LOCAL GOVERNMENT 1066 to the Poor Law

Every week I write about all sorts of things and I assume you know what I’m talking about if I mention past local government – ‘manor courts’ ....’the wallscot’ .... ‘metropolitan borough’ in regard to the history of Greenwich and Woolwich. But maybe you don’t know as much as I think you do.

I think its quite a story about how our current system of local government evolved – although I’m sure that if I went back to the Roman occupation they had it all sorted out. I will probably only go as far back as the Domesday Book - because it is a change, an attempt to impose order and – crucially - its something we all know about. 

I also think that yet again I’m going to have to do it in instalments. If I only do the background to the Royal Borough it will be long and complex even without any detail.  Greenwich and Woolwich were very different to each other and need to be looked at individually.  This might sound awfully boring but there’s lots of strange bits and pieces, particularly in the history of Greenwich.  In addition there are other local areas with their own administrative histories – Charlton, Plumstead, Kidbrook and Eltham.  I need to do them all separately.  I’ll also look at any relevant buildings.  

The underlying premise is that the parish is the basic body concerned with local administration but - as we will see -even that is not straightforward in our area. 

So I will begin with Greenwich - from Domesday to selling off Greenwich Town Hall.

Until about 120 years ago Greenwich and Woolwich were in the county of Kent - the County of London is quite a recent thing.  If you look at histories of local government in England the division into counties makes them a sort of a basic unit of local government. Kent is unique in its great age and background: it was the Kingdom of Kent and when William the Conqueror came along in 1066 and conquered England he apparently didn’t conquer Kent and its integration with rest of the country under the Normans was done by negotiation.   So we have ‘Invicta’ as the county badge: the little white horse on its hind legs . There used to be anInvicta badge on what had been  Garrett’s department store in Powis Street, Woolwich.  So, first of all, when I’m writing about Greenwich before 1900 and mention ‘Kent’ - that is the context and why.

It’s also worth pointing out that Greenwich is right on the boundary of the counties of Kent and Surrey.  That boundary has changed a lot over the years and I’m not going into all the details -  which are definitely complex.  But - for those of you who want to go and look at things - up at the end of Plough Way in Rotherhithe on the riverfront is a monument to what was once the boundary between Kent and Surrey which was once that far away from Greenwich. Thev boundary has only recently moved to Watergate Street and you need to be aware of how it’s changed If you want to make sense of some things which happened in the past of our area.     

However at the same time within the system of counties were subsections called ‘hundreds’ and there would have been several within the area which we know as Greenwich and Woolwich. The one which covered Greenwich is called Blackheath. Hundreds are said to have been one of the most important bodies in local government of up until the present system was instituted .They are said to have officers – constables, justices and various others. I find this very difficult as I’ve never seen any reference to them in operation.

One of their features was that they each had a place – an outdoor meeting place designated where everybody (men only?) could and take place in some sort of assembly . I’ve known about this for a long time and as a nerdy teenager I went looking for the meeting place of the Toltingtrough Hundred - which is the one which covered Gravesend - and it seemed to be in the middle of a big ploughed field and I didn’t have the nerve to walk across and see if I could find it.  I am curious about all this. Why is it that I have never seen anything about these meetings? Who could go to them?  What did they discuss? There is some reference to appointing  officers but what were the procedures? How did they do it? And why do we never hear anything about it?

And so - back to 1066! Once in occupation, in 1086 the Normans produced the Domesday Book which in many ways sets the scene for local government for the next 1000 or so years. Domesday Book lists the manorial ownership of every site and throughout the Middle Ages local areas were identified through their Manor and its lord. There are several entries for the area now covered by the London Borough of Greenwich.

