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The woman that walked to the Painted Hall from Cornwall (and nearly wasn’t allowed in)

July 16, 2015 By Rob Powell

Here's a great story found, found in an 1851 edition of the West Kent Guardian, of how an 84 year old woman walked from Cornwall to Greenwich to see the Painted Hall but almost wasn't allowed in because she looked too "grotesque".

Mary Callinich arrived at the gate to Greenwich Hospital, having first visited the Great Exhibition, and asked to see the Painted Hall and the Chapel.

The Sergeant guarding the entrance gate, rather unsympathetically, denied the Cornish pensioner entry on the grounds that she had "got such a funny hat". With that, she whipped out a black velvet bonnet and obviously transformed her appearance such that she was promptly allowed in.

She expressed her "highest gratification" as she departed after a two hour visit. Having seen what she came for, one wonders if the formidable Mary Callinich simply walked back to Cornwall afterwards.

Read the full article below:

grotesque

You can find more interesting newspaper stories from the past in the British Newspaper Archive.

Filed Under: Rob Powell Tagged With: Local History

London Borough of Greenwich created 50 years ago today

April 1, 2015 By Rob Powell

The London Borough of Greenwich was created in the big local government shakeup of 1965, bringing together the Metropolitan boroughs of Greenwich and Woolwich. That change came in to effect fifty years ago today with the new borough using the name of Greenwich but being based in Woolwich.

Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich's final meeting

At the very last meeting of the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich in the old town hall, councillors unanimously agreed to place on record their "deep appreciation of the loyal and untiring service given to the Borough over the years" by staff members and in the the final motion, moved by Labour's Johanna Gollogly, expressed their "deep regret that the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich" was to lose its identity on 31st March 1965. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Rob Powell Tagged With: Local History

Gasholder Trumps

September 23, 2014 By Dr Mary Mills

Last week I went to a conference on gasholders.  I have been researching gas industry history for many, many years and we have a large and important (and probably doomed) holder just down the road. I used to sit at Council meetings with a little paper model of a gas holder on my desk – the only person who noticed it was Chris Roberts (and he laughed, he did, honestly).

The conference was organised by the Institution of Gas Engineers -- and the industry is one that doesn’t really recognise people who don’t work for it (never has) but they did allow specialist historians like me to go. But they did get us all to stand up at the start so we could be identified as the aliens among them.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Mary Mills Tagged With: Local History

Frank Burton

August 6, 2014 By Kevin Nolan

It's never been easy to park near The Valley on Charlton's matchdays. So before the club generously offered me a spot in Valley Grove behind the away end, I tried my luck up on the heights around Charlton House, which made it a piece of cake cruising down Charlton Church Lane, but not so pleasant toiling uphill later on, especially when we lost.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Kevin Nolan Tagged With: Local History

The importance of Greenwich’s industrial history

November 21, 2012 By Dr Mary Mills

This article is about industrial history in Greenwich – why it is so important. I am going to try to explain that there is a whole history of unrivalled innovation here. But, which, sadly, we ignore – preferring kings and queens, without knowing about their role in all this – it was because of decisions made by the Tudor monarchs that Greenwich became so important.  This article has been put together really quickly – so, it’s all out of my head and no footnotes.

I don’t knew when the start of all this industry was – the earliest I know is the 12th century tide mill which turned up on what we call the Lovells site a few years ago.  That is still being researched and dug. Mills worked by the power of the tides tend to be about large scale works – this mill, we suppose, was owned by major landowners,  St.Peter’s Abbey , Ghent.  So, perhaps we had an early medieval industrial village – based round Ballast Quay – milling and fishing.

Fishing – there was a lot of that. In the 19th century Greenwich fishing fleets were out in the North Sea, catching cod.  When the railways came some of the ship owners went up to Grimsby and helped start a new centre there - but that is running ahead of myself.

