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 .