Rennie Brothers works Deptford Creek

 

Continuing our trip down the Greenwich site at Deptford Creek. The site which I described last week was Brewery Wharf and that is the first site you encounter on Norman Road on its corner with Creek Road.  Carrying on up the Creek towards Lewisham there are then a series of wharfs - Ravensbourne Wharf -  Healeys Wharf – Collier Wharf – New Sun Wharf and so on. And I will get round to talking about them eventually.

 

Today if we walk down Norman Road to the railway bridge it seems to be quite a, long way. Originally Norman Road was Ravensbourne Street and it ran only as far as the railway bridge. Before it was built there was no road at all, just a series of large sites some with wharves and some without. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the ‘copperas grounds’ on the Greenwich side of the Creek and I said how they seemed to have been in the area of what was later New Sun Wharf  which was one of the last wharves before the railway bridge.  Now the area on your left was you go up Norman Road is housing but in the 1840s it was just the large sites of market gardens or meadows.  But by the 1860s maps show works – marked as  ‘engine’ or ‘boiler works’ next to the railway line at the end of Ravensbourne  Street. I am pretty certain that this works belonged to the Rennie Brothers and I’m going to say a lot more about this at the moment.

 

I’ll come back to all the wharves I’ve skipped later and I will also write about the big site next door and to the rear of the boiler works with the gasholders on it – and some older people might remember them.  But I think we can make more sense of the area by starting with the Rennie Brothers works. But, despite the Rennies being very famous, it has been very difficult to find out anything which went on at this, their Deptford Creek, Works.  

 

The Rennie brothers were the sons of the great civil engineer John Rennie. He was Scottish, born in the 1760s and grew up to become an engineer working at one time for James Watt. In the 1790s he moved to London where he set up his own engineering business and continued with a career which involved amazing numbers of important structures. He carried out large drainage works, bridges, docks and much more.  He died in 1821 and is buried in St.Paul’s Cathedral.  His base and his works were at Blackfriars.

 

He had two sons, George and John, who inherited his business and after his death they remained in partnership as G. and J. Rennie, although each specialised in a different part of the business. They carried on using the Blackfriars initially in Stamford Street and later moving to Holland Street.  As time went on the works continued under their children.

 

In the 1830s they are said to have opened a shipbuilding yard at Norman Road, Greenwich.  I assume that their site is that shown on the 1860s OS Map which lay adjacent to the north side of the Greenwich Railway and which had access to Deptford Creek. This area may, or may not, have been part of the copperas works which seems to have gone out of use in the 1830s. In the mid 1840s the Greenwich vestry had a ‘tithe map’ drawn up in order to have something more accurate for the collection of the rates. But there is no sign whatsoever on it of the Rennie works and the site which later seems to be theirs is a collection of small holdings – described as ‘market gardens’, ‘meadow’ ‘sheds’.  The freeholder is either a local dignitary ‘Joshua Hargrave’ or John Manship Norman, a lawyer after whom Norman Road was to be named.  Some of them are let to ‘Faulkner’ and I wonder if he was an agent or some connection of the Rennies.

 

So far, so mysterious.  The Rennie site seems to have been known as ‘Creek Yard Boiler Works’ and although it is described as a shipbuilding site the Creek here, above Creek Road Bridge, could hardly be described as ideal for building  a vessel of any size.   Thus in 1859 Rennie’s took over Dreadnought Wharf with Thames deep water frontage where William Joyce had already built some substantial vessels. There the Rennies stayed until the early 20^th century and used it suitably for shipbuilding.  Most of the accounts we have of the Rennie works in Greenwich are about the Dreadnought site, not that on Deptford Creek.

 

The next thing I am sure of about the Creekside site is that in 1864 the Phoenix Gas Company bought the adjacent site to the north which involved some discussion with Rennies on access to the Creek – which the gas company did not need and which Rennie took over.  I very much suspect that in the 20^th century the gas company – by then South Met., took over the rest of the Rennie site. In the 1950s the nationalised gas industry had an enamelling factory on what had been the Rennie site.

 

So what was going on at the Deptford site?  A newspaper report of 1869 describes a strike there. This involved a government contract for ‘60 or 70 flat bottomed vessels for the shallow navigation of rivers in India’.   Two hundred men downed tools thinking that this valuable contract ought to lead to more pay for them.  The Rennies apparently got the Government to cancel the contact and sacked all the men.  While I suspect there was rather more to it than all that, it does give us two clues to what was done there. ‘Flat bottomed vessels’ could mean anything from punts upwards – but probably means something like a lighter.  ‘Two hundred men’ though does seem rather a lot of men.  I appreciate that 20^th century boat builders had power tools but Joe Jakubait built 90 ft New Orleans in 1991 in Greenwich with a staff of 20.

 

The Rennie’s Greenwich engine and boiler shop was closed apparently  in 1887. Subsequently  1895, eight years after the work is supposed to have  closed,  two advertisements appeared in the local press for its sale. One advertisement describes a plot of freehold building land ‘near the station and park’… ‘a freehold wharf and dock on with a water frontage Deptford creek’  and which had been run as a boiler works.  It was for sale by auction but whether this sale ever took place I do not know.

 

The other advertisement is for a different auction sale of the tools on the premises - boilermakers tools soe of which are described as ‘nearly new’.

 

BOILERMAKERS’ TOOLS, including nearly new hydraulic riveter, by Hugh Smith and Co., to admit of 10ft. 6.in,, and press 130 tons on rivet plate closer, Tweddell’s riveter, with wrought iron man 5ft. high, steam riveter, set nearly new vertical steel plate-bending rolls, by Scrivcn, 10ft. 6in. wide, 14in and 18in. diameter, two sets horizontal ditto, sis punching and shearing machines, two steam hammers, two screwing machines, five drilling machines, a 4-spindle multiple adjustable drill. An 11 ft plate edge planer, lathe, two Goliath and five overhead travellers,  two derrick and 13 forge and other cranes, two testing machines, proving pump, Cornish boiler, donkey-feed pump, two marine boilers, 20h.p. horizontal engine, 36in fan plate, furnaces and smiths hearths, eight tanks, wagon weighbridge, corrugated iron anvils, levelling slabs, shaping blocks, shafting, pulleys, leather belts, vices, jacks, and a large assortment of smiths' and boilermakers’ tools, adapted to the foregoing machines

 

A friend who has looked at this list has said how much it reminds him of the equipment auctioned off in the 1980s at the closure of the River Thames Ship Repairers at North Woolwich – a hundred years later.  I have attached some pictures taken then in the 1980s.

 

It is difficult to know what happened to the site after the boiler works closed. On maps the site appears to be empty in the late 19^th and early20th centuries.  By the 1950s had become part of the large Roan Sreet gas site and the site of gas industry owned factories. It later became housing.

 

This site is really intriguing. In some ways it is famous in that the many biographies of John Rennie usually mention it.  Although one biography on my bookshelf says it was in Woolwich!  Most of them don’t really take on that there were actually two works owned by the Rennies in Greenwich and assume that the ships and docks were all made on Deptford Creek site - while in fact they were made up the road at Dreadnought Wharf.  They also all assume that engines and boilers were all made at the Blackfriars works.

 

The site was famous, yet, I fact, unknown.