Mr Bugsby and the Coaling Jetty

You could see the world from Greenwich Marsh.

Before 1800 most of Greenwich Marsh was let to commercial interests by corporate land owners. It had a management board – their earliest preserved minute books are from the 1630s – who employed a bailiff and staff.

Over on the west bank was a Government owned gunpowder depot, otherwise there was a few huts and barns. And that was it.

However lonely and isolated we might think the area was then – it was very directly in touch with the rest of the world in a way few other places could be. It is surrounded on three sides by the Thames where a constant procession of shops and barges made their way up to London, and down river, going about ever possible sort of business.

Right opposite is Blackwall – where numerous voyages began and ended – and where the Pilgrim Fathers left to kick start America.

Across the river was the Blackwall depot of the East India Company – and anyone standing near the future site of the coaling jetty in 1800 would have seen great East Indianmen – ships at anchor and the tideway.

We need a leap of imagination to understand what they were like – these vast hi tech vessels had gone out to plunder the world, and founded an empire. To the people in the lands to which they had travelled they must have seemed like something from another world and they brought the riches of the world back to the Thames.

All around were shipyards where great warships were built – along with commercial vessels of all sorts, large and small. To the observer from the site of the coaling jetty – Busgby’s Hole – all of it was an everyday site.

This is an extract froma new book called ‘Mr Bugsby and the Coaling Jetty’ by Dr Mary Mills. It is available from East Greenwich Pleasaunce cafe, the Pilot Inn, Greenwich Communication Centre and Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Centre.

Nathan Thompson and the wooden nutmeg

In the 1860s the Thames ‘constituted the greatest shipbuilding area in the world’.  There were shipyards all up and down the river. However the Greenwich peninsula stands out being shipyard free until one manufacturer came there with a big idea.

As well as big ships there was always a need for the small craft that kept the whole system running with as many designs as purposes.  But this was someone who wanted to build boats, thousands of them, all the same. Boats had been made up and down the river for millennia – but never ones like this!

The National Company for Boat Building by Machinery had been set up by Nathan Thompson. He came from New York where Nathan had been a marine engineer. He said his system had taken him nineteen years to perfect and had been examined in New York by the United States Navy Department, He showed that it would take one man, working ten hours a day, eleven days and three hours to do it.  Within four years Thompson had come to England.

Thompson was the subject of an article by P. Barry in ‘Dockyard Economy and Naval Power’ who had visited Thompson’s works. He praised Thompson’s machinery as ‘practical  ….expeditious and economical’ but also drew to the manufacture of wooden nutmegs in New England. His English readers may not have known that in America Connecticut is known the ‘Nutmeg State’ and that a wooden nutmeg refers to a native of that state whose intentions are dishonest.

Thompson had a number of backers – chief of them Colonel Sykes, MP, Chairman of the East India Company. He produced a booklet consisting of letters of recommendation for his process which had been obtained following their visits to a demonstration works near Victoria Park in Old Ford, Hackney.  So the Company prospectus included references from an astonishing number of people including the Dukes of Cambridge and Sutherland and to an assortment of shipbuilders and industrialists. Whether any of them ordered any boats from him isn’t known.  The letters are however, like the boats, mainly identical to each other.

The idea was to produce a large number of identical small boats, made by a series of machines.  Thompson claimed that 25,000 new small boats were needed every year in Britain and he thought that he could supply a quarter of these.

Boats made to a system would be useful for all sorts of things.  Space was taken up by boats on the decks of ships – they could carry more if they could be quickly assembled and disassembled. Duplicate parts could be supplied and repairs thus done without any difficulty. Thompson’s boats, it was said, ‘go together like a bedstead’.  Landing craft could be stowed into a single transporter and then put together when time for the invasion arrived. Boats could also be packed up for overland journeys.

His system depended on a series of machines – fourteen in all and all steam driven.  The boats, which had to be all the same, moved through the system from one to another and were built up round a central ‘assembling form’ which, held everything together and in the right place.  It was however calculated that labour costs for each boat made would be less than a quarter than those made by conventional means. The cheapness of boats produced by this method would mean that new boats could be bought by fisherman and others without access to large amounts of capital.  Boats could be made very quickly – within hours of the order.

Once the company had been floated it was decided to set up the permanent factory in Greenwich and the site at Horseshoe Breach was leased from Morden College, Thompson set about making the Breach fit for shipbuilding by building a causeway and putting a boom across the bay itself.  They then faced the river wall with stone.  New buildings on site were to be proper brick built structures by agreement with Morden College.

Unfortunately they went out of business in their first year.

