Talk by Malcolm Eady
In part one Malcolm concentrated mainly on the historical and geographical drivers behind the Thames hosting what became a world port, how its importance as a port and communications centre resulted in London becoming our Capital, how being our Capital enhanced its position as our most important port and how the banks of its river became home to many important industries. Malcolm this time looked in detail at one of these industries – shipbuilding. From Saxon times to the late 19th century it was the Thames where most of the country’s important ships were built, and in great numbers.
In Saxon and Norman times, shipyards would have been a common sight on London’s riverfront. When the medieval London Bridge was built the yards moved to the downstream side of the bridge, then progressively further down river. By the 15th C the yards had spread to Wapping and Limehouse on the north bank & Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and Deptford on the south. Between 1512 and 1912 were the good years and, at its peak, it was the greatest shipbuilding area in the world. In those four centuries some five thousand ships were launched into the Thames from the Royal Dockyards at Deptford and Woolwich alone, with many more coming out of numerous private shipyards.
We were shown pictures of a private shipyard with an adjacent fitting out and servicing basin. Initially set up by the East India Company then sold off in 1653, by the end of that century it was one of the largest private shipyards in the country and therefore the world. At the end of the 18th C the yard was taken over by the Perry family who also built the Brunswick dock which opened in 1790. The area is now covered with blocks of apartments across from the 02 Arena on the opposite bank. A monument does remain, not to an industry however but to a very brave group of men and women who set sail from that spot in 1606 to set up a colony in Virginia. It was London where their ships and their finance came from.
Many graphics accompanying Malcolm’s talk were described and expanded upon, commencing with the Brunswick fitting out dock. Each ship normally only managed between four to six journeys. This was not only just due to wear and tear, but mainly due to ship worm, which in warm waters could quickly pepper a ship’s hull with holes. The next image showed a convoy of East Indiamen in 1803 just after war with France was declared, and so the convoy was two or three times larger than usual and probably led by a Naval commander.
Cargoes were extremely valuable; analysis of a ship’s cargo from 1747 valued it at £100,000, equating today to about £10 million. There was very big money and fortunes to be made and in the 18th c, about 97% made it home.
A map marked the position and names of Thames shipyards in the 18th century. In 1803 the East India Dock company bought part of the Blackwall shipyard site including the Brunswick dock to turn into the East India Export Dock. As well as private yards there were two Royal yards in the area, which had been set up by Henry V111 at Deptford and Woolwich. They were soon building the prestige ships of their time. Both were about the same size and set up around the same time. A picture of Deptford royal dockyard gave us an idea of size. In the first decade of the 1700s, more ships were launched from Woolwich than from any other English yard.
A group of slides then showed examples of famous ships built on our London river from Henry the 8th time to Cromwell, commencing with the pride of Henry’s fleet Henri Grace a Dieu shown taking Henry to the cloth of gold meeting with the French king. Then Elizabeth I’st prestige boat the Ark Royal, built for Sir Walter Raleigh in a private dockyard in Deptford. Elizabeth acquired it in lieu of money owed to the crown, its original name being Ark Raleigh. During this period at least thirty-four London built ships were engaging the Spanish Armada. During the Spanish war as a whole, London ships took more booty than those of Devon, Cornwall, Bristol and Bridgwater combined. The pride of Cromwell’s fleet was another London built ship, the Naseby.
Jumping forward to Nelson’s time, the next three slides listed which ships took part in three of Nelson’s famous battles, and which ones were built on the Thames or Medway. Malcolm acknowledged that much of this data had been collected by Elliott Wragg, a project officer at Museum of London Archaeology. The data highlighted the importance of the Thames and the Medway and how this has now been forgotten. He then moved on to the age of steam, describing how Woolwich dockyard was modernised to be the creator of the steam Navy. When in 1831 a special “Steam Factory” to build and install marine steam engines was established. the ships were still wood. A further slide showed us one of the first large warships fitted out with a screw propeller rather than as a paddle ship, keeping Woolwich at the forefront of steam technology. Another showed the large covered slipways.
As demand switched to iron hulled ships, and with long periods of peace, the time was up for the Royal yards. They both closed in 1869 and work transferred down to the Royal dockyard Chatham on the Medway. At about the same time Brunel was getting interested in ship design. In 1838 he designed the SS Great Western, a wooden hulled paddle steamer for the North Atlantic route. Bristol built, but with London engines built by Maudslay, Sons & Field in Lambeth. Twenty years later in 1858 he chose a London yard on the Isle of Dogs to build his enormous paddle ship SS Great Britain. The ship was designed to go non-stop to Australia, needing to carry fifteen thousand tons of coal. He again chose London built engines for the paddle wheels and James Watt and Co, of Birmingham to build the engines for the propeller.
