Hawkins Terrace and the Admiralty Compass Laboratory

 

Hawkins Terrace in Charlton is a bit of a mystery to me.  It is a narrow lane right on the Charlton/ Woolwich border and runs north from Little Heath.  It is parallel to Erwood Road (ex- Maryon Road) and runs along the backs of the houses. It ends in a patch of grass and rubble nearly at the back of St.Thomas’ Church. 

This is  a story of Greenwich’s smallest scientific establishment and the old soldier who cared for it.  If we look at Hawkins Terrace on an old map – say from the 1860s – that patch of grass and rubble is what looks like a garden with a tiny square building on it.  On some maps it is marked as ‘Observatory’.

It turns out that this was a government building - the Admiralty Compass Observatory. 

The Observatory dated from the early 1840s and resulted from worries about the accuracy of compasses in ships – both in the Navy and the merchant marine. There had been accidents which seemed to relate to compasses being near iron in the ships. A committee was set up and undertook various experiments and wrote learned papers and a way was found to set up naval compasses correctly for each ship. This involved ‘swinging the ship’ which was done in the River at Greenhithe and the laboratory could then set the compass correctly.

 As well as the Observatory in Maryon Road a row of giant letters was set up on a wall on Cox’s Mount,  The Mount is now in Maryon Park and it is the area which starred in the film ‘Blow Up’ but in the 19^th century it was a sand pit.

In the 1840s Maryon Road and the area round the Observatory a lot of high quality housing was being built built aimed at officers and technocrats who were in Woolwich at the Arsenal and Dockyard. St. Thomas’s Church was built around same time.  A first it had been planned to put the Compass Observatory in the gravel pits near Maze Hill but it was thought this would ‘spoil the beauty of the scenery’ there.  Maryon Road was conveniently near Woolwich Dockyard and so a site was leased from the Maryon Wilson Estate.

Captain Edward Johnson was in charge of the Laboratory project and he took on a retired Scottish  Artillery Sergeant, James Nathaniel Brunton. He would to live in a house on site and be paid 2/6d. a day.  Brunton only had the ‘rank and education of a Sergeant of Artillery’ nevertheless he ended up doing work normally reserved for highly educated professionals. He did so with great success. 

Visitors to the Observatory arrived at a ‘modest house’  behind which was an octagonal wooden structure said to be ‘rather like a summer house'. It was surrounded by a garden ‘kept in perfect order by Mr. Brunton’ with fine oak trees and roses – said to be fifty different varieties.   Inside the observatory and the surrounding area everything had to be free of iron – no iron nails, or buttons, or keys, or anything.  There were two shutters in the roof and three masonry pedestals to hold instruments. Two of them determined true north and the other was to hold the compasses to be tested.  As part of the process a telescope was pointed at the number scale on Cox’s Mount.

Captain Johnson died in 1853 and James Brunton was left to run the Observatory alone.   For the next few years he continued with all the work of testing as well as negotiating with compass manufacturers, solving problems with new equipment, ordering  repairs and checking the returns from the ships being swung at Greenhithe – and even conducting 30 swings himself.  But although he was authorised to sign certificates from ships’ masters, and advise on which compasses should be used and much else, he was never the given the rank of Acting Superintendent. 

Brunton lived in the house in Maryon Road with his wife Elizabeth who died in 1865, although she was thirteen years younger than him. There is no evidence of any children.

In 1869 when Woolwich Dockyard closed, the Laboratory was moved to Deptford Dockyard. The Observatory building was moved there and set up exactly as it had been in Charlton.  Mr. Brunton continued in his role at Deptford as ‘Assistant Superintendent of Compasses’

He was allowed to stay in the Maryon Road house for another year after which he was given a lodging allowance.  In 1871 he was living in The Terrace at Deptford Dockyard, 17th century handsome houses built for officers and demolished in 1902.  By then he was then living with another, younger and different Elizabeth, described as a ‘servant’ and he was.

In 1883 an inquiry into the running of the department noted that James Brunton was over 80 and recommended that he should be replaced.  He had been in post for 40 years and had never let standards drop. He resented this enforced retirement and said that giving it to a younger man was not a good idea. However he was given a pension of £73.00 a year with £30.00 extra for his army service.  There was an attempt to get him an increase in this pension but this was not allowed. 

Brunton died in 1887 living in Barry road, Camberwell, leaving £1,461 18s 6d. His sole executor was his ex boss at the Observatory, William Mayes.  He is said to have been buried in Greenwich but it is not clear where. He was a Chelsea Pensioner, which is of course for retired army personnel. However, as he had worked for so long for a Naval institution, he was probably allowed into the Royal Hospital Cemetery – now East Greenwich Pleasaunce.    

The site in Maryon Road reverted to the Maryon Wilson estates and was then let out as ‘Observatory Cottage’. In 1888 it was replaced by the present building at 80 Maryon Road which was built as the Rectory for St. Thomas’s church.  It is now a hotel - although I do remember at some point in the 1970s going to a party there when it was a private ownership. I wish I had known about the Laboratory then!

The letters set up on Cox’s Mount had a rather longer existence. There are several reports of the wall on which they were painted and a number of reasons given for their existence – some of which confuse it with an earlier signal station on the site. Some writers say it was  ‘for telegraphic purposes’ and signals were sent to Purfleet from 1794  and others say it was lined up with Shooters Hill. But that was an older system which was no longer used. For the Laboratory the Admiralty had rented the site from the Maryon Wilson Estate in 1845 and built a wall 'five yards high and nine yards long in line with the magnetic meridian' to be used for correcting compasses.  It was blown down in a storm in 1850 and reduced to ruins, but then rebuilt.

In 1853 nearby, in Maryon Road, the archaeologist, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, was born.  His grandfather was  Matthew Finders who had written an extremely influential report on compasses which recommended the setting up of such an institution as the Observatory. It was thirty years after his death before the Laboratory was set up and his daughter, Ann, the archaeologist’s mother, probably never knew him.  Was it a co-incidence that the family lived so close by the eventual result of his ideas.

In 1971 the Compass Observatory was part of the Admiralty Research Establishment in Slough but I do not know what has happened to it now. It was only in Charlton for a relatively short time of its long existence – but I think we should remember the long serving Mr. Brunton, who was only ever a Sergeant in the Artillery and a Chelsea Pensioner. He kept it going while the scientists and naval officers were elsewhere but was only ever a ‘retired Sergeant of Artillery’.

The book which describe the whole history of the Compass Observatory is ‘Steady as she Goes’ by A.E.Fanning. there are also a couple of contemporary accounts of visits to the observatory one of which is Charles Dickens and appeared in Households Words.   And no doubt there are people at the Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory who will correct me on this, as the compasses were correcting in Charlton. There are many web site and pictures of the Laboratory but nothing that I can find about its earliest days in Charlton.