So, we have just learnt that a previously unremarkable piece of Greenwich is now the same as Stonehenge ... and we can all go and see it and then tell people about it. Greenwich is now not only the ‘home of time’ but also, more recently, has become the ‘home of communication’.
What is all this about? I thought I should write something for people who don’t know anything about Enderby Wharf and why it is historically so important . Well, the fuss is about some structures on the Greenwich Riverside which have been given official status as historic monuments. So if you don’t know what I’m talking - about this is for you!
A group of us have been going on about this for some time. Some years ago a few or us got together and called ourselves ’The Enderby Group’ hoping to persuade the authorities that the then derelict riverside site of Enderby Wharf was more interesting than just being somewhere to stick a few more flats. To be perfectly honest no one took much notice.
But, now, the machinery on the Enderby jetty has been ‘scheduled’ by Historic England rather than ‘listed’ – and that is a measure of its importance. This old machinery was used to get communication cables from the factory and onto a ship. Originally they were telegraph cables, but this machinery is later and was installed for intenational telephone cables..
There was a time when - for many years - if you stood on the riverside at Enderby, for more than two minutes , some old fellow would come along and say ’ ah, yes, this is where Great Eastern loaded up the Atlantic cable and went off and joined us up to America’.
Well that’s not quite true. Brunel’s amazing giant ship, Great Eastern, was built just the other side of the river at Millwall but she was far too big to get into Enderby Wharf. So, to load the cable she was moored downriver and the cable was loaded onto hulks which took the cable and loaded it onto Great Eastern. In pictures of it being loaded, all the time it was watched and there’s always a line of men sitting on stools staring at the cable . Whatever happened it must have no faults, so it was watched continually to make sure there were none.
There is of course a whole big back story to all this. And I must admit that the Americans have a rather different version one - but bother them!. In the mid-19th century before Great Eastern there had been years of planning and the ways of making cables suitable for being laid underwater in the greatest oceans had been developed here.
First there had been the development of the idea that people across the world could communicate with each other by the means of cables laid under the sea . To start with it was just tapping a morse code but it was completely revolutionary - and was the start of the process which has led us to the Net becoming an everyday feature of all our lives. But it still uses the cables to carry all the messages.
When the Atlantic cable was being planned there had already been some international communication cables laid to more nearby places but the Atlantic cable was always the big one and it would be followed by others –like the India cable - and then, well, the rest of the world. For the first half century and more nearly all of that cable was made here, in Greenwich.
There had already been two attempts to lay the cable when they brought Great Eastern in. They had previously used old warships but they were never big enough to take the whole cable for the whole stretch across the Atlantic. Great Eastern was big enough to take the whole lot at once along with factory and laboratory facilities and some nice accommodation for the numerous men who needs to go with her.
Using Great Eastern in 1865 they got some way across and then lost the cable in the deep of the Atlantic Ocean and they ended up having to go back and start again and of course raise all the money to pay for it too,
The next year, 1866, Great Eastern went down the River, cable loaded and on some jetties bands played ‘Goodbye sweetheart’. The cable was to he laid from Valentia in Ireland -the most westerly part of Europe. Valentia is a great place and they have a little museum there to show off the start of the Atlantic Cable. This time Great Eastern =made it to Heart’s Content in Newfoundland - and there’s a little museum to the Atlantic Cable there too! A few years ago there was a bid for a long thin World Heritage Site all the length of the cable across the Atlantic. In 1866 with the cable laid there were great rejoicings - particularly in the world of international finance.
But what happened next is even more interesting. Having laid the cable to Hearts Content Great Eastern turned round and went off back into the winter Atlantic. It was dangerous and nobody heard of her for weeks - and it was assumed =that she had been lost. But no, eventually needles began to flicker on the ends of that earlier broken cable of the previous attempt. Out there somewhere in the vast Atlantic the men on Great Eastern had found that broken cable; they’d fished it up; they’d spliced it and mended it and now it was working.
That is such a pivotal moment in the world of communication -from thinking that ship was lost to all London and New York knowing she was safe – the start of the modern world.
I could carry on and I talk a lot more about what happened at the factory in Blackwall Lane and how the whole world was first stitched together with cables made there. How Great Easter was painted white and laid the cable to India. We only have to look at the recent cable failure to the island of Tonga to realise how dependent on it we all are now! But today cables are not made in Greenwich –and I haven’t got space to write here the development of fibre optics and about the Nobel Prize which went to Charles Kao.
We need to get back to those old fellows who used to stand on the Riverside at Enderbys there and tell people about Great Eastern and the Atlantic Cable. There’s a lot more there to see than just equipment on the jetty. I told Carol I would write about the steps because she organised work on them - maybe 20 years ago - and she’s getting a bit worried that they need renovation and repair and people need to know to look out for them.
The steps covered a mediaeval sluice which had been built to drain the marsh and that was there until the housing development started. The steps themselves were used to take people down to a ferry which went out to the great ships that used to stand out in the River. When Carol had them done up she had carved on them The History of Cable Making.
And that of course reminds me of all the ships that used to stand out in the river - the cable ships - the ships that went out into terrible storms to mend broken cables out in the oceans of the world. There were always people taking photographs or painting them . It was a great subject for artists. The final ship was the John W.Mackay which was there as a sort of monument until it fell to bits. It was always said that it was painted up when the Queen came down the River except that they only painted it on the side she would see! There is a ‘deep’ the river there where these very specialist vessels would moor and the cable loaded on them.
Of course before the cable makers came to Enderby Wharf it was used by the actual Enderby family themselves and before them there was quite a rope walk. The length of the rope walk went right down the site and lasted right up until the very recent developments. You could walk down the river to the pen stocks for the sluice and if you turned yourself round and looked down to Blackwall Lane you could see the length of the rope walk - and I’m sorry that isn’t included the development.
J then of course there is Enderby House which I really haven’t got the time to go into detail about except that it is now a pub. I think local people need to get them to stock leaflets about the history of the site and get them to understand that the history of the site is not just about jolly sailors and great voyages but also about the way that world communication was basically founded on this site.
There are several other things to see - most recently is Bobby Lloyd’s sculpture ‘Ley Lines’ which looks like a little picnic place but in fact is a an artwork depicting various lengths of cable types .
Add so we need to make sure that the work of lobbying about Enderby Wharf continues . Perhaps I should introduce you briefly to Alan who was once until quite recently an international journalist working on telecoms magazines who was responsible forgetting this scheduling of the gear on thejetty through. Someone else is Bill in New York who runs a massive Atlantic Cable website which I would recommend everybody to look at if you want to know about cables . There is also Stuart who knows an enormous amount about cable history. He’s written a number of books and numerous articles you’ll find references to them all on Bill’s website .
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