ . In Stratford that period
it could mean frontage on any one of the various ‘back rivers’ and not
accessible to craft of any size. This
site may have been let out from 1867.
The site at Deptford was very extensive stretching eventually from
Harold Wharf to the rail side gas works.
It included twenty-two cottages in Creek Street, a foreman’s house, a
mission hall and a workmen’s club ‘let at a peppercorn rent’.
For the first few years of Frank Hills’
occupation of the site we hear very little about the Deptford works. He continued to buy ammoniacal liquor from
the gas companies. For instance in 1838 he agreed with Phoenix Gas Company
–whose Greenwich works was just up the road - ‘to take all the ammoniacal
liquor for three years as required by the company’. At the Imperial Gas Company
in 1836 he said he could ‘take l50-200 gallons a day at Fulham gas Works and
would send casks to be filled’. In 1842 at the South Metropolitan Gas Company’s
Old Kent Road works he attended a special meeting where he agreed to take ‘all
the company's make of ammoniacal liquor for seven years at 7/- per barrel’. He made similar agreements with many, many
gas companies – I hvae looked at a lot of gas company minute books over the
years and he is always there – and I have barely scratched the surface of the number
of gas companies. Frank was very,very busy.
Also
in these years he embarked on various agreements and disagreements with other
chemists working on the chemistry of products from gas industry waste. Some litigation started in this period want on
for decades with court hearings where the evidence seems designed to baffle the
judge and jury – and me!
Another
of Frank's ventures in the 1840s was into road transport. In the early 1840s he became known for the development of steam road
vehicles. The best known promoter of
steam road vehicles in this period was Stratford based Walter Hancock and in
1839 Frank travelled on a Hancock vehicle to Cambridge while, as Mechanics Magazine commented 'taking a lesson on steam carriage construction during the journey'. He
later patented a gearing system which, it is suggested had originally been
developed by Roberts of Manchester. I am
afraid that this accusation of stolen ideas patented was to become a constant
theme with Frank. The cars may have been made at one of the ironworks on Deptford
Creek or on the Greenwich Peninsula by Joshua Taylor Beale, who I have also written
about in Weekender early last year.
It was said
that Frank Hills design was ‘the most perfect now known in England’. The vehicle
was taken out on trips on dangerous and difficult roads. He went to Hastings, and back ‘128 miles in
a day - half the time it took a stage coach’.
They went 'up and down the hills about Blackheath, Bromley and ..on the
Hastings Road as far as Tunbridge and back ‘. Frank boasted he went up 'Quarry
Hill which rises 1 in 13, and River Hill, said by coachmen to be the worst hill
in the country, rises 1 in 12’. Frank claimed to do them all.
Next week I
will say a bit more about the Deptford Chemical Works – and sometime in the
future about Frank and his steam cars.
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