South Met. Gas collier ships

 

My last article was about Ordnance Wharf and the South Met. Gas works tar works attached to the giant East Greenwich Gas Works on the Greenwich Peninsula. I read somewhere recently that the riverside wall round the gas works was nearly a mile long – and I can sort of believe it although I haven’t measured it.  If we keep walking onwards from Ordnance Wharf along the very boring bit of the riverside path round the back of the Dome, it does feel like a long way.  I hope no-one minds me commenting that this could be a fantastic bit of the Greenwich riverside if someone bothered opening it up and putting something there, instead of hiding themselves inside the Dome. All I can see now is fences 

But never mind – we soon go past that half boat- an artwork called– Slice of Reality. It’s a slice of a sand dredger called Arco Trent and it’s been there since 2000 when it was a piece of art commissioned for the millennium. It's by Richard Wilson and here’s a link to his web site where he tells you all about it. http://www.richardwilsonsculptor.com/sculpture/slice-of-reality-2000.html.  This whole bit of  riverside path is part of the sculpture trail called 'The Line' which starts over in the Olympic Park and then crosses over to Greenwich – but then ends before it gets to some of the art works to the south,  like Enderby Wharf  https://the-line.org/#/artists/4.  As we go along the path at the back of the Dome  we encounter another  art work called 'Liberty Grip' by Gary Hume which is ‘modelled on the limbs of a store mannequin’..... a mass-produced, utilitarian object on a colossal scale’. 

And as we go on remember the Blackwall Tunnel is below us and I will do something on the history of that in a future article. Eventually, as we emerge from the path, we come to what is now the clipper jetty which was called ‘Queen Elixabeth Pier’ but now just seems to be ‘North Greenwich pier’. Just beyond it is another sculpture – 'Quantum Cloud' by Anthony Gormley. It has been there since 2000 when it was commissioned for the millennium and, personally, I like it a lot. 

However at Quantum Cloud, have a look at what it is standing on. Here is one of the few relics of East Greenwich Gas works – some small part of the great jetty which once stood here.

The basic raw material of any gas works was of course coal. For Thameside gas works this came down in vast quantities by ship from ports servicing the Durham and Northumberland coal fields. It was a major industry and one which gets very little attention.  Even in peace time and good weather it was a dangerous journey and the crews of these ships were some of the toughest and most exploited, yet ignored, members of the industrial workforce. South Met.’s House journal has occasional articles from young men – usually office workers in the company – who had persuaded a collier captain to let them come along for a trip from Seaham to Greenwich. They were routinely terrified all the way down the coast reaching south London with some relief.  I hope to quote some of these in another future article. I am sure the crews enjoyed frightening these landsmen and there are other tales of the horrors of the passage ‘the ship is straining plunging and labouring heavily into the high sea.. we are watching  for her to clear herself from the mass of water she has shipped... we took a heavy sea aboard right aft and smashed our life raft’. 

 

They had been coming down the coast with coal since medieval times and by the 19th century the river was crowded out with ships. I have written elsewhere about the regulatory system which the Greenwich Harbour Masters house was part of.  At Charlton the hulk, Atlas, clanked out in the river in a big transhipment operaton.  In the 20th century all the big gas companies – South Met., Chartered and Wandsworth (and the power stations)- had their own fleets of vessels doing the round trip from Durham.  When they stopped coming in the 1980s we had the awful shock of an empty and deserted river – which continues to this day.

South Met had its own fleet of collier ships – and I will probably have to leave the details about them for another article.  The company’s first gas works was in the Old Kent Road – inland but on the Grand Surrey Canal. They had begun with a second hand barge called Thomas and then began to charter boats to carry the coal. When I wrote here last year about the West Greenwich gas works – where Waitrose is now on Deptford Creek – I described how this site became South Met’s lighterage department from 1887 and how they operated three tugs, a dock tug –which worked on the surrey canal - and over a hundred barges of various types. The company launched its first tug the ‘George Livesey’ in 1887 but others followed.  

The collier ships themselves were obviously much larger ocean going vessels.  A new collier brought into service in 1946 could carry 4,050 tons of coal – twice the capacity of older vessels. It could be loaded in a day and a half and could be discharged at East Greenwich in 12 hours using four grabs. She would make three round trips a fortnight. The coal was delivered to jetties at Greenwich and at Rotherhithe (where their huge jetty still survives). There were also facilities at Bankside and at Vauxhall Gas Works although not on the same scale.  Once unloaded coal was taken around the works by special locomotives – and perhaps that had better be the subject of another article as well as all the others I’ve been promising.

So – the great jetty at east Greenwich gas works. This stood on the site of what is now the clipper pier and it was certainly one of the sights as you went down river.  It was built in the late 1880s with the rest of this new works. It was built by Appleby Brothers – whose engineering works on the west bank of the peninsula I described a few months ago.

It provided facilities for unloading ships with coal from the north east and for loading ships with coke or ballast.  At first ships were unloaded by men in the hold with buckets and the coal was then craned to railway wagons. In 1903 it was extended and became T shaped. On the new arm were four travelling hydraulic cranes with a grab to lift the coal from the ships. The coal was discharged to four large overhead hoppers and then loaded into railway wagons below.  After the Second World War the jetty was altered again to discharge oil tankers.

The jetty could deal with a million tons of coal a year and about a quarter of it went into barges to be taken to the company's other works. Ships were berthed out in the river at high tide and as the tide fell they rested on the mud.

I have been told many times by men who worked there that the whole operation was remarkably quiet and that the hydraulic cranes were completely silent.  I have always understood that – being a gas works –no electrical equipment was allowed here. But I don’t know exactly how the operation was powered. The jetty was pulled down for the millennium and the new clipper pier built – but it is difficult to know if it could have been adapted for any other use as just the supports for the Gormley artwork remain.   

A few years ago local gas historian Brian Sturt, highlighted the gas workers war memorial window in Southwark Cathedral. This dates from 1923 and is in the Lady Chapel.  32 of the war dead were seafarers on company ships bringing the coal to London.   A great deal is written about the hard working conditions and the suffering of the men who mined the coal and the men who worked in the retort houses of the gas works. We hear next to nothing of the heroic men of the merchant marine without whom neither the mines nor the gas works could have functioned.