Greenwich Co-op History - RACS

 

In order to look at the growth of co-operative and other mutual organisations in what is now the Royal Borough of Greenwich we need to start with a  very quick look at the historical background. This part of Kentish Thameside had huge industrial sites by the 17^th century when the Royal Dockyards in Deptford and Woolwich, along with the Royal Palace in Greenwich, employed many, many people in the service of the state..

In this area a skilled work force in state owned industries were well aware of the advantages of collective action. This increased in the 19^th century with the military establishment in Woolwich and the vast industrial site of the Royal Arsenal - the largest and most diverse factory ever in Europe.  In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries private industries opened here using Arsenal trained engineers in skilled jobs – and workers with aspirations for better lives in a better world.  In the mid-19^th century many of these workers were involved in – for instance - the temperance movement and heard  a message of how, by founding their own organisations , they could take control of their lives.

In the mid 18^th century a number of mutual businesses were set up by workers hoping to improve the quality and price  of food and other household items on offer locally.  I wrote a detailed article about this  here a few weeks ago. In Deptford a butchery business was opened by Dockyard workers and in 1758 in Woolwich, as in Chatham, a mill was set up to support a bakery business. These were owned by groups of shipwrights or ‘artificers’ in the Royal dockyards and were successful in bringing down prices. The Woolwich Mill and bakery survived for 80 years and supplied bread commercially to military establishments as well as to local people. It stood near the side road still called ‘Mill Close’ today. The Royal Dockyard  closed in 1869; and a suggestion was made by a future leading co-operator that it might be saved by becoming ‘co-operative shipbuilding’.

In Woolwich several organisations were set up with a mutual structure, particularly for financial or insurance purposes. Most are not entirely relevant to a history of co-operation locally but it should  be noted that the best known of these institutions was the Woolwich Equitable Building Society of 1847 and described in the Survey of London as  ‘an important staging post in the history of mutualists enterprise in Woolwich, and a seed that grew to spread the name of Woolwich nationally’.

Alexander Mcleod came from a poor background in Scotland where he had served an apprenticeship in engineering and came south in the 1850s to find work in the Royal Arsenal. Today his statue still stands above the main door the shop he founded in Powis Street, Woolwich. As a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers he was at a meeting where the subject of Co-operation in trade was raised.  A special meeting was called for November 7^th 1868 at which the Royal Arsenal Supply Association was founded with just twenty members. This was the beginning of the mighty Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society.

The first cooperative ‘shops’ were stores in the homes of leading members - McLeod was secretary to the organisation and in 1869 the first store was in a room below his home at Parry Place on the Plumstead borders.  In 1871 they set up the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society Limited and adopted the ‘Rochdale model’ for a retail co-operative with profit-sharing through dividends. Two years later, when they took on their first employee,  it was decided to pay a profit sharing bonus on staff wages. This idea was unique in retail co operatives and I am reminded of the contemporary local profit sharing scheme at South Met. Gas which lasted until nationalisation in 1946. The RACS scheme lasted until the 1980s merger with CWS.

In the early 1870s they took on a proper shop at a site in Powis Street.  Survey of London comments that this was ‘away from the main shopping district-  typically for a co operative’.  It was at the western  the ‘Greenwich’ end of Powis Street and the start of what became a complex of RACS owned buildings there. At first it opened for just four evenings a week’ and McLeod became full-time manager.

Within ten years RACS  had 1,597 members, many of them skilled workers looking for a respectable shop with a high standard of goods at affordable prices.  Starting with groceries they soon added a draper, a boot maker and a tailor and, eventually, much, much more.

These Powis Street properties expanded and became RACS main stores. McLleod’s statue remains on a building now, sadly, a Travel Lodge .  There is not the space here to describe this central Woolwich complex of shops but it is included in great detail in the Woolwich volume of Survey of London.

By the 1880s the Powis Street shop included a butcher and the beginnings of the network of milk rounds. Then a tea room was added and at the back more stables and a purpose built bakery. Central Stores were opened in 1903, when RACS had a membership of 21,788 and was the largest co-op in London. At the opening ceremony a crowd of some 5,000 heard a speech from newly elected Labour MP, Will Crooks, followed by a procession round Woolwich which included the Society’s 130 horses and 86 vehicles plus military bands.

