The Enderby loading gear

 

So, we have just learnt that  a previously unremarkable piece of Greenwich is now the same as Stonehenge ...  and we can all go and see it and then tell people about it.   Greenwich is now not only the ‘home of time’  but also, more recently, has become the ‘home of communication’.

What is all this about?  I thought I should write something for people who don’t know anything about Enderby Wharf  and why it is historically so important .  Well, the fuss is about some structures on the Greenwich Riverside which have been given official status as historic monuments. So if you don’t know what I’m talking - about this is for you!

A group of us have been going on about this for some time. Some years ago a few or us got together and called ourselves ’The Enderby  Group’ hoping to persuade the authorities that the then derelict riverside site  of  Enderby Wharf was more interesting than just being somewhere to stick a few more flats.  To be perfectly honest no one took much notice. 

But, now, the machinery on the Enderby jetty has been ‘scheduled’ by Historic England rather than ‘listed’ – and  that is a measure of its importance. This old machinery was used to get communication cables from the factory and onto a ship.  Originally they  were telegraph cables, but this machinery is later and was installed for intenational telephone  cables..

There was a time when - for many years - if you stood on the riverside at Enderby, for more than two minutes , some old fellow would come along and say ’ ah, yes, this is where Great Eastern loaded up the Atlantic cable and went off and joined us up to America’. 

Well that’s not quite true.  Brunel’s amazing giant ship, Great Eastern, was built just the other side of the river at Millwall but she was far too big to get into Enderby  Wharf.  So, to load the cable she was moored downriver and the cable was loaded onto hulks which took the cable and loaded it onto Great Eastern.  In pictures of it being loaded,  all the time it was watched and there’s always a line of men sitting on stools staring at the cable . Whatever happened it must have no faults, so it was watched continually to make sure there were none.

There is of course a whole big back story to all this.  And I must admit that the Americans have a rather different version one -  but bother them!.  In the mid-19^th century before Great Eastern there had been years of planning and the ways of making cables suitable for being laid underwater in the greatest oceans had been developed here.

 First there had been the development of the idea that people across the world could communicate with each other by the means of cables laid under the sea . To start with it was just tapping a morse code but it was completely revolutionary   - and was the start of the process which has led us to the Net becoming an everyday feature of all our lives.  But it still uses the cables to carry all the messages.

When the Atlantic cable was being planned there had already been some international communication cables laid to more nearby places but the Atlantic cable was always the big one and it would be followed by others  –like the India cable - and then, well, the rest of the world.  For the first half century and more nearly all of that cable was made here, in Greenwich.

There had already been two attempts to lay the cable when they brought Great Eastern in. They had previously used old warships but they were never big enough to take the whole cable for the whole stretch across the Atlantic.  Great Eastern was big enough to take the whole lot at once along with factory and laboratory facilities and some nice accommodation for the numerous men who needs to go with her.

 Using Great Eastern in 1865 they got some way across and then lost the cable in the deep of the Atlantic Ocean and they ended up having to go back and start again and of course raise all the money to pay for it too,

The next year, 1866, Great Eastern went down the River, cable loaded and on some jetties bands played ‘Goodbye sweetheart’.  The cable was to he laid from Valentia in Ireland  -the most westerly part of Europe. Valentia is a great place and they have a little museum there to show off the start of the Atlantic Cable. This time Great Eastern =made it to Heart’s Content in Newfoundland  - and there’s a little museum to the Atlantic Cable there too!   A few years ago there was a bid for a long thin World Heritage Site all the length of the cable across the Atlantic. In 1866 with the cable laid there were great rejoicings -  particularly in the world of international finance.

But what happened next is even more interesting.  Having laid the cable to Hearts Content Great Eastern turned round and went off back into the winter Atlantic. It was dangerous and nobody heard of her for weeks - and it was assumed =that she had been lost. But no, eventually needles began to flicker on the ends of that earlier broken cable of the previous attempt. Out there somewhere in the vast Atlantic the men on Great Eastern had found that broken cable; they’d fished it up; they’d spliced it and mended it and now it was working.

 That is such a pivotal moment in the world of communication -from thinking that ship was lost to all London and New York knowing she was safe – the start of the modern world.

I could carry on and  I talk a lot more about what happened at the factory in Blackwall Lane and how the whole world was first stitched together with cables made there.  How Great Easter was painted white and laid the cable to India.  We only have to look at the recent cable failure to the island of Tonga to realise how dependent on it we all are now! But today cables are not made in Greenwich –and I haven’t got space to write here the development of fibre optics and about the Nobel Prize which went to Charles Kao.

We need to get back to those old fellows who used to stand on the Riverside at Enderbys there and tell people about Great Eastern and the Atlantic Cable. There’s a lot more there to see than just equipment on the jetty.  I told Carol I would write about the steps because she organised  work on them - maybe 20 years ago - and she’s getting a bit worried that they need renovation and repair and people need to know to look out for them.

The steps covered a mediaeval sluice which had been built to drain the marsh and that was there until the housing development started. The steps themselves were used to take people down to a ferry which went out to the great ships that used to stand out in the River. When Carol had them done up she had carved on them The History of Cable Making.

And that of course reminds me of all the ships that used to stand out in the river - the cable ships - the ships that went out into terrible storms to mend broken cables out in the oceans of the world. There were always people taking photographs or painting them . It was a great subject for artists. The final ship was the John W.Mackay which was there as a sort of monument until it fell to bits. It was always said that it was painted up when the Queen came down the River except that they only painted it on the side she would see!  There is a ‘deep’ the river there where these very specialist vessels would  moor and the cable loaded on them.

Of course before the cable makers came to Enderby Wharf it was used by the actual Enderby family themselves and before them there was quite a rope walk. The length of the rope walk went right down the site and lasted right up until the very recent developments. You could walk down the river to  the pen stocks for the sluice and if you turned yourself round and looked down to Blackwall Lane you could see the length of the rope walk - and I’m sorry that isn’t included the development.

