The Beale Foundry

 

Continuing along the riverside path, past Riverside Gardens we come straight onto to Enderby Wharf – or do we?  In the mid-19^th century after passing Coles Child's coal wharf and Mowlem's stone wharf, and some assorted barge builders we would have found, a foundry before we got to Enderby’s. Actually the site on which the foundry stood was originally leased from the Enderby family and eventually became pat of the cable works. Some people will remember the chimney here, demolished a few years ago, which would have been on the site of this foundry.  In fact its owner   seems to have been in some sort of partnership with the Enderbys.  He was Joshua Taylor Beale a resourceful and innovative engineer who you should really know more about.

Joshua Beale was a Londoner, born in Soho. I know nothing of his early life and training but in 1822 he took out a patent for a rotary steam engine.  This variant on using steam to power machinery had been around for a long time and many engineers had tried to make them a success.  Beale hardly features in a long list.  A detailed explanation can be found on the following website which puts him in his place, fairly near the bottom. http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng.htm.  Beale’s patent was taken out jointly with a Mr Benigfield in whose Aldgate tobacco factory the machine had apparently been running for three years.  As we will see, the rotary engine was a constant in Beale’s career and to be a factor in an amazingly successful device. 

In 1822 he was about 30 years old and described as a cabinet maker. – Five years earlier banns had been called for his marriage to Hannah Jones but it was not until 1825 that their son, John, was born. John, also a seriously clever inventor, is probably another story, but the lack of a wedding subsequent to the banns will turn out to be of some importance.  Meanwhile Joshua, still in Whitechapel seems to have abandoned steam engines for chemistry – in particularly the use naphtha – an old name for inflammable sprits derived from coal tar.  He was designing and selling oil lamps. Like others he was buying gas works waste describing – in his case from Shoreditch gasworks. He developed a means of heating inflammable liquids without any risk of them catching fire - important for those who wanted to work with coal tar.  In 1834 he patented lamps which burnt ‘the commonest hydrocarbon obtained from coal tar’ and in 1837 came the 'Air and Vapour Light; where the oil was vapourised to mix with ‘oxygen from the atmosphere'.

He seems to have moved to Greenwich, probably in the 1830s, but maybe earlier.  He and Hannah with their three children lived a Vale Cottage, roughly on the site of the Plaza at the bottom of Vanbrugh Hill.  Joshua seems to have been in partnership with the Enderbys and they leased the southern end of their site to him as a foundry =.  He seems to have been selling steam engines, lamps and other devices.  There is also report – discussed by Michael Faraday himself – of work done by Enderbys on rubber solutions and the search for a solvent which could be used to improve rope.  Beale undoubtedly worked for them on this as his work with naphtha was directly relevant, and this may be why he moved to Greenwich apparently under Enderby’s patronage

Beale continued with his work on steam engines in Greenwich and in the 1840s began to experiment with useing them in road vehicles. In this venture he was joined by another Mr. Beningfield, - John, who was the 'steward of the Ramsgate steamer'. In the early 1840s at least two cars were made at Beale's Greenwich works but they were the not the only experimental road transport which trundled round the roads of North Kent in the nineteenth century.  From the 1820s onwards some Kentish roads were - well, almost - buzzing with newly invented vehicles.   Most of them were steam powered and were developed as the same time as railway locomotives but they were lighter and smaller and, perhaps, more sophisticated.  He was to fall in with Colonel Francis Maceroni, an enthusiast for steam cars who was neither from the military or particularly Italian.

In 1841 Maceroni set up the ‘Common Road Steam Conveyance Company'...  This body aimed to commission a steam vehicle to Maceroni's patents.  They asked Joshua Beale to build the vehicle which he did with the help of his younger brother, Benjamin, who undertook the drawings.  At about same time another, Greenwich ad Deptford based, entrepreneur, Frank Hills, seems to have been doing much the same and it may be that Beale also worked for him  there is a description of a factory where two ‘handsome and powerful’ carriages were being built.  These were vehicles to take a number of passengers – one for 15 and one for 20. Hills, Beale and Maceroni began to undertake demonstration trips around the Kentish countryside.