John Scott Russell was a very accomplished hull designer, what we now term a naval architect, and worked on the design with Brunel. He was very keen to build it and put in a low price for the work to be done at his yard. With a revolutionary design it soon went over price however and the yard went bankrupt. Russell’s design had a double hull divided into nineteen water tight compartments, which saved the ship when it hit rocks on one of its first trips. She had ten boilers. Against Russel’s advice Brunel built the ship to be launched sideways. Russel wanted a dry dock and the ship floated out. Had it been a conventional lengthways launch down a slipway, as the river at Millwall is narrow it would probably have travelled across the river into Deptford High Street. A picture from the Illustrated London News showed the ship under construction, dwarfing the local houses and countryside.
The river shore was made up of thousands if not millions of years of compacted marsh. Because of the tremendous weight of the ship, uneven settlement of the concrete slips occurred and it took three more months to get it launched. Fitting out took a further eight months by which time the money had run out again and the ship had to be sold at a loss of £3m in today’s money. The ship was enormous; it was not until forty-one years later in 1899 that a ship longer was launched and not until 1901 that a heavier ship was built. The engine for the propeller was built in Birmingham, the weight of many parts exceeding what could be hauled by carts and horses. The total assembled weight of the engines for the screw propeller was five hundred tons.
She never worked the Australia route that she was designed for, instead she was initially put on the more profitable New York route as a top of the market fast and safe ship. There was a further series of accidents and bankruptcies. She finally found success as a cable laying ship, laying the first successful transatlantic cable and the first between here and India.
In the days of steam, the largest yard was Thames Iron Works at the mouth of the Lea with eight slipways. Large warships and small cross-channel packets could be built side by side. In 1865 it employed six thousand men. Three of the slipways were angled so the ships slid into Bow Creek and out past the point into the Thames. During the launch of HMS Albion, spectators ignored advice by getting too close and were swept away by the large bow wave when the ship entered the water. The company had three rolling mills and seven large steam hammers.
Over a period of twenty years a launch took place every ten weeks, either large ships for the Navy at an average tonnage of four thousand eight hundred tons or small civilian ships averaging three hundred and eighty-four tons. Not an ideal mix however as, if the Navy stopped ordering, the yard had nothing to fall back on. Probably the most famous ship built there is HMS Warrior, now down at Portsmouth. When finally launched in 1860 it was ten months overdue and bankrupted the company, but made every other warship afloat obsolete.
Within two years, London yards had built the two most revolutionary vessels of the century. In terms of technological capability and sheer capacity, London had the most successful shipbuilding industry in the world. In 1865, 29% of UK iron built merchant tonnage was launched from Thames yards but it was not to last. Because of unsound investments and the banking crash in 1866, employment fell considerably from twenty-seven thousand men in 1865 to nine thousand in 1871. The Thames ship yards also came under great economic pressure during the second half of the 19th C due to the cost advantages of northern yards with them being closer to supplies of coal and iron, lower wages costs, and room to expand in order to build new bigger yards for the bigger ships. Thames Ironworks merged with local engine builder John Penn in 1899, but by 1912 they were forced to close. The lasting memory is the hammers of the riveters of the company’s football team which are now displayed on a certain East London football team’s badge.
Malcolm’s final shipyard story was of Thorneycroft, six miles downstream from Twickenham at Chiswick. The larger ships built there, such as HMS Speedy, had to have their superstructure removed to get under Hammersmith Bridge, beyond which they were taken down to Greenhithe, which is by the current QE2 bridge, to be completed. Now nothing remains of the yard, just a quiet riverbank.
John Thornycroft, son of a famous sculptor, was a very clever engineer and designer who was interested in fluid dynamics and designing for speed. They lived on the Mall in Chiswick, and his father purchased a plot of land at Church Wharf Chiswick for John to start manufacturing boats.
The first commission was from the Royal Navy of Norway to build a torpedo boat to carry the Whitehead mobile torpedo which had been invented ten years earlier. Orders came flooding in and between 1877 & 1881 they built seventy-seven torpedo boats, mostly for overseas customers. Pictures showed their sleek fast lines. They were steam driven and on these small boats there were stokers sealed into holds six feet high and with no natural light, shovelling coal into boilers.
The next stage was to build larger boats to catch the torpedo boats and again there was a good overseas market. A range of other small one-off craft were built for use all around the world. A story was related about a boat built for the English Baptist Church, which had to be split into loads of no more than 65 lbs to be carried from the coast of the Belgium Congo up to Lake Stanley. The wood burning boiler had to be very simple as there were no specialist engineers to maintain it, just missionaries. They also built Nile steamers, taken out on the deck of a large cargo boat and, for the Royal Navy, river gunboats for use in China.
