Rope manufacture in Greenwich - Littlewood and some pre-Enderby scandals

 

Rope is something which was made in many river and seaside towns and Greenwich was no exception to this.  Rope was made in Charlton until 1985 and so there are still many people around who worked at the Bridon factory in Anchor and Hope Lane. But that is another story  and rope was made in our area long before that.

Rope factories are called “rope walks” and if you look at historic maps you will see several long thin works in east, and south east, London.   If you want to see rope made today by traditional methods go to Historic Dockyard at Chatham where the dockyard rope walk is still in production.  The building is so long that you can hardly see one end of it from the other and a machine trundles up and down the length of it and twists together long strands of material to make the rope.   Before machines like this were invented the ropemakers were on foot – they walked backwards down the length of the ‘walk’ with something like 40 lbs of fibre twisted round their waists.  As they went they twisted these fibres with the fingers of their left hands to make the rope - and in every working day they would cover more than 20 miles.

Rope Yard Rails was the name of a street in Woolwich which ran across the area which now seems to be called Maribor Park – that’s near the roundabout on the corner of Warren Lane and Beresford Street.  By 1900 this was a terrible slum but its name tells us that it  had been part of the great  Woolwich Ropeyard.  This had been set up under Elizabeth I, in the 1570 to supply rope to naval warships. It was the first naval ropeyard in the country – and so was an early state industry undertaken through a contractor.  The rope walk itself was a covered building running the length of what is now Beresford Street. By the 17^th century it had a grand entrance in the High Street and adjacent to it were some very nice houses for the master ropemaker and his clerk. 

In Greenwich there were also probably several rope works in the 18^th century but they would have been very much smaller than Woolwich and all privately owned and managed.  The one we know most about was at what is now called Enderby Wharf.   In the 17^th century this had been a government explosives establishment which had closed in 1770. In around 1800 a rope walk was built here.  In the official records a John Hounson is listed here and my guess is that this is the same John Hounson who had been the Clerk at the rope walk in Woolwich since 1780 - and perhaps he had decide to set up his own business.   He  was  only there for a short time and after that other people were running the works,  By 1808 a James Littlewood was there with a ‘rope house, rope walk, houses and wharf’.

Littlewood later described how he had borrowed £40 from friends in order to take the rope walk on but he was bankrupt by 1817..  He explained that he had done badly because he had been ‘very unfortunate’ in business and that “a conspiracy had been formed to take it out of his hands".   He had handed the ropewalk over to " a person named Young”  and this was an arrangement by which he ‘received nothing for it’ but was promised the job of foreman with a salary of £250 a year.  That didn’t last long and he was sacked by Mr. Young for stealing hemp  - although he denied that he had done this. He then began a court case against Mr. Young to get the rope walk back. The case was tried at Maidstone, but Littlewood was defeated because there was no written agreement.  While the case was being heard in Maidstone he was actually a prisoner in Horsemonger Lane Jail in Southwark for operating an illicit still to make liquor, and for selling this liquor  in the prison. 

Out of gaol and having lost the rope walk Littlewood  went to Kentish Town, and changed his name to Smith.  In Kentish Town he set up an illegal still which was eventually discovered by the Excise and as Mr. Smith he was fined 30 shillings in the Magistrates Court. In 1824 Robert Binns, landlord of the Seven Stars Pub in Whitechapel, was investigated by the Excise for  buying spirits which had been made without a permit and supplied to him in cans or bladders by a Mr. Cross.  The Excise Officers made further enquiries and discovered Mr. Cross who was running an illegal still in Bethnal Green and had others at Leytonstone, and Camberwell.

Littlewood  eventually admitted, in court, that he was both Mr Smith and Mr Cross and ‘within the past three or four months had manufactured three or four hundred gallons of spirits’.   The Foreman of the Jury is reported as saying “we are unanimous we cannot believe such a wretch on his oath.”  and there was no verdict.  Littlewood  was actually a prisoner in the Fleet Gaol while the trial was going on and he told the Court that this was ‘because of debts contracted at the Greenwich ropeworks’. 

Mr.Young, who is otherwise unknown, continued to manage the rope works until it was taken over by the Enderby Brothers.

In 1830, the rope works was purchased by the Enderby Brothers, Charles, George and Henry.  Over the next few years they developed the site by adding a sail making works and a hemp factory to the already existing rope-walk. Members of the Enderby family been living in the Greenwich and Blackheath area for some years but in the 18^th century the family had been tanners, oil merchants and paint manufacturers in Southwark. By the end of that century Samuel Enderby was investing in the Southern Whale Fishery plus the transport of convicts to Australia.   They maintained a considerable fleet which needed the rope and canvas manufactured at the Greenwich works. The Enderbys invested in the works by adding a boiler house and mechanised the quarter of a mile long covered ‘rope walk’ but the site was devastated by a terrible fire in 1845. Ever since the site has been known as Enderby Wharf. 

In the 1850s the site was taken over by the makers of the early telegraph cables whose successors remain there today and the site has become famous as the place which ‘cabled up the world’ in the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  The ropewalk itself was integral to the development of the cables – for example in the mid-1830s they were involved in looking at ways in which rubber could be used in ropes

The rope walk remained on site and can still be seen marked on maps of the telegraph cable works in the 20^th century.  It length could still be made out from the Greenwich riverside path until very recently and it is only in the last three or four years that Barratt’s high rise developments have obliterated it.

There is little else left of the rope making industry in Greenwich – although recent research on the Bridon Ropes Charlton site has identified “significant” remains, and I understand that some of this awaits publication. I also understand that the Bridon football team is still with us.   There is also a small decorative motif on new brick walls in Woolwich Road at the junction with Anchor and Hope Lane.  Someone has tried there to reference and commemorate this once important local industry.