THE WOODEN NUTMEG

 

 

Continuing along the river bank as we move past Morden Wharf the path swings inland to go round an inlet - this is Bay Wharf or Horseshoe Breach. It s thought to have originated when the tide broke through the sea wall – we don’t know when but it was before 1620 when the records start. A lot of things went on at that bit of riverside – and it is still busy now with a new boat repair yard.

 

In the 1860s, the Thames was 'the greatest shipbuilding area in the world'.  As well as the Royal Dockyards at Deptford and Woolwich there were many many private yards…. in Rotherhithe, Deptford, Woolwich, Millwall, Poplar and Blackwall – but the Greenwich peninsula was shipyard free.   One manufacturer, -however, did come to Greenwich and he had a big idea.  It was about building boats

 

On the river it was, and is, the small craft that kept the whole system running.  Small boats were needed for all sorts of things. The subject of this article wanted to build boats, thousands of them, all the same. So in 1864 Morden College leased Bay Warf to Morden College by The National Company for Boat Building by Machinery. He man behind it was Nathan Thompson, who came from New York where he had worked as a marine engineer. His system had taken him nineteen years to perfect and in 1859, had been examined United States Navy Department who had reported that his machinery must 'give him a worldwide reputation for genius'. Within four years Thompson had come to England.  He had been here earlier in 1854 where he had popped down to Osborne to tell Queen Victoria about a life saving device he had invented – but this time it was to get backers for his boat-manufacturing project. He opened a demonstration works in Hackney and produced a booklet with dozens of letters of recommendation from an astonishing number of people including the Dukes of Cambridge and Sutherland. The only problem being that the letters are all identical .

 

He set up the permanent factory in Greenwich on the site at Horseshoe Breach leased from Morden College. He built a causeway, put a boom across the bay and faced the river wall with stone. 

 

The idea was to produce a large number of identical small boats, made by a series of machines.  He claimed that 25,000 new small boats were needed every year in Britain and he thought that he could supply a quarter of these and since the shipbuilding industry was all around his works he could not fail to sell to them. His boats could be supplied in parts and quickly assembled as they 'go together like a bedstead'.  Duplicate parts could be supplied and repairs easily done.  They could be stowed into a transporter or carried overland and put together when needed. All very useful.

 

His system used fourteen steam driven machines.  The boats were built up round a central 'assembling form' which, held everything together in the right place. He calculated that the labour costs would be dramatically less and the cheapness of his boats meant that they could be bought by those without large amounts of money and his boats could be made within hours of the order.

 

His works was visited by P. Barry in 1863 who took photographs of the works publishing them in his book 'Dockyard Economy and Naval Power'. Barry was enthusiastic saying the machinery was 'practical  ....expeditious and economical'. He also mentioned Connecticut where a native of that state whose intentions are dishonest is described as a ‘wooden nutmeg’. However contacts in the US who had studied Thompson deny that this is a description of him, rather, they said he was a ‘snake oil merchant’.

 

Thompson has said that if he made only one fifth of the boats needed in Great Britain he could make a profit.  Unfortunately the demand did not seem to be there and he went out of business after a year. The problem was that all his boats had to be the same and he needed to sell 6,000 a year.   It is estimated that the total number of boats needed on the Thames each year was about 300 and that small boats were often very specialist and were often used for specific tasks.

 

I don't know what happened to Thompson.  In his report to the US Navy Department he said that he had taken out patents in: the United States, England, France, Russia Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Sardinia, Turkey and Spain.   Perhaps he went off and tried to make his system of boats pay somewhere else.  Perhaps, if he really was a 'wooden nutmeg' some of the capital he raised went with him and who knows what he did and where he went.

 

In writing this article I would like to the library at Mystic Seaport, in Boston, US.  A report of his visit to Queen Victoria in 1854 is on the Greenwich Industrial History facebook page.