J then of course there is Enderby House which I really haven’t got the time to go into detail about except that it is now a pub. I think local people need to get them to stock leaflets about the history of the site and get them to understand that the history of the site is not just about jolly sailors and great voyages but also about the way that world communication was basically founded on this site.

There are several other things to see -  most recently is Bobby Lloyd’s sculpture ‘Ley Lines’ which looks like a little picnic place but in fact is a an artwork depicting various lengths of cable types . 

Add so we need to make sure that the work of lobbying about Enderby Wharf continues .  Perhaps I should introduce you briefly to Alan who was once until quite recently an international journalist working on telecoms magazines who was responsible forgetting this scheduling of the gear on thejetty through.  Someone else is Bill  in New York who runs a massive Atlantic Cable website which I would recommend everybody to look at if you want to know about cables .  There is also Stuart who knows an enormous amount about cable history. He’s written a number of books and numerous articles you’ll find references to them all on Bill’s  website .

Boundary Walk 9

 

 

Well, I thought it was about time that I got back on the walk going right round the Greenwich Parish boundary. I can’t believe the amount of episodes that this is taking to do!  When I started it I thought it would be two or three episodes but now we’re on Episode 9 and I feel that there are lots of things which I’ve missed.

What this is about  - I have been following a newspaper report of a civic procession going right round the Greenwich Parish boundary in 1851. In the 19^th century these parish boundary walks were fairly common occurrences taking place every couple of years . In those days, although things were changing, the parish was still the civic centre of the local area but increasingly it was becoming a much more professional organisation.

Every few years they would walk round the parish boundary – the vicar,  churchwardens, some parish officers, a lot of choir boys and groups of school children from all the local schools

They had started off early morning from the top of Garden Stairs which are just by Greenwich pier and had proceeded up Deptford Creek, through the back streets up onto Blackheath and done a strange loop down to the Paragon and back.  Where we left them last time was in the street outside number 122 Shooters Hill Road where there is a small boundary stone up against the wall.

I suspect that this next section as we go north down the border with Charlton is it going to be fairly complicated . There are several boundary stones there but many of them are hidden and in places  difficult to see. So I am very reliant on what other people have recorded - in particular in the report on a walk which was done in 1980. I am also omitting from this article the house numbers where there is a stone in somebody’s garden because I'm sure they don't want people poking about looking for them.

From 123 Shooters Hill Road we need to cross over to what in 1851 was known as ‘Trout Common’, This is the triangular area between Old Dover Road and Shooters Hill Road on which some new houses have just been built - replacing a garage and outdoor car showroom.  It was once part of an area owned by the Trout family who had their farmhouse on the site which is now the M&S Foodhall in Old Dover Road.

The Trout family must have been there a long, long time because it is shown as this on the 1695  Travers’  Plan.  On that the boundary is shown at the easternmost end of Trout’s Common with the farm house right at the other end of what is now the Old Dover Road.  I’m a little confused as to how it can be called a ‘common’ and thus public, when it also appears to be privately owned. In the 1850s the area appears to be occupied by ‘Farmer Floyd’ although I am not sure whether ‘Farmer’ is his first name or his occupation. It later became a part of a timber yard but most of us will remember the area for the sales of old cars. Neil Rhind commented that this was ‘an undistinguished end to what was once the entrance to one of the finest roadscapes in London ... leading the traveller out of the country and onto the open plain of Blackheath’.

To be fair it does appear that the builders of the new houses on the site have made an effort here with big windows on the house at the point of the triangle  which now face down Shooters Hill Road and look up to Shooters Hill itself.

In 1851 the procession crossed Shooters Hill Road from 122 and then went down a passage  which crossed Trout Common into what the newspaper report calls ’the road to Myrtle Place’ - although we would know it as ‘Old Dover Road’.  ‘Myrtle Place’ itself refers to some houses then newly built on the corner of Vanburgh Park.

The boundary therefore emerges from Trout Common to cross Old Dover Road and then immediately turn left- westwards.  We are now also following the Charlton boundary as well as the Greenwich one and some of the boundary stones will have been laid by Charlton Parish as much as by Greenwich. It appears that there was at one time a boundary stone on both sides of Old Dover Road here as we emerge from the Common.

Having turned left the newspaper reporting the 1851 walk says that they go a short way down the road - that’s Old Dover Road - and ‘turn into the garden of the first house on the right hand where there is a Charlton Stone’. A little further on is a road junction and we will need to turn down this as part of the walk. This road today is Reynold's Place but it was originally Russel Place after a then well known local firm of builders. The boundary line itself goes down the back of these houses running between them and the boundary of the school.

In 1851 when the walk took place this was St John’s National Schools, and marked as such on the 1860s Ordnance Survey map.   Now, one of my problems with writing about this area is that it is very much divided by that boundary line between two parishes - and some historians write just about Blackheath and others just about Charlton.  St John’s Church is very firmly in Blackheath in Stratheden Road - and unfortunately some of its facilities, like the school, are technically in Charlton!  The original school buildings are still in Reynold’s Place as the first two or three houses on the east side - and I have to admit that I had no idea they were there until I looked at the road for this article.  The school appears to have had a fairly unstable existence, never doing very well and only recently it has been reconfigured as The Leigh Academy and rebuilt.

So, back to the newspaper report about the procession in 1851.  They went down Old Dover Road to ‘The first house on the right’ said to have a boundary stone in its front garden. That will be of course   the first house just past the tyre sales building - and very properly that is level with the footpath that goes down alongside the school grounds and the Reynolds Place back gardens.  Clearly there is no garden there now either and the fate of the boundary stone is clearly unknown. I sometimes wonder if these stones get themselves built into walls in the area near where they were originally placed. If I had known one needed to be looked for I could have done that instead of sitting cursing while I waited for a tyre to be replaced, on several occasions.

The procession continued down Reynold’s Place to Lizban Street – that name ‘Lizban’ is very strange and I can find nothing to explain what it means. The spell checker just keeps changing it to ‘Lisbon’ of course .  The road was originally called Bowater Place and the Bowater family were big land owners in the Charlton area so that’s understandable = but ‘Lizban’??   There are said to be boundary stones at the junction between Lizban and Reynolds Place and the account of the 1980s walks give considerable details about where they are.  They also say that there is a boundary marker way out of line at the other end of Lizban Street where a footpath goes down an alley way through bollards.

