Morden Wharf- Kupar - Telcon - Morden Iron Works

 

Our walk along the Greenwich riverside has now reached Morden Wharf. This runs from the Enderby Wharf boundary as far as the inlet which is Bay Wharf.  It was, and is, a large and complicated area owed by Morden College and over the past two hundred years it has had many different industrial leaseholders.  In the previous article I wrote about Charles Holcombe who was originally a partner in an early tar distillery here and then became head leaseholder for much of the site.  A lot went on here and will take up more than one of these articles.

First of all we need to back track a bit.  Back at Enderby Wharf I wrote about the cable works there, and how they made and laid the Atlantic cable.  However I had to start half way through the story of the cable companies and their work because it began here at Morden Wharf.  I’m sorry if I am telling this story backwards but it is either that or doing our imaginary walk backwards. I’m not sure which is worse! Anyway – how did the Greenwich cable industry start?

In 1842 Heimann and Johann Küper established a wire rope factory on the Grand Surrey Canal in Camberwell. By 1848 they were bankrupt and the work was taken over by George Elliott who had risen from a pitboy to become a mining engineer in the Durham coalfield. Later he was Sir George Elliot, MP and ‘exceedingly wealthy’. Under Elliott, W. Küper and Company expanded from just being the - "Original patentees of the Untwisted Iron Rope" – to a firm making iron ropes for collieries and ships rigging. They moved to Morden Wharf in 1851 with a lease from Charles Holcombe.

 

The earliest telegraph cables were not made in Greenwich but in Wapping and Gateshead – but the firms involved became involved in legal action over patent rights and some of the manufacture was subcontracted to Küper and Co. In 1852, Richard Atwood Glass, who was George Elliot’s chief accountant, began to look at the opportunities for using the company’s wire armouring for underwater cable.  As a result Küper secured contracts for a Sweden-to-Denmark cable. In 1854, Elliot took Glass into partnership and W Küper and Co became Glass, Elliot and Company.

Meanwhile, in Islington the Gutta Percha Company was set up in 1845. Initially they made a variety of products from gutta percha, a recently introduced natural product which unlike other rubbers is thermoplastic and can be moulded. It proved to be an ideal insulator for underwater cables and was used by the cable-makers from 1848 and soon had a near monopoly.  The company was fronted by Charles Hancock – one of the amazing Hancock brothers. The brothers and their key roles in a range of inventions and technological developments perhaps best illustrates the way in which there are so many connections between individuals in the story of the rise of industries in east and south east London. For instance – we have already at Enderby Wharf heard about Beale, and one of his many ideas was about was steam cars. Later we will hear about Frank Hills, also a steam car man, as well as a chemist – and over in West Ham was Walter Hancock whose steam cars actually ran a service.  Thomas Hancock, another brother, found a way of making rubber usable - and worked with Beale. It was a relatively small world but it moved ideas on technology forward dramatically.

In 1857, Glass, Elliot were awarded a contract for armouring half of the cable for the first, but unsuccessful,  attempt to lay a cable across the Atlantic. The Morden Wharf site was too small for the amount of cable which they needed to make and Glass Elliot agreed to buy the derelict Enderby Hemp and Rope works slightly up river from Morden Wharf. In 1864 they merged with the Gutta Percha Company, to form The Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company – usually shortened to Telcon. The made the first successful Atlantic telegraph cables system in 1866, part of which was probably made at Morden Wharf.

 

There is nothing to remind us now at Morden Wharf of its short life in use by Telcon – and, as far as gutta percha is concerned, people may remember a building at Enderby Wharf decorated with a dado of gutta percha leaves – sadly demolished in 2010 by Barratts.

 

So – what else went on at Morden Wharf?  There were several important firms. But I will start with a small short lived company that few people will have heard of. They were small –but they too had connections.

 

In the early 1860s maps show an iron works on the riverside slightly down river of the telegraph works at Morden Wharf. This was opened by Peter Soames and John Campbell Evans.  Soames was one of the Greenwich family who will be the subject of a future article. They owned a major soap factory at Morden Wharf as well as being involved in local politics and the local church.

 

Peter was a son of the soap works owner but his career was very different.  As a mechanical engineer he became a specialist in machinery for the sugar industry and in  1855 he  set up Morden Iron Works along with John Campbell Evans for ‘the design and construction of steam-engines, sugar machinery, and  mill work.. Improvements in sugar-cane mills and in sugar- boiling and treating apparatus”. As we will see – and I am sure completely co-incidentally – the Soames soap works was succeeded by what many people locally will have known as Tunnel Glucose- fundamentally a sugar works..

 

John Campbell Evans had worked in railway engineering and Evans and Soames both held several patents. At Morden Iron Works they seem to have made steam cranes and related equipment, but both were also involved with devices for use in the manufacture of telegraph cables. This was of course a neighbouring major industry

 

None of this lasted very long, and the partnership was dissolved in 1861 – although there is a record of an unsuccessful tender for locomotives for the Ffestinog Railway in 1863. It must be assumed that the works closed down after that.  Subsequently Peter Soames went to Siam to erect a sugar manufactory and later published a book on the subject.

 

Last week I wrote about the Council depot in Tunnel Avenue.  As we reach the border between Enderby and Morden Wharves we are at the point where the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich dustcart road from their Tunnel Avenue depot reached their jetty on a line of arches. Their old jetty is the ‘e’ shaped one now disused on the riverside and it is where theborugh’s rubbish was tipped into barges. Perhaps a good place to start looking at the intricacies’ of Morden Wharf and its history.