At the same time the Society opened numerous smaller shops around the area – a network which would eventually cover most of Kent and Surrey.  Initially however sites were in Plumstead. Erith, Charlton – and most notably in 1900 at The Links on Plumstead Common. There were eventually hundreds of shops and branches; all with their own histories.

RACS was not alone in South London in its popularity and expansion. In the 1890s a Co-operative Festival was held in Crystal Palace as part of Blackheath resident, Edward Owen Greening’s,  'One and All'  movement . 34,800 people are said to have attended and over 100 co-operative societies were there with half a mile of exhibition tables. There were speeches from London trade unionists - Ben Tillet and Tom Mann  and there was a grand concert with 6,000 singers and a new Labour song specially composed for the day – although the Co-op movement, including RACS at this stage, was not Party political. The Festival was an expression of what working people could aspire to and achieve  - “what do we want? ... good music ...  the love of flowers ... the appreciation of the domestic arts . ... the practice of athletics ... the desire for culture ... association in employment.”

The RACS Board of Management was known as the ‘General Committee’ with nine, initially unpaid, members. They managed the day-to-day business of the Society, but major decisions of policy needed to be agreed at a general meeting of members.

 

From the start RACS  promoted ‘culture’ and ‘association’.  The earliest facilities at the Powis Street store included a reading room and a library  - this was the earliest library in Woolwich, and others were set up in or near stores in the coming years. In 1901 the Powis Street library moved into a converted Baptist Chapel  in Parsons Hill which became the  Co-operative Institute and Education Centre.  The building was demolished when John  Wilson Street was rebuilt as part of the South Circular Road and the Education Centre moved to Park Vista in Greenwich.  I remember the Co-op library there myself in the 1970s and thought it was somewhere I was perfectly prepared to settle into and study.

Edward Greening’s ‘One and All’ movement, mentioned above, was all about healthy living, self sufficiency, allotments, growing your own food. As RACS expanded they bought up a number of farms and areas where members could grow their own vegetables or where their shops could sell fresh local grown produce.  One result of this, still with us today, is, now community run, Woodlands Farm on Shooters Hill originally purchased by RACS in 1920. Although, I’m afraid one service they provided was for customers to pick the piglet which would be slaughtered for them at Christmas!   By 1937 there was an abbatoir at the north end of the farm, which was said in the 1970s to have the fastest beef gang in Europe – and – well, we perhaps we should draw a veil over the shocking events of July 1987. The Woodlands Farm Trust does a good job and hopefully will continue to do so  (and thank you, Maggie, for recent presents of their excellent local honey and apple juice).

Some of the farm land purchased by RACS was used for housing development  - most notably on the Abbey Wood ‘Co-op’ Estate, aimed at respectable and well paid Arsenal workers. Here street names reflected Co-operative values and the movement’s  heroes – McLeod, Federation, Greening and several more.  One unique feature was the excavation of extensive underground mine workings for chalk to provide building materials.  The miners’ canteen survived to become the reception area for what is now the Abbey Wood camp and caravan site.   

Later, in 1925, RACS took over and managed the architecturally exceptional Eltham Well Hall Estate built by the Government in the Great War to house munitions workers.  RACS added community facilities, in particular Progress Hall and retained the estate until it was sold to Hyde Housing in 1985.

As RACS grew and expanded they began to take over smaller local co-ops. The earliest was probably in 1905 when they took over  East Greenwich Co-operative Society  which operated a single shop in Woolwich Road, later used by the  Co-op funeral service. Once taken over by  RACS they soon announced greatly increased turnover in the shop.  In the 1960s this process of takeovers was accelerated and many Co-operative  Societies were taken over by RACS from as far from Woolwich as Woking, Sheerness and Slough.  I well remember when they took over Gravesend Co-op in 1968 with its 20 shops   However, there is no mention in the RACS account of Gravesend Co-op Hall where I saw George Melly, or indeed of Gravesend Education Department where I met Harold Wilson.

The Great War led to the introduction of sugar rationing – ironic since the Co-op Jam factory was opened in Abbey Wood in 1916. It survived to be bombed in the Second World War and provided valuable employment for local women. On 7th November 1918 – just four days before the end of the war  - RACS had celebrated its 50th anniversary with a Jubilee Concert.  Sales for 1919 were well over £2.5 million and membership was 68,500. They looked forward to a prosperous peace. 