The walk turns right at the junction with Lizban Street and Reynolds Place and went right along to a gateway which goes into the grounds of Rectory Field and the school.  A boundary stone is marked on the map just as you turn from Lizban Street into the Rectory Field Grounds. There is an awful lot of undergrowth in that area which could be hiding it.

There is a path which goes right the way down the side of Rectory Field between here and Charlton Road and along which the boundary goes. This same path was there in the 1850s. Clearly Rectory Field is now a well used and very diverse sports ground.  I really don’t have the space here to even begin to list out the various famous clubs who have been part of this complex of sports organisations and the various famous victories which have been part of that.  Perhaps another time. Although it is probably worth noting that this remains a private sports ground available to the Clubs and their members who occupy it.

When the walk took place in the 1860s the rectory itself was just to the west of the Rectory Field in the middle of what is now the Cherry Garden Estate. The field was then just a field attached to the rectory and with nothing more than a couple of trees marked in the middle of it. 

 Various accounts of the boundary say that at the point at which the Rectory Field foot path emerges in Charlton Road there was once a boundary stone but that this is now in the garden of Poplar Cottage = which is on the of the left as you come out of the sports ground.  This ‘traditional’ weatherboarded cottage was restored in the 1970s and was apparently previously known as ‘Asses Milk House.

On reaching Charlton Road the boundary as shown on the map, goes straight over. But I think I will have to leave that for next time. In the 1850s when this walk was originally undertaken across the road was an  area full of very posh houses in their own grounds and it will be a bit of a puzzle to work out exactly where the route went.

 

 

Millennium embroideries

 

I’ve been lent a very beautiful book ‘ Stitches in time ‘about the Millennium Embroideries – I was being urged to write something about the needlework - but then I thought 2000 its not long enough ago to count as history.  I am told that the embroideries had been on public display at the Greenwich Heritage Centre when it was in the building now appropriated by Woolwich Works, but that they had not been seen since the Heritage Centre was suddenly closed in 2018. 

The embroideries were done by a group of -very expert – local women, as a record of the  history of Greenwich at the Millennium embodied pictorially in stitches. I’m not sure if you can have a document which has no words, just pictures but, thinking about it, I don’t see why not . As this series of articles looks at many historical documents I suppose it’s valid for me to look at the embroideries.  Right!

But then I thought –‘the Millennium was 25 years ago’ and since then children have been born who are now parents themselves. However - 2000 - the year of the Dome!   There was a lot going on in my life then and I had started Greenwich Industrial History Society in 1998 with the late and very wonderful Jack Vaughan who wanted the world to know and understand the history of industrial Woolwich.  

When the news came out about the Dome coming to Greenwich for the Millennium I thought somebody should write a history of the Peninsula.  Some very posh ‘professional’ writers were being commissioned to produce books about it. Among them was Adam Nicholson who wrote ‘Regeneration’ for them - I would like to thank him because he bothered to talk to me and remembered me when I met him later.  I did bit more research and self published my little yellow book ‘Greenwich Marsh’.  Along  with its recent rewrite ‘’Greenwich Peninsula. Greenwich Marsh” it has always been my best seller then and now. -With the help of my husband I sold several hundred - all by post. Around this time I got tangled up in the ‘Ghost in the Dome’ and I spent a lot of time being interviewed by those periodicals interested in such things.

So Greenwich Industrial History Society – how does that fit with the embroideries?  Well, both are about the history of Greenwich - although we seem to have been running on parallel lines: we knew nothing about them and they knew nothing about us.

The book is riveting about how it was decided to produce the ‘Greenwich Bayeau tapestry’.  One of the main people behind it was Beverly Burford , who was Curator of the Museum at Plumstead. I had an awful lot of time for Beverly and very sad that she never lived to lead the Heritage Centre as she should have done over the coming years . The book also mentions the late Francis Ward, who was the part of Julian’s team at Woodlands Local History Library – and also Chris Foord who was Beverly’s assistant and who last year came to speak to Greenwich Industrial History Society about his current role in the London Borough of Kingston.

Someone else who played a key role in the embroideries was the late historian, Sally Jenkinson. I never met Sally but I was aware of her reputation and I am very aware of her booklet, among others on Enderby Wharf – its probably the first publication that mentioned Greenwich industry in any detail and the first to tell the amazing story of local work on telecommunications .  In retrospect, thank you Sally, very grateful.  There is also a chapter in the book from Crooms Hill based historian, Beryl Platts. who I understand work closely with the embroiderers on Greenwich history and what things should be represented.

I don’t know exactly what has happened to the embroideries now but there is a campaign going on and a lot of people have been making a big fuss about them. I wondered perhaps, as a historian,  I should look and see how these embroideries interpret Greenwich history. Perhaps I can say something here which will catch somebody’s interest and help the campaign get the embroideries back to where people can see them and appreciate the work that was done and what the embroiderers were trying to say.

I am far from sure if work on embroidery counts as industrial.  It has rather been popularly sold as a activity undertaken by posh ladies who didn’t need to have real jobs. I am however amazed at the amount of historical information that is around about embroidery.  I didn’t know that the National Maritime Museum actually runs classes and gives out information... and I also like to thank Beth Robinson whose work on mid-20^th century embroiders included interviews and an awareness of these issues.

Embroidery was a very, very big thing in Tudor England with intricately embroidered clothes as well as furnishings. There was so much of it that this can’t be the work of otherwise unengaged ladies. It must have been done by professional embroiderers and I would be grateful if anybody has any information about how they were organised. Were they out- workers doing it at home or was there a studio set up where they worked?  A lot of the work they did was using gold and silver threads. In the late 19^th century such thread, made out of precious metals, was done in a factory on the Lewisham borders which is now called the  ‘Silk Mill’. There were huge security arrangements there because of the value of the materials and I’m sure that the same value applied in Tudor England.  So where did Tudor embroiders do their work?

