Ted's small engineers

 

In the early days of Greenwich Industrial History Society we used to do a newsletter which came out every other month. After some years it ended because I was so busy with other things and because poor Steve was doing all of the send outs each month on his own - and I thought that was a bit unfair. Anyway, in those days we used to have in membership a lot of elderly men who had worked in local industry all their lives and who wanted to tell all sorts of stories about their lives and what they ‘d seen and done. An awful lot of them had been engineers of various sorts.

One of them was a very elderly man called Ted Barr. He originally started by telling me he  was writing a history of United Glass.  GIHS has never published anything about United Glass - which had the biggest glass works in Europe based at the end of Anchor and Hope Lane. Ted never did submit a manuscript on UG, and I’m sorry about that. But he said lots and lots of other things. One of them was occasionally sending lists of small engineering firms that he thought he could remember in Greenwich  and see if anybody else could remember what they did and who they were.

What I thought I would do - and it will take many, many episodes  - is to list them down along with anything  I can find in addition.

Ted eventually moved from Greenwich and went to live up in North Yorkshire where he was very involved in the local preserved railway.

So here are the first on the list of firms listed by Ted:

Adams Door Spring Works.  In Anchor and Hope Lane. I can find no trace of this company in Charlton  or indeed any where in the borough of Greenwich at all. The Adams Door Spring Company seems to originate with an 1890s patent  for Robert Adams. At the turn of the century they were at 105 Union Street in the Blackfriars area of Southwark. They are one of the firms shown in stained glass windows in Christ Church, Black Friars Road. It’s perfectly possible of course that they had an unadvertised presence in Charlton.   And I have no idea what a door spring is but it appears to be complicated

Antifouling Composition Works.  In Anchor and Hope Lane. ‘Antifouling’ products are designed to combat growth of various sorts on the hulls of ships. The works in Anchor and Hope Lane is particularly associated with a blue plaque to Italo Svevo who lived at at 67 Charlton Church Lane 1903-1913. Italo Svevo was the pseudonym of Ettore Schmitz, who lived in Trieste where he was a friend of James Joyce. He worked for the Trieste based anti-corrosion composition works firm of his parents-in law, Gioacchino and Olga Veneziani and  became a partner in 1902. He negotiated a contract with the Admiralty the for the Company’s Moravia Anti-Fouling. Composition -  made from a secret family recipe - but he could only get the contract if they set up a works in Britain.  The factory in Charlton was built in 1903 and remained through the Great War. In the 1920s they moved to Surbiton.

Arthur Martin.  Tool Maker of Plaxtol Place, Westcombe Hill.  I included something about the Arthur Martin company in an article I did here in March 2023 about Westcombe Park. https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/2024/12/blackheath-vale.html; 

 It was one of a number of businesses in a small area north of Westcombe Park Station and accessed from Westcombe Hill. One of the first books on our local Industrial Archaeology was ‘London’s Industrial Archaeology by Aubrey Wilson. He describes an old and interesting Whitworth planing machine owned by Grafton’s of Eltham says that ‘Grafton’s acquired the machine around 1900 and it was thought to have been sold to them by the famous tool and cutter makers, Arthur Martin’.

Arthur Martin & Co may have been famous to Aubrey Wilson in 1967 but to me they are bit of a mystery.  They closed, I think, in 1961 but they were still advertising for staff “a permanent position offering advancements’ in 1959. I appealed locally, and more widely, for information on the firm. No one ever replied and I know no more.

British Oxygen Co.   Clearly not all the firms which Ted listed were small and local. British Oxygen was and is a large multinational (BOC). I wrote an article on the Greenwich Depot in Weekender in July 2024. https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/search?q=british+oxygen

In Greenwich British Oxygen was on an unimpressive site at the southern end of Tunnel Avenue. My article quotes from their national advertising  but all I found locally were a number of accidental explosions. Ted gave no detail. His chatty notes say “formerly Brin's Oxygen Co. Our Science Master at Invicta always used the old name.  They were among the 'lesser big boys' but employed many people. Bill Faulkner, an area technical engineer, was my workshop tutor at the South East London Tech. I remember one evening he arrived a bit hot and bothered because he had spent all day in Ashford Loco Works showing the locals how to repair cracked cylinder castings of up to 3 tons apiece. He reckoned he had been chased all the way home up the A20 by flying bombs! This would have been 1944.”

British Ropes. Anchor and Hope Lane. This was another big firm on a prominent site and I have no idea why Ted put it in his list of small engineering firms – may be they had a specialist engineering workshop?  ‘Bridon’ were on a large site down the west side of Anchor and Hope Lane. I wrote an article about rope making as one of the first I did for Weekender and was advised by the late John Yeardley, who had been manager there.  Later I did an article based on a booklet about Frost’s ropeworks. https://maryswritegreenwich.blogspot.com/2024/12/frosts-ropeworks-briden-charlton.html

One remains of the factory is the Bridon Ropes Football Club. https://www.bridonropesfc.com/

Case Developments Co. Ted commented on this firm ‘I never knew what they did’. Well, I know what they did but I can find no reference to that South Street address –which today is a Turkish barber. Where did Ted get his information from?  Case Developments were in Kangley Bridge Road which runs between Lower Sydenham and Beckenham and was once the site of many factories. In the 1950s they advertised vacant jobs for ‘toolmakers with experience of Bakelite’. There are also a number of reports of health and safety infringements  - but no information on what the Bakelite was used for.

Colloid Mills. Woolwich Road, ‘near the tram graveyard’ – the ‘tramatorium’ was on the corner of Penhall Road. Close by was a National School which closed and in 1928 the site was bought by Guy Hurrell.  He had a works in Blackheath where he refurbished machines and manufactured the Hurrell Homogeniser – a type of colloid mill.  The firm flourished and Hurrell invented several more useful things. The works was bought up by Stones in 1946 and Hurrell moved to Strood. The firm still exists in Strood and still makes homogenisers.

More small works to come in a future article.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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