The gas industry in south east London has been well written up – mainly details on the important and impressive, but very late, East Greenwich Gas Works. Before the 1880s there were a scattering of small local works and some like various Phoenix Company Works, and South Met’s Old Kent Road are reasonably well known. Some, like Eltham, are almost completely unknown. In Woolwich a small early works was replaced by two equally obscure one. But – there was one other works in south east London – actually in Woolwich - which never gets a mention.
In the winter of 1872 there was a great strike among London gas men and in December of that year many of them were on trial and being sent to prison. One night in early December a terrible gale damaged property all over the England so when the lights went out in the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich it was assumed that the gas workers in Woolwich had gone on strike in support of their colleagues. In actual fact the gas holder on the Arsenal site had become ‘deranged’ in the wind. (I don’t know in what way a gas holder can become ‘deranged’ – do they just mean ‘moved’?)
Many people will not understand about the Royal Arsenal – it was a vast factory covering over 2 square miles with, at its height, 80,000 workers. There was also much secrecy about its happened inside its walls and it was sometimes called the ‘secret city’ and certainly one in which even quite a large gasworks could go unnoticed, Today the town of Thamesmead covers part of the site.
The Arsenal gasworks was apparently built in 1856, at the same time as a hydraulic network was installed. This date seems very late because there had been interest in gas manufacture early on when from 1814 William Congreve was “Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory’. The nearby Royal Dockyard had produced coal gas even if it was only when Mr. Lukin blew up the seasoning sheds in 1812.
The Arsenal gasworks was built by government contract by Hannah, Donald and Wilson of Paisley. They are a very unfamiliar name to me and their work seems to have been almost entirely outside of the London area, much of it abroad. It might be asked why it wasn’t built by the Royal Engineers and although I agree expert knowledge might be needed, we should never underestimate the RE. The works was sited on the west banks of the Royal Arsenal Canal, very close to the Thames on a site which had once been used for labour by the convicts who lived on hulks moored in the Thames. Convict labour was used to build this gas works. It covered 3 1/2 acres and there was a large chimney which in 1870 began to tip and had to be realigned.
Coal Gas was to have many uses in the Arsenal but initially it was used for lighting and this was eventually extended to supply Woolwich buildings belonging to the war office– The Royal Military Academy, the Royal Herbert Hospital, numerous barrack buildings and many more. From the start it provided facilities for experiment. For instance in 1868 Admiral Arthur Cochrane’s investigating the manufacture of gas from bitumen alone and also as a mixture with coal from various sources. Arthur was the grandson of the Earl of Dundonald - who invented coal gas for lighting and didn’t realise he had done it.
There are a number of reports of ballooning activities from the Royal Arsenal Gasworks. In 1864 Mr. Coxwell flew to Sevenoaks and was accompanied by a goat was – which was apparently quite happy. In 1878 in very bad weather a balloon called The Crusader was used. These balloon flights werer in connection with research on War Balloons in which balloonists could be sent up in battle conditions to see what the enemy was up to. These were often tethered balloons at a great height and similar work was going on in France and Germany. The observers in the balloon had special codes to communicate with the military on the ground. Royal Engineers ‘from generals down’ were to be trained in the use of these balloons. The Arsenal gas work had a piece of ground nearby reserved for these experiments. One take off is described as being monitored by many senior officials from the Arsenal – including, for example Professor Abel, the eminent War Department Chemist . There was much discussion on the relative merits of hydrogen and coal gas in various weather conditions and quality of luminosity
Obviously there were a lot of explosives about in the Arsenal and there is a report from 1872 that all gas lamps were to be ‘lit by electricity’ to ensure safety with the gunpowder. But gas had many applications around the site and in 1905 it was said that half the output of the gas works was used for other than lighting - annealing cartridges, tin smith’s work, lead melting, tempering steel for tools and guns, riveting forges, brazing, chemical and metallurgical work. There were for instance automatic gas heated machines for soldering
I have mentioned the 1872 strike above but in the far better known south London gas strike of 1889 the gas workers at the Arsenal supported the Gas Stokers Union who wanted the connection between their mains and those of South Met means she disconnected. What happened is unclear but the government authorities is said to have replaced them with a batch of 35 able-bodied paupers from the workhouse
Just before the Great War the works was due to be entirely reconstructed and the work was supposed to take seven years. The most recent description I have is that of the London and Southern District Junior Gas Association visited the works in 1920. On the visit they saw the new steamship coaling pier. This was handing coal for the whole site – which included various power stations and boilers houses as well as the gas works. There were elaborate arrangements for handing the coal and transporting it various works using hydraulic lifts and with an overhead railway– in the case of the gas works via one of the rail systems. There is an excellent set of pictures of this system in the history section of https://www.royal-arsenal-history.com/
There were two holders installed when the works was built in 1856. These holders were originally single lift but they were changed about 1902 to hold 300,000 cubic feet with three lifts. This work was done by Messrs. Willey but the War Department did the underground work and that on the tank – and like others working on this riverside had trouble with water penetration. In 1907 one of the holders was breached following an explosion in a magazine in one of the tumps where cordite was stored. The gas escaped from the holder and apparently the explosion could be heard as far away as Bishop Stortford. Thousands of Woolwich people rushed down to the Arsenal – where family and friends were at work. However, no one was killed although there was extensive damage.
A great deal of the plant was automatic and electrically driven from the Arsenal’s own power stations. There was an arrangement of flues to the boilers under the foundations and all steam power equipment was in one shed. There were facilities for benzol and tar recovery. This was worked up into motor benzol all of which was used within the Arsenal itself. Some dehydrated tar was processed as a fuel for some special locomotives. There was a department which handled all the gas fitting needed within the arsenal which included specially designed small furnaces and lighting on universal joints which could be adapted to light particular tasks
I do not know when the Arsenal Gas Works closed. The site was run down very gradually after the Second World War – but the whole site was subject to tight security well into the 1980s. Anyone who didn’t work in the Arsenal site had very little knowledge of what went on in there. Once it became clear that the Arsenal was going to close ‘outsiders’. I remember being told about a trip for local councillors to see inside what they understood was too be a site available for housing. They were kept in a locked coach with blinds over the windows which they were only allowed to lift briefly when told to. Later I arranged a GLIAS visit and two members went to the wrong gate and were marched across the site by a military escort.. Everything was cleared before the developers were allowed in and then the archaeologists dug up everything looking for the Romans (which they found)
The site of the gas works is now mothballed – clearly in terms of undeveloped land on the arsenal site it’s quite a small patch and very isolated from the old danger areas. Nevertheless it is scheduled for housing and owned by Peabody – who know manage the whole of the Thamesmead complex. We shall see,
No comments:
Post a Comment