Fishing meant boat building – and that was certainly going on along the riverfront.  Historians have some arguments about the scale of it, but maybe by the late Middle Ages big ships were being built in Deptford – and some were for the King.   Henry VIII – we hear a lot about him in Greenwich – but he took the decisions which made our industry so important later.  First of all he encouraged what became the Royal Dockyards at Deptford and at Woolwich (and of course, elsewhere) and we can trace all sorts of threads from that in terms of British Naval Power – but also in terms of all sorts of technologies around ship building, and social outputs like the Co-op and trade unions (the first recorded instance of picketing is at Woolwich Dockyard).

But it wasn’t just ships with Henry VIII – he also encouraged all that fancy armour we see in the Tower today and other bits of military innovation in the Great Barn at Greenwich.  Over the centuries some of that ended up moving down to Woolwich and became the Royal Arsenal  - where they made big, big, big guns  and did major research in what could be the biggest factory complex ever – Woolwich trained engineers went out in the 18th and 19th and set up whole industrial complexes with what they had learnt here.

Other bits of Tudor patronage spread from Greenwich to Lewisham to become the Armoury Mill and  in the early 19th shifted to Enfield to become the Royal  Small Arms factory – and their need for explosives became chemistry and led to the establishment at Waltham Abbey – which leads us on to things like nitro-glycerine, dynamite  and, I  am afraid, The Bomb.  In fact Government sponsored industry spreads all-round the country – and beyond.  All over the place are factories which can trace their origins back to a department moved from Greenwich and Woolwich – it could be drawn out and traced like a great family tree. And the resulting technologies were not just about military power but could be used in fields like medicine

I must go back to the chemistry for a bit – and return to the 17th century.  After the Restoration various individuals came back from exile on the Continent with all sorts of ideas. One, Nicholas Crispe (he’s buried in Hammersmith) opened a copperas works in Deptford – one of many along the Thames.  (And, by the way, the first known mention of coke manufacture is in 1636 in Deptford).  Among other things copperas was the earliest way of making sulphuric acid – there is a famous 1845 quotation about how important it is to a developed economy.  In time, other chemical entrepreneurs moved to Deptford Creek – there was a Beneke from the family who also produced Felix Mendelssohn and there was wicked Frank Hills – at Deptford they seem to have developed more modern and efficient methods of producing the acid.  Just downstream from them in the 19th century John Bennett Lawes discovered how to make modern fertilisers – while Frank Hills changed the gas industry, and, in Germany, Mendelssohn’s son founded chemical works which provided the base for their great industrial expansion.

Back to the river and the ships.  A major energy source, of course, was coal – much of it from the north east coal fields.  Forget the romantic days of sail in the river –most of the ships were dirty little colliers doing the round trip from Newcastle and Durham, year in year out and much of it was unloaded in a facility off Charlton.  Coal fed industry’s need for heat and light. But it was also a major source of raw materials (my PhD was about how they used the chemicals recovered from coal).  I have considered writing the history of the industries of the Greenwich Peninsula in terms of coal used as a raw material – all those factories making tar products, even the soap they made was ‘coal tar’.

London River was THE major shipbuilding area in the country up to the late 19th century but Greenwich was never in the same class for that as surrounding areas – give or take a few late aberrations like Blackadder and the two first ro-ro ferries.  Frank Hills built his battleships on the other side of the river – have you ever thought what it must have been like to look out and see Warrior being built over on Bow Creek???  In Greenwich Woolwich trained engineers worked at Penn’s great marine engine factory on Blackheath Hill – and pushed at the boundaries of design and innovation. Some of them went off to the provinces to open factories making things like bicycles and sewing machines.   Have you any idea of the amount of highly skilled engineering in Greenwich in the 19th and early 20th centuries??   Greenwich was also a centre for barge building – prize winning vessels with design criteria pushed by the skilled workers of firms like Pipers.  When the Government began to send battleship orders to the Clyde and Tyne – so Penn’s turned to making cars and lorries, like many others.