We start off with the  Celts and the Romans - we have a Celtic lady working at a loom and we have some Romans making a Roman Road. Each panel has many such images - I haven’t tried counting but there’s a lot! I suppose my remit is to see how industry is represented in the panels and if it It is proportionate with everything else. What I think it represents is not exactly Tourist Greenwich but what we would like visitors to know about and some interesting little details.

The panels on Vikings and the Middle Ages have very little if anything industrial. Every panel has a strip at the top depicting the River with lots of boats.  Well - they had to be built somewhere by somebody!  

And so on to the Tudors. That does include some mill with a nice little picture of the waterworks with the water mill at Brookmill.   Below that there is actually a picture of a cannon although nothing about where it might have been made.

The page on the Stuarts includes at the top a lot more shipping and of course Peter Pett with the Sovereign of the Seas. There’s a brief mention of the Mulberry or Charlton House although I’m not sure that counts.  And they do show the Woolwich rope works which I have never written about - and I ought to.  c

The Georgian page also has a lot more shipping but this was a very lively era working towards industrialisation and there really isn’t that much here There is one little ship which represents the Royal dockyards and there are some of the buildings in the Arsenal. It takes it that the Georgian era  finished  in 1837 - which is fair enough. But by then there were a number of foundries in the area as well as chemical works -  and early first attempt at making mechanical road vehicles.

Then inevitably it moves on to what it describes as ‘Victorian’ – and, yes, there’s lots there. The Greenwich railway, various activities at Enderby Wharf which could be of course e early days of the cable and telecoms industries although it doesn’t show that. There’s a picture of a fire engine although the text gives no reference to Merriweather’s. I am particularly pleased that right. At the top of the page is East Greenwich No. 1. Gas holder. A friend took a photograph of it and I put it on the Gas Holder Appreciation Facebook page where it’s getting lots of likes.

And SO to the 20^th Century which is all quite good. There’s lots of planes and boats and in fact it’s extremely crowded panel. It also includes in the margins a great deal of electronic apparatus. It’s all very good and I think we should congratulate the stitchers very much on what they produced.

Plumstead Station

 

 I thought it was about time I got back some of the railway stations in the Borough.  The last one I did was Woolwich Arsenal so logically I now ought to do Plumstead but I’ve been rather avoiding it because I know that it’s quite a complicated story for one thing and for the other Plumstead has got lots of devoted local users.  All of whom might be a bit upset at an upstart like me from Blackheath writing about their station.  Sorry, but I look forward to your criticizing me and hopefully putting it on my Maryswrite Blog which where it will appear in a couple of weeks time

So Plumstead Station:  it opened in June between Abbey Wood and Woolwich Arsenal stations.  Earlier in April there had been an official ceremony of laying the foundation stone’ - attended by officials of the company and ‘influential residents of the district’.   I’m intrigued by this report. Is there actually a foundation stone? Does anybody know anything about it?  And if no one does should we start looking for it?

The station was built on the North Kent Line which had opened ten years earlier in 1849 . Greenwich  Industrial History Society Members and friends should be very up to date with the history of the line since only a couple of weeks ago we had  a speaker , Richard Allen, talking about the line in a great deal of detail with lots of amazing pictures.

Plumstead Station opened in response to the huge 19th population increase in the area. It was near to the Royal Arsenal and an ideal stop for the factory workers. At this time the Arsenal was taking on vast numbers of new workers –numbers which  peaked in the Great War.

To those who had only ever seen the station from street level it would seem to be a small and unobtrusive little station.  The main building would have seemed fairly modest -  single-storey with a tall pitched roof, some fancy brickwork and tall chimney stacks.  But once on the station itself it is very different. The actual platforms and the operative part of the station are down below in a cutting and the single storey street level building is in fact the top story of a three storey station. The station did not follow the designs of those stations already built on the line.

Down on the platforms the buildings at platform level had a trackside façade with three arches, which look like a viaduct, and behind them was a waiting room and offices . It is a design was unique to Plumstead.

Most stations have a canopy to protect passengers from the elements, amd Plumstead has an intricate canopy with valances like Dartford station. To have this facility in the main building of a station was unusual on the North Kent line and unique to Plumstead

Nevertheless it attracted its share of grumblers and a letter from a Mr Sadler of Macoma Road , who wrote to the press in 1909 to draw attention to features which the station needed but did not have – he included the need for a booking facility on the bridge,  ‘way in’ and ‘way out’ signs for each platform,  to be available at all times; waiting rooms and toilets for both sexes upon both platforms; ticket offices for first,  second and third class passages; all trains which ended their journeys at Woolwich to run on to Plumstead.  He had sent a copy of these demands to every member of Plumstອad Vestry.  A shorter list came from a  Mr Wright of Alliance Road, Plumstead who wrote in 1956 aA letter taking up an entire column in the local newspaper about the problems of the  station clock.

 

 At first there was no footbridge, and  passengers had to cross the line via the road but a  lattice footbridge was installed in 1894 and had a roof over it. In the 2000s the rail  authority decided to remove the footbridge and there were arguments about a proposed lift and altering the various unique features.  Resident groups wrote “Access for all London Stations, especially Plumstead , is welcome however not at any cost. Network Rail proposes installing an “off the peg” footbridge and lift shafts, directly from the station building. This will mean demolishing the historic bridge and replacing it with a massive modern box structure.”

Originally the station had three platforms – the additional one being an up-line facing bay platform connected to sidings and including a water tower and crane. This was removed in 1926 when the line was electrified  with just the tower and crane  left while a wooden waiting shelter was erected there.  In the 1960s this shelter was removed along with the footbridge roof.

A signal box opened in 1892 at the western end of the platforms builft in the South Eastern Railways inhouse design.  It closed in 1926.

