THE ENDERBY FACTORY - the Enderby family, their rope works and business interests in Greenwich

 

THE ENDERBYS

 The Enderby family were very numerous but the brothers who bought the rope walk were descendants of the Samuel Enderby who had had an 'oil and white lead' works in Loman Street, in The Borough. He was in the 'oil and Russia' trade, which meant that he processed mutton fat from the Baltic together with oil from whales slaughtered at sea at a plant in Rotherhithe. Oil had all sorts of uses but, in the days before coal gas, was often used for street lighting.

 Samuel married Mary Buxton whose family were ship owners and he took over her family business. His ships went out to hunt whales and by 1790 he was a rich man with sixty-eight whaling ships working in the Southern Oceans.  In the 1790s his son, Samuel, Jnr. lived in a large and impressive house on Crooms Hill.  His mother lived on Blackheath and family members were active in local good causes. It was his sons who bought the Greenwich riverside site.

 The factory consisted of two large waterside buildings where spinning machinery and looms were used to make canvas.  On site were rooms to spin hemp and a flax mill.  Outside was a building for a steam engine and boiler, houses for the foremen, stables, a smithy, and a joinery. There  was a 'pitch house' and the brothers negotiated seven-year contracts with the gas companies for a supply of tar.  There was also a project with the City of London Gas Company for making 'composition,'  usually a coal tar based mortar used by the cheaper end of the building trade. In 1837 Michael Faraday himself gave a lecture in 1837 on the use of naphtha as a solvent for rubber and how it could be applied to new types of rope and cable. Their most famous ship was the 'Samuel Enderby.  For her first voyage an experimental rot proofing was used. This was Kyan’s extremely poisonous sublimate solution,  more usually used as a treatment for syphilis. As a result there was some problems with nausea. Such uses of chemical products still under development in the 1830s shows how open the Enderby brothers were to innovation and the new ideas about chemistry and its development.

This younger generation of Enderbys had money and leisure and many ideas beyond rope and canvas manufacture. Charles Enderby was one of the founders of the Royal Geographical. Enderby crews went to the Southern Oceans in search of whales and in the course of their travels made many important discoveries. Their ships became identified with Antarctic exploration and the stories of the explorers with their, sometimes harrowing, adventures make exciting reading.  They named the new lands which they discovered 'Adelaide Island' after Queen Adelaide, 'Mount William’, after William IV - and, of course, ‘Enderby Land’.

Nevertheless the business was gradually failing

On 8 March 1845, a devastating fire at Enderby Wharf put an end to the family’s involvement in the sail and rope-making business.  The factory's own fire engine fought the blaze joined by two from the Parish, another from the Royal Dockyard and one from the London Fire Brigade Establishment. A detachment of Royal Marines was sent to help but there was never very much hope of saving the ropewalk.  By the next morning all that remained were the 'lofty walls' of the factory - and they were blown down by the high winds in the next few days.   It was said in the Kentish Mercury that the fire was either 'spontaneous combustion' or that it was ‘wilfully raised by some incendiary'.

A small house which may have been on the riverside was also destroyed and by June 1845, building work began on a new riverside house for Charles Enderby possibly on the foundations of the old house. The new house incorporated an unusual ‘Octagon Room’ on the first floor of the north-west corner with an angled bay window and river views. This building is Enderby House which still stands on the river bank.   Charles entertained the rich and famous here.  He had a number of 'curiosities' including a Tudor bedstead and a stuffed 'parson bird' from New Zealand, which, when alive, had been a pet. 

The Enderbys were part of that circle of merchants with strong government and establishment links - the same people who ran Morden College and the East India Company.   Exploration was an expensive business: in theory, it was undertaken to discover new areas for whale fishing but this trade was soon in decline as gas lighting replaced oil, and whales became scarcer.

In 1847 Charles Enderby got a concession to set up a whaling station in the Auckland Islands in Antarctica, the 'Southern Whale Fishery'. It was a short lived and unsuccessful venture in which he, and other members of his family, lost a lot of money and the brothers died in relative poverty.

Nevertheless the manufacture of rope at Enderby Wharf had started something and that was to be in cables.  A business which had begun slightly down river at Morden Wharf was looking for a vacant site to which they could expand.

gw 2020