New East Greenwich the tidemill and the Pilot

 

'When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?

No! - here's to the Pilot that weathered the storm'

 

So wrote George Canning about Prme Minister William Pitt in 1802. The Treaty of Amiens had just been signed with the French, one of its clauses handed the colony of Ceylon to  Britain.

 

Anyone who has walked all this way round the Greenwich riverside path may well find themselves looking for a pub. There is only one, The Pilot, in River Way, which is a fine, recently modernised, hostelry. Those who look closely will see a plaque on the wall of The Pilot which reads 'New East Greenwich, 1804'. This seems to imply that The Pilot and Ceylon Place, the row of adjacent cottages, were some sort of new development away from the main industrial town of Greenwich. If a developer came to Greenwich Marsh two hundred years ago, who was he? And why did he think this piece of unpropitious marshland was somewhere suitable to build?

 

I’m afraid this article is going to be about something I’ve written about a lot in the past.  As we go past the gas works jetty and the Gormley artwork and carries on down river towards Charlton we come to a site which I have written and written about lots of times.  So bear with me – I will try to put a different spin on it, but I guess many readers of Weekender won’t have been around when I wrote about this in the 1990s or seen the BIG article I did on it in London’s Industrial Archeology No.17

 

Entries in the Greenwich records show that Ceylon Place and The Pilot were indeed built in 1801- 1804 and, in addition, that the site's owner was George Russell. Russell continued to be listed as the owner of New East Greenwich for many years after. He is lised I a directory lists him there under 'nobility and gentry', but where did he live? The unpretentious cottages in Ceylon Place are hardly residences for a gentleman! In 1832 he is listed there as a 'miller and mealman' - but this is to run on. Who was George Russell?

 

In 1792 a Mr Russell, who lived in Greenwich, was burgled. He must have lived close to the river because the criminals  escaped in a boat. Is this George Russell, and did he live at or near 'New East Greenwich'? There is no record of a house there so early. Later in the century there was a big house on the river front, up past The Pilot.when there was a road which went fro the Pillot to the river. t was called East Lodge. -  later I will do a article aoit East Lodge and the eccentc man who lived there.

 

The description of George Russell as a 'miller' is to reveal a lot of the story of New East Greenwich. Along with The Pilot and the cottages was built a very large and important tide mill.  This was on the riverside site where the Jetty with ts gdening nd commuit rorects now stands. A tide mill is technically a water mill but on a very large scale. This one was built to harness the power of the River Thames and its tides. On the nrth side of he rier Only a few miles to the north of East Greenwich is Three Mills, at Bromley- by-Bow, where the House Mill is open to visitors on some Sundays. To visit Three Mills is to understand that a mill like this is a big operation on an industrial scale with nothing rural or 'olde worlde' about it. The House Mill means business and East Greenwich, although not nearly so large, was built to maximise the power of the river to shift a lot of grain.

 

We know a lot about the East Greenwich mill because one afternoon, in 1802, Olinthus Gregory, Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, went for a riverside walk. When he got to where the mill was being built he was very interested, and stopped to chat to the foreman. The foreman, in the way that foremen do, told him in a lot of detail how he would have built it differently, himself, given his way. Gregory did some drawings and later wrote a technical description of the mill.

 

The mill stood parallel to the Thames with a channel under it which allowed water to come in and out from the river. Behind the mill was a four-acre reservoir which filled with water on the incoming tide. In the channel was the mill wheel, which worked as the tide came in, and was then reversed as the water was let out of the mill pond on the ebb. Thus the mill could be worked all the time.

 

It was built by a millwright called John Lloyd. There was nothing rural or 'olde worlde' about Lloyd either. Among other things he was currently building the Government armaments complex at Waltham Abbey. We read a great deal about the steam engine builders of this period because what they were doing is seen as 'revolutionary' and exciting, but at the same time millwrights, like John Lloyd, were at their peak. They were undertaking some very important installations - but, because they are seen as 'old tech' we never hear of them. John Lloyd was knew about steam engines and used them where they would be useful. At East Greenwich a steam engine was used to build the mill - but that is another story wich I will get too nxt week..

 

New East Greenwich, then, consisted of a big mill, cottages for the workers, a pub, perhaps a big house. Who was George Russell? To find a clue we need to go to Sidcup, to Longlands, a big house, now gone.  George Russell, the owner of Longlands, actually died in 1804. He was a very rich man and had made his money out of soap. Nowadays we do not associate soap works with London, but, in the last century, the largest soap factory in England was at Old Barge House, on the south bank of the Thames alongside Blackfriars Bridge, and now the site of the Oxo tower. Late it was owned by Benjamin Hawes whose son, Benjamin Jnr, became a government minister and married a Miss Brunel. Benjamin Hawes Snr had bought Old Bargehouse Soap Works as a going concern from its founder, George Russell, at some time at the beginning of the century. My new book about the early London gas industry has a whole chapter about what went on there.

 

George Russell had been a Clerkenwell 'soft' soap maker in a small way. The son discovered a way of making hard soap and built, himself with his own hands, a soap works on the site of Queen Elizabeth's old bargehouse. It has been said that he became the leading soap maker in England and was able to set prices which all others had to follow. At his death, in 1804, he left £150,000.  

