As we continue round the riverside path, past Ordnance draw dock and the site of the new hotel we come to the edge of the ,East Greenwich gas works complex. Here the riverside path along the river wall stopped and was closed for the hundred or so years while the gas works was functioning. It closed in the 1880s then was rebuilt and reopened for the millennium.
This was not a simple gas works but a collection of
organisations involved in the processing of coal from the Durham coalfield part
of which was to make ‘town gas’ for sale to the public. The first site we pass was
known as Ordnance Wharf and it was a huge and complicated factory processing coal
tar. It was built on the site of the Blakely Ordnance Factory – hence the name
of ‘Ordnance Wharf' and it is said that when contractors moved into clear and
rebuild the site that it was littered with half made ‘great guns’. They also took over and included in the works
the site of Forbes Abbot chemical factory – more about that later.
To be honest there must be hundreds of men out there who
worked at Ordnance Wharf and who could tell you far more about the works than I
ever could. Faye, whose husband had been a manager Ordnance Wharf, gave me a bundle of literally hundreds of
pictures of the site and I will base a lot of what I have to say on those – and
thank you to Faye.
Tar was collected here, processed and sold. The pictures
show men standing on heaps of the stuff but also show the ‘pitch bed’. A sort of lake of solidified coal tar. It looks horrific and although workers are shown
wearing face masks the whole atmosphere seems filthy and dangerous. After the Great War the gas company had bought
three huge tanks used by the Admiralty
for oil storage at Hull and each holding about a million gallons. These tanks were sunk into the ground at Ordnance
Wharf to store creosote. I think I
remember in the 1990s Michael Heseltine making a speech at east Greenwich about
the horrors of the gas works and the need for remediation. He mentioned these
tanks, sunk below his feet, as some of the worst features of the site for
pollution.
Many of the photographs show the works in a state of semi dereliction
– much of this down to wartime damage. In particular there are pictures of the jetty
– now to be used for the posh new hotel – it is a much smaller and a less distinctive
structure than the huge jetty for the main works which is now the site of the
clipper pier. The Ordnance Wharf jetty
had on it a structure called the Temperley Transporter and there are several
pictures of it collapsed in ruins after a storm. The Meridian Line briefly touches the edge of
the Peninsula here and there are pictures of a broken and derelict sign for
it. There are also pictures of
specialist installations for various
processes and also some scruffy sheds. The
dry dock was also still in place, but used as a water reservoir.
There are lots of pictures of puddles of tar – and I am
reminded that a friend told me once that chemists in the Ordnance Wharf lab
could distinguish 96 grades of tar by sight.
Those puddles look pretty boring and all identical - but when I showed
them to a group of gas engineers in Manchester some years ago they all got very
excited ‘Cor, look at that!!!’ ... ‘’Seen this one, that’s amazing’. (Whatever turns you on!).
Another group of pictures are all about road vehicles, many
of them are photographed up on Blackheath and presumably are to demonstrate
what the company could offer in the way of tankers and ways of laying tar on
the road to local transport engineers. Some
of them have quite complicated grading apparatus fixed on the back. Some years ago one of these was reproduced in
Historic Gas Times (oh yes, that publication exists!) where Brian described the
calibration and testing of road tar sprayers when tar from the larger gasworks
own tar-plants was a major source. The
South Met Gas Co. tanker included with the article had been fitted with “channels to collect the
spray.. ... the aim was to obtain an even spread of tar and the channels fitted
for test purposes“.
Brian also told us “ Gas works coal tar was also sold to
the public who came to the works gate, with perhaps a gallon can and this could
be filled for about 2/- in the 1950's. It was used for treating fences and
timber garden sheds. “.. My own father
had a story about trying to carry a
bucket of gas works tar home on the crossbar of his bike.... the result involved the Mayor’s car.
I was going to finish by returning to Forbes Abbott whose
site South Met. Gas took over for Ordnance Wharf. They were a chemical manufacturing company
originally based at Iceland Wharf in Hackney wick. It was in Iceland Road – but Forbes Abbott
moved out a century and a half or so before the regenerators moved in. James Forbes had an 1867 patent for sulphate
of ammonia – which at that time probably meant he was processing waste ammonia
from various gas works. Forbes Abbott moved onto to specialise in ammonia based
products and then tar. They then moved to east Greenwich. Now, I am very grateful to Debs who has done
a lot of research on some chemical company personalities in Middlesbrough, some
of whom came to Greenwich. They include a George Sadler Field who apparently
managed Ordnance Wharf for 40 years in the Great War and later. They also include a Frederick Lennard who
came to Greenwich. In 1883 he registered
a patent for a continuous tar still but this patent was registered from an
address in Shoreham, and it should be noted that Forbes Abbott had a branch in
Shoreham, and at East Greenwich their new site was called Sussex Wharf.
There are various technical sites on the net which describe
the Lennard still – called a ‘continuous pipe still’. This short description was sent to me and
does it rather more succinctly “The
continuous production of residual products from bituminous materials by means
of so-called pipe heaters or tube stills was invented in England by Frederic
Lennard in 1891 and a few stills of this type were used there for distilling
coal tar to briquette pitch and other tar materials.”
So east Greenwich had the
first continuous pipe still for its tar in 1893 to be followed by Bristol tar
works in 1898.
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