The ‘Hole in the Wall’ was the name given to sidings added I 1859 north of Plumstead Station on the down side the railway which linked to the Royal Arsenal complex. There were also nine goods sidings beyond the road bridge east of the station and a single-track connection from these goods sidings went into the Arsenal for military trains of guns, ammunition and, indeed, new locomotive parts. This had all been originally made in 1824 for a horse drawn tramway and inside the Arsenal was a huge complex of light and heavy rail lines and systems. The single-track connection with the Arsenal was taken out of use in 1967, after the military site had been severely degraded. but some of the sidings  were later electrified.

These goods sidings allowed military trains of guns, ammunition and, new locomotive parts to access the Arsenal from the main line. After the Great War a number of the Arsenal’s munitions factories became surplus to requirements, but to avoid widespread redundancies in the area, it was decided to build fifty steam engines there. Eventually, the Arsenal factories manufactured the components for these locomotives, but they were  transported down to Ashford works for assembly.

The sidings to the east of the station have survived surprisingly well but by the mid-1990s their usage for freight traffic was virtually non-existent. But the electrified sidings whicg were retained are still in use for storage of rolling stock and more recently by Crossrail.

The station is  located at the western end of the ‘Ridgeway’ pedestrian and cycle path which runs on top of the Southern Outfall sewer and ends up at the Crossness Sewage Works -  including, of course, Crossness Engines Museum,

Local people have been very concerned that the station is kept as nesr its original format as oposible and that it also provides accessibility =-  ‘Save Our Station History!.  .....  accessibility is a good thing! Destroying local history and ignoring the local community is not! “

They continued saying that Network Rail’s plan would  mean damage to features  dating from 1892 -the demolition of the iron lattice footbridge, the removal and replacement of the attractive brick steps, damage to the section of the building, removal of part of a canopy and removal of a crenellated section of the original 1859 station.

They  claimed that Network Rail had  coerced the Area Planning Committee into accepting its ‘lazy, one size fits all proposal, by using emotional blackmail, ignoring requests and reneging on promises.’

 

Latest news is that the bridge will  be kept  but clearly residents will continue to fight to keep this attractive station with its unique features

NEW BOOK SHIPBUILDING IN GREENWICH

NOW AVAILABLE

£10 on Amazon    

    

Sailing barges

 

One reason why I have been doing so many articles about Greenwich shipbuilding is that I hope soon to produce a booklet about it and so it’s all in my head at the moment.  I always hope that these articles get read by people who will get back to me if they think I’ve got it wrong.    There is one  subject I’ve always been very nervous writing about - because I know there are lots of  enthusiasts out there – and that is the red sailed sailing barges which all over the River when I was a girl.

I first started writing about Greenwich industry in the 1990s and often sent articles off to Bygone Kent for publication.    Bygone Kent was then edited by the late Pat O’Driscoll.  Pat had worked on a   sailing barge as a young woman and had then been a journalist specialising in articles about the River and had edited various publications on barges. When I sent in my articles about Greenwich industry and  Greenwich history generally she usually agreed them and they went straight off to the printer.  However if  they were about sailing barges she didn’t trust a word I  wrote and off  my article would go to one of the experts down in Kent somewhere and she would get them to rewrite it. Things are different now but I still feel that writing an article on sailing barges is a bit risky.

Clearly there have been barges of one sort or another on the River since considerably before the Stone Age but we can only experience for ourselves barges which date from the late 19^th and early 20^th  centuries.     There was a time, which I can remember as a child in the 1940s, when you could see sailing barges stacked in the river at Gravesend, all of them still at work. In the late 1960s in Greenwich I met men who were still working barges on the River . So these sailing vessels survived at work over hundred years after powered vessels had become normal on the River. 

These barges were immensely practical and dealt with most of the heavy haulage of London river and beyond – carrying the bricks,  the corn,  the rubbish  and everything else, and doing it cheaply and reliably. This was a large industry of haulage operators  many of whom we’re very wealthy.

Most of the barges could go into coastal waters - in fact have seen websites complaining that since they are describing river boats they can’t include Thames sailing barges because  they were designed to go out of  the estuary to the south and east coasts. They were flat bottomed to allow them to use the small creeks around the estuary in order to serve the many mills and other industrial sites on them.  They needed to be easily manoeuvrable and to be able to function with a minimal staff. 

Being powered by the wind made them even cheaper to run -  but I will leave  the technicalities of the sails to the many websites which describe them. However the sails and masts had to be able to come down quickly if the barge was expected to go up river – perhaps to industrial areas like Brentford and beyond - and they had to be able to get under many bridges to get there. I remember meeting a chap who as a boy had done that trip regularly -  but, he said, ‘ all we had to eat was Campbell’s Soup’.

Greenwich was  a centre for building these barges. Many of the articles I’ve written in the past mention some of these sites. One major boat building site was Pipers which was on what is now Riverside Gardens and Piper specialised in  very high quality racing barges.  Nearby them were several other  barge  builders -  Hughes on Providence Wharf and also Badcock.   Before them there  had been many others about who we know very little. There was also Shrubsall right the way down the Peninsular at Point Wharf -  down near  where the Bullet from a Shooting Star sculpture is now. Edmunds  were also in the area. Then, right up where  the Ecology Centre is now, was Norton’s.

 Perhaps I should also explain about the barge racing which was a major feature in the design of some of the barges built in Greenwich.  These races had begun in the late 19^th century when some of the big operating companies and their customers put up quite large sums of money as prizes for race winning barges – and some barges were built with race wins in mind rather than the haulage industry. The races still take place  but the number of participants today is restricted to those few remaining barges which are capable of  taking part.

The fact that they took part in races also says something about their speed. For many of these barges  it’s wasn’t just about getting the cargoes around but that they could move quickly if necessary - of course if the wind was right.  I’m not going to claim that I’ve ever had much to do with the world of sailing barges – and perhaps I’m too easily impressed - but in the 1970s I went on holiday on Xylonite. She is a steel barge named for one of the earliest plastics. We were in Faversham and one day her owner/operator said we would go to Harwich.  Now,  Faversham to Harwich is not an easy journey by road or rail but it turns out to be quite straightforward by water. You get out  into the estuary, turn left and then straight up the coast to Harwich. So we went out into the estuary and he turned into the wind to go north up the coast -  and she just took off!  This fairly plain vessel went over on her side and rocketed up to Harwich...and,  as I said, she isn’t one of the fastest barges. Impressive.

