Last week I wrote about the 17th century copperas works on Deptford Creek and some of the things which resulted from that. What became known as Copperas Wharf, which is now the site of the Laban Centre, was used as the site of the old Board of Works depot in the 19th an 20th centuries? There also seems to have been paint and colour works there - but I’ll come back to that in a future week.
The next site going north was Wheen’s soapworks. They were there from 1849 - but who was there before them? In accounts of their history Wheen themselves always said that they took over the site from a pin factory. Well, I’ve found no trace of a pin factory in the area – amd have some doubts if this is a suitable site for such a works anyway. What we do have is a drawing of an incredibly large and grand works on what is clearly the site which became Wheen’s. The drawing is dated as 1841 which means that it was built for someone else – and surely that wasn’t a pin factory!
It appears that on the site of what became Wheen’s Soap Works some eight years before them was the ‘Ravensbourne Wood Mills’. The advertisements for the Mills’ sale in 1843 make it sound pretty grand with an ‘engine room, noble sawing room, lofty planing room’ and so on’. Ravensbourne Saw Mills seem to have been a partnership between a John Poyer Poyer and a William Hickling Burnett. If you look up William Hickling Burnett on the net there are many art dealers’ advertisements which describe him as an important British Artist ‘active 1844-1860’. However someone of the same name had in earlier years taken out patents for many devices, including wood working and sawing machinery. In 1851 he describes himself as a ‘retired civil engineer’ born in Portugal. The other partner, John Poyer Poyer, came from Barbadoes and had considerable links with slavery. There are also a number of newspaper reports of legal actions where he seeks to dissolve his partnership with Burnett and they describe how he was persuaded to back plans for Burnett’s patented machinery – but it was never actually built. Did he, I wonder, finance this grandiose factory building? He certainly owned some of the land since there is a later report of his children leasing the site to Wheen’s. Well – then I think we can all get the picture of what was going on! The only thing is – is William Hickling Burnett, the artist, the same man?? Did he take up art in retirement – and perhaps make a better job of it than designing machinery??
So this grand factory building was taken over by Wheen’s in the late 1840s and it became their soapworks. Soap isn’t really something we associate with Deptford – although there were other big works nearby. One in particular was the huge Soames site on the Greenwich Peninsula – and I have written elsewhere about the Hawes soap works in Southwark where they also made gas for lighting the works with oil unsuitable for soap. There had been at least one previous soap maker in Deptford. He was a Mr. Dommet – although I am not sure if his works was actually on the Creek itself. Soap Was liable for tax in the early 9th century and in 1823 Dommet had been subject to a raid by the officers of the Excise who then discovered a trap door ‘under a heap of brick rubbish’ in his works. Twenty feet down were several tons of soap, which was liable for tax. Unable to arrest Dommet on the premises they nabbed him in the street outside – his defence was well I can’t help it’. Six years later he was fined £500 for again evading paying tax on his soap. £500 in 1820 is about £47,000 in today’s money – so how much soap was this man making and how much tax was he actually getting away with not paying?
Wheen’s were much more respectable and were a major Deptford industry for just over 100 years. Neil Rhind wrote a short history of the Wheen family in Blackheath which was published in 2019 in the Greenwich Industrial History blog https://greenwichindustrialhistory.blogspot.com/2019/10/richard-wheen-deptford-soap-manufacturer.html.
Neil’s interest was in the residence of Richard Wheen at Colonnade House which is the big posh house opposite the duck pond in South Row just round from the Princess of Wales pub. It is let into flats these days but there are still lots of bushes in front of it, so it’s quite difficult to see. It is however one of the grandest of Blackheath houses.
The Wheen family soap works had originated in Finsbury in 1769 and then been moved to Ratcliffe Highway where it flourished. By 1837 it was being run by two brothers – Richard and John- and they were manufacturing 645 tons of soap in 1834 rising within a year to 750 tons. They decided that despite the success of the works that the profits would not support two families so the works was split and Richard came to open his works in Deptford. To be perfectly honest he moved to Colonnade House from an address in Regents Park so his assessment of having only just enough to live on must have been for a life style with demands rather larger than most of us would expect – although as he had 11 children I suppose they came expensive, particularly as he needed seven servants to care for them all.