A memorial to those employees who had died in the Great War was installed in the Powis Street Head Office. In 1918 as part of the peacetime future RACS purchased Shornells – a huge house in woodland off Bostall Hill in Abbey Wood.  They intended it to be used it as an education centre and a hostel for students. The first weekend school there featured lectures by playwright, George Bernard Shaw, and economist, G.D.H.Cole. – plus 30 year old  Joe Reeves, future Greenwich MP, who had just been appointed as RACS Educational Secretary. By 1985 and the merger with CWS Shornells was in a bad state, subject to vandalism and fires.  It was sold for £1 to a local project for a Greenwich hospice and remains in this use today.

In 1921 RACS established their Political Purposes Committee which involved  direct affiliation to the Labour Party, locally, regionally and nationally.  The early co-ops had been set up at a time when political allegiances were changing, with new ideas and new politics - the gradual rise of Labour and decline of the Liberals. Most co-ops did not identify too closely and recruited activists from many different political perspectives. The foundation of RACS Political Purposes Committee is a complicated story, as is it history up into the 1980s. I would very much recommend Rita Rhodes book ‘An Arsenal for Labour’ which follows the whole process through with more clarity than I ever could achieve. 

Outside London the Co-op Party was active and dealt with politics and elections.  In the RACS area nominees represented co-op interests on local Labour Party management committees and nationally RACS’s nominee had a place on Labour’s National Executive Committee. Since the demise of RACS in the 1980s a Co-op Party branch was set up in Greenwich and Woolwich and quickly built up a strong membership.  Co-op delegates still attend Labour Party management meetings, and most Greenwich councillors are ‘Labour and Co-op”.

In 1926 RACS was involved in setting up the youth movement known as ‘the Woodcraft Folk’.  This had originated outside the co-op as ‘Kibbo Kift’ , which was set up to provide an alternative to the militarism of the Scouts and  with an Advisory Council which included H. G. Wells, and  Julian Huxley.   Joe Reeves the RACS Education Department Secretary, was interested in the youth movement and RACS  Society developed its own version called ‘The Woodcraft Folk’.   It was to become  a national organisation with 6000 members by 1938 –and by the 1980s over 15,000. It still appears to be going strong – see their web site – there is a group near you!  The nearest to me is just up the road in Mycenae House.

 

Also In 1926  RACS bought freehold land, once part of the Woolwich  Royal Dockyard from the Admiralty. They named it Commonwealth Buildings and by 1937 nearly 1,900 staff were employed there. They  mainly handled  grocery and provisions warehousing - bacon smoking, tea blending etc. There was also a pharmaceuticals laboratory, shoe repairs, clothing manufacture, general engineering, and motor maintenance, along with a garage and depot for transport.  In 1929 a Co-operative Exhibition was held there attended by the Prince of Wales and over 200,000  members of the public. It was said that queues to get in were a mile long.  It included “a model bungalow. the theatre of fashion, home cookery demonstrations, concerts, arts and crafts, cornet and hosiery making, working  exhibits of machinery, sweet boiling, cigarette making, etc. Famous bands will provide music and  Admission is Free.” The site was closed in 1985 and developed in the 1990s for housing . It is now King Henry’s Wharf.

 

When the Commonwealth building site was demolished the original gateway and entrance buildings to what had been the Royal Dockyard remained with the address of ‘2 Commonwealth Buildings’. This  was the Royal Dockyard’ Apprentice School and it still houses one last  co operative business - the funeral services, now run by CWS. Another relic of Commonwealth Buildings is the prominent chimney on Woolwich Church Street. Although it was built as part of the Royal Dockyard it was used by the Co-op for their boiler systems. It also appears to be doing well, despite being disused

 

In the years between the two World Wars the numbers of employees at RACS rose from 1,000 to 10,000, with 70 new shops opening in the 1930s – some of these shops were Post Offices.  There was the start of a travel business with two charabancs for hire, and eventually purchase of hotels.

 

World War II came with much bomb damage. After the war, and most significantly, a group went to America to investigate a new way of shopping called ‘self service’.  Soon a shop using this system was  opened in Woolwich and many others followed.  I would be interested to know if other shoppers  were like my mother who just refused to use the wire baskets provided at Gravesend Coop’s Echo Square branch .