There are numerous websites giving vast amounts of detail on sailing barges. I was particularly taken with an article  on shipping wonders of the world (https://www.shippingwondersoftheworld.com/thames_barges.html). It describes barges  at the time when they were still operating  commercially. I found it very interesting and it describes in detail the sailing rig and why it works, as well as other construction issues  which I can’t possibly begin to even describe.

 However we are looking at barges built in Greenwich and there are quite a lot of them, very, very many that we know nothing about.  I thought I would pick on a couple of them and just described  a small amount about  them.  As far as I know the only Greenwich built barge afloat is Orinoco which I wrote about last week.

The most famous Greenwich barge - in fact, some people will claim, the most famous of all barges was Giralda built by Piper’s in 1897 as a racing barge and using all sorts of special design features.  Of course the race organisers expected the racing barges to be able to prove that they could also carry all the bricks and rubbish and stuff up and down the river like all the other barges. Giralda was never actually good at that but she was extremely good at winning races.  Enthusiast web sites give details of her designers and of the various men who commanded her during races.  And also of her really rather ignominious later career.

Another famous Greenwich  built barge and race winner was  Veronica built at Shrubsalls  in 1906 and eventually hulked  in 1976. There were many details about her and some relics at the Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum in Sittingbourne.   The museum had closed down and I’m not sure if they have ever reopened - I suspect not.  I don’t know what  has happened to the exhibits and pieces of barges like Veronica.  I understand that her mast is (or was) holding up the roof at Gravesend’s Riverview Park Library.  She was hulked - that means left to rot - down on the mud  flats  on the river Swale, near the crossing over onto the Isle of Sheppey.

I remember going to a Docklands History group back in the early 1980s where the most unlikely people were all claiming that they owned various of these abandoned vessels. They  all said they were going to restore them even though many of the  barges consisted of no more than a few planks  sticking out of the mud and  I am- sure that none of them ever sailed again,

 When I first started writing about sailing barges for my first book about the Greenwich Peninsula there were still two Greenwich barges, made by Pipers, afloat.   One of these was the James Piper. Alan and I went up to see her where she was still moored at Chiswick Mall and used as someone’s home. I thought she was most impressive and the vast space of the living room accommodation was amazing. However she has since been broken up and there is a very upsetting and brutal film on YouTube of this being done . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqp03pwG4Vo

The other barge was Wilfred which had being used for many years  as a Spanish restaurant on the Embankment. Only last year, in January 2024, she capsized in a storm  and  was raised but then towed away.   There are websites which say she has gone to be broken up but I am not sure  exactly what has happened to her.

 Thames sailing barges are an interesting and very involved subject.  There’s at least one replica barge built a few years ago – others use some of the ideas behind them when they were  commonly operational.   There is an awful lot written about them which I could only be begin to vaguely touch on here.  Not only has a lot been written about their operation but there are huge numbers of enthusiasts and of course many of the people who operate the few that are left are very much involved in promoting them.   Whatever I say here, quite honestly, is very inadequate.

BARGES AND LIGHTERS

 

Last week I wrote about the Rennie brothers shipbuilding business on Dreadnought Wharf in Greenwich and  said how difficult it was to research this clearly important company . Equally difficult are the many small ship and boat building business  on the Greenwich Riverside about which little is known and who appear in few written records – a single directory entry, payments in official records, or a brief mention in somebody else’s history.

In various articles and books I’ve  described as far as I can some of the big boat builders with sites in Greenwich –  and some of this article will be about the builders of famous and remarkable sailing I to them in a minute. There were however many other builders and they built very small boats and the humble lighter – the engineless  ‘dumb’  barges which carried everything and anything around the River and the docks. There must have been many thousands of lighters in the Port of London and someone had to build them.

The only reference I have ever seen to the building lighters is a photograph of one being launched from Pipers’ yard in East Greenwich but Pipers was hardly a small firm being the premier sailing barge builders on the river and the sort of works which always had photographs taken of their activities

There are plenty of websites describing lighters and I see that that the London Canal Museum had the exhibition about their history earlier this year.  The National Maritime Museum website points out the difference between lightermen and watermen and I wrote a bit about Watermen in articles about watermen’s stairs -  (which reminds me I still have a number of those that I’ve never written up).Anyway the NMM website explains that lightermen were concerned with the transport of  goods whereas watermen took people. The name lighter is always said to come from the fact that by removing goods from cargo ships they became lighter –and some claim a German adult source for the word

Over the past couple of days I’ve been reading a new book ‘Maritime Metropolis’ by Sarah Palmer and it’s talking about the Port of London before 1914. It takes  on all the big themes about the Port as well as the history of its management. It’s all about parliament and international trade and things like that.  It’s not going to mention although little companies but without them I don’t know where the big ones would be!  I’m very much enjoying reading the book, though.

To come back to all those little companies to those companies we see in directories. There were some on Deptford Creek and some along  what is now the area covered by Dreadnought Wharf and along the west bank of the Peninsula .They tend to be in offices buildings with some foreshore and they advertise lighterage and wharfage and in fact they provided services which kept the river industries moving – and surely many of them must still exist. I guess that a lot of them were much bigger organisations then we realise in their small office buildings. 

Dreadnought Wharf is now part of a walkway which goes along the Riverside and includes an area which was and still is called Wood Wharf .  There is a very interesting little book called ‘Wood Wharf’ by Ron Richards who talks some of the industries in that area. . He describes otherwise barely remembered businesses -  like the Bishop family who built barges and had a workshop and a sail making business here. He points out that in the mid 1970s there were still six barge repair yards along here before you reached the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

When I first met Ron he was working for a boat repair business called Pope and Bond who were based there on the actual Wood Wharf –as distinct from the road called ‘Wood Wharf’. They had been there only since 1967 and undertook boat and barge repair and were one of only a few such businesses left on the Thames – a vital facility for all craft using the River. They were carrying out contracts for the Greater London Council. Eventually they lost  a major contract and were forced to
close.  Ironically the Government had ‘safeguarded’ working wharves along  the River but had failed to do so for boat and barge repair works.There  was a huge effort made to save Wood  Wharf but it was soon and inevitably taken over by developers

But I wanted to return the builders  of the few remaining spritzel sailing barges – the ones which normally get all the attention. The only Greenwich built sailing barge which I am aware of still in sail  is Orinoco,  Check her out at https://www.facebook.com/SBOrinoco/?locale=en_GB,     An old friend of mine, Jim Hughes, who was a sailing barge  enthusiast had done a lot of research on Orinoco and was building a model of her. This was back in the 1990s.

