Trenchards

  Over the past few weeks my articles here have covered a number of business and works around Deptford Bridge – the brewery, the distillery and a group of mills, including slightly downriver the Olde Floode Mill.  Mixed up amid the buildings of these businesses were the works for sale of timber, stone plus sawmills of the Trenchard family. I mentioned Trenchard briefly back in my article on Hope Wharf and Kamptulicon last September. (Issue 224) 

As E.P.Trenchard and Sons this was a family business and the main person involved who started it was Edward Penny Trenchard – after his death it was split and mainly sold.  He seems to have come to Deptford in 1871 when he was already in his mid-40s. From family history records it seems he was born in Broadfield in Somerset. This is a place so small that if you blinked as you passed it you would miss it.  There is however a useful and exhaustive history website for the village which gives details of the ownership of many buildings – and the village is so small that it must be almost every building.  There is just one mention of a Jos Trenchard as a tenant briefly at Westleigh Farm.  Interestingly the ‘big house’ in Broadfield is Fyne Court, a National Trust property, which in the early 19th century was the home of Andrew Crosse who undertook successful experiments in atmospheric electricity and voltaic piles.  He was visited by such luminaries as Sir Humphrey Davy.

Although apparently just a short term tenant farmer Edward's father, Joseph, described himself as a ‘Yeoman’ and left a four page will which gives no indication whatsoever of his family or what he owned but deals mainly with the future administration of his, unnamed, landholdings. This area of Somerset, including towns like Taunton and Wincanton,  has been home to many ‘Trenchards’ as landowners and residents over the centuries, some of them very distinguished.

The next thing we find about Edward Penny Trenchard he is living in Cincinnati and described as a ‘grocer’.  By then he was married with a growing family, several of whom were born in the US. What does a ‘grocer’ mean - a small neighbour hood store or a vast wholesale business?  There is no indication.

By 1871 Edward Penny Trenchard was back in England and living in Kidbrooke Park Road in Blackheath where he was wealthy enough to have two live-in servants. There is no apparent clue to the family’s source of wealth or how he went from being a grocer in Cincinnati to a stone and timber merchant in London.

In his first days in Greenwich Edward Trenchard was involved with a local rowing club on the Tideway called the ‘Argonauts’.  There was even a ‘Trenchard Cup’ for sculling and a report in the Mercury describes a race beginning at the Blakeley Ordnance Works and going down river. Most of the entrants were representing various Greenwich and Deptford works.   This is in 1874 but web pages about the club say it closed down in 1857. It seems likely that a residue of members continued to call themselves ‘Argonauts’ as part of the – still extant – Curlew Rowing Club. 

Edward Trenchard’s business in Greenwich and Deptford covered a number of sites and it is quite difficult to know exactly how each one was acquired. There were also at least two sawmills. One site – the one already mentioned in my article on Hope Wharf - was at the Deptford Bridge end of Greenwich High Road and lay between Hope Wharf and Mumford’s Mill and like them had a wharf on Deptford Creek. It had previously been occupied by John and James Langton, timber merchants, who had another site at Queen’s Wharf, Rotherhithe.  In Greenwich Trenchard dealt in “Baltic fir timber planks …deals .. match boarding … mahogany … oak …  laths … palings.   Initially he seems to have owned the site in partnership with a Mr. Smith and by 1875 they were also dealing in slates … Roman cement … chimney pots .. bricks .. tiles, and ‘garden edging lumps’.

This Greenwich site is shown on maps as a Timber Yard which including a ‘Deptford Saw Mills’ – although of course the was technically in Greenwich, not Deptford, In fact, and confusingly, this is very far from the only ‘Deptford Saw Mills’ in existence at that time. Here are several others actually in Deptford itself as well as at some other Deptfords - one is in Sunderland. In addition, and, mysteriously, in 1871 there was apparently a ‘Deptford Saw Mill’ in one of the suburban streets – now Cranbrook Street - in Deptford New Town just up the road from the Brook Mill. 

Trenchard’s other works was over on the other side the creek from his Greenwich saw mills. This was on the peninsula area between the mill pond for the tide mill and the line of the Creek.  The entrance to this site is through and past the Olde Floode Mill and with an address in Deptford Church Street – now the entrance to Asquith Gibbes House.  Trenchard’s site here was very large and included timber and cart sheds. It had a long frontage to the Creek.