Philip Banbury, writing in the 1970s, pointed out that Thompson did not mention that all the boats had to be the same and that there was little hope of persuading customers to buy so many of a standard type .  Banbury estimated that boats needed on the Thames was ‘perhaps 300 of over a dozen types and sizes’. small boats were usually very specialist and had evolved for a wide range of tasks and conditions. Small local boatbuilders had marginal capital costs whereas Thompson’s machinery required a large investment.

I don’t know what happened to Thompson.  In his report to the US Navy Department he said that he had taken out patents in: the United States, England, France, Russia Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Sardinia, Turkey and Spain.   Perhaps he went off and tried to make his system of boats pay somewhere else.  perhaps somewhere in the world he was successful and perhaps somewhere there is a memorial to him.  Perhaps, if he really was a ‘wooden nutmeg’ some of the capital he raised went with him and who knows what he did and where he went.

Some of the information used in this article came from Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut.  They wrote and said they were hurt at my description of the ‘wooden nutmeg’  – he was in fact they said ‘a snake oil merchant’.

John Mowlem and Granite Wharf

A young Mary with her mum at the Great Globe

I have recently been on holiday in Devon and Somerset – and on my blog I have put something about the Jubilee Wall which has been built on Watchet Station and how the stones in it are very similar to the wall which used to stand in Cadet Place in Greenwich, off Banning Street – and how I hope our Planners have arranged to have our wall rebuilt.

I thought I should explain some of the background to the site in Greenwich which was adjacent to the Cadet Place wall. This is the site which is now the big hole downriver of the new housing on Lovell’s Wharf, and which will be the next site to be developed. It is also the site where the ancient tide mill was found recently.

So – when I was seven we went on holiday to Bournemouth. And most of all I remember a visit to the Great Globe at Swanage and I came back to the Globe fifty years later but this time here in Greenwich.

What we now know as the Lovell’s Wharf area had previously been developed in the 1840s by Coles Child, for Morden College. What we now call Lovell’s, he called ‘Greenwich Wharf’ – part of it became known as ‘Granite Wharf’ because in 1852 he leased it to Mowlem, Burt and Freeman.

The original John Mowlem had worked in the Dorset stone quarries and then came to London and founded the famous contracting firm in 1823. He began with paving contracts and a wharf at Paddington. By 1852 he had retired to Swanage and the firm was then managed by his nephew, George Burt. Mowlem and Burt made an extraordinary collection of bits and pieces taken from the London streets and took them back to Swanage where visitors today can follow trails to see them.

Mowlem’s Greenwich wharf was their ‘stone yard’. In the 1860s there are records of their ‘substantial buildings’. By 1869 maps show rails appear going to the river edge, and a slip with ‘mooring posts’ and a crane. ‘Cadet Place’ was called ‘Paddock Place’.

At Durleston Country Park near Swanage they sell a postcard which shows the Great Globe, now on site there, as being built in Greenwich. The Globe was the idea of George Burt who had earlier commissioned a smaller granite globe, now on display in Beaulieu. The Great Globe is made of 15 pieces of Portland stone – held together with granite dowels. It was taken from Greenwich to Durleston sections by sailing boat. Whether the stone originally came from Swanage is not known – but the expense of carting 40 tons of stone between the two must have been considerable.

Cadet Place had this extraordinary wall of what appears to be pieces of random stone, some of in a blocked up gateway. Geologist, Eric Robinson, called it ‘Cyclopean’ and identified the stone as part of Mowlem’s stockpile of stone. Eric says it includes ‘White Portland Stone, some of it dressed with the stone pick, pink and red sandstone – not necessarily as hard as the Coal Measures York Stone – they are joined by ‘Bluestone’ (Diorite).

At either side the blocks sit at unusual angles with an infill of angular pieces of dark bluestone – this dark stone came from Guernsey in the Channel Islands and was much used in kerbs and cobbles’. He says that this miscellany is almost a museum of the sort of stones which made up the stone cartage trade in the English Channel – ‘just add some granite’s. He continues, ‘look at the cobbles and smaller cube setts in the entrance to the yard and you see all of these granitic rocks polished by cart wheels and cars’.

Elsewhere, Eric has provided guides for school children (and adults too) who want to explore the world of stone in Greenwich – and he promised me more information when I spoke to him last week I was not as lucky as a small child. When we visited the Globe at Swanage in 1947 I had no idea what it was – but, gosh, I was impressed!

East Greenwich: The home of communication

How an east Greenwich factory enabled world wide electronic interaction – and how it became the central part of a local network of communication based industries.

