Pipers

 

Continuing along the river walk in Riverside Gardens we are on the area of Dog Kennel Field leased in the 1840s by Morden College to Coles Child and known as Greenwich wharf.  The section of the riverside  most downriver in the land Coles Child leased became known as Piper's Wharf – Pipers were premier builders of Thames Sailing barges. Until very very recently a boat repair business – Thames Craft Docking – remained on the site but moved down river so that the flats could be built.

 All along the riverside there have been barge builders and repairers since time immoriable – and there is very little information about the vast majority of them.  On the area, now covered by the flats of Riverside Gardens, there there were number of wharves with various businesses - Badcocks, Dawsons, Scholey – named for the owners. They have left little in the way of records.

The Thames sailing barge was the goods carrier of the river up until the end of the Second World War. As sailing vessels they had been around for many years, but the design was refined in an age of steam and petrol engines . The barges were cheap to run crewed by one or two men and a boy and the wind as fuel.  They could go over estuary mud flats and up the Essex Creeks, and many of them could cross the channel and continue up continental canals.  With the right wind they could really shift too. They are very, very impressive vessels - why ever did we stop using them?

The most famous of the Greenwich barge builders was James Piper whose champion barge building business began in the 1890s and lasted into the 1970s.  However it has not been easy to find out much about the background to this firm – despite many ex-employees and family members doubtless being around. I learnt as a girl in Gravesend that ‘river people’ only talk to other ‘river people’ so if Piper family members read this,  can I just say that I hope its ok, and ‘sorry’ if its not.

James R. Piper was apparently originally apprenticed to a William Bromley who lived in Gravesend where he was a JP,  but he was a Greenwich ship owner ‘known from Windsor to the Yantlet’.  Piper later went to work for Mowlem’s at their East Greenwich Yard  on Granite Wharf – which is described  in a previous article.  After being with them for ten years he opened a small yard on the next door site and went on to become one of the largest barge builders on the Thames. He also worked as a marine damage surveyor. Pipers specialist barges were sophisticated vessels – nothing haphazardly built up on the riverside – and they won a number of spectacular races. Barge races – which of course still take place – attracted large sums in prize money. Pipers built other vessels – lighters and, latterly refrigerated barges, and doubtless much more.

The most famous racing barge was Giralda, but she had had precedecessprs. 'James Piper' for instance was a wooden barge of 56 tons which won a number of races in the 1890s and eventually was broken up in the 1950s, having been used as a house boat in Chelsea.  'Haughty Belle' a wooden barge whose design has been described as ‘astonishing’.  She won the 1896 race

Giralda, thought. Was most famous barge ever launched – watch out for pictures of her on calendars, picture books and much else – I once found myself in Somerset eating off a table mat with her picture on it. Not that those who print her picture have any idea about Giralda or that she had anything to do with Greenwich. She was named after the bell tower of Seville Cathedral – originally it was the minaret on Great Mosque of Seville built in 1184 but when the Moors were expelled it was taken over by the Catholics who eventually rebuilt it as a cathedral, keeping the tower, and adding to its summit. Giralda, the sailing barge was built with the purpose of winning the gold cup in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year.  She was designed by Piper's foreman, Jack Currell , the ‘genius of her building’ for £1,350.   It is said that the everyone in the trade laughed when she was launched because she was straight and flat and ugly – although the boat builders who copy her today describe her ‘lovely lines’.  She went ahead and won the Cup . She continued to be raced, winning Thames and Medway championships - Champion of the Thames six times and Champion of the Medway four times  After the races she had to be sent back to the barge yard to be strengthened so she could be used for haulage. From 1928 she was used as something to moor other vessels to.   Today a modern yacht building company tell us “Our design is based on the lines of Giralda built by Pipers of Greenwich in 1897; reputedly the fastest Thames barge ever built.” A half model was made of Giralda and preserved by Pipers and in 1943 a piece of her timber was kept at Greenwich with an inscription on it – I would love to know what has happened to these.

I am only aware of one remaining Piper barge.  This is Wilfred built in 1926. She is a steel barge and ‘the last word in modern sail barges’.  For many years now she has been a wine bar and restaurant on the Victoria Embankment  moored off Temple Pier.  I had hoped to say that Leonard Piper built in 1910 , was moored at Chiswick Mall where I visited her  in the 1990s and was very impressed with her vast size below.  Sadly it turns out she was broken up in the early 2000s– there is a dramatic video on YouTube of her last moments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqp03pwG4Vo

Much else has gone of what once a flourishing industry employing many Greenwich people.  I was told how in the 1950s there would be a queue of bargemen outside to the Woolwich Road Labour Party offices waiting to pay their union dues.  In the 1980s abandoned boxes full of their minute books had been moved out into the garden – it was pouring down with rain when I found them and I took them there and then to the Poplar archive of the Museum in Docklands

More recently Thames Dry-docking moved from the Badocks and Pipers Wharf sites down to a new boatyard at Bay Wharf. Once they had gone the Environment Agency pounced, declared the area unsafe and set about clearing and rebuilding the foreshore.  Away went the parallel timber barge slips running down to the river and away went the old masts and decking which were holding up the river wall. I am very sure that all those bits and pieces had a tale to tell, but they were gone before you could find out who knew what was what.   I understood that one of those pieces of old wood which was dumped was the main mast from sailing barge Genesta which had been preserved there and stood outside the Greenwich works– she had been missing in a storm for four days off Blyth. The mast was in Greenwich but Genesta stayed afloat and went to Guernsey.

On the landward side of the wharf, hidden where passers-by couldn’t see it, was the name of ‘James Piper’ in stonework on an internal wall.  There was an old house and a lot of interesting looking stuff all around, but no chance whatsoever of finding out what any of it was,  let alone preserving it.