 

Self Service was the future in the modern world – there were also rental schemes for TV sets,

and fridges. Then at head office  a computer to work out the dividends was installed, as well as an  automatic telephone exchange .

 

RACS made it to their 100 year anniversary  but by then felt out of date and old fashioned. The co-op as a body  serving local working class interests has become too remote for the public to understand or relate to. I have heard various reasons given as to why RACS failed – did they over reach themselves with the super-store at Margate? Did replacing the ‘divi’ with stamps just make them seem identical to the commercial supermarkets opening around them.  Although today round here Co-op online deliveries are more efficient that the big name stores and the grocery stores appear  to be doing well.

 

In 1985 RACS gave up and became part of CWS. 

 

If anyone is interested I still have two RACS membership packs –one with unclaimed divi on it.  A couple of times I have rung up CWS to ask what I should do with them – but no one in Manchester had ever heard of RACS, after all it was in London where co-ops, like heavy industry, apparently never existed!

 

I have tried to cover here a few features of co-operatives in the borough of Royal Greenwich. Much of it about RACS  - but there is so much I have missed out. One very important feature, for example, was their support for women in public life - and so much much more.

 

There are several histories of RACS and what I have written here is very dependent on material collected by Ron Roffey.  Ron was RACS last company secretary –and he collected a vast and interesting set of memorabilia which was housed on a whole floor of the Powis Street Department store. When he had to leave there, the Council housed the collection in various depots but eventually most of it had to go. I was also told that Rochdale museum wouldn’t take much of the vast archive of written records -  if that isn’t true, please correct me.

 

But Co-operation in Greenwich is not dead,  despite the demise of  RACS. We still have co-op shops and  Royal Greenwich is a ‘co-operative council (51 Labour-Co-op out of 60 majority members and 4 opposition).  In the 1980s as Thatcher’s policies decimated Greenwich industry and jobs so the Councils looked to new ways of creating jobs. In 1982 they set up Greenwich Employment Resource Unit  which evolved into today’s’ Greenwich Co-operative Development Agency.  Inevitably this organisation has had its ups and downs  but it is very much still with us and currently achieving success after success – continuing to make the co-operative message count in Greenwich – and something we should all be proud of.

 

 

Garden Stairs

 

I think it’s about time that I continued looking at the various sets of waterman's stairs along the Greenwich riverside. The last article I did on them was about the apparently non-existent stairs at Greenwich’s Billingsgate dock. So this leads us to the next ones which are virtually next door to Billingsgate and they are ‘Garden Stairs’.  They’re right near the foot tunnel and like all the others the lead down to the foreshore where in the past licenced watermen could pick up and leave passengers.

In the last few weeks I’ve written a bit about the boundary walk around Greenwich and I think it’s notable that these processions of local worthies started at Garden Stairs as a key point in the centre of the Riverside stretch of the Greenwich Parish boundary.

When these stairs were first created is not known but a document of 1449 refers to them. It is said that they were originally called ‘Skarne’ or ‘Skerne ‘ Stairs after an Elizabethan family who owned land here. An Edward Skerne was ‘of East Greenwich’ in 1517 and may have had connections to the Hatcliffe family, whose charity is still an important Greenwich property owner. At the dissolution of the monasteries an Edward Skerne was listed as a ‘vicar’ at Charterhouse – where Henry VIII’s government was monstrously murderous to leading  theologians. The family seem to have been landholders in north Lincolnshire – but there were others with that name including a 15th century politician. Back on the Greenwich riverside it had been claimed that ‘Garden’ is a corruption of this – although I must say I can’t turn ‘Skerne’; into anything like ‘Garden’.

These stairs were used by the industry which everybody has forgotten - this bit of the Greenwich riverside was the centre for the fishing industry which dominated Greenwich until the end of the 19^th century. The stairs at one time led up into Fishers Lane. In the ad columns of newspapers of the 18th and 19^th centuries we find many fishing vessels for sale. One example from 1801 ‘to be SOLD and now lying at Greenwich, Garden Stairs, the JOHN and JANE FISHING-SMACK, of 15 tons, and British built; she is a very fast sail .....’

