A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the East India Company’s shipbuilding and repair site at the point at which Deptford Creek joins the Thames. After the East India Company left the site was used by a huge variety of ship builders and I only have the names of some of them. I wrote about those with a Thamesside wharf Weekender in January 2020 and then followed it up with a chapter in my book ‘The Greenwich Riverside, Upper Watergate to Angerstein’. Those shipbuilders used the Thamesside drydocks built by the East India Company and they were the ones who were easy to research and there were books and articles about them. There were also some companies who use those sites who weren’t shipbuilders but all of them had wharf frontages on the Thames. Trying to find others whose address was ‘Stowage’and who had a wharf fronting onto the Creek has been much more difficult. So many shipbuilding companies had a very bad habit of moving about – one ship built, perhaps, in Rotherhithe and the next one in Limehouse - and so on and you don’t know where they are half the time.
I was going to start with a ship builder called Colson - and I want to stress that he is not anything to do with the recently submerged Bristol slave owner, Colston. It’s spelt and pronounced differently for a start. But I have wondered if Colson were connected to a prolific firm of boat builders – spelt Coulson - who were based in Scarborough and moved to Whitby in the 1790s.
Identification of William Colson as a London shipbuilder seems to depend on the parental identity of Frederick Henrik Chapman who was born in Gothenburg in 1721 – he was a very, very major naval architect and based in Sweden. His mother was the daughter of a London shipbuilder called William Colson - note however that it says ‘London’ ship builder not ‘Deptford’ and I can find no reference to a Colson as early as this in Deptford.
There was a Colson shipbuilder in Deptford over hundred years later when he is said to have a wharf on Deptford Creek. I doubt that Colson had been there all the time since the 1720s and never been noticed! This Colson was near Creek Bridge in 1835.
In the late 1830s Colson was commissioned to build two big packet boats for the Navy. These were two masted sailing vessels probably intended for use in training. They were called ‘Express’ and ‘Swift’. There is a newspaper repors of the launch of Express and also, sadly, a report of how a number of men were drowned killed in an accident when they were on their way from Woolwich to Deptford to help with the launch of Express. Both ships are described as “packet brigs” and having been built in Deptford were taken to Woolwich for fitting out. They were then commissioned and based at Falmouth with later repairs at Plymouth. Express eventually went to the east coast of South America and was sold in the 1850s. Swift, also commissioned went to the Pacific in 1849.
Later, in 1835, Colson advertised the sale of English and African oak, and fir from his yard as ‘over plus pf the building of two of His Majesty’s packet boats’. He also said he was buildimg a ‘new pleasure yacht on the most approved principles. There is no more information after that.
Another shipbuilder who definitely had a wharf frontage on the Creek although he seems to have later moved to Deptford Green - was William Walker who is mentioned as a neighbour of the Anthacene Company in the 1870s. Walker is a good example of another ship builder who had a number of sites and moved about between them, Keeping track of him is not helped when every port and shipbuilding area on the east coast and elsewhere seems to have a ‘Walker’s’ shipyard. There is also, of course. Low Walker on the Tyne were there were shipyards, another and Deptford in Sunderland where there were more ship building companies. So I hope I’ve got it right.
Despite Walker’s frontage on the Creek by the 1880s he advertised having a ‘large graving dock’. This has to be one of the docks which were on the Thames Riverside and which were originally built by the East India Company. They had been used by various successors - Lungley, for instance, who altered and modernised one of them. Walker described his company as ‘marine engineers’ and probably concentrated on using the dry docks for repair work.
Walker definitely built ships at Rotherhithe – they built ‘Lothair’ there in 1870 . This was the last of the famous clippers and the last big ship built in Rotherhithe. I would recommend reading Angie’s posting about the ship on her sadly now defunct blog https://russiadock.blogspot.com/2013/07/lothair-last-large-ship-to-be-built-at.html. They also built ‘Mikado’ and ‘Shun Lee’ there. Another clipper called ‘Ambassador’ is said on some web sites to have been built in Deptford – but press reports of her launch say it was Rotherhithe – and Angie wrote a page on that too – https://russiadock.blogspot.com/search?q=ambassador
These were big, glamorous ships. like the Cutty Sark is the last survivor – although apparently Ambassador’s skeleton survives at Punta Arenas. Fast sailing ships built in the age of steam.
