John Day and Lands End

 

Over the past few weeks I’ve done three articles taken from the memories of John Day describing his apprenticeship in the Royal Arsenal in the 1930s.  John was an ‘Engineering Apprentice’ which he had got following good school results and a competitive qualifying examination. This meant that he worked in many different departments in the Arsenal over the course of his time while also studying for a degree in Engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic. The young men on this programme were expected to be the future leaders of the engineering profession and John was to spend his working life in the Patent Office.  These episodes of his memories were sent to me intermittently over four or five years and they don’t always connect up that well - so I’ve done my best but it is sometimes a bit fragmentary.

I finished the last episode with a description of the Arsenal motorcycle club and some very big 1930s machines some of which are worth a small fortune today.  His father was in charge of the main power station in the Arsenal and John wrote about him too. Clearly having a father with a senior job gave John access to information over and above his daily work about this vast works and its ways.

Moving on to when John says he had been working, ‘allocated’ to a ‘spell in the western `D.C’.  This was the oldest part of the Arsenal – where Woolwich Works is today - and it had originally had an electricity supply from a building in Warren Lane’ which was originally a DC (direct current) supply only and which was apparently still in operation when John was there in the 1930s. 

He was next allocated to substation No.4 (Sub 4).  I am told that this was ‘Lands End Power House’ which was to the east of the old main part of the Arsenal. In the last episode I wrote here I described how John visited the Crossness Explosives pier, which was on the riverside at what is now Thames Bank Place’. The Lands End site power plant was to the south and quite a way away – in fact so far away as to be almost at the eastern edge of the Arsenal site. John says it was east of the Sales Ground where ‘unwanted bits and materials were sold off by auction’ and served the Danger Buildings, the F shops ‘where all the woodwork was done’ and Crossness Explosives Pier. The substation was divided into two areas - one of which held the voltage reducing transformers switchgear and the other was the rest room. 

It seems that originally Lands End was primarily a hydraulic power station built in c1905/6 to operate equipment on the, then new, Crossness Explosives Pier. It appears that it was built using money from the Army and Navy. This is possibly to do with land ownership as the Arsenal began to expand into new areas to the east of the main site in order to meet the need for the new high explosives being developed in this period by research staff at Woolwich and Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, originally under Frederick Abel and James Dewar – although Woolwich based Abel died in 1902. Along with the pier and tumps this power plant was designed to minimise the risk posed by these new materials. Woolwich production was to concentrate on the propellant Lyddite, although this had not been developed by chemists in the Royal Ordnance like Abel.

The power plant was eventually transferred to the Royal Ordnance in 1910 following an agreement with the Admiralty and the War Office. It supplied hydraulic power to the cranes on the Pier, and steam for heating and electricity for capstans at some of the tumps - magazines 3- 15 - and for lighting the pier and other structures in the vicinity of No. 2 magazine. It also supplied steam for fire-fighting purposes. On maps an accumulator tower, blacksmiths and fitters shops are marked along with a boiler house with a tank and chimney and a coal bunker between them. It was later converted into an electricity substation probably in the 1950s. Thus in a location far from the central part of the Arsenal, was ‘well out of sight and out of mind of the main part of the Arsenal’. It stood roughly where Crossway crosses a canal between Pointer and Eastgate Closes – a site now in the Borough of Bexley.

When John was there in the 1930s the substation was the responsibility of Andy Clements, with Syd Freeman as electrician’s mate and Bill Nunn as motor cleaner. Work began in the morning when they `made tea and waited for the next phone called to say something had gone wrong’. As ever, John has a story to tell us about a lesson learned:

“One morning while Syd brewed the first cup of the day, Andy pushed the newspapers off the table and produced a bit of chalk and proceeded to introduce the then resident apprentice into the deeper intricacies of electricity distribution of three-phase current. Then the phone rang and Andy told me to take Syd and sort out the trouble. 

“I forget what the trouble was but I do know that I hadn’t a clue how to solve the problem. Syd, who after all was three or four times my age, suggested a solution and all went well.

“When I returned to the substation Andy asked me what I had done and I told him that Syd had suggested a solution. Oh dear! Andy really went for me!  The gist of his tirade was if you’re in charge of a job you do not follow the instructions of a subordinate and you take responsibility. A lesson learned – but would it have been better to have the problem unrepaired? There seems to be no concept of teamwork?  I guess that this strict respect for skills embedded in a hierarchy was, and probably still is, all part of this world of apprenticeships and the handing on of knowledge to a selected successor – with many class issues included. The world we seem to have lost.  The point about responsibility is significant – but, like so much else, must be subject to past legal decisions in the real world.

One sort of skill being passed on was the art of scrounging and how to improve your life in the workplace by unofficial initiatives.  The vast size of the Arsenal must have made it ideal for such activities.  

John says Andy had ‘acquired’ a garage on the other side of the road which could be used for the benefit of engineering apprentices who, John said, ‘wanted to work on their cars or motorcycles particularly on Saturday mornings.’  I suggested a lathe might be useful so Andy took me on a ‘scrounging trip on the dilly’.  (I must say that the phrase ‘on the dilly’ is unfamiliar to me - or at least in this context.  I can guess, but if anybody wants to enlighten us on this - please feel free

Returning from the scrounging trip they had ‘a ½ inch centre lathe from a ‘mothballed’ shop’.  This was set up in the substation driven by a motor, acquired by more scrounging. Then ‘news of the lathe reached the shop steward of the main shop and he began to raise great concerns. John comments that ‘he would, he was the shop turner’. Then ‘he was soon told to be quiet - the lathe would only be used by an apprentice and was only for ‘foreigners’.

John’s time at Lands End was in the 1930s and it seems it was converted into an electricity substation in perhaps the 1930s - it was substation No. 11.  Maps from the early 1950s no longer show the accumulator tower and by then the cranes on Crossness Pier were electric. At that time the Arsenal was responsible for the navigation/warning lights on the large pylons which used to carry power across the river. The lights on it were on a rope and pulley system so that they could be wound down to ground level for maintenance. They were built in 1933 and carried 132Kv over a distance of 3,060 feet, they were dismantled in 1987.

Many of the tumps remain, some in other use and some abandoned.  They were magazines  used to store explosives – described as ‘mainly cordite’ although very little of that was made in Woolwich. They date from the late 1880s and were usually circular and surrounded by a wall and a moat, designed to minimise and contain blast. They provided only part of the storage needed for an eventual 40,000 tons of explosives . Some tumps have since been used for a variety of recreational and other purposes – but others are derelict. Most remain hidden behind houses and away from roads and invisible – needing to be sought out.

Some of the jobs John described required entry to the Danger Buildings. These were a series of wooden huts of relatively light construction surrounded by high earth banks and joined by wooden walkways a couple of feet from the ground. These walkways were known as a “clean” area whereas off the walkways was the “dirty” area. Access could only be attained through the dirty/clean building where all smoking, snuff taking and metal articles had to be left and one had to put on special nail less overshoes as one stepped one foot at a time over the  barrier from dirty to clean. One step off the “clean” walkway, one became “dirty” and was not allowed back.

More about all of this in future articles. For more information about all of this please look at the huge and very complex Royal Arsenal history website https://www.royal-arsenal-history.com/and also thank you very much to both Ian Bull and Steve Peterson for help and information