So Garden Stairs are ancient and more than any of the other sets of riverside stairs embody the romantic picture of maritime Greenwich which the tourists come to see. For centuries visitors came to Greenwich by boat – as many still do. In the past they mainly seem to have gone to the nearest pub – and that wasn’t far away at all.  There were two pubs at the top of Garden Stairs and many, many others nearby.

I am grateful to the author of the ‘Dover Kent’ Series of descriptions of pubs (http://www.dover-kent.com/) for great deal of information about the pubs at Garden Stairs. He has analysed the mysterious early 18^th century drawings of Greenwich which were published as ‘Greenwich Revealed’ by Julian Watson and Neil Rhind.  He has reproduced the section of the drawings which shows the riverfront and the two public houses - the buildings which were in Brewhouse Lane.

There are various prints by Thomas Rowlandson from the early 19^th century showing people apparently arriving in Greenwich by boat. In one of Rowlandson’s drawings the people climbing the stairs, the spectators and others are behaving in a respectable and decent manner. The other print shows them in a range of rather different activities – but, please note, that all these passengers seem to be heading for the pub. 

The Salutation Tavern – whose sign is shown in various drawings, stood at the top of Garden Stairs, in Fisher's Lane. Although the address was 1 Garden Stairs. The sign is faintly visible on the sketches of buiding and very clear in the Rowlandson drawings. It was eventually demolished when Greenwich Pier was built – but seems to have been rebuilt itself at around the same time. They advertise  ‘an ordinary’ " which was a public dinner, which one could attend on payment.

On the other  side of the stairs was the Peter Boat Tavern.  A ‘peter boat’ was a fishing vessel. Like the "Salutation" the "Peter Boat" can be traced back to the 17th-century.

Before Greenwich Pier was built these stairs were used by ferry services. The history of Greenwich ferries is one of prolonged aggravation of various sorts and, I will save all that for another article. Cross river ferry services operated from various places along the Riverside – we have already noted them at various sites in the part of Greenwich west of the Creek and in central Greenwich the cross river ferry had moved to the end of the Horseferry Road in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  Garden Stairs appears to have taken mainly services coming down river from London – then as now, only today they use Greenwich Pier.

In 1818 - PASSAGE BOAT to and from LONDON and GREENWICH, 6d. each . ..... these boats, affording superior accommodation and shelter, start, hourly, from Tower Stairs to Greenwich, and from Garden Stairs, Greenwich, to Tower Stairs, every day’

Fast forward to 1927  ‘JOHN WOOD and CO., wishes to inform their Friends and the Public in General, that their BOATS continue going every hour to and from, Garden Stairs, Greenwich, to the Tower Stairs, London .... by their punctuality and good conduct, they will have a continuance of the same’

I am riveted to find a newspaper report of 1894 about a proposed ‘Free Ferry’ between Greenwich and Millwall. Both the Great Eastern Railway Company and the Greenwich Pier Company, were involved and ‘the committee recommended the site at the east end Greenwich Pier, and failing that the one on the west Garden-stairs...... the Vestry should appoint a deputation to wait upon the London County Council’. The Woolwich Free Ferry had opened in 1889- but in the end Greenwich got its foot tunnel’.

There were also public and sporting events centered on Garden Stairs:

In 1829 THE SALUTATION SAILING CLUB ..... on Wednesday next ... skiffs and square-sterned wherries, for a Silver Cup and other prizes   ...  to start from off Garden-stairs ....there will be five boats ....the prizes are four Cups, and various money

And in 1830 GREENWICH CORONATION REGATTA   .....The entire front of the town of Greenwich, river, and its banks, were crowded with spectators ..... the double attraction of the Peterboat sailing-match, and the annual contest among the young Greenwich watermen ....   for a new Wherry. .... rowed for in live heats ...... blue, pink, green, and orange, accordingly took their respective stations ... at the conclusion of an arduous struggle ...... the two first men took their stations below Garden-stairs, and were started down with the tide  ...... Green .......... maintained the lead throughout and on arriving at the prize wherry, which was stationed at the Hospital, he leaped into her amid enthusiastic cheering

Garden Stairs, were rebuilt in the mid 19th century as a much larger flight in stone on the built-up river wall at the west end of Greenwich Pier, where they still exist today.