Meanwhile we hear nothing about what Walker’s Deptford site was used for . There were reports in 1866 of distress among Deptford working people because of the problems in the local shipbuilding trade and charitable meetings were being held in the local churches to address this problem and to collect money for families with no incomes because men were out of work. Walkers was mentioned in this context.
In 1875 Walkers declared bankruptcy describing themselves are ship builders and engineers with an address in Fenchurch Street adjacent to the railway station. There seemed to be only three board members in the company one of which was William Walker himself. Another was Bengt Magnus Lindwall - a relatively young Swedish man living in 1861 as a lodger in a boarding house but nevertheless a ‘ship broker’. Ten years later he was married and living in Plough Way, Rotherhithe – a far from upmarket address – and described as a metals agent. None of which sound very prosperous.
The third member is more mysterious. Christopher Crouch was a solicitor and there appear to have been a father and son of this name but neither appear to be alive in 1870. In the 1875 bankruptcy hearings his estate is described as ‘separate’ so it may be that he was actually dead and had been for some time. I hope he wasn’t the Christopher Crouch who in 1864 was in court for something described as ‘bestiality’ in a railway carriage with a young woman (just lost something on the floor under her seat) - so perhaps he was in jail.
Anyway – it isn’t the most impressive Board of Directors I have come across.
Bankruptcy doesn’t seem to have stopped the building of boats by Walker’s at Deptford. For instance In 1879 they built ‘Fury’, a steam tug – and tugs and similar sized vessels seemed to be what they built in this Deptford yard. She was bought by a company up river in Pimlico and in 1881 her skipper was fined 40 shillings for navigating at a speed ‘to cause is damage to the river bank’ at Putney . She had various owners at Brentford and lasted until 1939
In 1881 Walker’s also built iron screw tug ‘London’ nicknamed ‘The Squib’ - because ‘she was very narrow, ran very fast and had a terribly large turning circle’. She was owned by Mark Goodwin of Southwark and then The Gamecock Company which was a Gravesend based group of pilots owning and operating tugs.. In 1887 she was used to rescue the crew off a sinking barge and then took them to Sheerness. In the 1890s she was sold to Newport, in Wales and then to Liverpool and was eventually scrapped in Tranmere on the Wirral in 1908.
In 1882 Walker’s advertised a ship called August, a brig ‘of Grieveswald’ – which I suspect was with them for repairs and never claimed back. It is they say, in their dry dock. It had been in an accident at Southend and was going to be auctioned.
There were however problems at Deptford in 1882 with ‘trade riots’ ‘of a serious and threatening character’. This was among men from Walker’s shipbuilders and Wheen’s soap manufacturers. It appears that trade unionists at Walker’s were refusing to work extra long hours for low wages but that Irish men had signed up ‘to work all the year for a fixed scale of wages,…’and are now working overtime without extra pay’. The unionised workers at Walkers ‘have taken a strong stand against long hours and low wages’. The newspaper report is keen to blame the Irish population in Deptford for this and everything else – they said that the Irish population in Deptford was very large and the disturbances which ‘take place after dark involve heavy sticks, pokers, and even crowbars …’ extra police have been brought in’. Recent incomers escaping terrible poverty.
In a press statement of 1882 Walkers say they are building a ship, ‘Cormorant’, also a ship ‘Morton’ ,three new ships and two 1,000 ton steamers. ‘Cormorant’ is a fairly common name for ships and it appears that General Steam had a number of ships with bird names. The P&O Heritage web site says that she was built in 1882 and that she was a general cargo ship working for P&O, owned by General Steam Navigation..I’ve been unable to find a press report of a launch.
‘Morton’ was built for an Australian company and initially sold to Tasmania and later to Hong Kong and then Japan – and wrecked in 1897.
So Walker’s they seem to have continued to build vessels at Deptford although I suspect that they were working on behalf of General Steam Navigation who were eventually to take over all these Creekside
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