So – what has all this got to do with today when it’s all about the internet and stuff like that.  Well – lets go down to Enderby  Wharf.  Contrary to popular belief the Enderby family had their whaling base elsewhere. Their Greenwich works was a rope and canvas factory – and the 1830s they tendered to make some cable which was part of experiment in communication on an early railway.  This became the Electric Telegraph – and as the Enderbys left,  the factory became Glass Elliott, and then Telcon and now it’s Alcatel.   It was under Glass Elliott and, thanks to Brunel’s, Great Eastern, that the underwater cable crossed the Atlantic – and something quite important happened to international finance.  It wasn’t just that – cables went round the world from country to country and by the 1920s the Greenwich works had produced the vast majority of them.   What hadn’t been made here was made by Siemens of Woolwich (who also produced vast numbers of telephones), Johnson and Phillips of Charlton (who also produced vast quantities of large electrical equipment), and a couple of factories in North Woolwich.  Alcatel no longer make the cable itself in Greenwich – they are much too high tech for that - but they will tell you that the underwater cable pushes the signals from your computer round the world a lot faster than the satellites do.

It’s amazing how London gets missed out of all the industrial history books.  I know people who can talk in a similar way about industry in the Lee Valley, in Stratford – and about London’s huge aircraft industry.  We didn’t have aircraft in Greenwich and, although they did make some railway locos in the Arsenal it wasn’t a big thing.  Greenwich was big on the trams though – although I’m afraid it was maintenance and destruction in Charlton.

There is so much I have missed out here – I’ve just tried to pick up the big strands.  There was the first power station supplying electricity over a distance ever – built in Deptford by Ferranti,  and there was a pioneering local authority heat from waste plant in Plumstead.  East Greenwich Gas Works was a very, very late works – but with unbelievably high aspirations and ideas about its perfectibility and it had the biggest gas holders in the world.  The biggest glass works in Europe was in Charlton – alongside a bottle works whose production escalated with the start of the NHS.    Steel magnate Bessemer was on the Peninsula for a while, along with his chum Walton who invented linoleum – his Greenwich works was his third – making patterned lino in a way which is impossible today.   There were the propellers made at Stone’s, including something vast for the Queen Mary.  There were the perforations from Harveys – have you seen the film of how they took the fractionating column to Grangemouth up the A5 in the 1950s??   There were the terrible smelly dog food works – added to by smells from soap and glucose.  Lots and lots more – read the Greenwich Industrial History blog or join Greenwich Industrial History Society (please!)

What I said at the start is that of this article is that Greenwich industry was about research, skills and innovation.   And,  look, isn't this important to the way we live today and doesn’t it have some elements of romance in it too??

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Local History

The Greenwich.co.uk guide to… 234 Trafalgar Road

August 3, 2011 By Rob Powell

Greenwich.co.uk recently reported that a London church was eyeing up the former restaurant in the Plaza building on Trafalgar Road. If a church was to be established in the former cinema building, it would mark a seventy-five year transformation from Our Gracie to His Grace - this is the story of 234 Trafalgar Road...

"Built for Mr and Mrs Greenwich"


Illustration of the proposed Granada Theatre printed by the Kentish Mercury

The Granada Theatre company was experiencing incredible growth in the 1930s across London and the south east under the stewardship of the impresario, Sidney Bernstein. Their cinemas promised customers "service with a smile" and reminded them in advertising that it should be pronounced "gra-NAH-dah". In 1937, the chain arrived in Greenwich.

The new theatre at the busy junction of Trafalgar Road, Blackwall Lane, Woolwich Road and Vanbrugh Hill took seven months to build.  Able to seat over 1900 patrons, it was designed by C. Howard Crane, with the interior designed by Theodore Komisarjevsky.

A feature in the Kentish Mercury a week before it opened it declared the new addition to the Granada chain,  "Built for Mr and Mrs Greenwich".

The newspaper noted that the "predominant colour in the scheme of wall decoration is silver, set off by natural and pastel shades in various hues."