 

 

 

 

 

Boundary Walk 2 - Greenwich Railway to Deptford Bridge

 

Three weeks ago I wrote here about the procession of church wardens and various officials who walked round the Greenwich boundaries in 1851 starting at St Alfege’s church vestry rooms. The procession was headed by the Superintendent of Highways, with the colours of the Greenwich Volunteers and an amateur brass band. Then came the Rev. Mr. North, of Trinity Church, with churchwardens, Evans, and Moore, two parish overseers, a group of Governors and Directors, R.S. Martyr, parish surveyor, and Mr. Kadwell, the parish treasurer.  Trinity Church, by the way, was the church which used to stand in Blackheath hill on the corner with Maidstone Hill. It’s a block of flats now but the church railings are all round the site.  I don’t know why Reverend North was doing this parish walk and not the actual priest at St Alphege’s.

First of all they went to Garden Stairs beside Greenwich Pier – which was the proper start point on the parish boundary. From there they processed along the riverside to Deptford Creek and then up the east side of the Creek.  We left them at the railway bridge where they were looking to see if they could find boundary markings on the bridge abutments. 

The report of the walk says that after leaving the railway bridge they went through ’Mr Norman’s grounds’. These were plots along the south side of the railway bridge.  The owner was John Manship Roman after whom Norman Road was named. He was a wealthy lawyer who, I presume, owned these pieces of land in Greenwich for investment reasons.

The procession then went through ‘Mr. Williams Tanyard’ which was on the edge of the Creek slightly up river of the railway bridge.  This means that they will have gone through the area which ten years later were the site of Joseph Bazalgette’s Greenwich Sewage pumping station – which, of course, is still there.  I do no
t know if any preliminary work was underway but, regardless, there is no mention of anything on the site in 1851.

So, they reached ‘Mr Williams Tanyard’. John Williams, a Bermondsey tanner, had established the works but had died in 1831. His two sons had inherited the works but had frequently quarrelled - often leading to the legal action. There appears to have been a windmill on the site, which could have been ornamental. The tannery was on the edge of the creek on land now covered by out buildings of the pumping station.

The report says that in 1827 a boundary walk had noted a marker stone here with some sort of inscription on it but in 1851 it ‘was not to be found’.  They say ‘the boys’ who are in the procession with them ‘encircled the point at the extremity of which a stump was driven in 1831 but which has also disappeared’.  I assume they mean that a marker was erected in 1831 but that it had gone by 1850. This is also the first we have heard of ‘the boys’ in the procession who I guess may have been choir boys – or perhaps just local lads following along with something which looked interesting.

When I tried to research the 1827 walk all I could find was the report of a trial for assault. This apparently described an actual fight when the procession got to Blackheath and which, inevitably involved two groups of young men.

The 1851 report also reminds us about ‘the Waterman’ who was in his boat going up the middle of the Creek which was the actual boundary line - because naturally the procession couldn’t walk on water. They said he would normally have walked up the Creek when the tide was low and of course today the Creekside Centre organises walks up the Creek at low tide.

At an island ‘called the Osier beds’ the Waterman got out of his boat and walked over to what was then another marker stone. This part of the Creek has been so churned up and altered by various owners and entities over the last two centuries it’s very difficult to be exact as to what part is being talked about here. The Osier beds are mentioned elsewhere – osiers are willows plants grown commercially to be harvested for basketwork and other such activities. These beds were, I think, on small peninsula on the Deptford side of the Creek which was the site of the Olde Tide Mill.  It has most recently been owed by Goldsmith’s College who I understand have just sold it. Comparing old maps of the Creek to the modern area is very, very difficult and even more so now following the insertion of the Docklands Light Railway above and alongside the Creek.

I wonder what happened to the missing boundary stones they keep mentioning. Often such stones get kept because they are difficult for contractors to move and they just get left when areas are changed. But what has happened here has been so drastic that I can’t imagine that even if they existed that anybody would notice them. they would just get picked up and slung into wherever all the debris was going.

The Waterman – who was still on foot and out of his boat - walked across the Osier ground ‘to where there was another stone’.  They say that on the centre of this stone was ‘a cross or mark’. I wonder what that was and I wonder what happened to the stone. He then went ‘across the island to the overflow’. I am not clear what this ‘overflow’ was. Even before the Deptford pumping station was built there were various sewers which emptied into the Creek and there were also considerable alterations to the line of the creek for various mill workings. However I rather think that the Creek may have been joined here by a tributary stream coming from the Brockley Cross area.

