Over the past couple of months I’ve
published stuff about some small firms in Greenwich based on a long list which
was sent to Greenwich Industrial History Newsletter in the early 2000 by a very
nice man called Ted Barr. They are all firms which he said he knew personally
and I’ve been doing the best I can to find something out about each of them - with
rather mixed results.
The first one this week is E.Kingsnorth and Sons, Motor
Engineers, Blackheath Hill. Ted said they
did tool making and precision works ‘for Elliots’ – who I will come to next. I
have just spent the morning looking Kingsnorth up and got various bits of
information. However the one thing I
have found out is they have a very active local family history interest - and
there is actually an Australian website about the family. Now rather than me
write up what I’ve found and get it all wrong can I ask if one of the family
history people gets in touch and perhaps I could do something really accurate
with your guidance. The best way to contact me is by the Greenwich Industrial History Facebook page and
if you leave a direct message I’ll pick it up. Please don’t try to telephone me
whatever you do.
Whether or not I hear from
anyone I will write this company up in a future article.
The next one on Ted’s list
is the ‘Elliott Machine Co’. He says
they were on Blackheath Hill ‘in the old railway station’ – which
was, of course, Blackheath Hill Station. But I can find no trace of them at all
- except there is a big American company
in Baltimore with that name. In particular they are not listedIn articles and
websites about the old Blackheath Hill station – one of which is Sub Brit’s Nick Catford who goes into enormous trouble to list down who was there
using the site. He does however mention, as others do, that there was a ’Heliot’ Company on that site. So
I think someone is busy dropping their Hs! I’ll write up Heliots
in some week’s time when I get to the
Hs.
And so to F.Francis and Son.
I really have a very unusual bunch of firms this week – and I do pick them at
random! This is Francis Tin Boxes of Blackheath Road. They were on the old Penn’s site on Blackheath Road - it’s now the
trading estate which has got Wickes on it. Before that the company had started
at a site in Trundleys Road in Deptford. The site is now
occupied by Franklin Close roughly where the print shops stood, Franklin Place
the site of the drum lines and Crosslet Vale which covers the round and
rectangular tin lines and the tinplate stores before emerging on to Blackheath
Road through the personnel office which was a portacabin to the east of the
main office block. The entrance was at the corner of John Penn Street and
Coldbath Street and the exit was between the main office block and the
personnel office. In its time the company was highly successful opening an additional plant
at Wrexham to service the Liverpool based oil companies and acquiring Shemtec
Packaging of Leeds and Drummond Packaging of Greenock.
When I was doing the Greenwich Industrial History newsletter
in the early 2000s I was sent a huge newspaper article about Francis.It was by
Colin Smith who had worked for the
Kentish Mercury for many years. He was very proud of their work in producing
articles on local industries. In particular he had masterminded a special supplement
in 1969 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Francis Tin Box
manufacturers of Greenwich and this is what he had sent.
Sadly the issues of the Kentish Mercury on the British Library database
do not cover 1969, so I can’t check it. However here are some extracts:-
SMITH
WITH AN EYE FOR 2069 Surrounded by bits of wire,
transistors, circuit diagrams and photoelectric paraphernalia, a young man
called John Smith works in a small office perched high up in the five-gallon
drum department. On the fast-moving automatic one-gallon rectangular
manufacturing line, a can passes a beam of light and a blob of hot solder spits
out to land precisely at the base of the neck, which is to be fitted. In the
same split second, flux arrives precisely on the other side of the neck. The
device which ensures that the solder and the flux arrive at the right moment
thousands of times a day is a simple example of what can be done by the
application of electronics in the tin box trade.
The
talk is of photoelectric cells, capacitance probes, proximity switches and
micro cells. John would rather we didn't talk of magic boxes and magic eyes,
because this suggests that there might be something mystical and impractical
about the whole business.
The
Francis war effort wasn't confined to making camp kettles and meat tins in
1939-45. They made bombs and torpedoes too. Workers at Trundleys Road used to
make large square tins destined to be filled with an incendiary mixture. In the
Second World War: "We used to make 65lb. bomb cases and aerial torpedoes
weighing 250lb. They stood as tall as I was. We made cases for depth charges as
well.
A young
woman working for F. Francis and Sons used to call in at Mence Smith's on her
way to work to buy a threepenny bamboo cane. the cane would be cut into
six-inch lengths and handed around to the girls on the benches around her. an
essential bit of equipment for any solderer when everything was done by hand. Today it is
done automatically.
