Rebuilding the East Greenwich tidemill - Bryan Donkin and John Hall

some years ago – right back 2013-4  I kept getting emails from a woman in Derbyshire  - Maureen- she was on about the  engineer, Bryan Donkin, and how he had done some work on a Greenwich tide mill.  She thought the mill was the Old Flood Mill at Deptford Bridge, about which I knew very little. So I didn’t take a lot of notice of her but pointed her in the direction of some Deptford based historians.

I was however interested in Bryan Donkin.  I was researching Joshua Taylor Beale – who I wrote about here a few months ago.  His very important exhauster patent had been sold to the Donkin family company, so there were links here which might be important.  Maureen was involved in the archive for the great Donkin factory in Chesterfield, which was eventually closed in 2018.

Bryan Donkin had set up his engineering works in Spa Road, Bermondsey in 1803. He had previously done an engineering apprenticeship with John Hall of Dartford – yes, that’s John Hall who I mentioned last week whose firm were employing Richard Trevithick when he died.   Donkin’s work in Bermondsey is famous for a number of important innovations – tinned foods; paper made in continuous rolls, pen nibs and very very much more and included water wheels.  After his death the firm remained in the family and in 1903 moved to Chesterfield and continued successfully there. Much of that success rested on the Beale exhauster, invented in Greenwich.

Maureen was part of a group of people attempting to put together the history of the Donkin Company.  She was fine with the firms pre-Chesterfield roots but some contributors to the reminiscence website seemed put out to discover the firm had originated in Bermondsey ‘that seems to be somewhere in London, so it must be wrong’.  It was only when she mentioned John Lloyd as the builder of the mill that I realised that it wasn’t the mill at Deptford Bridge which Bryan Donkin had worked on but the East Greenwich Tide Mill – which I have written about over the past two weeks. 

So, a couple of years later I was at the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock looking at Bryan Donkin’s diary of work done on the East Greenwich Mill.  Of course I also looked at their file on Beale which was full of scandals and discovered that Matlock is not a good place for an old lady on her own in Mid-December (it's in a ravine so the wifi is very dodgy, for food there’s the chip shop, or the other chip shop).

So – what happened to the east Greenwich tide mill? Following the death of George Russell the developer, the estate went into Chancery for a long period. It was administered by the law firm of Sharp and Handasyde – and Sharp’s role in the 1796 altercation, which I mentioned last week, when he was pushed into the river, should be noted.  In 1809 they called in Brian Donkin to give an opinion on the state of the mill. It was then only seven years old, but was sinking into the soft ground, causing the walls to twist. There was water under the building and the wharves had collapsed. 

Donkin wanted to know details of the construction of the mill.  The foreman had been a Mr. Dryden, who I mentioned two weeks ago as moaning to Olinthus Gregory that the mill was being built all wrong. He, and his boss John Lloyd, refused to talk to Donkin until some money had changed hands - £300 which seems a lot of money in 1809. However from then on Lloyd cooperated with Donkin, showed him the plans, and agreed they were rubbish because they ignored the constant pressure of the moving water.  Donkin enlisted his friend John Hall as the contractor for the work to be done and so they began what was to be a long job.  Donkin describes every visit in his diary along with detailed instructions of the work to be done. This was a massive and major work and it was accompanied by constant complaints from Sharp and the other executors to keep costs down and to work faster. 

One of the things which was done was to enlarge the mill ponds which lay behind the mill – basically the area in front of the Pilot pub. I have always been amused to see that landscaping by the New Millennium Experience Co. Sited a hill on what had been a mill pond.   The main work however was to stabilise the mill with new brickwork and piles sunk deep into the river bed.  A Mr. Cook was brought in as Clerk of the Works on a salary of two guineas a week and he moved into a house on site.  Work went on, bricks were laid and the ponds extended. Eventually two new oak sluice gates were installed, old doors were bricked up, and a new water wheel was installed. This had all costs a lot of money.

In 1812 Sharp went bankrupt and Handasyde denied having had any money belonging to the estate.  Hall consulted his solicitor and in 1813 a court held at the City Guildhall found Handasyde was liable for the debt. Donkin’s diary says little else about this part of the affair and is very quiet about the final settlement on the work. He mentions a sum of money so vast that I think everyone who has seen it has concluded it was a mistake!

So what happened to this Greenwich riverside mill once it was repaired?  It has originally been designed by a William Johnson who appears to have lived in the Mill House until 1807 –and so was gone before Donkin arrived.  He actually went to Maldon where he either owned or was involved in a salt works.  He later seems to have gone to Cheshire and then to Millbank. He may or may not have been the William Johnson involved in the Haytor Granite concern.

At Greenwich from 1807 the miller was a William Doust.  Donkin doesn’t mention a miller as being present while the work was being done, and indeed the mill house was used as accommodation by the contractors. Later the Mill is recorded as belonging to Thomas Pattrick; and was often known as 'Pattrick's Mill' Thomas Pattrick came from Thorpe le Soken and there may be a connection with a similarly spelt Pattrick’s Mill at Harwich.  There is no reason to believe that it had any more problems.

It is a pity therefore that some thirty years later it was described as a ‘heap of materials’.  This description come from Frank Hills, the then owner, who was trying to get a reduction in his rates, so maybe, in those circumstances, it is not a surprise.  I will try and describe Frank Hills in my next article. He had bought the mill in 1842 as part of his marriage settlement.

As we will see – and the story of this mill is a very very long saga.  The mill probably survived into the 20^th century when it was demolished when it was part of South Met Gas’s Phoenix Chemical works. It was then completely forgotten until local history librarian, Julian Watson, saw a note about it in a history of tide mills – and gradually his, and my, research has uncovered this huge story, having started with nothing.  There is a long long way to go yet!

So – thank you to Maureen.  I never did meet her in Matlock but she has now written this all up ‘Bryan Donkin. The Very Civil Engineer 1768-1855’ by Maureen Greenland and Russ Day. Published by Phillimore 2016.  Buy it, it’s very good.