"Behind the facade is a large area with a flat surface, where, presumably, the staff will be able to sunbathe and indulge in other forms of recreation."

Inside the Granada was a Mighty Wurlitzer organ, able to "command a world of music, from a full symphony orchestra to a Chinese tom-tom, the human voice, ships' syrens, the roar of an aeroplane, the crash of the surf, even a telephone bell."

The theatre was managed at its opening by John Roberts, who had six years' of experience in running the Rialto in Leytonstone.

It was, according to the Cinema Treasures website, the "plainest of the purpose built Granada Theatre chain." It certainly lacked the glamour of the Woolwich Granada which had opened a few months earlier and had been billed as "the most romantic theatre ever built" - later recognised with a Grade II listing.

Opening Night

Greenwich's Granada was opened on Wednesday 29th September 1937 by the superstar, Gracie Fields.

'Gracie "mobbed" at Greenwich' was the headline in the Kentish Independent, as they reported on the presence of "Britain's most popular comedienne". Actually Fields was a late stand in, and it was Maureen O'Sullivan who had been due to open the Granada but she had to withdraw because she was suffering from flu.

The presence of 'Our Gracie' drew a crowd - estimates vary between 8,000 and 10,000 - to the theatre's opening night. Upon arriving, Gracie went straight up to a roof balcony and performed "Sing as we go" and "Sally" for the fans out in Trafalgar Road. Photos from the opening made the next day's Daily Mirror.

According to the Kentish Mercury, she was piped on to the stage by the Dagenham Girl Pipers. The report says:

"She described the cinema as 'proper posh' and then said in a rich Lancashire accent, 'Well, I don't suppose you want to hear me talking, you want to hear me sing. Shove a piano on the stage, lads!' And she sang 'Sing As We Go', 'I Never Cried So Much in All My Life' and 'Sally'"

Charlton Athletic footballers Donald Welsh and John Oakes presented a signed football on stage to a pupil from John Roan School as a reward for being the first to enrol in the "granadiers" - a kids club which gave members special deals on Saturday matinees.

Elephant Boy and Midnight Taxi were the films shown on that opening night.

The opening night of the Granada coincided with a meeting of the council, so Mayor Dabin couldn't accept his invitation to attend the opening. He, and others from the council, instead visited the Granada on the following Monday.

Mayor Dabin declared it to be the "the last word in cinemas" and said he hoped it would be "an incentive to the traders in Trafalgar Road and to the landlords of the properties to improve their buildings".

Greenwich had Talent

Soon after opening, an amateur talent contest was launched on Friday nights at the Greenwich Granada.

A prize of £2 was on offer for the winner and £1 for the second placed act - whichever act got the loudest applause from the audience was crowned the winner.

The first such contest took place on October 15th. Eight entrants from Greenwich, Deptford, Plumstead and as far as Chatham took to the stage to compete for the first prize. The Claire Bros, who played the accordion, took the spoils and Ted Maitland from Alliance Road, Plumstead, came second for his recital of "The Charge Of The Light Brigade".

A few months later, Ted Scoging of Whitworth Street proved so popular with his syncopated piano routine that as well as winning the prize, he was offered a week's engagement to perform at the Granada.

Advertising

The Granada, like all cinemas, would advertise its listings in the local papers. Flyers were also created and handed out - often with a topical twist using newspaper cuttings.

This handbill below subverted a local newspaper report of the proposed second Blackwall Tunnel to suggest it was needed to "carry the crowds" to see Arthur Tracy appear in The Street Singer.


From the Granada archive at the British Film Institute library

When newspapers reported on the strange case of noted theatre organist, Reginald Dixon, getting lost - and reported missing for a while - in a thick fog in Middlesex, the Greenwich Granada rushed out flyers exclaiming, "We've found him and even if it snows he will appear at Greenwich Granada."