 I said I would look first at Greenwich but it is the most complicated of the entries for our area and will need some explanation. There are a number of articles in Greenwich local history publications about this which describe how the Greenwich local history staff unravelled what it all meant. Please don’t take this as best version of the problem.  It appears that in the Domesday Book ‘Greenwich’ refers to the area now which we would see as Deptford.  What we think of as ‘Greenwich’ is included in the entry for Lewisham. Most of Lewisham and the area which we would see now as Greenwich was then in the ownership of St. Peter’s Abbey in Ghent.  They had a facility on the Greenwich riverside in the area now known as Ballast Quay. This has all become of interest recently following the discovery of a 12^th century tide mill adjacent to the site which is assumed to have had some connexion with the Abbey and has highlighted ideas about the economy of the area. Sadly it has never been written up by the archaeologists.

What became the Manor of East Greenwich has a very interesting history in relation to its ownership by the Crown and later to charitable bodies. This includes its later use as a legal entity which could be used by those living outside England who needed to be a tenant of a manor in order to complete some legal process. It could almost be said that ’everyone in America is a tenant of the Manor of East Greenwich’. There are books and websites which will explain this manoeuvre clearly and precisely - while anything I say is a gross simplification.

One of the most important functions  of local government is to  look after those people who are unable to care for themselves – what we would describe as social services. Traditionally much of such work was administered by various religious organisations but I don’t know how regularised this was.  Henry VIII’S dissolution of the monastrys must have caused many crises. The City of London was able to purchase Bart’s and Bethlehem Hospitals from the Crown – but not every area could raise money like the City.

What emerged from this situation was the Elizabethan Poor Law and this again is a much more complicated set of legislation than it first appears. It sets up what we now would understand as the system of administrative responsibility for those unable to care for themselves. We go on and on about Queen Elizabeth, Gloriana  and the Armada and all that but this body of legislation set up a solid framework based on the parishes.  Over the past 400 years it has changed as ideas on social care have changed but the basis of local care for those in need remains.  So by the early 17^th century things were looking a lot more like local government today and bodies gradually had to employ officers who could go round and sort out the various problems and very much taking on a role that we would expect local government officers to deal with now.

The parishes then were St Alfege for Greenwich east of the Creek, and St Nicholas west of the Creek to the Surrey border. St Paul’s Deptford,which now takes up a part of what was once St Nicholas, but is now in Surrey, was a new parish formed in 1730.

An administrative area of great importance to us here in Greenwich is the legislation around the management of marshlands . Clearly most local marsh had been embanked and sea walls built at a time when few records were kept.  Throughout the Middle Ages governments appointed bodies of local worthies as Commissioners who would keep an eye on the Marshlands and order work as necessary. There is a formula for management based on that for Romney Marsh - where the great Dymchurch Wall has employed maintenance staff  since the Middle Ages.  In the 1620s a body was set up to manage Greenwich Peninsula consisting of land owners in a sort of committee who met on a regular basis at the Old Green Man pub on Blackheath.

I think this might be a good place to stop and carry on in a future episode as administration begins to take on a form which we would recognise where they’re setting up of various local boards And of course there will be some buildings we can look at. This has just been about Greenwich and as I said Woolwich as a rather different history but rather later and all the local areas the smaller have their own stories which I can come to in due course.

Boundary walk 11 - back to Greenwich

 

I think it’s probably about time I got back to the boundary walk around the Greenwich parish boundary in 1851.  It was weeks ago since I did the last – the 10^{th -} - episode of this and I really need to get on with it. This one will be the last one and it will take the procession back to the start point of their walk.

For those of you who haven’t been following this over the last year - it’s about a procession round the Greenwich parish boundaries in 1851. This was quite a common thing to do towards the end of the 19h century: the vicar and churchwardens would arrange for one of these walks every few years and it was quite a big thing. The procession would be some of the parish officials, various local bigwigs, the choir boys and children from all the  local schools - including the workhouse school. They would start in the morning from Garden Stairs, near Greenwich Pier, and walk right round the boundary -  and have all sorts of adventures on the way - and it took all day. Clearly the area was very different to what it is now – but perhaps not as different as we like to think.  