The report also mentions a stone on ‘the corner of Mr Cobbett’s floor cloth factory.”  I’m afraid that I seem to have missed Mr Cobbett and his floor cloth factory when I did the Deptford articles and my Depthford book. The factory seems to have been on Deptford Bridge with a frontage on the Creek. ‘Floor cloth’ is one of the predecessors of linoleum and widely made in this period. Mr Cobbett appears to have had a large and long established business.

At this point they say they were met by the parish officers and groups of boys from various Greenwich schools. Some were from ‘The Green Coat School’. This had been founded in 1672 by Sir William Boreman. It was to provide education and clothing for twenty boys born in Greenwich who were the sons of watermen, seamen and fishermen, especially if they had served in a war.  The charity was, and still is, managed by the Drapers’ Company. The School was in Prince of Orange Lane near what is now Greenwich station.

Other boys came from the ‘Grey Coat School’. This was the Roan School which is clearly still with us albeit in very different form but also originating in the 17^th century. It was based in Roan Street where there was once a pub called ‘The Grey Coat boy’.  The school was 46 Roan Street now a block of flats.  There is said to be a plaque over the door explaining all this – if any reader knows the whereabouts of this plaque please let us know, because it isn’t over the door now!!

The third group of boys came from ‘The Union School’.  This was part of the workhouse and run by the local Poor Law Union. The Workhouse was on the corner of Vanburgh Hill and Woolwich Road on the site of which is now the Library and Baths.  It was built in 1844 and included a large schoolroom. Most of the children would have been inmates at the workhouse – and I think we should say ‘hooray’ to the Greenwich vestry for including them in the procession on the same footing as the boys from the two charity – but still posher – schools. There were 25 of the Union School children present and that they appeared ‘clean and healthy was the subject of frequent remark - and which highly reflects on the management of the Union’.

Having been joined by these school boys the procession continued through to the end of Mr Williams’s tanyard and went on to ‘Mr Fearnly’s  premises in Greenwich High Road’ .This is another works which I missed in the Deptford book. James Fearnly was a coal and corn merchant on Hope Wharf – which fronted on to what is now Greenwich High Road and one of the endless blocks of new flats.  Aparently he was a land owner in Eltham.

So –eventually the entire procession proceeded to the centre of Deptford Bridge and stood in the middle of the road and sang the hundredth psalm

“All people that on Earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice;

Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell;

Come ye before him and rejoice”.

 

And then they gave ‘three cheers’.

Having reached Deptford Bridge they crossed over to the south side and began a long meandering walk towards the water works at Brookmill – which I will describe when next I come back to this long procession.  We’ve only just started really!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greenwich Highwaymen and George Landmann

 

I thought this week I should come back with another episode of the childhood of George Landmann -  the man who built the Greenwich Railway.  All of this story is taken from his autobiography,  the first volume of which is really about his youth, his birth and upbringing in the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich.  Those of you who are fed up with me going  on about George Landmann will be glad to know that once he had qualified from RMA he went off to Plymouth and then  Canada and although he probably came back to Greenwich  to visit his parents  we have to wait another 50 years before  his work on the Greenwich railway and he becomes of interest to us again. 

 So hold your breath for 50 years!.

  I’m also omitting from this description of his childhood and  youth his many accounts of expeditions and meetings with various famous people.   I would recommend anybody to read his autobiography which is amusing and interesting and full of incident but most of it is not relevant to his life in Greenwich  - and I am quite honestly not sure if all of it is true.

George says his father took a house on Blackheath in 1789 when he, George, would have been 10 years old. I’ve been unable to find out where this house was. He says it was  in ‘Sot’s Hole, also called Conduit Vale’.  That is now the area at the top of Hyde Vale where it joins West Grove. In the 18th  century there were houses on West Grove and others facing the Dover Road on areas which are now grassland.. I understand that  the late, and much missed, Neil Rhind compiled a database which has extensive information about her inhabitants of that area but there is no entry for the Landmann family. Maybe because they rented the property they don’t appear in the rate books and directories which Neil used.