Richard Wheen moved his soap works to Deptford in 1849 and apparently it did well from the start. Five years later he was offering a `good bright yellow soap’ for export at £22 a tub. Sadly at around the same time an accident took place in the works when James Welch walked along the edge of a vat of boiling soap. His foot slipped and he fell in head first. He died later in Saint Thomas’s hospital - without the slighted hope that he could live. The local Board of Works Inspector paid a visit to the factory in the same year. The Board members had been very concerned at the number of very smelly works in the Creek and had found some very bad practices, with resulting bad smells on works adjacent to Wheen’s on both sides. Wheen’s got off lightly with a report of ‘only a slight effluvia from a vat continuing kitchen stuff'. So they did rather better on local smells than on health and safety for the workforce.
The raw materials used for soap were basically fats of various sorts. Wheen’s used imported cottonseed and other vegetable oils and but their main source of supply was fat from various sources –including great quantities of beef fat from the Deptford Metropolitan meat markets. In the 1850s Richard Wheen was advertising for ‘butchers’ fat’ which would be called for daily 'all over town' and for which he was offering contracts. 100 years later, in the 1950s, Pat O’ Driscoll interviewed to Jack McAuliffe who had worked for Wheen’s for many years. He described how the fat taken from cattle slaughtered at the foreign cattle market in Deptford was used for soap. In his early days at the works he saw it was arrive there by horse and cart – he saw the carts getting stuck in the muddy ruts of Copperas Street and watched men from the works move them on with crow bars.
In the 1880s Richard Wheen patented improvements in 'the extraction of fatty matter from raw butchers’ fat'. This process is said to have been of great help to the growing margarine manufacturing trade. The Deptford factory was well able to undertake such experiments with their ‘highly qualified chemist’ and ‘well-appointed laboratory’.
Jack McAuliffe also told Pat O’ Driscoll about an old ship’s bell installed on a post in the works which signaled the beginning and end of the working day. He said there had been a plaque on it with the name of the ship it came from. He wondered if anyone could remember what it was. He also said the steam engine at Wheen’s had come from Brunel’s Great Eastern when she was broken up in 1889. It wasn’t the main engine but one of the smaller ones – he wondered about the truth of that too.
In 1912 there was a big fire in the works reckoned to do damage worth £20,000. It was in a range of buildings but doesn’t say which ones they were. Firemen came from ‘all parts; and there were three fire fighting river floats but it still took a couple of hours before the fireman got the fire under control the buildings. It was reported that this was in the middle of an icy winter and water froze as it fell on the firemen’s clothes.
Richard Wheen himself became even more prosperous and eventually moved to Keston with his 11 children. In retirement he enjoyed many activities and which included shooting in Scotland. He later moved to Tunbridge Wells where he died leaving £50,000. The business was carried on by three of his sons Richard Francis and Charles and they were followed by other descendants. It always was a family firm
In the Second World War Wheen’s continued to make soap in the factory which survived various bombing attacks with explosive bombs and rockets – alas also remember that the homes of most of the work force suffered bomb damage. At one point it was discovered when a boiler was cleared that an incendiary bomb had got mixed up with the coal and burnt along with it. They produced soap which went to the rationed British population but also made special soaps for the forces – salt water soap to use in the desert, special soap for the Far East. They made soaps for the NAAFI and for pit head baths as well as for refugees in central Europe.
Wheen’s survived after the War to take part in a Greenwich manufacturer’s exhibition where their stand featured obelisks carved out of soap. Their brands then were: Wheen’s Washer, Refined Primrose, Pearly Soap Flakes, Gazelle Health Soap, Superb Toilet Soap and a lawn tennis ball cleaner. I particularly like the sound of Wheen’s 'Fearless Carbolic' - I always did say that up until the 1960s soap had to be a no-nonsense germ killer and what else it killed was neither here nor there and so what if it left your hands like a nutmeg grater!
Wheens closed in the early 1950s after 100 years in Deptford. They were one of the most successful firms on the Creek and it’s a rea
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