Sadly Jim shad a stroke and a message was given to me that he wanted me to do something.  I managed to deduce from the few words he was able to say that he wanted me to see Orinoco then berthed at Hoo Marina.  So I went down to Hoo and took some photographs  - although as everybody knows I’m the world’s worst photographer!

When Jim died his widow ,  Elsie,- lent me a box of notes that he’d made of the background to Orinoco.  She had been built by members of the Hughes family (no relation to Jim) who had a boat repair and lighterage business on what was then called Providence Wharf, on the Greenwich Peninsula  -part of the area which is now Riverside Gardens. However it was not anything to do with the boat repair business which remained there until relatively recently.   Jim had done a lot of family history research into the Hughes family which I wrote up and sent to Bygone Kent for publication .  The editor then was the very wonderful Pat O’Driscoll, but she never published anything about sailing barges which I wrote without having it thoroughly inspected by one of the many enthusiasts she was in touch with.  However she eventually published the article with not too many changes.

But I soon discovered that Jim’s  research about the Hughes family’s past activities and work on Providence Wharf was only a small part of their story.  He did not know that they had moved  eventually to Dreadnought Wharf in succession to the Rennie Brothers, who I wrote about last week. There Augustus and Edmund Hughes changed the company name to the London and Tilbury Lighterage Company Limited’ and worked to carry out a wide range of river maintenance tasks. They did not restrict their work to the Thames or even to England. Reports say that they were dredging rivers and shallow seas in Argentina, Kuwait, Burma, Australia, and India –

The last family member who was involved in management of the company was Michael Hughes who died in 1976.  They merged with the construction giant RM.Douglas in 1991 and became Tilbury Douglas.  In 2001 they changed the name of the company to Interserve.  By then they had long left Dreadnought Wharf. The company was carrying out major construction projects worldwide -one. example is the Birmingham based National Exhibi I tion Centre but there were many more

Around 2020 The company began to experience financial difficulties and eventually went into  administration. As I understand it the Tilbury Douglas construction section is still going but the Interserve  parts of it have been closed down.  There are endless websites which describe the financial difficulties of the company as well as the past.

There are many other websites under the Interserve name and I am far from clear which of them refer to the ex Tilbury Lighterage business and which are something completely different. Very many of them are charitable and I am very aware that Interserve gave a great deal of its profits to various good causes and some of these may be among these websites.

One of these maybe  the environmental charity, Groundwork. I’m aware that Groundwork gave a considerable amount of money to keep the Greenwich Riverside Path in good order and I remember walking down the path with Groundwork officers who were making notes about work which needed being done .

I said at the beginning of this article that there were many small businesses along the Riverside in small and unpretentious offices offering services using their lighters and small boats and that they were probably a bit different from the big companies which built the spritzel sailing barges.  I think that the Hughes brothers are a good example of this. When they were on Providence Wharf and later Dreadnought Wharf who would have thought that they had this huge international business which was to become a leading operator in river services worldwide .

Rennie brothers shipbuilders at Dreadnought Wharf

 

I have been trying to put together information about Greenwich shipbuilders. There is one  important firm which I’ve never written about – that is the Rennie brothers, George and John Rennie’s works on Dreadnought Wharf, just up river f
rom Greenwich Pier – although I did write about their Deptford Creekside engineering works.

Writing up the two Greenwich sites has been an exercise in frustration and why I’ve delayed doing it for such a long time. There are so many questions about them which are going unanswered. Clearly this was an important and innovative company but trying to put together something coherent about them seems very difficult. There is too much information but in other ways not enough.  What I say about them is correct but I always feel there is a lot more which remains out of my reach.

The Rennie brothers were the sons of the great civil engineer John Rennie. In the 1790s he had moved to London where he set up his own engineering works at Blackfriars. He had two sons, George and John, who inherited his business and after his death remained in partnership as G. & J. Rennie, although each specialised in a different part of the business and as time went on the works continued under their children. They carried on using the Blackfriars works initially but set up an engineering works on Deptford Creek which extended eventually to another site at Dreadnought Wharf with a Thames frontage . Hopefully this article is about their works on Dreadnought Wharf  but  by the mid 19^th century there were a number of ‘Rennie’  shipbuilders around the country  - particularly in Scotland. This obviously makes more confusion only too likely.

I wrote about the Rennie works on Deptford Creek when I was looking at Creekside industries and in my book about Deptford Creek.  It was sited on the Greenwich bank close to the railway line and was a large engineering workshop making boilers and engines and perhaps some small boats. The date on  which the works opened is not clear and although they are said to have been there by the 1830s they are not shown as being liable for rates or even in occupation on the mid-1840s Greenwich Vestry. tithe map.  I also speculated that it seemed unlikely that ships of any size could be built that far up the Creek given its narrow width and fall of water at low tide

Their occupation of Dreadnought Wharf site seems initially to have been an extension of the Creekside works. Dreadnought was a part the stretch of Thames Riverside which is now called Dreadnought Walk. The site which is actually on the corner of the River Thames and the Creek was in the 19^th century the Phoenix Gas Works who owned much of the land which became Dreadnought Wharf. They had leased it in the 1850s for shipbuilding by William Joyce who had  two shipbuilding slips there and although he had died in 1856  his firm had continued until 1866. It maybe that that  the  Rennies were using some of Joyce’s slips before eventually taking over the entire site..