Five
gallon drums - a familiar sight where ever oil is to be found - are turned out
by the thousand every day at the Francis factory. Chimeless - they're the ones
with a domed top and inset handle - and standard ones with a flat top, are made
for a wide variety of customers. These
drums are made to the precise specifications of many different customers. Some
have larger openings than others, handles are different, and the type of
tinplate used may vary from one customer to another. One of the most modern and efficient machines
in the factory is the Soudronic body welder used in the manufacture of
five-gallon drums. This can produce bodies at the rate of 20-22 a minute,
compared with about half that number by the old hand-welding methods. After
leaving the body welder the drums travel by conveyor belt to be flanged,
socketed and double seamed.
.
We reproduced some of the
article and some of the pictures in the GIHS Newsletter. We were soon sent
emsails with memories of the factory - .so
many it was unprecedented. Over the years we’ve written up loads and loads of different works on GIHS
publications and industrial history websites and so on and, usually no response
at all from anyone that worked there. Occasionally you’ll get someone to say something
like ‘remember old friends’ but Francis
was unprecedented in the amount of stuff that came in.
I see that there is a F.Francis & Sons Facebook
page so perhaps I could introduce the firm through that. It says =” F Francis and Sons Limited was a tin
box manufacturing company founded in 1869. Originally operating from 140
Trundleys Road, Deptford it was latterly based at Thames Ironworks, 50-62
Blackheath Road, Greenwich, England until closure in 1987. All traces of the
company have been obliterated from the site.”
They say about work there “The
company was a hive of industry turning out vast quantities of tinplate
containers made almost entirely from components made on site.
Tinplate sheets were received in mostly from
the Park Royal railhead then printed to the customers' designs in the print
shop where as well as the single colour machines there was at least one
'tandem' printer which printed two colours each pass, the sheets being oven dried before being
stacked at the end of the line for transfer to the printed stock store.
The
print shop was the place to be in winter but very hot in summer.
There
would be a number of can bodies printed on each sheet depending on the size of
the container to be produced and these sheets would be slit prior to
manufacture. Customers would call off their designs by the thousand with the
large oil companies placing orders for say 100,000 5 litre rectangular cans
with approximately 10,000 per vehicle.
As
well as the 5 litre oil cans they made 2.5 litre, 1 litre and 500 ml
rectangulars as well as all the same sizes in round paint cas which were
offered internally lacquered (to stop rusting where water based paints were
being packed) as well as in plain tinplate for oil based products. Additionally
they produced 20 and 25 litre tinplate drums as well as 205 litre steel drums.
I’ve also been through some of the people who
contacted us and I’ve picked out what
some of them say about the background of the firm and what it was like working
there.
--- material that I delivered to the old Plumstead Local History Museum on
closure in 1988 survives, including a large portrait of the founder Frederick
Francis that hung in the boardroom
--- F
Francis & Sons did not buy the site until 1916. At the time of the First
World War they were still in Deptford. From there they made thousands if not
millions of camp kettles, mess tins, pails and meat tins
--- I
remember tea breaks where we had the old sugary condensed milk in tins which
was stirred into the tea in the tea pot. & when we went to wash our hands
& go to the toilet it was in an outhouse with no hot water - it used to
freeze solid ice in the winter.
--- also
the smell of the printing fluid - cellulose I think it was - & you could smell it hundreds of yard up
the road & yet the workers were smoking almost on top of it, dear, dear - where
was health & safety then? what a story A.?
--- I think it was Brenda in quality control who is holding one of the cans in
the advert.
--- Good days still remember the smell
---F
Francis & Sons Ltd, Blackheath Road, Greenwich were awarded £1,000pa for
the part military occupation of their factory by the Defence of the Realm Act
Claims Commission at their meeting on 6 February 1916
--- the Deptford works was transferred to John
Penn Street after the closure of the Crown Cork Co in John Penn Street.Also
they had a 45 gall drum production line in Kieghley Yorkshire. I believe they
owned Kieghley lifts. Towards the end of my apprenticeship went to Kieghley to
aid the installation of that line
My
mother had a tin box with F Francis
& Sons 1940 embossed on the hinges lid. She told me that it contained
chocolates. she received it when she was 14 in Malta during WWII. It might make
me a future article
There is whole aspect The tin box industry which I
haven’t got space to go into now. But there are a lot of people out there who
collect tin boxes of particular designs and so on. Well it might do for a
future
article almost
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