I’ve been using the 1851 newspaper report of the walk that year. I’ve also used a report from 1980 of a replica walk which was done that year as a sort of memorial and to see what was still there and  what wasn’t. A report of this walk was published only in 2022 by Greenwich Historical Society. In 1851 the boundary was still marked with stones and posts and very few of them have survived and most of the ones that were noted in 1980 have now gone.

So, I left the last episode which I did of the walk somewhere down near Woolwich Road. That episode had been particularly difficult because it  had followed a section of the walk which started at the gates of Rectory Field in Charlton Road and gone downhill through what in 1850 was an area of big houses and fields. Now it is all early 20^th century housing built with little regard for what the area was like in the 1850s.  The walk seemed to follow what may have been a footpath going from what is now the Catholic Church in Charlton Road and ending up in Dupree Road and then into Woolwich Road.  In 1980 the walkers simply gave up trying to work it out and just went down Victoria Way. I suspect they were probably pretty tired by then anyway.

One problem as reported in the local paper Is that it fails to mention that you need to cross the railway. The walk as reported in the local paper took  place in 1851 - Charlton Station is a very short distance from where the  boundary line crosses the railway and dates from 1849 – just two years earlier.  This was the North Kent Line: remember that it was the 1870s before the link through to Greenwich Station to Charlton was put in.  So in 1851 the railway they crossed was the North Kent Line coming from Blackheath through the Blackheath tunnel. It seems very strange that the report in the Kentish Mercury doesn’t mention it.  I wonder if perhaps the reporter had abandoned the walk before they did that stretch -  surely they  would  remember crossing the  new railway.

 If you look at the map you can see the line of the boundary coming down from Charlton Road. It may follow a footpath but, whatever, it’s going through fields and past trees and boundary stones and that’s quite straightforward at first.  But then it begins to get more complicated and it stops being a straight line and curves round onto a bridge to cross the railway. Then on the other side there’s a sawmill and a number of other buildings and eventually we get to a yard and some buildings and on into Woolwich Road.  I’m tempted to think that the building and yard are the now closed pub – originally The Roupell Arms, but more recently The Pickwick.

Today that walk would mean crossing the railway from the back of Bernard Ashley Drive, and then down between  blocks of flats, to reach Dupree Road  and from there to Woolwich Road.  How is it that the report misses this whole quite complicated area? Nor is it mentioned in the report of the 1980 walk which seems to give up completely by that point -just going down Victoria way and looking over the railway bridge .

Having reached Woolwich  Road the Boundary line and the walk turns eastward towards Woolwich: goes  a couple of blocks along the road to the corner of what had been Lombard, or Lambard, Wall.   wrote quite about this feature in an article a few years ago about the boundaries of Charlton.   

'Lombard Wall' was an important boundary feature – a bank or an earthwork of some sort which is still the boundary between the Parishes.  It was used as a pathway  – but there is no sign of it now. It was called a ‘wall’ because that is the old name for marshland features like this – a ‘wall’ is a bank designed to keep something – like river water - out. I have seen a recent archaeological ‘desk top’  report for the area which gives no mention of this ‘wall’ and where it is (or was).  It seems most probable that it was built at sometime in the Tudor period and it is sometimes said that it was built  by William Lambarde.   However it is mentioned in a conveyance of a neighbouring estate in 1555.  William had inherited the land only in 1554 and was still a minor so its not very likely it was built by him.  So if it was built before 1555 it could have been built by his father John Lambarde or – well, someone else.

There are other explanations: in the mid-19 Century a civil engineer speaking to the Institution of Civil Engineers called it ”a cross embankment” and“one rather stronger than the others”.  He also said that it was called “Lombard’s Wall” and said he was sure it was built some people from Lombardy.  I am aware that most of the engineers who worked on flood relief schemes in the Thames marshes in the 16th Century were Italians so it’s very possible that one of them was a ‘Lombard’.   Whatever the real name and whatever the reason for it neither the wall nor the road on the wall, now runs from Woolwich Road – only going from Bugsby’s Way to the River.  The space between Woolwich Road and  Bugsby Way is covered by major retail and other developments

The report of the 1980 walk ends abruptly at the corner of Lombard  Wall.  But the 2022 printed report of this includes  a photograph from the 1980s walk which shows historian Michael Egan looking at a large and ‘important’ boundary stone which in 1980 was still on the corner.  There has been massive regeneration in this area and  that stone has completely disappeared . Julian Watson  has commented that this was an extremely important boundary marker. Sadly neither includes details of what the actual inscription on it was. 