Rennie brothers were responsible for some important vessels -one of these was a very fast iron paddle steamer called ‘Queen’.  It has not been easy to find very much about this vessel except that the National Maritime Museum has a 19^th century model of it. One other .problem is that there were several vessels in this period called ‘Queen and many others called ‘Queen of  ...  this that  and the other’.

 The ‘Queen’ dated from 1842 which means it is extremely unlikely to have been built in Greenwich or at the Creekside Works. There is one online suggestion that it was built at Blackwall by Ditchburn and Mare. It is said to have had a particularly important engine and given that it was commissioned by Rennie, who were engine specialists, that makes sense - but another online source says it was engined by Penn!.  This is all very confusing and the confusion is not helped when every other paddle steamer built in that period  seems to be called ‘Queen -something or other’.  I assume that it was built twenty years before the Rennies took on Dreadnought Wharf as some sort of demonstration of a technology and it needs putting into that context - perhaps someone could enlighten me?

‘Queen’  was followed in 1846 by ‘Oberon’ one of three ‘packet boats’ built to ‘War Office specifications ‘of 300 horse- power, designed by the Navy Office’ for ‘use in the Ionian isles’  delivering mail. Clearly this indicates that the Rennies  had a viable shipbuilding capability. They had a big launch event for the ship at which  ‘Sir John Rennie took occasion to eulogise the astounding steamer-designing genius of the Surveyor’ .... ‘who, not at all ambitious of the honour, repudiated the supposed connection’. 

This lavish launch event was held at ‘the building-yard of Messrs. Rennie, the contractors’.  At a date in the 1840s this is not likely to be Dreadnought Wharf or indeed the Creekside works. I wonder if there is another possibility?  There are newspaper reports of a number of men -shipwrights -who were being prosecuted by a Deptford shipbuilder, William Ive.  This was about work which had not been done on the Oberon and it seems that Ive was himself a subcontractor working for Rennie.   Ive’s shipyard was on the site of what had been the East India Dock Shipyard, Deptford, later taken over by General Steam Navigation. Is it at all possible that this was where Oberon was in fact built and maybe was where the reception took place??

Rennie Brothers continued to make engines for ships built by other companies – sometimes those built by Ditchburn and Mare. So what ships did they build themselves?  I’m aware that my list of vessels probably misses out many from the 1840s and1850s.  However, from the early 1860s newspaper reports of launches from ‘Messrs Rennie’s building yard’ are relatively frequent and it can be could assumed that this means Dreadnought Wharf was in use.  Many of these were impressive vessels built for foreign customers but, as we will see, by the 1890s most customers appear to be British and purchased smaller vessels.

 

They also seem to have been making what could be described as river and dock infrastructure  amenity vessels.  In 1860 ‘His Grace the Duke of Somerset’  was in Greenwich to visit the premises of Messrs. Rennie and to see a gigantic floating dock  built for a foreign government’.  Of course there was also a ’sumptuous luncheon at the Ship Hotel’ .It seems unlikely that anything ‘gigantic’ could be made at the Creekside works  and by 1860 it’s perfectly possible that they were using Dreadnought Wharf instead.

I have picked a few vessels to describe below and hopefully they are typical of very many more built at  Dreadnought Wharf , several of which were important and innovative constructions.  The ones I’m  picking out to mention are a tiny sample of what they were in fact producing

 

In December 1863 Rennie launched a screw steamer to be called ‘John David’  built for Verbist of Antwerp.  The launch ceremony was performed by Miss Pietroni followed by the usual sumptuous luncheon at the Ship Hotel. It can be assumed that Miss Pietroni was the daughter of Charles Pietroni, of London-Wall, ‘a gentleman of great experience in steam-ship building ’ who had worked  with the Imperial and Royal Danube Steam Navigation Company, of Vienna . where he was involved with ‘ the Maria Dorothea, the first steam vessel and constructed at Trieste’ . the newspaper commented that ‘seldom has a better ship than the John David been built in this country’. The newspaper commented that this showed ‘the great dependence of foreign powers on our shipyards’.

In 1865 HMS African was built to serve as a tender for the naval establishment at the Cape of Good Hope and in 1868  HMS Manly, an  iron-paddle tug  was built for service at Portsmouth Dockyard . In 1870 two twin screw steamers were for ‘the Bengal famine fleet ... adapted for Indian rivers’. In 1879 they built a steam launch for the Indian Government to be used in Madras;

It was not only sales to India which were important-  even more so was South America. In 1872 the Riachuleo ateam dredger was built for harbour works at Buenos Aires.  For military use the Pilcomayo, a gun boat for the Argentinian Republic,  was built in August 1875  and in 1874 Mexico, a Sloop of War, was sold to the Mexican government. And in 1875 the Bermajo gun ship for the Argentine. There were many others.

They were also producing smaller vessels for British users in the 1870s. In 1875 Atlas an iron paddle tug was built for General Steam Navigation- she was eventually badly damaged when run into by a lighterage  tug at St Katharine’s Dock in 1876. In 1892 they built a tug , Crescent, for local Deptford tug owners Jesse Jacob and in 1904. Robin for General Steam Navigation.  They continued to build tugs and lighterage vessels. In 1909 they built a vessel for Hope Lighterage who were taken over by the Gas Light and Coke Company. It was eventually renamed ‘Beckton’.

Most famously in 1905 they built some of the steamboats for the ill fated London County Council river service –one of the boats was to be called ‘Rennie’! It should be noted perhaps that some of the records say that they were commissioned to build these as subcontractors for Chiswick based Thornycroft.

In 1912  they moved to Wivenhoe in Essex, closing what was described as ‘the oldest remaining firm of shipbuilders’.   Although that quotation gives the impression that they had always been at Dreadnought Wharf   I think we know this was not so. Some 60 men lost their jobs   but the whole of the skilled emp¥ovés will be given the opportunity of transferring their services to the new shipbuilding yard..... At present there are one or two vessels in hand, including`an oil-tank steamer, and there is enough work for about a fortnight’.

 

In Wivenhoe they were to specialise with Forestt  to  build a life boats - but that’s another story