In 1999 the ‘Dome’ was nearing completion, with a strong emphasis on electronic technology while ignoring traditional industry. Greenwich was talked up as ‘The home of Time’, and Alcatel, with a factory near the Dome, published a booklet “Greenwich, Centre for Global telecommunications from 1850”. This was never picked up, not even by the local press, and the enormous contribution of local scientists, engineers and workers to the technology on show in the Dome, went unnoticed.

Alcatel were, and are (as Alcatel-Lucent), based on the west bank of the Greenwich Peninsula on a site often known as Enderby Wharf. In 1837 the Enderby Brothers were asked to help in the development of pioneering telegraph cable technology. By the 1850s underwater cables were making possible an increasing pace of international communication and the Greenwich works, by then in other hands, was becoming the main manufacturing base for them.

The heroic story of how a cable was laid across the Atlantic has been told many times. The eventual success was with cable made in Greenwich and laid by Brunel’s vast ship, Great Eastern. I always feel that the really great moment was when, having successfully laid the fourth cable, Great Eastern left Heart’s Content to sail off into the Atlantic and find the parted ends of the third, attempt. No one knew where she was, and there were stories she was lost. On 2nd September 1866 the needles on the instruments at Valentia flickered – the broken cable has been found and mended in mid-Atlantic and, not only did everyone know now where Great Eastern was, but that the world had changed too.

The Greenwich Peninsula factory was to change owners several times, but for most of its history was known as Telcon. However, other local cable making factories were started – Hoopers on the Isle of Dogs, Henley at North Woolwich and Northfleet, Johnson and Phillips in Charlton, Siemens in Woolwich, STC at North Woolwich, BICC at Erith, and so on. Up to the 1920s the Greenwich factory produced the vast majority of underwater cables world wide. – Older local people will still remember the cable ships at Enderby Wharf. The expense of advancing technology brought mergers, and in 1970 STC became the sole British firm in the business, taking over the Greenwich site. Alcatel (itself the result of similar mergers in France) took over in 1994.

These early cables relayed a very limited amount of information using Morse code. By 1924 Telcon, developed a cable system which could transmit 1,500 words per minute. Work continued, and continues, on improving cable. In the 1930s scientists at Telcon were developing polythene – with a trade name of Telcothene – for use in cables. At the same time ‘repeaters’ were developed for amplifying the signals as they travelled through the cable –repeaters are still made at Greenwich today. The last repeaters for use with coaxial cable were made in Greenwich for a system that was laid between the Canary Islands and Spain in 1977.

Recently we have heard about the Nobel Prize awarded to Kao for his work, mainly undertaken in Harlow, on optical fibre technology. Much of the work to build optical fibres into submarine cables took place in Greenwich and the first cables and repeaters using this system were developed in early 1980s; though cable manufacture at Greenwich then ceased – going to STC’s Southampton factory (and later Calais, under Alcatel). The first transatlantic optical system was laid in 1988 with 10,000 telephone channels. Since then development has escalated. Ten years ago Alacatel’s booklet of 1999 boasted that Greenwich based scientists were producing cable which could send 10 million copies of the Daily Telegraph every second, far superior to what could be sent via satellite. Goodness knows what it can do now! We all talk about how global telecommunications are used every day by all us – this is where it began!

Production and development of much telecommunications technology came from South East London – although obviously as companies expanded factories and research centres were built elsewhere. Of the other companies involved the biggest was Siemens based in Woolwich, their site being roughly between the Thames Barrier and the Woolwich Road. They became part of AEI, then GEC, eventually closing in 1968. Looking at photographs of their production lines it comes as a shock to realize that all those telephones we knew and used before the introduction of the mobile were developed and made in Woolwich. Siemens made telecommunications cables but they also made and developed a vast range of enabling devices – oh – and yes they also developed and made telephone exchanges.

When Siemens closed a group of their apprentices and technologists continued to meet. They are now all OAPs and as the Siemens Engineering Society have published an archive document – and an attempt leave some information about what was achieved in Woolwich, which is now lodged at the Greenwich Heritage Centre.

And where else can we find out about Greenwich’s great contributions to the electronics revolution. Well – not locally! The best place is the museum at Porthcurno on the very tip of Cornwall. I would recommend a visit to Valentia, in South West Ireland, for the romance of the transatlantic cable. I am told there is a museum at Heart’s Content, in Nova Scotia. Most of all I feel that local people should know about all this, be proud of it and tell the world. It is after all the skills of all those in the local workforce who developed and made these devices which made this revolution we talk about actually happen.

Mary Mills would like to thank Richard Buchanan for advice and additional information in researching this article.