With this series I am working gradually down Deptford Creek and I’m now on the Lewisham side going down towards the River. I said I would try to cover every wharf - so I am continuing to look at people who were operating businesses on Sun Wharves, on the junction of Creekside and Church Street.
Now I am going to make the same disclaimer as last week when I looked at other businesses on Sun Wharves. I know there is a community of interested and involved people in the area who all know a lot more about Sun Wharves and other sites on the Creek than I ever will. I guess some of you are getting pretty annoyed at seeing me trying to write about them. I also know there are a lot of very complicated politics around all of this area. I just wanted to say that I will try and stick just to writing the history as I find it. I’m sorry if I get it wrong and I would be very grateful if people told me about my mistakes - you can find me on Twitter or Face book. DM me there.
On the 1897 insurance company plan of industrial sites on Deptford Creek the third most northern section of Sun Wharves is marked as ‘Penfolds’. ‘ Penfold’ is a surprisingly common name around Greenwich. If you look them up in the local press since 1800 there are many people with that name mentioned with many sites and businesses. Several of them were elected local government councillors in Lewisham and also in Greenwich. There is an excellent article by Mr. Running Past the south east London blogger, about a branch of the Penfold family who had several local wharves including this one on Creekside. However, Mr. Running Past gives a lot of detail about the family, he mentions this Deptford site only briefly in a list of several which they operated.
Most recently a local Penfold business, based in Lee, was associated with the sale of cars but from the late 19th century they had other sites in the area. Mr. Running Past says that Walter George Penfold was born in Deptford in 1852; his father was a ‘dust collector’ and the family lived in the Tanners Hill area near Deptford Bridge. Over the next few years as Walter married and raised a family and they moved to a variety of addresses in the Deptford area. By 1871 he was working as a Coal Porter - presumably on one of the nearby wharves – of which there were plenty dealing with coal deliveries – but 10 years later he was a ‘carman’. As a driver of some sort at that time he would have had a horse and cart although he might have used a hired vehicle or he could have been employed by somebody who owned the vehicle he operated. As Mr. Running Past says, this was to be the start of a major local business
By 1893 Walter had a yard at Greenwich Wharf. This is the riverside site in Greenwich at the end of Pelton Road now called covered with flats called Riverside Gardens. Anyone who remembers the area before it was developed for housing in the early 2000s will remember there were riverside wharves but behind them was a series of parallel empty sites which in the 1970s were no longer in use. Although had previously had industrial uses there was no riverside access since the 19th century. I suspect that the Penfolds had one of these back sites. Here Walter Penfold was listed as a cartage contractor with William and Arthur Penfold – presumed to be his sons – employed as carmen and contractors’ journeymen. Walter Penfold tendered for contracts with the local council for various haulage jobs including cartage with horses and carts and gradually, as time went on, other vehicles. The family seems to have lived in Banning Street which still runs parallel to the River in this area of Greenwich.
By the 1890s Greenwich was not their only site. Mr. Running Past mentions one in Lee High Road and one in Brayards Road in Peckham as well as a second one in Christchurch Way in Greenwich - very close to Greenwich Wharf. But he also had one in Creek Street – which is the one we need to think about in this article. It is marked as ‘Penfolds’ on the 1897 insurance plan for Sun Wharves. The Creekside business seems to have been run by Albert, one of Walter’s sons. He is described as a ‘wharfinger, a contractor and a carman’, and he lived in Creek Street. I must point out that that ‘Creek Street’ in the 1890s is now called ‘Creekside’ – but there is still a ‘Creek Street’ road sign up on the wall of adjacent Evelyn Wharf. It was also sometimes known as Copperas Street - which is now the street which joins it to the north,
Albert’s address is given as 4 Creek Street and this house features in Lewisham Council’s Conservation Report on the area. It is described as one of the earliest surviving buildings on Creekside as a 'charming early Victorian house with a raised ground floor’ and which they say ‘is notable as being the only residential building on Creekside river facing side’. They note it is identified in 1899 by Charles Booth in his report on classes of housing and residents in South London and say he saw it as being ‘socially superior/ to the other residential properties in the area. I think that this comment only refers to Booth’s colour grading for the maps which gives a better hue to this house but Booth makes no mention of the actual residents and who they were. Today it seems a pleasant enough house probably rather smaller than it appears and in the middle of what will soon become a development area – with the usual flats looming over it.
