Last week I wrote about Greenwich parks and gardens and how they related to local past industry. I mentioned the new Green Greenwich Book and the entry in it for St.Mary Magdalene churchyard in Woolwich. In 1892 it had been redesigned as a garden by Fanny Wilkinson, the first female professional landscape gardener. Then in 1966 it was upgraded by Woolwich Council to become a park. As a result most of the tombstones were removed and stacked around the perimeter and only the monument to Woolwich champion bare knuckle boxer, Tom Cribb, remained.
I said in my article last week that I knew of a rescue attempt not mentioned in Green Greenwich. This was for part of the tomb of Henry Maudslay - he had designed the tomb surrounded by railings himself but what was rescued were panels with an inscription.
In 1982, and after four years of negotiation and a change in church law, a group of historians got a number of young men from the military in Woolwich to help them remove the pieces of the tomb. Apparently these pieces were taken to the National Maritime Museum store in the Brass Foundry in the Royal Arsenal. There were three historians - Ralph Burnett and Jack Vaughan, President and Chair of Woolwich Antiquarians, and Alan Pearsall, historian at the National Maritime Museum. It was Jack who told me about it and gave me the photographs.
So who was Henry Maudslay and why were they so interested in him. Maudslay was an extremely important 19th century engineer. He was Woolwich born and trained in the Arsenal before moving on to other companies and eventually to setting up his own important works. In an outstanding career perhaps the most important thing was his invention of a metal lathe which enabled the manufacture of standard screw thread sizes. He did this by repeated testing and using his enormous skill. He made this first machine with an accurate screw which can be replicated to make others rapidly.
Maudslay came from very poor background. In Woolwich his parents lived in Salutation Alley - a small and very impoverished street behind what was the Granada Cinema - now the Ebenezer Building. His father had been a soldier but, wounded and disabled and he worked in the Arsenal as a storekeeper Henry was born in 1771 and from the age of 12 was employed in the Arsenal making and filling cartridges. He later worked in the Carpenter’s Shop and then the Blacksmith’s Shop but never as a formal apprentice. From the start he was exceptionally skilled and his work was admired by everyone - including the older skilled craftsmen. When he was eighteen he was recruited to work for Bramah in central London.
Bramah had designed
and patented an unpickable lock. Maudslay made a set of tools that allowed the lock
to be made at an economic price and followed this with much else. Along with his
screw-cutting lathe which allowed standardisation of screw thread sizes
for the first time, he produced a set of taps and dies that would make nuts and
bolts consistently so that any bolt of the appropriate size would fit any nut
of the same size..[3 He also invented
the first bench micrometer capable of measuring to one ten-thousandth of an
inch.]
These were major advances in workshop technology enabling new steam driven
machinery to be made much more accurately and very much faster – with all sorts
of implications on issues like costs and safety.
In 1797, after
having worked for Bramah for eight years, Maudslay set up his own business and
by 1810 was employing 80 workers. The
firm moved to larger premises in Lambeth and included Joseph Field and eventually Maudslay’s sons. Working for
the Navy in association with Sir Marc Brunel Maudslay built a series of 42
woodworking machines to make wooden rigging blocks. These machines could make 130,000
blocks a year, needing only ten unskilled men to operate them - an early
example of specialised machinery for assembly-line production
Maudslay's Lambeth
works specialised in the production of marine steam engines. His first marine
engine was built in 1815, fitted to a Thames steamer named the Richmond.
In 1823 a Maudslay engine powered Lightning, the first
steam-vessel to be commissioned by the Royal Navy. In 1829 a side-lever engine for HMS Dee was the largest marine engine at
the time.[4]This work and
more innovation continued longer after Maudslay’s deaty.
In 1825 Marc Brunel
began work on the first under water tunnel –the Thames Tunnel now the tube line
between Rotherhithe and Wapping. To build at an innovative tunneling shield was
designed and made by Maudslay Sons &
Field at their Lambeth works. Maudslay also supplied the steam-driven pumps
that kept the tunnel workings dry.]
Many outstanding
engineers trained in his workshop, including Richard Roberts, David Napier, Joseph
Clement, Sir Joseph Whitworth, and James Nasmyth. Maudslay thus played a part in the development
of mechanical engineering as part of a technological revolution
Henry Maudslay died
on 14[13] February 1831 and was buried in Woolwich.
His sons and grandsons continued with the works . In the 1860s the company set
up a shipbuilding yard in Greenwich,where Blackadder, Halloween and two
Bospherous ferrres wer nbuilt. It later
became a boiler factory . In the 1890s
grandson Herbert Maudsley cancelled a meeting with landowners Morden College
about disposal of the site of this failing Greenwich factory because he was ‘too
busy sailing at Cowes’.
The firm went out
of business entirely in the early 20th century and a three day
auction was held in Greenwich of all the effects of the company including
everything from the Lambeth works. The
Science Museum were allowed to view items before the sale started and several items went directly to them Maudslay's original screw-cutting lathe was
one of the items they took and it is
sometimes displayed.
Although most of
his life was spent working and living outside of Woolwich Maudslay always
remembered his life there and was eventually buried at his own request in what
is now Churchfielda in what was the graveyard of St.Mary Magdalene. There has always been a mixed response in
Greenwich to honouring any of the many, many important engineers and
technicians who lived and worked locally. Maudsley is the only one of them to be
included in the stained glass windows in Woolwich Town Hall. He doesn’t quite
make the Victoria Hall along with Henry VIII and Elizabeth but he does have a
section in the windows in the Public Hall at the back of the Town Hall complex.
Maudsley had designed his own iron tomb and tombstone and sadly this was cleared in 1966 in order to turn the churchyard into a park . Thus the work done many years later by the group of historians to rescue the plaque from the tombstone and to preserve it,
Initially these pieces – three cast iron plates - were stored in the Royal Brass foundry by the National Maritime Museum but later they came into the possession of developer Barclay Homes. They were then acquired by the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust in 2018 and they are now at Anchorage Point store. The trust investigated getting them conserved in 2022, but it was prohibitively expensive.
The inscription: ‘To
the memory of Henry Maudslay born in this parish 1773 died at Lambeth February
15th 1831 a zealous promoter of the Arts and Sciences, evidently
distinguished as an engineer for mathematical accuracy and beauty of
construction, as a man for industry and perseverance and as a friend for a kind
and benevolent heart.
In writing this article I have had some difficulty in getting facts together. All three of the historians involved have since died. I had the photographs and a brief note from Jack and Julian Watson too – and as ever great thanks to him has managed to dig out a very very brief report from a Woolwich Antiquarians Newsletter from the 1980s.
There are a number of questions in my mind about the whole episode which I cannot find any information on. What were the original negotiations which enabled the tombstone pieces to be removed from the churchyard? What was the change in the law? I’m also far from sure who the young men in the photograph are. I vaguely remember that they were from some sort of army apprenticeship scheme. Are any
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