Woolwich Power Station - and the boy killed across the River

 

I had been thinking for some time that if I ever finish my book about George Livesey I will do the next one about Public Utilities in the Borough of Greenwich.  I think I’ve covered most of them in these articles but I’m aware of an omission.  I have never done anything about Woolwich  Power Station, monumental and efficient – so perhaps this is the time to do it.

Woolwich Power Station itself dates from around 1890 when an organisation called Woolwich District Electric Light Company  was set up to build a power station  in Woolwich -  desite plans by Ferranti’s Deptford based London Electricity Supply Company to supply Woolwich.  The shareholders were all Woolwich politicians and the message was that ownership of power should be local and that big corporations were not wanted.  I assume this is a response to the closure by the South Metropolitan Gas Company in 1888 of the two Woolwich gas companies. 

We need to keep in mind that Woolwich Metropolitan Borough Council as we understand it, only dates from 1900. One of their first acts appears to have  been the takeover and municipalisation of the erstwhile private electricity company

Woolwich Borough was an amalgamation of three district boards. One of the others was Plumstead Board who with an outstanding engineer in Frank Sumner had begun to build a state-of-the-art generating station in White Hart Road.  This was to generate power from Plumstead’s waste and included many other features which we would see today as green and outstanding . It was only the second such  generating plant to be built.  In 1900 it was still not operational and Woolwich  inherited it and opened it in 1903..

I am not clear if the street lights were converted to electricity from gas. The South Metropolitan Gas Company was making some very advantageous offers to local authorities  and the incandescent light was coming in - some of which had been taken up by Plumstead . However Woolwich politicians were not impressed with incandescent light and I suspect were busy converting everything to electricity made in Woolwich.

In-1906 Woolwich Council was presented with a report which had been commissioned from elite civil engineer Alexander Kennedy.  This is many pages long and absolutely damning about the situation with the power stations in Woolwich.  It says in great detail that the finances are unsupportable and that there is a very low customer base. I don’t entirely understand why that is but I wonder if all the huge government institutions in Woolwich were being supplied by another source,  maybe in the Arsenal.  He also infers but doesn’t say that it’s madness to try to support two power stations and gives considerable detail of how things can be changed - which on the whole point to a down grading of the Plumstead destructor and generating station.

Nevertheless Woolwich power station itself flourished.  It was built on the site which is now partly covered by the Woolwich Leisure Centre but mainly what used to be their car park. It was part of what had been Roff's Wharf on the site of some boat repair facilities in Globe Lane.

From 1912 they concentrated electricity supply from the Globe Lane works and considerate expansion took place then with a large turbine hall being added, along with a boiler house and chimneys and a cooling system which involved a tunnel under the river - does this still exist?  In the course of the work timbers from a Tudor warship were discovered.

Everything seemed to be going well but in 1920 the station was involved in an accident so bizarre that I would not have believed the story to be true that hadn’t seen official  coverage.

On the 29^th of November 1920 Maurice Pettit, aged 15, an apprentice bricklayer, had left his home in Wickham Way and made his way to the Woolwich foot tunnel, and  having  walked through it got on a bus where a seat had been saved on the upper deck.  It was 5 minutes past 7 am.

 In Woolwich Power Station William Cottle, the shift engineer was getting ready to set up extra capacity for the morning’s work load. He had been instructed to start No. 4 set and in about ten minutes had a speed of 3, 00 revolutions a minute and the governor had control of the speed.  He was then told to lower it but instead the set started to race. He tried to deal with this and there were several things he could do. At first he expected the seed to decrease but it still increased. He tried to close the valve but he was then hit by flying metal and remembered nothing after that. It should have shut off automatically, but it didn’t.  Later ‘experts ‘said the governor for one reason or another failed to carry out its proper functions with the result that the alternator burst and the set had been  reduced to scrap iron. One of the pieces, of the now demols4hed machine struck the steam rotor of the next largest set and debris flew everywhere.”

Over in North Woolwich  Maurice walked  up  the stairs of the bus, and went to the front where his friend had saved his seat.  He started to unbutton his coat and then he fell down. On the bus there was shaking and terrible confusion, and an explosion seemed to come from the other side of the  water’.  Maurice was lying on the floor in the gangway and a piece of metal was beside him . He had a large wound in his back and a fracture of the spine . He had died very quickly..

In the power station itself same other workers were injured— William Cottle. Plumstead. The driver the machine with minor injuries to the head; William Henry Stiff, charge hand, Charlton  with injuries to head and legs; and Robert Dally, Bow with injuries to head and face.. Dally was removed to Plumctead Infirmary, and was there detained.

I have been unable to find a report of this accident other than the inquest report in the local newspaper. Woolwich Council a month later awarded less than “£100 to Maurice's family in respect of loss of his income but without admitting liability.  There was very considerable damage to the power station building as well as the machinery yet there is no report of this to the electricity committee  in the local papers. Sadly of course the Minutes of the Committee are inaccessible in the Greenwich archive. Let’s hope it was insured

The earliest buildings on the site were replaced in 1924–28 and new machinery installed. The engine-house elongated and re-equipped – the work overseen by G. W. Keats, the Council’s Electrical Engineer. The Council continued to take a proudly progressive role in promoting the use of domestic electricity.  In  1930 Globe Lane was closed and the reinforced-concrete lattice-framed coaling jetty that still stand line was built to designs by John Sutcliffe, Borough Engineer.  Later the irregular river walls were re-laid and straightened.

It was further expanded in the 1930s and was the only power station in the country built by direct labour. It had art deco decoration as befitted a town centre building with three fluted chimneys as a local landmark. It was notably efficient and  from 1934 was a ‘selected’ station under the Central Electricity Board, its supply linked into the National Grid. It was not fully brought into use until 1948, when, following nationalisation, the British Electricity Authority ran the station.

 There were more changes in 1952–7.  Given the town centre location, an architectural effort was made. Vertical ‘special brick’ strips in glazed-panel walls added a loosely Art Deco veneer, and extensions of the older buildings to the south onto Market Hill gave the complex coherence from the High Street. Perimeter walls and railings went up only in the early 1960s.  The three chimneys  which rose 263ft were a local landmark, fluted ‘for balance and dignity’ There were further slum clearances east of the power station making room for a huge coal yard that extended up to the Arsenal.

But Woolwich Power Station soon came to be outmoded. In 1978 Generation stopped in 1978 and it was demolished the following year. The first chimney was demolished by hand in 1988.  The remaining two by explosives in 1979. The site of the main power station building then became the Waterfront Leisure Centre car park; part of the coaling jetty remains but in 2020 the car park was sold to Berkeley homes and it became part of the Royal Arsenal development.

And – what about the destructor station in Plumstead. Throughout its  existence it has been used as a depot and most lately by Crossrail.  Its listed buildings are the major remains of Woolwich electricity generating.  That and the long jetty on the riverside.