Memories of the Granada

Joan Collins was a child living in Tyler Street at the time of the opening of the Granada. She recalls the first night:

"It was dark. The whole Granada building was dark and I was sitting on my father's shoulder... all of a sudden, all of the outside lights went on. Everybody cheered and screamed and clapped... and then Gracie Fields came and sang some of her popular songs. It was very special."

Listen to Joan's memories of the opening night of the Granada
Joan Collins" memories of the Granada"s opening night (mp3)

Listen to Joan's memories of being in the Greenwich Granadiers club for children
Joan Collins" memories of the Greenwich Granadiers Club (mp3)

During the second World War, George Farnish was an assistant to the Gas Identification Officer in Greenwich. In an account of his life in he wrote before he died, he recalls having to carry out a mock gas attack on a Saturday afternoon in the town.

He placed a cannister of weak tear gas at the corner the junction by the Granada and warned shops to shut their doors and the theatre to control its fans.

"The police had to blow their whistles and shout 'gas', then suddenly the Granada started emptying out, people with tear gas in their eyes. The manager had not believed us and left the inlet air fans on, and the place had filled very quickly. "

In his memoirs, Greenwich-born author Christopher Fowler remembers the Granada as a place where "hunchbacked, chain-smoking pensioners whiled away their afternoons because they got cheap tickets to the early shows. When they weren't noisily unwrapping boiled sweets in the quiet parts of the film, they were creeping around the toilets with bladder complaints."

Bingo!

After the amazing boom of cinemas throughout the 30s came the inevitable decline. UK wide cinema admissions peaked in 1946 and had been on a downward trend ever since, dipping below one million in 1957 and continuing to fall rapidly as home television experienced a boom of its own.

The entrepreneurial Granada was looking for ways to diversify and started to introduce bingo at some of its less successful theatres. Part week bingo was introduced in Greenwich in 1963 and within five years, films had been dropped altogether.

The Granada survived as a bingo hall through to the 80s. The pictures below show that the sign which would have once advertised the features simply said, "Bingo Everyday".


Used with permission from the Old Cinema Photos Flickr account

By the end of the 80s the bingo hall had been closed down and Granada's time in Greenwich had come to an end.

A Star Is Born

In autumn of 1992, 234 Trafalgar Road was reborn as the Stars nightclub and is still fondly remembered by almost 400 people who have joined a Facebook group in its honour.

One former patron commented on the group, "Oh those were the days ..... crispy scruched hair ..knee boots ..and orange foundation..Dj playing the same songs in the same order every Friday.. I LOVED IT!!!!"

Another fan of the club added, "I remember my mate jumping off a raised stage at a foam party, landing on his knees and nearly breaking his legs! Priceless memories!"

For others though, the club was a place to avoid - it earned itself the unfortunate nick name, "Stabs", with one local resident remembering that there was "always too much blood on the road outside Stars on a Saturday morning for me to ever venture in."

By 1996, the party was over and the Stars had gone out.

The Plaza

Following the closure of Stars, developers moved in.

The building was gutted and thirty-nine new apartments were built inside.  The building was rebranded as the Plaza and shops were created at the ground level with Ladbrokes the bookmakers occupying the prime retail space facing onto Trafalgar Road.

Local journalist Darryl Chamberlain took these photos at the time of the transformation.

In 2006,  Caffreys Sports Bar requested permission from Greenwich Council to be able to offer pole dancing from its premises in the Plaza building.

The proposal proved to be hugely controversial and a campaign was launched by local residents to oppose the plan.

The Council's Licensing Committee did, however, grant permission for dancing to go ahead - but, to the relief of local campaigners, a Stop Notice was issued by the Council at the last minute to stop the bar from trading.

That Stop Notice was successfully appealed by the owner, Shopsearch UK Limited, and in 2009 the council was to compensate the owner for lost income.

A chinese restaurant opened for a while above the bookmakers but the space is now empty and various planning applications for changes of use have been submitted to the council, including for use as a place of education, a three bedroom apartment and most recently as a place of worship.