I have mentioned two or three times during the course of these articles about the boundary about how the many boundary stones which are on maps and which people remember have vanished They apparently are not recorded as heritage assets by the Council and they are so small that a contractor it's not even going to notice to bring it to the council's attention should this be thrown out or not. I notice that currently the Greenwich Council has a consultation on the future Borough and there is planned seminar and a consultation which includes heritage issues.

The walk then continues down what used to be Lombard Wall until we get to Bugsby’s Way. This area has now been massively developed and this stretch of Lombard Wall has vanished and is now a gap at the back of some of the supermarkets. We then cross Bugsbys Way into a road called Lombard Wall. This is now an exit road from the many Riverside wharves and is infested with some of the nastier  lorries along with a lot of dust and dirt and general dreadfulness. There is no sign of anything which identifies it as an ancient flood barrier and I wonder if anybody has ever looked for it

 

Before we get to the Riverside we would have passed the end of Ayles rope walk down near the River.  I also think it quite likely that we have crossed another railway line in one of lines  coming off the Angerstein line to local industries served by that system.   At the Riverside they met a boat and a waterman  and some of the party went  with him on his boat - once again the boundary line itself is the middle of a waterway and so the boat has to go because to go up the middle of the River Thames in order to exactly on the boundary line on. This is possibly quite dangerous seeing how busy the River would have been at that time.

                                                                                                                    

The rest of the party will have had to carry on going back along the riverfront from Charlton to Garden Stairs where they were to finish. This will have meant initially picking their way across all the railway lines at Angerstein Wharf and I am sure all sorts of other hazards along the riverfront which have long since been removed. It wasn't by any means the reasonably progressive Riverside path we have  now. I wonder how many of them were left at this of the procession at this late stage - everyone must have been very tired and I suspect that a lot of the children will have left some time ago.  Even without stopping and looking at things it's a considerable distance along the riverfront there right round the Peninsula.

Having got back to Garden Stairs they went back to the church where they gave three cheers and everybody went home.  They do say they got there very late –usually they expected to be back  about 5:30 and they don’t say exactly what time they arrived  back this time. They said its all the fault of the Kent Water Company who kept them waiting down at their new reservoir – I wrote  up that months and  months ago.

and off to a nice sit down

 

Windmills

 

I’ve been working on a new book about energy generation in Greenwich - all the power stations and everything.  I realised, rather to my surprise, that  I’ve never done anything about windmills.  There are people out there who start to be interested in industrial history and look first  at windmills - and they never get any further.  There is a whole culture out there of the minutia of windmill construction and use – so, I thought I should look at what there was in Greenwich and Woolwich.

 

I’m afraid the answer is going to be ‘not much’.  Traditional windmills are not particularly efficient energy providers and the local jolly Miller grinding the corn for Mr Baker may not have been that useful in a heavily industrialised area with a large population.  Of course there must have been many, many mills about which we know nothing – and inevitably this article can only be about those we do know about.

 

The one windmill which we do know a bit about was in Woolwich -  and I've written things about it before, some in a great deal of detail. This was the’ shipwright’s mill’ which I've covered in articles about the Royal Dockyard and also about the cooperative movement in Woolwich.

 

Mill Lane in Woolwich is a turning off Woolwich New Road and is on land once known as ‘Mill Hill’ because several windmills were apparently sited there, probably from the 15^th century. In the 17th century the Board of Ordnance owned land there, where they built a conduit and The Shipwrights Society from the Royal Dockyard got permission from them to build a mill and bakehouse there. The mill stood in ‘Conduit Field’ just off Woolwich New Road - then called called ‘Mill Lane’ or ‘Cholic Lane’ and it was slightly south of what is now called ‘Engineers House’.  A drawing from 1845, when it was vacant and derelict, shows an octagonal timber smock mill.  

