Harvey's history

 

The amount of work in writing these articles each week can vary widely depending on the amount of material I have about the particular industry I am writing about.  Clearly the week  before last when I wrote about the South Eastern Railway signalling works I didn’t actually have anything at all – and I would like to thank various people in the Railway History world who have also tried to dig something up about it – and all of them have failed.  Surely there are people around still who actually worked there??

I thought this time I would do G.A.Harvey who had a huge factory in Woolwich Road.  I’ve got the opposite problem with them – so much material that I think I might have to do it as a serial!  There are five pages on Harveys in John Smith’s History of Charlton and I also have some material from the firm itself.  Copies of the Harvey Magazine were given to me some years ago by (now-ex) Tory Councillor Geoff Brightly, whose father worked for there.  So – Thanks Geoff!

Harveys  - marked on some maps as ‘Greenwich Metal Works’ was in the Woolwich Road next to the Tram Depot which I described a week or so ago. The frontage of the site is where the fire station is but the works went back some distance to the rear of that in an area now covered by BOC.  I remember a long brick wall fronting up the site with a grand entrance in Holmwood Villas – an entrance which has lost some of its structure continually year by year for some time but still has, Ithink, a few bricks left.

The factory in Woolwich Road dated from just before the Great War when Harvey bought 22 acres of market gardens in Charlton in 1911.  By 1913 the factory was set up with equipment, machinery and employees. As John Smith remarks “how could a metal firm now with 300 employees fail to mushroom in 1914-1918 - as mountains’ of munitions poured out of the mammoth factory.”

George Arthur Harvey. who founded the firm,  had been born in Deptford and started work as an errand boy at the age of 11 and was later apprenticed to an engineering firm in Deptford. In 1874 at the age of 21 he set himself up in a business in a lean-to shed in Loampit Vale in Lewisham where he made gutters and other items for in zinc for local builders.  He had one yoing boy as his onlu employee and did very well. The first machine which he used in this shed was still in use when the company moved to the new Charlton works and it went with them – but he didn’t say what sort of machine it was.  However George Harvey was proud to show it to the Duke of York,  later George the Sixth, when he visited the Greenwich factory.  

 

He remained as the company’s Chair until his death in 1937 but had an active life outside the works. Involved in local politics as a member of the Progressive Party he was elected to the first London County Council to represent Lewisham. The Progressive Party, which contested elections in London had been founded by the Liberals and some of the leaders of the future Labour movement. From 1914 a separate Labour Party contested elections and eventually the Progressives lost their seats or returned to the Liberal Party. In 1898 George Harvey attempted to get the Liberal Party candidature for Parliament but they chose  John Penn, head of the Blackheath Road engineering firm. 

 

Employee welfare was an interest of George Harvey and they did more than most local firms to benefit their staff.  Part of this included was a housing program –they owned houses and flats all round the area and an employee with a young family and no proper home could expect to have something offered to them. Keith Clarke described how following his marriage he was offered a third floor flat in Harvey House,Nightigale Place. When a baby arrived they were moved to a grond floor flat in Vanburgh Hill.  The firm built the Harvey Gardens ‘cottage’ estate in Floyd Road in 1936 and later, in 1952, they built the Prentis Court flats in Charlton Lane – named for the firm’s medical officer. Prentis Court was opened by Harold Macmillan, then Minister for Housing. But, of course, later the Tory Prime Minister.  He said “G.A.Harvey are known the world over..  they represent the best of the old and the new….they have all the new modern outlook that we connect with the most go-ahead methods… in addition to the several hundred homes which you have already provided this makes a new departure’.   In the 1970s the new build sites were sold to the Council in the 1970s – and a suspect all the others were too..

 

By the time of his death in 1937 George Harvey was living in Brighton. Three years earlier there had been a big 'beano' for the firm's ‘jubilee’. Three special trains took Harveys workforce to Brighton for the day. Lunch was a ‘blow out’ at the Regent Restaurant and once eaten there was a toast to ‘The King’.  Then George Harvey was presented with a silver rose bowl from the workforce. The presentation came with a speech from Harry Icough – Chair of the Sports Club and a Greenwich Labour councillor and a future Mayor.

