Road transport and Deptford

 

As I near the end of my journey in articles up and down Deptford Creek,  and wondering what to write about this week, a friend has suggested ‘you ought to write something that gives the bigger picture – something which looks at the Creek as a whole’.  Well – yes – but finding something which covers subjects which I haven’t covered in other articles isn’t easy. Although in retrospect I could have done it differently.  There are some industries I have missed out on my way and – ah– one of them is road transport (well sort of).  There were a whole lot of 19h century pioneers of passenger and goods road transport on and near the Creek– and some of them have got ‘missed out’. So – this article will look at it as part of a ‘bigger picture’ of the Creek.

I am not sure if crossing Deptford Bridge counts as being involved in Deptford Creek but certainly many of these early road vehicles clanked and trundled over the bridge on their way up the Dover Road – and several of them because the steep road up Shooters Hill was a good place to demonstrate their inventions.

One of these was a very early and very idiosyncratic vehicle.  This was Samuel Brown – and he must not be confused, as I guiltily have in the past, with the more famous chain inventor and Blackheath resident. This other Samuel Brown was living in Brompton, west London, when, on 27^th May 1826, he drove up Shooters Hill in a carriage propelled by his invention – a gas vacuum engine, a sort of internal combustion engine using hydrogen. Someone more local at around the same time was a John Hill, a resident of Creek Street, with working with a Timothy Burstill demonstrated an ‘8 ton, road steam carriage with a very large boiler’ up the road in Kennington.

Samuel Brown must have taken his vehicle with its revolutionary engine over Deptford Bridge and I also assume other early inventors who crossed here were men essentially attempting a sort of bus service.  In October 1833 Sir Charles Dance ran his steam carriage every day for a fortnight between Waterloo Bridge and Greenwich. It was mounted on four wheels with a tall rectangular funnel and had seats for six or seven people inside with four more on the roof, while a footman stood at the back.  This fare was half crown (25.) a time.  A year later ship builder John Scott Russell brought two steam carriages by ship from Scotland to use in Greenwich. However the most successful of the steam carriage builders of the 1830s was Walter Hancock who designed and made vehicles in Stratford, east London and ran what were essentially bus services in central London.  Illustrations show one of his steam coaches called 'Era' advertising a service between London and Greenwich, probably in 1834. ‘Era’ carried sixteen passengers with a crew of three - the driver, an engineer and a lad.  There were two engines for the engineer to manage.  The 'lad' stoked the boiler with 'common gas coke ' - that is coke bought from the gas works.  It is unclear if this service ever actually ran but if it did – surely it used Deptford Bridge.

I’ve written elsewhere in my books about the Greenwich Peninsula (and i an article here in June 2020) about Colonel Maceroni and Joshua Taylor Beale who manufactured steam road vehicles in East Greenwich.  I’ve no evidence they ever came near Deptford Creek but their biggest contemporary rival was Frank Hills certainly did.  I described his Creekside chemical works in detail back in March.  In 1839 he went on a demonstration trip of Walter Hancock’ steam coaches  when it was noted that he 'was taking a lesson in steam carriage construction during the journey'.   He then patented a device which was thought to infringe an 1833 patent of  a Mr Roberts. I don’t know where Frank’s two steam cars were built but it could have been at his Deptford works – or a nearby engineering firm –asis a strong possibility.  During In 1840 he took his vehicles to Windsor, Brighton, and Hastings - stopping every eight miles to take on water. He went to Hastings, and back, 128 miles in a day in half the time it took a stage coach.   They went 'up and down the hills about Blackheath, Bromley and ‘on the Hastings Road as far as Tunbridge and back'.   Frank boasted of the difficult hills he went up 'Quarry hill rises 1 in 13, River Hill - said by coachmen to the worst hill in the country, rises 1 in 12’ he wrote in Mechanics Magazine.  

Frank claimed that passengers could be conveyed at half the cost and double the speed of stage coaches.  He had met with no problems or 'derangement's' on his trips around Kent - well only once, there had been some problem with muddy water which had only stopped them a few times.  But, no steam car public services emerged from his expeditions and he seems to have dropped the idea by 1845 or so.

One of the last steam cars to run experimentally on Kent roads was built for the man who later became the ship builder Sir Alfred Yarrow.   As a teenager, together with a friend, James Hilditch, he experimented with a whole range of inventions. One of these was a steam car and in 1861 it was taken up by T.W.Cowan of Greenwich.   I wrote about the manufacture of Yarrow’s steam car here in some detail a year ago –June 2021 – in an article about the Kent Ironworks. Yarrow's vehicle – manufactured on Deptford Creek - was driven from Greenwich to Bromley once a week.