 

In 1760 ‘the mill built by the Shipwrights ...... was consumed by fire’. It was thought ‘other local bakers’ were guilty of fire raising and there was some sort of presentation to the Lord Mayor to protest their innocence.  Presumably these locals were the operators of other mills in the area which we don't know anything about although they are described as ‘bakers’ not ‘millers’. So were ‘bakers’ operating mills and are the terms just interchangeable?  It should also be noted that every windmill I am aware of in Greenwich Borough area seems to have been milling corn to make flour, despite that there were numerous industries around with a need to grind other things.

 

The only windmill in the Borough of which there are any physical remains is that at the rear of The Old Mill pub in Old Mill Lane on Plumstead Common.  It was built in 1764 and so is possibly the earliest tower mill in this part of Kent.  It stopped working in the 1840’s, and in 1853 the Old Mill Public House was built adjacent to it and fronting the road.  It is now listed Grade II.

 

It is a four-storey brick tower which stands close behind the pub and which once had four sails and a domed cap.  Although it is very close to the pub building it seems completely independent and I wonder what it's used for now. It looks to be in good condition but I've never met anybody who's been inside it and would be very interested to know.

 

Moving to Greenwich and Deptford there seem to have been very few windmills. There are pictures of windmills in the Deptford area but they are most well in what is now Lewisham.

 

There is just one windmill on the Greenwich bank of Deptford Creek.  A tall white smock mill is shown alongside Deptford Creek in the background of a painting of Deptford Theatre dating from  1840 on land now covered by outbuildings of the pumping station. It is marked as a windmill on some later maps and as adjacent to a long building described as a tannery. The tannery was there  1792 - 1876 and the mill may have been a wind pump or maybe used for bark grinding.

 

There are a scattering of other windmills in the Greenwich Borough area.  One is marked on a map  in Mottingham Lane; there is a single reference to ‘a stump windmill’ at Horn Park Farm in 1833. There is a bit more information about a windmill in Harrow Fields –later covered by the Ferrier Estate - which was  blown over in a storm and was relocated in 1836 to Meadowcourt Road in Lee. Nearer to Greenwich it is thought that a windmill may once have stood on the Greenwich side of Blackheath at the north end of West Grove where the southwest corner was once called ‘Windmill Field’.

 

There are many pictures – some by famous artists – of windmills on Blackheath. These were all in what is now the Borough of Lewisham, but very close to the boundary. They were the subject of a very, very detailed article by Leslie Monson in the 1977 Transactions of the Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarian Society.  They were included by Neil Rhind in two volumes of his work on Blackheath and its Environs and more recently by Rob Cummings in his book on windmills in north west Kent and Kentish London.

 

One  - probably the earliest - of the Blackheath windmills stood adjacent to Hollyhedge House in the late 17^th century.  Hollyhedge is the site of the current Territorial Army buildings, on a side road to the east of Wat Tyler road.  It is described as an open post mill and is mentioned in a document of 1689.   It is thought that the mill was built on an encroachment on the Heath and that the house was built later- the mill site being a mound used for a water tank site.  The mill remained there until 1769 when it was moved to a site near Blackheath Vale.

                                                                     

Another early mill was in Morden Hill - which is said to originally been a footpath leading to it.

It was present in 1745 and had been built after 1706 as another open trestle post mill. It was removed around 1777 to be used elsewhere but the miller’s house survived Into the 1830s. It should be noted that there is modern housing in a ‘Windmill Close’ on the south side of Morden Hill.

