On this trip up the sites on Deptford Creek we have found all sorts of sites, from obscure local building suppliers, to some very big names. There were also some important innovators – we will see more of them as we go back down the Lewisham bank. The firm we are about to come to was both a very big name and an important innovator. To enable it to be included here is also one of the reasons I have gone some way along the older eastern course of the Ravensbourne and the Greenwich boundary.
This factory was on the site now generally known as ‘Wickes’ – and it was on the trading estsate where Wickes is located, although the older works would have included some plots now used for housing. Their site ran from Blackheath Road down to the old stream and another boundary was what is still called John Penn Street.
In 1799 John Penn established an agricultural machinery and engineering business in what was then Coldbath Street – there may have been a bath house there previously. Several researchers wrote long articles which went in the Greenwich Industrial History Newsletter, and argued with each other on the exact location, entrances, dwelling houses and more on this works – and I’m happy to give anyone the references to these articles if they want (just ask!). But all you really need to know is that Wickes and other shops and some houses are now on the site of the John Penn’s works – and there were three John Penns.
This earliest John Penn came from Bristol where he had worked and trained as a millwright. He was not the only soon-to-be-famous name in engineering to come to London in this period and in 1805 he was one of a group who founded a millwright’s society here. His son, also John Penn, was alos born in 1805 and from the age of 13 was apprenticed in his father’s Blackheath Road factory. He was to build his first steam engine at the age of 17 and his ‘grasshopper’ engine became the first to power the works
We need to remember that in those days London shipbuilding was pre-eminent. Down river from the Tower lay shipyard after shipyard where innovative and justly famous ships were built, including, of course, in this period ships which fought famous naval battles and others which dominated the world’s commerce. However the first steam ships were also on the River and would replace the great wooden ships. London’s shipbuilders could handle that but steam ships need engines. South East London was to provide the engineering skills to build them. There is no space here to detail them or their work but, it is important to say that the most prolific, innovative and thus most important was John Penn.
Should you go to Dresden you might want to go on a river trip down the Elbe and there is a historic paddle steamer, Diesbar, which does these trips. She is advertised as being powered by the oldest functioning steam engine in the world. I think we should be a bit ashamed that the Diesbar’s web site neither mentions that that engine was made in London, or that it was made by Penn’s. It dates from 1841 and was made originally for a ship called Bohemia. Back in the 2000s I was actually asked to go to a celebration of Diesbar in Dresden. At the time I was a local councillor and it would have been good to say that I took the good wishes of Greenwich people and Greenwich Council with me – but, as it turned out I couldn’t go anyway, for personal reasons. Which was a pity.
The older John Penn died in 1843. The firm was then inherited by his son John who was ‘driving the business forward into marine engineering’. In that year he heard that the Admiralty wanted to commission more powerful engines for naval vessels and that existing contractors Birmingham based Boulton and Watt’s engines would be too heavy. Penn, uninvited, sent in a tender for a light engine of twice the power - –his “smaller, lighter and more modern oscillating engine”. These first Penn engines for the Navy were fitted on the official yacht, Black Eagle, and from then on Penn was the major suppliers of steam engines to the Navy, also moving on to screw propulsion methods.
The firm also took on a riverside site at what is now Payne's wharf – I wrote about that site for Weekender in December 2019. This was Penn’s boiler shop and there remains on the road side there the one relic of the firm– a small bollard with their name on it. They also had a wharf –Evelyn Wharf – on the Lewisham bank of Deptford Creek shortly below the tide mill, and we will get to that sooner rather than later. Clearly they must have needed a means of water transport for their heavier products which was reasonably close by Blackheath Road.
In Portsmouth is the preserved warship Warrior – and I have written about her before. She was built within view of Greenwich over on the mouth of Deptford Creek at Thames Ironworks in 1861 - 8 years before Cutty Sark was built in the Clyde, incidentally. Warrior was built to be really really scary and to be really really modern. Many of her component parts came from Greenwich and Woolwich engineering works and of course her engines were from Penn’s. By the time she was restored the Penn engines were gone but replicas have since been made and installed (as an aside I can’t see any mention of Penn’s on the Warrior website. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place. It does explain how you can have your wedding on board though).
A preserved Penn now in the Western Australia Museum was dredged up from the sea bottom. It is a horizontal trunk engine recovered from the wreck of the iron steamer SS Xantho, which sank in 1872. It is the only known example of the first mass-produced, high speed and high pressure marine engine. The result of a feat of co-ordination of mechanical engineers by John Penn on behalf of the Admiralty which “made the great Continental Powers stare with wonder”.
The younger John Penn died in 1878 – remembered as “great man, one of the most distinguished workers of his age and country”. He died at his great house in Belmont Hill, Blackheath – The Cedars – now flats.
Another John Penn was to follow and manage the company which continued to make and sell ground breaking engines but as with all these families the third generation also had gentlemanly interests beyond the workplace. John Penn III also stood as a Tory in local elections and became MP for Lewisham and ‘a leading parliamentary golfer’.
Another memory of the firm can be found in Greenwich South Street in the Penn Almshouses. They were intended as a memorial to the second John Penn and were for poor men and their widows who had worked in Penn’s factory. Today, of course they work with the Council and other local almshouses.
In the 1880s times became harder as shipbuilding on the Tames began to lose its force and firms moved to the north and to Scotland. Penn’s became a limited company – John Penn and Sons Ltd. The 1890s saw them return to building massive triple expansion engines for a new age of warships as the threat of conflict with Germany began to emerge. Increasingly they could not compete in price with ship and engine builders from the north.
In 1899 they began negotiations to merge with Thames Ironworks. Thames Ironworks was the great warship builder from Bow Creek where Warrior had been built as well as many more warships and flagships. I could go into a lot of details about how in the early 20th century it was chaired by Arnold Hills, vegetarian, temperance, partially paralysed – and they too were suffering from government orders placed with northern firms. John Penn III died in 1903.
Thames Ironworks invested in the Greenwich site and much of the contract work for HMS Thunderer was carried out there in 1911. Thunderer was to be the last warship built on the Thames. There were no more orders and Arnold Hills spoke to 10,000 London workmen from his invalid basket in Trafalgar Square. Orders were going north and their jobs were gone.
Gradually Thames Ironworks moved to the manufacture of stream powered cars and lorries at Greenwich. It was too late and in May 1913 the Blackheath Road site and its equipment were up for auction.
Some of us will remember the site before Wickes took it over in the 1980s. The remains of the Penn works had been a bakery for some years but the old pattern shop still stood. Many Requests had been made for its preservation ad listing. As the Council finally made the move to have it listed the developer demolished it ultra-quick. I am not aware of any memorial to the Penns on the site now although I know there are some plaques in surrounding streets.
We should take more notice of the Penn works. We may not like or approve of their products destined for military use – but we need to take notice of the technology, the inventiveness, and the skills of their employees. To have a job at Penn's was a measure of a worker's ability. Why are they so forgotten –although to be honest, they are remembered rather more than some others.
There are many web sites about Penn's. But I would like to recommend ‘John Penn and Sons of Greenwich’ by the late Richard Hartree (Landmark publishing 2008). Can I add that it was really difficult to get any Greenwich bookshops to take it?
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