We know that in 1812 the Landmann family were living at 28 Crooms Hill. George says they were at Sots Hole for only three years – so where were they from 1792 to 1812?  Did they go back to Woolwich?

Most of what George has to say about life on Black Heath is about highway men and I suppose at a site so near to the Dover Road there were some good views of them – and exciting for a young boy. He describes the robberies as ‘exceedingly frequent and perpetrated in broad daylight’ and I’m quite prepared to believe this. If you look at the local papers for these years there many reports of local  highway robberies.  In 1789, the first year in which George lived on  Blackheath, we find in just one month .........“On Saturday night three robberies were committed on the other side of Blackheath, by three men armed with cutlasses and bludgeons”.....”Saturday night a Mr. Frodshams carriage was stopped on Blackheath by a single highwayman, badly mounted, who took from him a small sum, and rode off towards London”..”On Monday night last, about o'clock, William Thomas and Samuel Goodwin were taken by the patrols upon Blackheath Road, after robbing a Captain Sproul and a lady in a chariot of their watches and some silver - they appear be the gang of footpads which have frequented the Blackheath Road for this long time past.”

George wrote about several robberies which he claims to have witnessed. He records how one Sunday evening when“well dressed inhabitants of the vicinity were prominent in Chesterfield Walk  ..when they were suddenly looking in the direction of the Green Man Tavern”This pub was just across the road on what is now the site of Allison Close – it was there until the 1970 and I’m sure there are people still around who will remember the ‘music hall’nights there.

In 1789 what people in Chesterfield Walk saw was “a man on a horse making the utmost haste on the road to London”. It appeared that this individual had intercepted a resident sitting in his garden, reading a book . He was mounted on a handsome horse and spoke politely in a friendly way to the book reader - but then got out a pistol and held it to the residents head and then rode off with his valuables.

You can be sure they all had ‘handsome horses’- today’s robbers are also said to be fussy on the quality of their cars! Next on Chesterfield Walk that day were two people who said they had just been robbed near the Rising Sun pub, by four armed men

George also records that the artist Paul Sandby, then drawing master at the Royal Military Academy, knocked on their door one evening. He had his daughter with him and said they had been stopped by a robber and both he and his daughter had lost their watches and their money. His daughter was so upset that he had brought her down the Landmann’s house so that she could sit and recover herself.

Next he tells how a General Mcleod, out with his wife, encountered a highwayman on the road to Charlton. The robber pointed a pistol at them saying he would blow their heads off if they didn’t give him their valuables. As he turned to look away the General picked up a Cologne bottle and pushed the end of it into the robbers neck, saying he would blow his head off. The robber clearly thought that what the General was holding against his neck was a pistol and immediately ran off..

George Landmann also says that every month he witnessed the transport of the money to Woolwich pay the artillery stationed there. It was taken across Blackheath with an escort of artillery officers and six private soldiers.  Three of the privates walked on each side of the post chaise carrying the money along with the pay clerk, There was a non-commissioned officer marching in the rear and the soldiers all had fixed bayonets and muskets loaded with ball.

Changing the subject from criminals on horses, George, talks about the “celebrated pickpocket Barrington”. There are a number of websites which describe the career of George Barrington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Barrington) George Landmann’s description of him as “celebrated” says a lot about the glamorisation of criminal in the early 19^th century.

When the family lived in Blackheath George was sent to a school 'of which the Rev. Dr. Egan was the master'.  James Egan had taken over 'The Royal Park Academy' in Greenwich from his father in law, Dr. Bakewell. Egan was interested in methods of teaching languages and encouraged boys to only speak either Latin or French in school and to do so in a way that 'divests instruction of harshness'.  In 1786 the school had won a national prize for its methods of teaching Latin to school boys by making learning fun. It should be noted that as an adult George Landmann spoke several languages fluently.

George says that the school was 'close to the new church, at the corner of King Street, and is now converted into tea gardens'  - somewhere near the park gate at the top end of King William Street. George's 'new church' was St.Mary's –now long gone and which stood on the site now taken by William IV's enormous statue.

Once in his teens George became a cadet at the Royal Military Academy and gave great descriptions of classes there and of the various members of staff who worked alongside his father. I might do an article on that in due course.