Mr. Running Past says Penfolds were on this Deptford site from 1910 but, as I noted above, they are noted on the insurance plan for 1897. This plan also shows ‘cart sheds’ both on the Creekside wharf and across the road on a site with was then otherwise empty with just ‘stabling; written on it. This site across the road will become important for the next users of the site. Mr. Running Past also makes the point that a firm like Penfolds with many horses would have needed some sort of grazing facility nearby. It’s difficult to think of what in that area might be available and suitable - and so the horses would probably have had to go some distance for their rest times - or, more likely, never saw a green field in their whole lives.
Although Albert is described as a wharfinger he was often dealing with building materials and there are reports of roads making materials being handled on the site. Often this was for use by the local authorities. generally however the family they are listed as ‘Cartage Contractors’.
Penfolds must have left this site in the 1920s after the Great War as they developed their other sites and changed from horses to motor vehicles. They went on to become a leading firm in local transport businesses until they closed eventually in 2016.
Penfolds were replaced on the 3 Creekside site by Medina. Their office block still sits on the west side of the street – where Penfolds once had carts and stables. It is still in use – apparently most recently as a church. So no. 3 Creekside is across the road from Sun Wharves and is described in the Lewisham Conservation Report as having been built around 1922 and is as ‘art deco’ office and factory building. They also note the art deco signage near the gables with the ‘Medina’ name on it. Another web site describes this sign as having a ‘1910s looking typeface’ and makes the point that Medina is the name of Islam’s second holiest city or more generally ‘town’ Arabic.
Medina seems to have used a number of company names which are not always clear. There was a loading bay and vehicle entrance as part of the building opposite Sun Wharves. It seems that the riverside wharf was used for oil tanks for what is described as an ‘oil refinery’. Now when I think about oil refineries I think about the vast site on the Isle of Grain, now gone, and clearly the small Sun Wharf site can’t have been anything like that. Medina produced ‘edible oils and fats’ as well as inedible ones, and had delivered them to customers in their own fleet of tankers. Now only the art deco office block remains and the tanks on the waterfront have all gone – alongside the wharf is where the residential boats are now moored.
I know nothing about Medina’s origins. In 1927 they registered a change of name to ‘Medina Refinery Ltd’ for their business handling greases and it had previously been known as ‘London Oil Medina Ltd’. In 1927 they registered the name of ‘Medaline’ to take over the business carried on my ‘Medina Refineries Ltd’ at Deptford. What was going on? What is ‘Medaline’?? It is probably a made up trade name but today it is the name of an antibiotic and a number of other more obscure things, none of them anything to do with oils. There is however some mention of a ‘secret formula’ for Medaline greases. They had some great signage and I am sorry I can’t reproduce here (copyright as ever!!) a bright sign for their ‘motor oil’ with a great leopard logo on it. The fact that it is motor oil makes me wonder if what they were producing was in fact some sort of petrol. We tend to forget that at one time motor oil wasn’t imported but we made it ourselves from coal, which would go well with the vast coal imports in this area. Over the other side of the River, in Hackney Wick, ‘petroleum’ and aviation spirit were developed and manufactured by Carless, Capel and Leonard. Nearer Deptford, South Met. Gas Company manufactured their own ‘motor spirit’ at East Greenwich Gasworks and it powered all their own vehicles.
As ever the newspaper reports, as of so many companies, are about the misdeeds of their employees. In 1932 to one of Medina's drivers was fined for excessive noise from defective tyres. In 1939 one of their drivers, George Scott, was charged with the theft of cooking oil. More recently in 1959 another individual was part of a gang found guilty of stealing edible oil from drivers of Medina tankers. He went to jail but this was not theft by employees but opportunistic thieves.
Finally in 1968 they changed the name of the firm again to ‘Medina Refinery (Camberline) Ltd. I haven’t got the faintest idea what ‘Camberline’ means. On the net it seems to appear as a name used occasionally on sites worldwide for various unrelated businesses. Does it have a link to edible or non edible oils or to a family, or a process – it would be good to know.
I also got excited seeing a reference to them on the net in a book about the production, the crushing and use of soya beans. Then I realised that there were many, many, many web sites about this and that they covered a vast array of books or essays about soya beans in every possible context. But are all by the same two authors and the reference to Medina was the same in all of them – part of a list of British soya bean crushers. I had hoped to find a health food link for this firm and that Deptford would have been in the forefront of a technological breakthrough in the field. But sadly no.
Medina remains a bit of a mystery to me – if you know better please get in touch. What were the edible oils and of course the inedible ones? Motor oil? Soya beans??
Next week we have to continue to stay around Sun Wharves with Evelyn Wharf –– but soon we will be onto slaughterhouses and potteries. Stay with me for them!
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