I thought this week I should get back to my long long list a small factories and workshops in Greenwich borough. I’m still taking them in alphabetical order from the list which Ted Barr published in Greenwich Industrial History Newsletter and on that list I’ve only reached letter ‘h’.
So , lets start with Harrison Barber slaughterhouse - specifically horse slaughter. I assume they were extremely busy in the early years of the 20th century as huge workplaces full of horses were disposed of with the incoming internal combustion engine. I’m afraid I’m unable to find a map which specifically marks the slaughterhouse site - although I’m sure I’ve seen one in the past. As far as I’m aware it was in Blackwall Lane round about where now the fly-over crosses and then there’s the big roundabout. Charles Booth’s Survey of London Poverty mentions it in his Greenwich section where he says that it was just south of Marsh Lane – then that was the name of the road the Pilot pub was in. In those days it was a turning off Blackwall Lane, going down to the river. and was later called ‘Riverway’. The slaughter house site was called ‘Holmdale’ and it included a house where the site foreman lived.
Before the mid 1880s the site seemed to belong to a family called ‘Ribbins’ who lived in Roan Street. Thomas Ribbins, described as a ‘cat’s meat dealer’ was in his sixties in the 1800s. His son Joseph was described as his ‘assistant’ and as a ‘general dealer’. The family had a business of some sort in Deptford - I am aware that Trundleys Road was once known as ‘Knackers Lane’. However in the 1880s they had a business seem in Bridge Street. Pressure was being put on them by the Board ofv Works to move out of that area and they eventually gave in and moved down to Marsh Lane at in the 1880s. So, a business considered too rough for Deptford was acceptable in Blackwall Lane!
It must be said that local newspapers seem to have a numerous stories about members of the Ribbins family . This includes numerous prosecutions for pub based petty violence, gambling and so on. There are also several prosecutions for what we could see as the ‘dodgy horse trade’ – buying stolen horses and turning them into cats meat before they could be identified. There are some very upsetting cases of cruelty and so on. They were required by the police to collect any horse that had died in the street and this also is the subject of some very upsetting press stories.
In 1874 An Act of Parliament had prohibited any future horse slaughtering business to be set up in London. Harrison Barber had operated in east London with manure and glue works at Forest Gate and at Sugar House Lane, Poplar. They were gradually taking over any London slaughter houses which were at risk of closing down. In 1887 Ribbins along with some others set up a company which could rival Harrison Barber because,they complained, they would soon ‘take care of everything in London’. It was a very shortlived organisation and predictably Harrison Barber soon took over the Marsh Lane works – as it turned out it was one of their smaller works.
Clearly in the first quarter of the 20th century vast numbers of horses must have been killed just because their existence was inconvenient. For instance on the site which is now Greenwich Power Station a 1000 horses were once stabled for the horse trams. All of them must have died before their time. Later they used the captive bolt system – as did also suicidal employees.
The Greenwich branch advertised itself as selling pet food, the ground up remains of the unfortunate horses. The Forest Gate branch sold manure and glue. In 1925 a Harrison Barber decorated float took part in Greenwich Shopping Week Celebrations. I would be riveted to know what decorations they put on this float.
Clearly their custom was declining as horse transport ceased. I don’t know exactly when the site closed but it I don’t think it functioned after the Second World War. I understand that their activities were eventually confined to a site in Tottenham and eventually became foreign owned.
The next item on Ted’s list was ‘Haybeerd’ – he said they
were somewhere near South Street and made transformers, chargers and other
electrical gear. The only problem was
that I could find not a single website which had that name with that weird
spelling. After trying many many different alternatives I came up
with’Heayberd’ and from then on it was really quite straightforward.
Eventually I discovered Fredric Cecil Heayberd who was
born at in Tranmere, near Liverpool, in 1887. His father was apparently a
retired sailmaker from Portsmouth. At the age of 24 he was living with his
mother, still in the Liverpool area and working for an electrical engineering
company as an instrument maker. He spent
the The Great War in the mechanical transport division of the Army Service
Corps. Immediately after the war he
married Margaret ,from the Liverpool area, and then they moved south.
Fr ederick Heayberd apparently founded his engineering
business in the early 1920s and` for whatever reason he came to London with
ideas for an electrical engineering business. I do not know what they were or
how he started – he will have needed capital and some skills in getting
customers and so on. Initially, in 1922. they had as central London address at 10
Finsbury Street – in an area ofv the City which in the 19th century had been
used for specialist manufacturing but by the 1900s was let in multiple units to
mainly clerical firms. Finsbury Street is a possible location for a new
electrical engineering firm, although I would guess expensive and I suspect
that this was an accommodation address only .
In the early 1920s he was advertising for sale a
‘safety alarm jewel case’ from a residential address in Manor Park, Lee. The
first mentions of his Greenwich factory are from the mid-1930s although they
may well have been there earlier. The
address is usually given as ‘Guildford Road’ which was an earlier name for what
is now Guildford Grove. Sometimes the
address is 114 Greenwich South Street- a
building still in use as a business premises. Alongside it is a gateway leading
through to the back of the shops which in the 1930s will have gone to a site now
only accessed from Guilford Grove. This is now a gated housing estate called Admiral’s
Gate – which I guess sounds more like maritime Greenwich than ’Battery Charger
Gardens’ or something or other. When the
new housing was built the site had been in use by an electronics company called
Texel, started by ex employees of Elliott Automation. But I don’t know how long
they had been there.
In 1937 Hayberd were at a British Industries Fair and advertised their products as : ‘Battery
Chargers; Rectifier Units and Plant; Transformers; Radio Components; Motor
Accessories. Automobile Compasses’. I suspect their main products were electrical
chargers of various sorts. They seem to have continued with a central London
office although I assume they were bombed out of Finsbury Street. In 1946 they had
offices at 28 Russell Square – a property soon to become part of London
University.
Frederick Heayberd
died in March 1960 in hospital in Bromley. I assume
that he ran the company himself until then. It presumably continued in the
ownership of his widow, Margaret , forva few years and later closed. It has not been easy to find out this much about
what was obviously a considerable business in West Greenwich and which must
have employed numerous people. Was it taken over and moved? ‘’ I guess people still need battery chargers.
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The next firm on Ted’s list is Sykes Pumps and they are
not a small firm. They are still functioning as far as I’m aware, on a site on
the Greenwich /Charlton borders and there is a more than adequate site history
on their website . https://www.andrews-sykes.com/about-us/#t1
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