 

As a wealthy man and in his old age Russell had bought land on Greenwich Marsh. He died before the mill was completed and the mill and all his other property went into Chancery and thus in all probability lost its initial impetus.

 

Initially  Russell's workmen, under his foreman Thomas Taylor, made bricks there. This involved digging up the 'brick earth' which was then moulded and baked. The dirty, smelly, activity began to worry the marsh bailiff – the 'wall reeve'.   His name was Philip Sharpe and one day in April 1796 he walked down to the site and met Thomas Taylor.  An argument developed. Taylor said ‘Damn your eyes Mr Sharp, if you come here I will polish your teeth and stop your eyes with mud, Sir!'. He followed this up by ordering John Bicknell, who was standing nearby, to push Sharp off the river wall. Tis was ohn Laurens Bicknell would  have been about 12 at the time! He was the son of Sabrina Sidney, who as a young girl had been ‘bought’ to be trained as the perfect wife.  She later worked for Charles Burney at his Greenwich school and John went on to a legal career as solicitor to the Admiralty, and to become a fellow of the Royal Society.Bicknell ut I 1-4 e was just a a young who did as he was told.

 

Soon after Mr. Russell applied for official permission to build a wharf and causeway into the river .This causeway was to remain in place until 1999 when it was removed by the New Millennium Experience Company.  The consent of the City of London Conservators was always needed if the river bank was to be cut or breached and  in 1802 they were approached by a William Johnson who wanted to cut the bank in order to erect a flour mill.  In June 1802 he had approached Morden College, who hold large amounts of land on the west bank of the Peninsula. He told them also that he wanted to build a corn mill but they had said permission would only be given for a valuable consideration.  But in October of the same year he had clearly gained permission from Russell ‘to cut the bank’ and had employed a Mr. Hollingsworth to do so. James Hollingsworth, Was a Scottish engineer, then working on London dock schemes.

 

William Johnson had a series of patents. He apparently came from Liverpool but was living in Widmore House Bromley, Kent, with a young family. With the mill under construction he moved to Montpelier Row in Blackheath.

 

So what has this got to do with Prime Minister Pitt? At Morden College in Blackheath I was shown a document of 1842.  This refers to a lease on the site between the Right Honourable William Pitt – the Prime Minister; the Right Honourable John Earl of Chatham - the elder brother of Prime Minister William Pitt A career soldier but with a place in his brother’s cabinet and a member of the Privy Council.; the Right Honourable Edward Crags - 1st Baron Eliot, a Politician with landholdings in Blackheath and the Honourable John Eliot the first Earl of St. Germans with Blackheath interests.  What this group of elite politicians has to with the mill and its surroundings remains unresolved.

 

There may however be another link to Prime Minister William Pitt and the plans for an industrial village here.  The cottages and pub now stand in a sort of courtyard called Riverway.  This is the remains of Marsh Lane which once ran to the east bank of the Peninsula from Blackwall Lane.  In the early 20^th century it was renamed Riverway and in the late 1990s cut off from the river by the New Millennium Experience Company.  This was once a much bigger settlement with several terraces of cottages and community spaces. East Lodge was demolished in the early 20th.  Most of the rest was demolished in the mid-20^th century by the London County Council and the Central Electricity Generating Board.

 

The remaining cottages were only saved from demolition in the 1990s by a last minute listings order. They are generally known as Ceylon Place.  This name can be explained by national events.   In 1802 Ceylon was ceded to the British Crown as part of the Treaty of Amiens, thought at the time to represent the end of the wars with France

 

The pub is called the Pilot and has been greatly extended and now made to look older than its 200 years.  The wall plaque says ‘New East Greenwich 1802’.  From this we can infer that Russell intended a new settlement with that name.  The name has usually been taken to mean that 'pilots' used the causeway which once stood at the river end of Riverway.  There was no pilot station there or indeed any reference to pilots or pilotage activity.  Look in a dictionary of quotations where under George Canning you will find a line from a song, 'here's to the Pilot that Weathered the storm’. This was written for the inauguration of the Pitt Club in 1802 and to celebrate the acquisition of Ceylon.  The pilot of the song is William Pitt – and hence the pub name.

 

Having diverted to the pub it is time to return to the mill itself. Most of what we know about it is derived from Olinthus Gregory’s account. Gregory was Mathematics Master at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, later in 1808 replacing Hutton as Professor.  It appears that one day he went for a walk along the riverside and arriving at the site of the mill, then under construction and did some drawings of the various parts.  While on site he spoke at length to the site foreman, a Mr. Dryden. Dryden was very critical of the plans for the mill.

 

The mill was built by the millwrighting firm of Lloyd and Ostell. They were based in Gravel Lane, off the Blackfriars Road and had undertaken other major contracts in south east England.  John Lloyd is buried in the graveyard of Christ Church, Blackfriars Road.

 

So the mill was built to mill corn on the Greenwich riverside. But in its story we are about to encounter a drama, and this drama was to shake the development of the steam engine and to damage the reputation of one of our most important engineers.  The many references to it in histories of steam ascribe its site to anywhere between Rotherhithe and Woolwich – but it happened here in East Greenwich at the end of Marsh Lane.  But at the moment this article has run out of space so you will have to wait for another article to and see what happened.

 

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