                                                                                                                                              

So, there were two early windmills, both of which were moved from their original site. Later two mills stood near what is now Talbot Place. They were known as the East Mill and the West Mill and were on encroachments on the Heath, near a site where sand and gravel extraction was active. This was the area now called Blackheath Vale.  Goffers Road on Blackheath was once called Windmill Road and must have run past the two Talbot Place mills. Both mills were the subject of many paintings of the Heath and thus their eventual states of dereliction can be noted. They also seem to have provided focus points for festivities and events on the Heath.

                                                                                

West Mill was on the site of the current ‘Mill House’, which was built in 1836 on the corner of Talbot Place and Goffers Road.  This may have been the Hollyhedge Mill, dragged across the Heath around 1770. It appears to have been demolished in 1835.

 

East Mill stood behind the houses in Duke Humphrey Road, to be built on the edge of what became later the Vicarage garden. It may still have been standing in 1842 but had been was demolished by 1850. It may well have been the mill which previously stood near Morden Hill.

 

Blackheath Vale is now the site of workplaces, housing and a school in what was in the 19^th century a very considerable chalk pit. Both mills stood nearby and as Neil Rhind pointed out there would have been a sheer drop at the back of the West Mill.

 

 

 

Over the past centuries, as the area covered by the Borough of Greenwich was heavily industrialising wind power does not seem to have been used for anything more than a few corn mills.

 

However we should not be looking at the use of wind to raise energy as something old fashioned  and although there seems to be little to do with its infrastructure in Greenwich today we are certainly using energy created by the wind.  Out in the Channel the London Array is said to raise enough energy to fuel 500,000 homes.

 

Some 20 years ago I saw and photographed a very bizarre vessel on the River which I since understand was the Mayflower Resolution which is used for installing wind turbines at sea.  So that image will have to do for Greenwich and modern wind power.

 

John Day part 2

 In my last article, a couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to John Day who was an important engineer at the Patent Office. In his retirement he wrote a long series of articles for the Greenwich Industrial History Newsletter about his apprenticeship at the Royal Arsenal in the 1930s.

 I’ve always been quite keen to extend what John had to say to a wider audience but he only ever gave us permission to use his material in the newsletter and if we wanted to reproduce it somewhere else we would need to get permission from his descendents. I have no idea if John had children or how we could contact them if he did.  So I am using quotations from his material as part of these articles which seems to be the only option we have of getting what he had to say better known. I hope it’s interesting, anyway.

 

I should perhaps confess that all of what he says about different types of guns and other weaponry is like a foreign language to me. I am doing my best to record what he said but I am well aware that I may be making some really silly mistakes. If you spot any, or just want to comment, please let me know. I think it would be very interesting to learn a lot more about what was actually done in the Arsenal as it’s an important part of Woolwich’s local history.

 

In my first article – using material taken from his account – he was at the start of his apprenticeship in the Arsenal.  He was given an introductory job in the New Fuse Factory where women workers put together components.  He had also been set some easyish tasks and made various items and at the same time helped staff with maintenance work on the shop floor.   

His next move was to spend only a month in the Mechanical Test House – a building just across the road from the Power Station. This was an important part of work in the Arsenal with a long history in state military manufacturing establishments. But there was little for an apprentice to do here apart from watching ‘slinging ropes and chains being tested for load bearing’ and ‘odd samples of metal being broken and tested for hardness on a Vickers diamond machine -a machine, so called, because it left a diamond shaped imprint, had been developed locally at Vickers Crayford works in the 1920s – and has gone on to become standard equipment for the test. However, John said, they were only allowed to watch and not to be involved. I wonder if there were legal limitations which meant testing could only be undertaken by those qualified to do so.

Back in the office there was homework to do from the classes at the Polytechnic and when they were finished ‘there was a drawer full of western magazines’.

Facilities were not wonderful and a toilet was situated in the middle of the wide roadway outside of the Power Station. It was built from corrugated iron and flushed, continually, by a stream running underneath into a sewer emptying into the river. Nevertheless first thing every morning it was full of ‘newspaper readers’. One morning one of the apprentices made a paper boat, and floated it down the stream having put some paraffin soaked cotton waste in it – with resulting ‘Irate men and a good illustration of pandemonium’.