On a Wednesday in July 1840 a party of seventeen went in Maceroni's carriage from East Greenwich through Lewisham to Bromley... Coming back to Greenwich they turned off onto the Dover Road and  went up Blackheath Hill - at 12 miles per hour  ''in gallant style' with 17 passengers.  They continued across Blackheath and up Shooters Hill and as they needed water they stopped at The Bull.  Inevitably, water was not all they took on there - the report says 'the men were regaled and eulogised the scientific engineer'. Frank Hills' carriage went rather further - Windsor, Brighton, Hastings - although there was a need to stop every eight miles to take on water.  This activity seems to have stopped by the end of 1841.  Beale and Maceroni had agreed £800 each for the carriages but Beale charged extra £300 per vehicle because of the changes.  The money was not paid and Beale impounded the carriages. The eventual fate of these vehicles is not known.

In 1842 in another complete change to his usual work he became Engineer to a project for Artesian wells in east London.  This seems to have never got going, but it shows the range of projects he ws prepared to take on.

He repeatedly patented changes his to his ‘rotative engine and continued to make them naming it the "Anti-John Scott Russell Steam Engine", referring to the owner of Millwall Iron Works who was an opponent of this type of engine an id not include Beale in a published list of rotary engines.  Beale also made more conventional steam engines. In fact the only remaining Beale engine known to be still in existence is a conventional condensing engine which he sold to a silk mill in Glemsford in East Anglia and which is now in the reserve collection at Beamish industrial museum. He also made engines for boats, and possibly the boats themselves – he is said to have made ‘an iron pinnance’. A trial of his boat and engine at Yarmouth was described by no less than George Stephenson who said the engine could not be made to work and the party was stranded out at sea. It appears Stephenson had to pay for the rescue...   

In May 1848 Beale provided the engines for two launches to be included in the equipment for Sir James Ross’ expedition to fin Franklin. The launches themselves were built by Thompson of Rotherhithe and a demonstration of them was ordered by the Admiralty and took place on the river opposite Somerset House. By the early 1850s Beale is said to have had ‘several boats on the river’.  This included his experimental craft ‘the Pigmy Giant’

Beale, however, claimed to have sold ‘a considerable number’ of engines and other devices. One was a ‘bird’s wing’ propeller for boats. He probably also tried to make gas cookers - at a time when such things were quite unheard of and, allegedly, sent spies to see the kitchen equipment a rival, Thomas Barlow, had installed in Islington. He also patented a means of preventing 'encrusting' in boilers with urine and soda and other are also hints of an interest in boot and shoe manufacture, and in dyeing.

 

Most important was the exhauster.  This is the one thing which is remembers for and was an astonishingly successful device.  . Exhausters were used mainly in gas works to draw the gas through the pipes like a reverse pump and was an adaption of his rotary steam engine.  One local customer was the South Metropolitan Gas Company in the Old Kent Road which bought one in 1854.  But there were to be many others – every gas works needed one.

Joshua died in 1866 and the factory was taken over by his son, John.  John redesigned the exhauster and took out a new patent for it in the 1860s.  However, the lease on the Greenwich factory was about to expire and John did not renew it.

The exhauster was extremely useful and profitable and John sold the patent to the Bermondsey based Brian Donkin Company. When I visited the Derbyshire Record Office to look at Donkins’s file on this purchase I found it to be full of letters from Benjamin Beale –Joshua's brother and John’s uncle.  They say repeatedly that John had no right to inherit the factory and the patent.  He was really John Jones ‘a workman in the factory ‘and that Joshua could not have a son since he had never married.  He claimed that he was Joshua’s heir and therefore should have the rights over the exhauster patent.  The case reached court some years later when Benjamin challenged Joshua's will but the judge took no notice of his claim that John could not be Joshua’s son.  Yet there was something strange in Joshua’s personal life - the single set of banns and no marriage, and Hannah’s death in 1841 at what looks, from the newspaper report, to be a hushed up suicide.  This action of Benjamin’s against his nephew – who he must have known since he was a baby – seems to be particularly distasteful and must also have affected John’s two younger sisters.

There must have been an agreement of some sort between John and Benjamin. John had sold Donkin his revised patent, and so Benjamin sold the original patent to Gwynne’s, the Hammersmith and Blackfriars based pump maker.   John went on to develop a very successful bicycle and a projector which was one of the steps to the later cinema projectors. Clearly a wealthy man he built a large house in Westcombe Park Road. Benjamin moved to Wales.

The exhauster became a major part of the Donkin Company’s output. In 1903 they left Southwark for Chesterfield where they continued to pioneer new developments in gas industry machinery. The exhauster was redesigned and altered many times and machinery based on it was still being made in the 1960s’.  The works closed in 1996 but now, still in Chesterfield AVK’s Donkin Division makes ‘high performance valves and accessories for the gas supply industry’ and add that their predecessors made equipment ‘used in the UK and worldwide gas industry for over 170 years’.