Shipwrights' Mill and early co-ops in the Royal Dockyards

 

I understand that there is some local interest in a national cooperative event to be held in Woolwich and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to write something which points out that the earliest recorded coops were in the Royal Dockyards- Woolwich, Chatham and Deptford.  

Before I start, I think we need to get out of our heads that the ‘Co-op’ is just a shop owned by a ‘Society’ which sells groceries or whatever and pays a ‘dividend’ to its Members from profits. There is still a huge national Co-op which does just that but once we had our own ‘Society’ in Woolwich with the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society and very successful it was too. But a ‘co-op’ doesn’t have to be a shop – it can be any so sort of organisation or business set up on a model where any profits are shared out between a group of members.

Greenwich Borough has a huge record of support for co-ops and since the 1980s we’ve had Greenwich Co-operative Development Agency actively promoting them locally. This was set up by the Council, originally to help provide more local jobs. It’s been very successful – possibly it’s the most successful Cooperative Development Agency in London. I might do a whole article sometime about them-, but, first, today I’m going to look at these early ventures.  In Woolwich we had the earliest co-ops recorded – and it’s them that this article is about.

Labour relations in the Royal Dockyards in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were not good, to put it mildly, but historians have found what they describe as ‘indications of mutual activity’. After a long strike in 1745 there is a report of groups of shipwrights getting together and making offers to various contractors to deal with them rather than with their employers. The Survey of Woolwich describes how ‘enterprising mutualists’ developed in the Thameside 18^th naval dockyards. Shipbuilding was, they say, ‘an unusually co-operative trade and dockyard employment fostered strong collective values’.

Dockyard shipwrights came together in the 1750s to form a retail society, and hoped to gain some control over the supply and price of basic food. ‘Open to all who were employed within the yards, this was, it has been claimed, the first co-operative society in England. This Society of Shipwrights came into existence as a retail co-operative society’. It opened a bakery in Chatham, a corn mill in Woolwich and a butcher shop in Church Street, Deptford.

Chatham is, of course, outside my remit here – but it seems likely that they had a corn mill and a bakery.   Their business ‘the Baking Shipwrights’ - was thought to be forcing down the price of bread by undercutting local bakers by a penny a quarten loaf - which didn’t go down too well with the established trade. Kent and Chatham bakers had the shipwrights prosecuted for ‘selling bread at lower rates than the Bakers and making the same, not having served an Apprenticeship’. The case went to Maidstone Assizes in April 1758 where it was thrown out in; later a hearing at Quarter Sessions had the same result. This is said to have led to ‘great rejoicing’.

In Deptford a report of 1758 describes  a new Butcher Shop, ‘set up by subscription of the Artificers in his Majesty's Yard at Deptford ...opened in Church Street, to the great benefit of the poor in the Town -the Meat being sold at the lowest prices ... which immediately occasioned a great fall in the value of meat’.  I can’t imagine that went down well with the local butchers either but I have found no report of their reaction.

Happily we know more about the Woolwich corn mill.

Mill Lane in Woolwich is a turning off Woolwich New Road. It is on land once known as Mill Hill because several windmills were sited there. probably from the 15^th century.  Among them was the ‘shipwrights mill’ built on the high ground in 1758 by the Shipwrights’ Society along with a bake house.  In the 17th century the Board of Ordnance had owned land here and built a conduit to supply water to what became the Arsenal down at the Warren. The Shipwrights Society got permission to build on this area for the annual rent of a shilling, so long as they allowed artillery officers and Ordnance Board employees to subscribe and that they supplied bread to the barracks if necessary. It was said later that “some time ago the Artificers in his Majesty's Yard at Woolwich had agreed to build a Corn Mill, and make their own Bread, in imitation of their Brethren at Chatham.’

A public house just across Woolwich New Road was known as the Jolly Shipwrights.

However in March 1760 ‘the mill built by the Shipwrights belonging to His Majesty’s Dockyard at Woolwich was on Sunday, the 16^th of this instant, consumed by fire  - and the said Mill had worked for about six Weeks, but did not work on Sunday.  nor was there any Body in it from Twelve that Day, yet that Night it was entirely consumed, by what Means, is variously suspected”.  Naturally it was other local bakers who were suspected.

As a result of this fire there was some alarm at Chatham  “the late Accident burning down –the Shipwright’s-Mill in Woolwich, has put the Shipwright Bakers upon their Guard, and all necessary precautions are taken to preserve their Mill from the like fate and especially to prevent any malicious Design’.

It was said ‘scandalously and maliciously’ that Woolwich bakers ‘were concerned in setting the same on fire’. Six Woolwich bakers swore before the, Lord Mayor of London on March 24^th 1760 that they ‘do severally make oath and say that they neither knew nor heard of the same in flames, and that they, nor any of them, did not set the same on fire or were in any matter whatever accessory to the said accident; .

The rebuilt mill appears to have settled into productivity –although in 1782, when trade was slack, the shipwrights approached the Board Ordnance offering to supply the newly built Royal Artillery Barracks with bread. However the shipwrights carried on trade with the mill for over eighty years.  It was drawn in 1845 by an artist, W Clifton, who shows an octagonal timber smock-mill.. Later the mill was let to a private company was empty and disused by the 1840s.  The property was finally ‘acquired’ by the War Office and it was demolished by the 1850s, when housing began to be built in the area.

The Dockyard itself closed in the 1860s when the mill was long gone, but there are hints of suggestions of mutual organisations in its final years. However as the Dockyard closed so the first hints of a different sort of Co-op began among workers in the Arsenal – and the start of what was to become the vast Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society .It would be interesting to discover if ideas of mutual trading organisations spread almost as a legacy from the Dockyard to those able to take forward these values to Arsenal worker.

 

See: C.R.Dobson ‘Masters and Journeymen’. & archive material collated by Ron Roffey.