At the end of the next month John was moved to the erecting bay of the Main Machine Shop, this was in ‘Laboratory Square’ - the oldest part of the Arsenal. There they were building Mk.1 Dragons, which he describes as “gun towing tractors that held a gun crew of six ‘and which had been developed by Vickers at Crayford. John says they were powered by a ‘4 ½ litre Meadows engine’ - Henry Meadows was a Wolverhampton based engine and gearbox specialist. John said It had a ‘Wilson preselector gearbox to the front axle, having two steering clutches’ and that they were ‘full track vehicles’ with a top speed, unloaded, of about 30 m.p.h.

John was soon involved in testing these vehicles. To do this apprentices went out with the ganger. acting as his mate– in John’s case the ganger was Owen Stott, ‘a large Welshman’. They used a tank testing area which was between the Danger Buildings and Plumstead Road. It had ‘built-up single figure gradients’ and was crossed by a railway line. It was also home to some rabbits – we rarely hear of any wildlife on the Arsenal site, but here it was, just off Plumstead High Street. Owen was always overjoyed to spot a rabbit and chase it at full speed over the testing ground and John comments ‘ one soon learnt to hang on tight when this happened’.

 

Owen taught John a lesson which he said he had never forgotten. The Meadows engine used on the Dragons had a radiator at the rear that included an oil cooler. When one leaked John was given the job of replacing it. After he had installed the new cooler he ran the engine to see that it wasn’t leaking and while concentrating on this he leaned very near to the unguarded fan. Owen saw the danger and ‘tossed a crumpled sheet of newspaper into the fan ... which produced a white explosive blur’. John says ‘I shot out over the three foot high side of the vehicle in one bound ... you won’t find me near an unguarded fan again’.

Another job John was given in the erecting bay of the Main Machine Shop was using a hammer and chisel to cut flat surfaces on the sides of cast iron mountings of 6 inch coast defence guns so that ‘the  new - fangled predictor gear’ could be added to them. Guns of this type were closely identified with the Royal Arsenal and the ‘new fangled’ gear would enable their use with changing needs and conditions. He also worked on the scraping of the flat surfaces on the saddles of 2 pounder anti - tank guns. These are said to have been Britain’s main anti-tank weapon and John comments ‘a nice little gun that was too weak for its intended work’.

He also notes a lightweight tank as ‘interesting in having two A.E.C. bus engines on their sides under the floor’. AEC were of course the west London based bus and lorry manufacturers who were to make enormous numbers of military vehicles in the Second World War and it is interesting that their engines were also being used in tanks. In the mid 1930s – at around the time which John was describing - they switched production away from petrol driven engines to diesels, but he doesn’t make clear which fuel was used here. He also comments about these tanks that as much of the interior as possible was made in light alloy.

There was also much to be learnt in watching established staff at work. He describes watching three men ‘securing armour plate to magnesium alloy framework with red - hot rivets’. One man ‘held the rivet gun, another held the rivet snap and another had with a lump of sacking to put out the fire!’. He explains that all the joints had to have at least two right angles, ‘since a lead bullet would squirt through one right angle joint ..  that’s why tank armour is all one piece, or welded together without joints.’

He then moved on to pattern making ‘which made a change from dealing with metal’. ‘’He describes Tom Hammet, who was the next tradesman he was placed with. Tom was ‘a craftsman of the old school’ and nearing retirement. He made string musical instruments, including a homemade double bass which he played in a local orchestra. He was also a Methodist lay preacher. John said ‘To Tom, Picture Post was utter pornography.’

He described how Tom ‘ once he made a small mistake in 2 inch diameter core box, some eight inches long, cutting too deep less than a sixteenth of an inch, over an area of about a square inch. So meticulous was he that although he was on piecework, he neatly cut out the offending area and inserted a new piece - even matching the grain, though it would have several coats of paint and varnish over it.

It was all part of his education.