One reason why I have been doing so many articles about Greenwich shipbuilding is that I hope soon to produce a booklet about it and so it’s all in my head at the moment. I always hope that these articles get read by people who will get back to me if they think I’ve got it wrong. There is one subject I’ve always been very nervous writing about - because I know there are lots of enthusiasts out there – and that is the red sailed sailing barges which all over the River when I was a girl.
I first started writing about Greenwich industry in the 1990s and often sent articles off to Bygone Kent for publication. Bygone Kent was then edited by the late Pat O’Driscoll. Pat had worked on a sailing barge as a young woman and had then been a journalist specialising in articles about the River and had edited various publications on barges. When I sent in my articles about Greenwich industry and Greenwich history generally she usually agreed them and they went straight off to the printer. However if they were about sailing barges she didn’t trust a word I wrote and off my article would go to one of the experts down in Kent somewhere and she would get them to rewrite it. Things are different now but I still feel that writing an article on sailing barges is a bit risky.
Clearly there have been barges of one sort or another on the River since considerably before the Stone Age but we can only experience for ourselves barges which date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There was a time, which I can remember as a child in the 1940s, when you could see sailing barges stacked in the river at Gravesend, all of them still at work. In the late 1960s in Greenwich I met men who were still working barges on the River . So these sailing vessels survived at work over hundred years after powered vessels had become normal on the River.
These barges were immensely practical and dealt with most of the heavy haulage of London river and beyond – carrying the bricks, the corn, the rubbish and everything else, and doing it cheaply and reliably. This was a large industry of haulage operators many of whom we’re very wealthy.
Most of the barges could go into coastal waters - in fact have seen websites complaining that since they are describing river boats they can’t include Thames sailing barges because they were designed to go out of the estuary to the south and east coasts. They were flat bottomed to allow them to use the small creeks around the estuary in order to serve the many mills and other industrial sites on them. They needed to be easily manoeuvrable and to be able to function with a minimal staff.
Being powered by the wind made them even cheaper to run - but I will leave the technicalities of the sails to the many websites which describe them. However the sails and masts had to be able to come down quickly if the barge was expected to go up river – perhaps to industrial areas like Brentford and beyond - and they had to be able to get under many bridges to get there. I remember meeting a chap who as a boy had done that trip regularly - but, he said, ‘ all we had to eat was Campbell’s Soup’.
Greenwich was a centre for building these barges. Many of the articles I’ve written in the past mention some of these sites. One major boat building site was Pipers which was on what is now Riverside Gardens and Piper specialised in very high quality racing barges. Nearby them were several other barge builders - Hughes on Providence Wharf and also Badcock. Before them there had been many others about who we know very little. There was also Shrubsall right the way down the Peninsular at Point Wharf - down near where the Bullet from a Shooting Star sculpture is now. Edmunds were also in the area. Then, right up where the Ecology Centre is now, was Norton’s.
Perhaps I should also explain about the barge racing which was a major feature in the design of some of the barges built in Greenwich. These races had begun in the late 19th century when some of the big operating companies and their customers put up quite large sums of money as prizes for race winning barges – and some barges were built with race wins in mind rather than the haulage industry. The races still take place but the number of participants today is restricted to those few remaining barges which are capable of taking part.
The fact that they took part in races also says something about their speed. For many of these barges it’s wasn’t just about getting the cargoes around but that they could move quickly if necessary - of course if the wind was right. I’m not going to claim that I’ve ever had much to do with the world of sailing barges – and perhaps I’m too easily impressed - but in the 1970s I went on holiday on Xylonite. She is a steel barge named for one of the earliest plastics. We were in Faversham and one day her owner/operator said we would go to Harwich. Now, Faversham to Harwich is not an easy journey by road or rail but it turns out to be quite straightforward by water. You get out into the estuary, turn left and then straight up the coast to Harwich. So we went out into the estuary and he turned into the wind to go north up the coast - and she just took off! This fairly plain vessel went over on her side and rocketed up to Harwich...and, as I said, she isn’t one of the fastest barges. Impressive.
There are numerous websites giving vast amounts of detail on sailing barges. I was particularly taken with an article on shipping wonders of the world (https://www.shippingwondersoftheworld.com/thames_barges.html). It describes barges at the time when they were still operating commercially. I found it very interesting and it describes in detail the sailing rig and why it works, as well as other construction issues which I can’t possibly begin to even describe.
However we are looking at barges built in Greenwich and there are quite a lot of them, very, very many that we know nothing about. I thought I would pick on a couple of them and just described a small amount about them. As far as I know the only Greenwich built barge afloat is Orinoco which I wrote about last week.
The most famous Greenwich barge - in fact, some people will claim, the most famous of all barges was Giralda built by Piper’s in 1897 as a racing barge and using all sorts of special design features. Of course the race organisers expected the racing barges to be able to prove that they could also carry all the bricks and rubbish and stuff up and down the river like all the other barges. Giralda was never actually good at that but she was extremely good at winning races. Enthusiast web sites give details of her designers and of the various men who commanded her during races. And also of her really rather ignominious later career.
Another famous Greenwich built barge and race winner was Veronica built at Shrubsalls in 1906 and eventually hulked in 1976. There were many details about her and some relics at the Dolphin Sailing Barge Museum in Sittingbourne. The museum had closed down and I’m not sure if they have ever reopened - I suspect not. I don’t know what has happened to the exhibits and pieces of barges like Veronica. I understand that her mast is (or was) holding up the roof at Gravesend’s Riverview Park Library. She was hulked - that means left to rot - down on the mud flats on the river Swale, near the crossing over onto the Isle of Sheppey.
I remember going to a Docklands History group back in the early 1980s where the most unlikely people were all claiming that they owned various of these abandoned vessels. They all said they were going to restore them even though many of the barges consisted of no more than a few planks sticking out of the mud and I am- sure that none of them ever sailed again,
When I first started writing about sailing barges for my first book about the Greenwich Peninsula there were still two Greenwich barges, made by Pipers, afloat. One of these was the James Piper. Alan and I went up to see her where she was still moored at Chiswick Mall and used as someone’s home. I thought she was most impressive and the vast space of the living room accommodation was amazing. owever she has since been broken up and there is a very upsetting and brutal film on YouTube of this being done . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqp03pwG4Vo
The other barge was Wilfred which had being used for many years as a Spanish restaurant on the Embankment. Only last year, in January 2024, she capsized in a storm and was raised but then towed away. There are websites which say she has gone to be broken up but I am not sure exactly what has happened to her.
Thames sailing barges are an interesting and very involved subject. There’s at least one replica barge built a few years ago – others use some of the ideas behind them when they were commonly operational. There is an awful lot written about them which I could only be begin to vaguely touch on here. Not only has a lot been written about their operation but there are huge numbers of enthusiasts and of course many of the people who operate the few that are left are very much involved in promoting them. Whatever I say here, quite honestly, is very inadequate.
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