In my article the other week about Conduits I said I would try to do a history of water supply in the Greenwich area.
I had hoped to keep away from doing another yet another article about the Brookmill Water Works in Deptford but I can’t see any way I can avoid it. The history of water supply in Greenwich is the history of the Kent Water Company and that was begun and based at Brookmill. I’m sorry if I am repeating myself butI have a lot more detail now which hopefully will be interesting.
First, I think I need put the Kent Water Company into context with the rest of the history of London’s water supply. In so many of the books and articles about London’s Water the Kent Company only gets a brief mention, if that!
Most histories will start, as I have, with conduits for spring water to ‘big’ houses. In the City of London water was piped in from springs outside the built up area. From the 16th century there were also various devices which lifted water from the Thames to supply City residents.
The first major attempt at something different is, of course, the New River. It opened in 1613, having taken some years to build and is sometimes seen as setting a template for future public service development. If you don’t know the New River – go and find it! These days you can walk alongside it, and admire it. It snakes down from Hertford, through Enfield and Tottenham and these days it terminates at Horsey - but originally it went to Islington, to New River Head near Sadler’s Wells.
From the mid-17thand 18th centuries a number of private water companies were set up. Some accessed springs north of the built up area and others extracted water from the Thames or the Lea. What is now South East London was one of the last to be supplied – and it began at the Brookmill.
We start in the early 17th century with a corn mill- the Brookmill on the river Ravensbourne - but that had been working for a long time already and I don’t think we have any idea when it was first opened. A survey of Deptford made in 1608 notes that it had belonged to ‘late Henry Beecher’ - with “divers other land and tenements in the town of Deptford”. But sadly they also say ‘we cannot certify the truth thereof because we cannot see the deeds thereof”.
We don’t to know whether the data was unavailable because of Mr. Beecher's death or - what I often suspect with these surveys - that the landowners may not have been very co-operative in giving out information. Anyway it appears to have still been a corn mill rather than a water works. And apparently remained so for the next sixty years.
In April 1668 it was purchased by John Evelyn - the famous diarist who lived some of his time at Sayes Court in Deptford, which he eventually owned. It was bought to add to the Sayes Court estate but Evelyn thought the deal was expensive and said that he agreed to go ahead with purchase only because of ‘the passion R. Browne has for it”. R.Browne was Evelyn’s father-in-law . Evelyn returned to the subject in 1674 when he records that he had paid £360 ‘to purchase the interest of Dr. Jacomb’s son’ in the mill. Dr.Thomas Jacomb was a leading Presbyterian minister whose first wife was a Catherine Beecher – from whom their son presumably inherited some rights over the Brookmill. £360 seems an extraordinary amount of money to pay – (£71,038.92 says the conversion progrmme on the net)
What of course we also don’t know is if John Evelyn and his wife’s family acquired the Brookmill property with any intention of developing it - perhaps as a waterworks, and we also don’t know if they retained any ownership rights in the future. By 1700 it was known as ‘Taylor’s Corn Mill”.
Most accounts of the Kent Company will tell you that the works began around 1700 with the granting of a royal charter to a group of petitioners. This is not actually true and I’d say with some certainty there was no royal charter. The two lead petitioners were a Robert Walton and a William Yarnold. I know nothing about Robert Walton but I suspect he was a local dignitary. The pipes already laid underground went to Sayes Court and maybe the ideas and finance-came from the Evelyn family and that the scheme was primarily for their water supply . The other likely body behind the scheme is of course the developing Royal Hospital in Greenwich, of which Evelyn was Treasurer
Yarnold however had quite a bit of background in the start ups of water companies in various provincial towns . He came from a Worcestershire family and with his brother John had installed a water supply system in Oxford in 1694 and William had also set up a scheme in Newcastle in 1697. In 1698 John had patented “an invention for draining mines, meres and marshes and for rising water for supplying the inhabitants of any towns and villages’. While I do not know what the device consisted of I note a reference to it in a paper at a recent conference on early steam engines – although I do not think it was actually a steam engine itself. It is described here as- “an engine very useful for draining mines granted 6 days prior to Savery’s famous 1698 Fire Engine Patent”. By the time William got to Deptford he was clearly very experienced.
It appears that Walton and Yarnold had got a licence for their work at Deptford from Lord Romney. Henry Sidney had only been created Earl of Romney in 1694 in recognition of his support for the Glorious Revolution. He was also Lord Lieutenant of Kent. Soon after he became the Ranger of Greenwich Park and set about improvements. It is under him that the main road was moved from the Queens House to what became known as Romney Road - and with the new Royal Hospital adjacent it is easy to see that a waterworks would fit in with other general improvements.
Walton and Yarnold appear to have got a licence from Romney but had already been at work at ‘Taylors Corn mill’. They had been told – but surely Yarnold must have known this – that they must get a licence from the King. They had already ‘expended about £600 in erecting a water house … and fixing a ‘forcing engine’ therein and laying pipes underground. Maybe the forcing engine was that patented by John Yarnold a couple of years earlier. It is possible that this system remained in place until reconditioned by John Smeaton in 1779.
It is illustrated in a diagram published in
an article in the Engineer in the 1930s by H.W.Dickinson. This describes the engine which was alongside
the exi sting water wheel. It was not a steam engine but “was coupled to a
three-throw crankshaft, which by levers drove three suction and force
pumps …. the water was forced from the
mill dam to the top of the water tower.”
Samuel Travers, the Surveyor General was asked to report. Which he did. He commented that Walton and Yanold had spent £600 but that it would cost many thousands of pounds more. Is there a subtext here that maybe they might be asking the King to contribute??
Travers thought they should be granted a Royal Licence for 500 years and ‘to raise the water out of the River Ravensbourne and to lay pipes through the streets and wastes … and to erect conduits or receptacles for water in any convenient places”. And there should be a special agreement with the Royal Hospital.
The report is dated 17 September 1700 and it appears that their ’petition’ was granted. So the earliest water works which we are aware of in Greenwich was put to work, which it did – and in some ways has continued to do so. The site of all this activity in 1700 is now the site of the Stephen Lawrence Centre and everything in in this area has been very much changed. The article written in the 1930s says some that some original bits and pieces were still in the River but they cannot possibly be there now . I am not aware if any archeological organisation has looked at this important site although a great deal of work was done on the river when the Docklands Light Railway was built. I feel myself that there are many questions to be asked about the course of the Ravensbourne and how it may have been altered in the 17th Century s much as in the 21st.
More in my next – or next but one
Thanks.Elisabeth Pearcey. Oliver Pearcey, Malcolm Tucker
No comments:
Post a Comment