On the other side of Church Street and not on the Creek was another ‘Deptford sawmill’ which was owned by Trenchard & Sons and which included a timber store with a frontage on Deptford Church Street. The site was entered from what was then known as ‘Reginald Place’.  I suspect this is now the site of the old Tideway School and Garden about which there was a major dispute a year or so back.  Edward Trenchard’s son, Albert, as a Deptford councillor around 1905, is said to have taken an interest in archeological work on that site in regard to a pottery and to have helped fund a collection of it locally.  I am sorry if I have failed to find a local reference to that.

Edward Penny Trenchard clearly had extensive property interests. He owned an estate at Honor Oak Park and appears to have built and rented out houses in the area – some of them rather upmarket.  He built a house for himself in Honor Oak Rise which, I suspect, is now the ex-nunnery known as Cabrini House on the corner with Forest Hill Road – and to say it is a ‘bit grand’ is an understatement. Other properties which he seems to have built in that area were substantial middle class homes.  At his death a considerable portfolio of other properties throughout South London were disposed of – and which include properties in Woodlands Park Road in Greenwich.  

He also owned many properties in Wincanton in Somerset where he owned a farm with a ‘fat stock’ herd of cattle, along with a quarry and a windmill. He is actually described in one contemporary account as one of two ‘principal property owners’ in the town. He also took part in civic life, for example as a member of the Wincanton Charities Trust. He was an active Liberal and in 1885 he represented Wincanton in the selection of a parliamentary candidate for the area.  

Back in Deptford he was also Chair of the Deptford Liberal club which was handily adjacent to all his works standing on the corner of Deptford Bridge and Church Street.  He was also closely involved in selection meetings for parliamentary and other candidates in Deptford and in south London generally. There are many reports of meeting at which he was the Chair.

Unfortunately I do not know which of the Wincanton quarries that Trenchard owned, but clearly it may have been a source of stone for his Deptford businesses. It would be delivered by the barges and small cargo vessels which could access his wharves on the Creek. We learn of other sources of raw materials from reports of court cases. In one significant court case, after his death, the measurement of sand in a barge was a major issue – who was responsible for the amount and how could it be measured?   The case is said to have made legal history and also tells us that the sand had come from Aylesford. Yet another source is revealed in a Welsh fraud case which involved slate from Talysarn in North Wales

Over the thirty years of Trenchard’s s ownership of these wharves there are very little in the way of press reports on them – apart from the inevitable bodies being fished out of the Creek. In 1881 we learn that both sites were damaged by the fire in the Robinson Mill because the fire service had to use Trenchard’s yards as places to stand the fire engines and send jets of water flying into the air and also into windows.

Edward Penny Trenchard died in 1899 leaving his very considerable portfolio of property which was sold in the next year or so. The Deptford businesses were left to his two elder sons – Edward got the stone yard and the Reginald Place properties and Albert got the Greenwich saw mills.  Another, younger son, Arthur was to oversee the disposal of other properties.

Four years before his father’s death young Edward Trenchard had come home one night to find two men in his house who he did not know and discovered that his wife was involved with a trooper form the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues). Subsequently his solicitor’s 'agent' attended a house in Osnaburgh Square to ‘discover’ the erring couple and the landlady’s daughter gave evidence that the trooper often stayed the night. The divorce went through giving custody of the children to Edward

Young Edward almost immediately sold the two Deptford sites to a Robert McCollum who intended to run a sawmill business there. He was a mechanical engineer who had worked for United Asbestos at Harefield in the printing department.  After a few years in Deptford he became ill and returned to Uxbridge.  .    No more is heard of young Edward, or indeed of his younger brother Arthur.

Albert Henry Trenchard however was to follow his father as a leading light in the local Liberal Party and was elected to Deptford Council representing Blackheath Ward.  He was to become a leading councillor and take up any causes. He seems to have been pretty, lively, to put it mildly, and local newspapers of the early 20th century are filled with his speeches and constant interventions in other’s speeches with a ‘loud and slashing style’ and as an ‘emphatic speaker’.  He was to continue to own the Greenwich based Deptford Saw Mill for some years. He eventually died in the 1930s at the age of 83 in Eastbourne.

Edward Penny Trenchard made a mark on Deptford and he and his sons are part of the story of the wharves on the Creek.  I continue to he puzzled by them.  They seem to be property speculators but it is unclear where their money came from.  Why did Joseph Trenchard – apparently a small scale tenant farmer – find it necessary to make an elaborate will which never mentioned what he actually owned?  What exactly did Edward Penny do as a grocer in Cincinnati and where did he get the money from for all that investment and lifestyle on his return to England.