 

After George died his son, Sydney, became Chair. Inevitably Sydney had had the education that his had lacked – he was sent to Mill Hill public school. He was made Assistant Managing director in 1913 at around the time that the when the works moved to Greenwich and later he was made Managing Director while his father was Chair.  Sydney was to remain as Chair until 1956 when he became President. He died in 1958 and was remembered for his interest in the welfare of the workforce -  but also for his singing voice which is said to have been of operatic standards.  Locally, like his father, he was involved in various organisations and ‘good works’.  He was, for instance, on the board of the Miller Hospital in Greenwich High Road and funded a rehabilitation unit there. 

 

Sydney died in 1957 and the Chairmanship was taken over by his son, Gordon.  According to Keith Clarke  he ‘set about bringing in young ‘whizz kids’ who were going to make this old fashioned firm a modern commercial success’.  The old established staff ‘soldiered on in increasing bitterness and dismay’..

 

I am only too aware that these big factories with local staff and management are very much The World We Have Lost.  Men – and sometimes women, and whole families - worked and socialised there.  They also– interacted with other local factories through sports clubs and built their teams with dinner dances and socials. In my own childhood in Gravesend my Dad was ‘Father of the Chapel’ and also ran monthly socials at the sports ground.  Neither he, nor my mother, ever worked anywhere else. Life had a stability and a sense of belonging which we can barely understand today.

 

In large firm like Harveys there was of course a house magazine which was taken up in the main with social events.  Picking at random- a Harvey Magazine for 1962  which it begins with reproducing the firm’s message to the new Queen with condolences for the death of her father.  I really did pick that one up by chance but it does give us a real sense of how things once were and how we have got to today!

 

A few pages od rhe 1962 magazine are devoted to weddings and funerals, retirements and births. There is a photograph of the Safety First Awards prizewinner – won during a demonstration held by the Transport Department with an ‘address on the importance of safe driving’.  Then there are  pictures and short write ups - of: a Christmas Party’ ….a New Year party; … the Annual Staff Dance and Cabaret (‘this cabaret included: ‘charming Ladies of the Chorus’...  ‘whirl wind roller skaters’ and a ‘demonstration of Olde Time Dancing’); …  the Children’s Party  (each child got a bonbon and a whistle) … . the Foremen’s annual dinner (modern dancing to T. D. Smith’s band) ...  The Cricket Supper ...  The Bowls Dinner ... The Heavy Construction Department Dinner ...  and .. The Heavy Tank Department Social.

 

It’s the same with sports.  In 1958 the Sports Club had 17 separate sections – even if one of them was Olde Time dancing, and another Model Engineering  which I suppose are sports, well sort-of. In 1938 there had been a brass band and there were always four football teams. A sports fixture diary shows something on every day - The Bowls Club was playing Metrogas (that’s East Greenwich Gas Works) ... Football team A was playing London Paper Mills ...  the Hockey Team was playing Royal Ordnance. –other matches involved Telcon, Molassine, and London Transport.   It is only too easy to see how the dinners, the socials and the sports built communities and how people worked at these factories throughout their careers.

 

Keith Clarke who has written extensively about his job at Harveys describes how his grandfather was works manager in the early days of the firm when it was still in Lewisham. His father worked there as a draughtsman – more about him when I get round to writing about what the firm actually made. Keith knew the factory and went to the children’s parities. When he started work his father was asked by management why his son was not working for the firm and so got a job there in the drawing office.  He was soon in trouble for wearing grey flannel trousers rather than the expected pin stripes (and this is 1946!!). When he married his wife was given a job as a filing clerk.  Keith also mentions his aunt who was Sydney Harvey’s private secretary ‘a very formidable lady ... who terrified my wife.

 

I think this has better be part one – and I will get back to Harveys and what they actually made in a future episode