For the really successful Creekside firm which produced powered road vehicles of all sorts we need to go to the Greenwich bank and – of course – Merryweather’s.  Fire engines need to be fast and reliable and Merryweather made vast numbers of them, albeit until aroind 1900 they were horsedrawn – but they also made steam trams and other specialist vehicles. I wrote about Merryweather in this series last August. As I said then we need to stop ignoring this famous and prolific company.  There must be more Merryweather vehicles preserved by enthusiasts than any other. Look for them on the net and you will be overwhelmed by the amount of web sites dedicated to them and their products lovingly restored all around the world

Until the end of the 19^th century that fire engines remained horse drawn and the steam raising machinery which they carried was to power the pumps for the water used to fight the fires.  In 1899, they produced the world's first successful self-propelled steam fire engine, the 'Fire King' - the first went to Port Louis on Mauritius. The first motorised fire engine used in London was a Merryweather appliance delivered to the Finchley Fire Brigade in 1904 – and this was commemorated in 1974 by the issue of a special Royal Mail postage stamp.  The enthusiast press has also carried many articles about their later move to petrol engines and the design of them.

Merryweathers made steam engined trams from the 1870s but these appear to have been sold more internationally than in Britain and there are some preserved in Euopean transport museums. One oddity is their manufacture of what has been called the 'first car’.  In 1888 they built the Butler Petrol Cycle - a three-wheeled petrol vehicle. Edward Butler had been investigating a number of similar projects and had worked for a number of local firms – but not for Merryweather.  In 1887 he had patented a petrol driven tricycle and placed an order with Merryweather to manufacture a prototype, which they duly did.  Tests on it were not particularly successful and it appeared that its use would have contravened the ‘red flag’ acts.  Butler went on to other researches with other firms and manufacturers.   I have a long and detailed article about Butler by L.R.Higgins, which I understand is deposited in the Bexley Local History archive.   However Merryweathers construction of this vehicle marks an important milestone in transport history.

Steam lorries and other vehicles were made at Penn’s old works on Blackheath Road.  By 1900 Penn’s had been taken over by Thames Ironworks and it is in their name that steam propelled cars, buses and lorries were made at the Blackheath Road works and the name of a firm called ‘Thames Engineering’.  By this time Thames Ironworks was under the control of Arnold Hills – Frank Hills' vegetarian, teetotal, philanthropist son.  The firm seems to have built s wide range of vehicles –both steam and petrol driven. In 1907 Thames Engineering Works, Greenwich, London, SE exhibited at Olympia a complete omnibus chassis, steam driven with a vertical engine giving 30-40 h.p; a three-ton lorry complete with body -a 15-cwt. van chassis. 

 Years ago Arnold Hills' grandson gave me some pictures of some very, very swish vehicles he said they made and I have since seen similar vehicles on the cover of Autocar magazine.  Were they really made and sold?  They were petrol vehicles, not steam.  Do any of these Thames Ironworks vehicles still exist? (I watched Genevieve on ‘Talking Pictures’ last week - which reminded me).  I have found on the net one hefty semi-bus which is apparently ‘in a private collection in Europe’. Are there others? Can we see cars, buses and lorries built in Deptford?

My final road vehicle company on Deptford Creek is even more mysterious.   This was Creek Street Engineering which I think was somewhere in the area of Harold and Evelyn wharves on the Creek. In 1890 Messrs. Capel and Co., engineers and gas-engine manufacturers had a works in Dalston. In 1898 a petrol-engined car was designed by Herbert Capel of the Clarkson and Capel Steam Car Syndicate and its manufacture was undertaken by the Creek Street Engineering Co, Deptford.  The brand name was Capel.. There were only a few vehicles and production ended in 1901. The only model was ‘a voiturette with a 4 hp two-cylinder engine was mounted under the driver's seat which drove the rear axle.. The vehicle offered space for three people in a face-to-face arrangement’.

 

In the 1970s this company apparently became  Stewart & Dennis Engineering Ltd and one report says that they made hovercraft which under took test trips on the Creek.  I find it hard to believe this is true??  It it is please send me reports as soon as you can and I will need to add it to means transport developed on the Creek.