A short side story about another London first followed. The Thorneycroft built HMS Speedy was the sixth to carry that name. Number three was an East Indiaman launched in 1803, subsequently taken over by the Navy and eventually in 1817 put up for sale as a hulk. A Baptist minister from Cornwall together with a businessman and Congregationalist from Plaistow started a campaign to buy her and convert her into a floating chapel for use in the London Docks. Their campaign succeeded, and the Ark as it became known was dedicated a year later in May 1818.
Putting a steam engine into a ship rather than a railway locomotive was easier, as its weight had no rails to crush. Glasgow companies led the way at the beginning of the 19th century, but again it was Thames side companies which soon dominated the market for most of the 19th century. This led to questions being asked in the House.
A table showed the result of a question in parliament about who was getting admiralty contracts for marine steam engines indicating that Thames companies were dominating the market, primarily Maudslay, Son and Field of Lambeth. Henry Maudslay’s father was a carpenter in Woolwich Arsenal. Henry himself started work in the Arsenal as a powder monkey with the dangerous job of filling mortars and shells with gunpowder, was trained in the workshops to become a skilled blacksmith and toolmaker, became head hunted to join a famous locksmith company and was soon running their workshops. Nine years later he set up his own workshop, designing and building the first screw cutting lathe. Screw threads were previously cut individually by hand and therefore were not repeatable and so each screw had to be matched with its own nut.
Henry was asked by Isambard Brunel’s son Marc Brunel to build machines to produce thousands of rigging blocks required by the Royal Navy. The machines were capable of making one hundred and thirty thousand ships’ blocks a year, needing only ten unskilled men to operate them compared with the hundred and ten skilled workers needed before their installation. This was the first ever example of mass production of repeatable items and the machines were still being used eight years later. His firm also built a marine steam engine for the first paddle ship to be built on the Thames.
He then built for Marc Brunel a tunnelling shield for the tunnel Marc was building under the Thames connecting Rotherhithe and Wapping, which is now used by the East London Line. Until 1830 his company was the only one the admiralty would buy steam engines from. His factory was known worldwide for being the most advanced manufacturing company in the UK, and subsequent top engineers received their training at his works. He built a highly accurate bench micrometer, now in the science museum, which could measure to 1/10000th of an inch.
His factory was in the Westminster Bridge Road, and was eventually pulled down to build Lambeth North tube station which contains high up in the booking hall the only plaque recognising him. A picture showed the demolition of the company’s nearby riverside factory just before the First World War, It was included because it showed the riverside being built out to accommodate an embankment and space for LCC County Hall.
Malcolm then turned to how bulk goods such as coal and grain were dealt with and distributed along the Thames, commencing with grain. Once the corn laws were repealed in 1846, import of grain into London Docks became a major trade. Before WW2, London docks imported nearly three million tons of grain per year. The main docks were Millwall and Royal Victoria. Large grain silos were built and fleets of barges transported grain to mills via the Thames and connecting canals. He illustrated this by a series of pictures recording one of the last round trips from Coxes Mill on the Wey Navigation at Weybridge to the granary at Millwall Dock.
The mill with its large millpond was built in the early 1780’s by ironmaster Alexander Raby. Barges were used to deliver grain from the London docks to the mill until 1969, when grain terminals in the docks were closed and moved to Tilbury. Initially men or horses were used to tow barges up the Wey canal to the river. Waypoints shown included Kingston Bridge and Teddington Lock where a small tug pulling barges from Weybridge was changed for one of Tough’s more powerful boats to deal with the river in London.
Large grain silos were built at the docks and one of the largest was at Millwall. When built it could hold a week’s supply of grain for London, a massive structure. An alternative to the silo was to discharge over the side directly into barges, using floating grain elevators. This proved to be such an efficient method of unloading that the Port of London Authority were giving discounts to those chartering the ship.
Large Mill owners soon realised that it made economic sense to build their mills at the dockside and just transport the finished item, using the good rail and road system built for dock traffic. An aerial view from the 1930s illustrated the Royal Victoria dock with three mills next to each other, all of which took a battering during the blitz. Another large mill owner the Co-Op had their mill on the riverside at Silvertown.
Thus ended Malcolm’s second talk on this wide-ranging subject, for which he was thanked by all present. His next in due course will cover the hay, coal and timber trades on the river and then go on to look at how many famous food producers had their first factories along the Thames.