Sidney Bernstein himself did not get attached to bricks and mortar. In fact, he strongly resisted his Tooting and Woolwich theatres being listed and while the Greenwich Granada may not boast their splendour, its eventful history and unmissable presence at one of Greenwich's busiest junctions makes it part of the fabric of East Greenwich.

Plaza building

Plaza building

With thanks to the the Greenwich Heritage Centre, the British Film Institute library, Joan Collins, Darryl Chamberlain and Dr Mary Mills.

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Greenwich.co.uk Guide, Local History, Trafalgar Road

Greenwich.co.uk guide to… John Humphries House

June 29, 2011 By Rob Powell

When the University of Greenwich demolishes John Humphries House in Stockwell Street this year to make way for its new School of Architecture, it will be the end of a building which once upon a time was part of the white heat of new technology.

A building that to many just looks like a dated office building had been at the forefront of the computer revolution fifty years ago and provided a lead in showing how local authorities could pool services and resources to maximise efficiency.

The site itself on the eastern side of Stockwell Street had originally been ear marked for a road widening project.

In November 1950, councillors from the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich’s Works Committee adopted a scheme to widen Stockwell Street to deal with "the increasing amount of traffic using the thoroughfare."

As some of the buildings on the eastern side had suffered damage in the war, it was thought that they would need redeveloping anyway, thus creating an opportunity to buy and demolish the buildings.

The council set about buying up the land necessary to widen the Stockwell Street from the junction of Burney Street to Greenwich High Road.

By April 1961, the council had acquired parcels of land in Stockwell Street but still had to acquire numbers 4, 3 (Sabo’s newsagent) and 2 (the Spread Eagle) if it was to proceed with its widening scheme.

Following a change of heart, councillors decided to “avoid the necessity for purchasing the additional property,” although the council did also subsequently purchase number 4 Stockwell Street, by shifting the scheme across to the western side of the street.

Around about the same as the council found itself with plots of land on the eastern side of Stockwell Street that would no longer feature in the widening scheme, it also was looking for a base for an exciting new project – a computer centre.

Computers had been used for processing activities such as payroll several years and organisations that did not own a computer would purchase processing time on commercial computers.

One man who had worked extensively with the new computers was the Treasurer of the Borough of Greenwich - Mr John Henry Humphries.

Humphries, born in 1904, moved to London from West Hartlepool in the mid 1920s, where he first worked at Hammersmith Council, then Stoke Newington before joining Greenwich Council in 1934. His rise was quick, going from Assistant Borough Treasurer to Deputy Borough Treasurer and then Borough Treasurer in three years.

One of his “many contributions to Greenwich”, according to the local Mercury newspaper, “was the devising of a new formula to fix rents on the council’s housing estates” which was widely praised as one of the fairest to be used by local authorities.”

Humphries has been described as a “pioneer in the application to municipal accountancy of electronic computers” and his department was involved in a complete rewrite of the payroll application on a commercial computer to cope with a newly introduced graduated pension scheme.

He was also one of the key architects in the formation of the  London Boroughs’ Joint Computer Committee.

The JCC included the Metropolitan Borough Councils of Bermondsey, Camberwell, Deptford, Greenwich, Southwark and Woolwich and was created with the intention of purchasing a shared computer so that the member boroughs could pool their data processing requirements.

Its remit was to “provide, operate and manage an automatic data processing service.”

Greenwich’s lead role in the project is illustrated by the decision to make Greenwich’s Town Clerk and Borough Treasurer (Humphries), the Clerk and Treasurer for the JCC respectively.

Stockwell Street was chosen as the site for the JCC's new Computer Building and contractors for its construction were appointed in July 1962. GE Wallis and Sons of the Strand successfully tendered for the construction contract at a cost of £104,762.

W.H Penfold and Sons of Lewisham got the £579 contract for the demolition of existing buildings on site before the work could begin on the Computer Building, as it was known.

Inside the Computer Building would be a LEO III, ordered from Leo Computers at a cost of £202,008. It was the fourth installation of LEO’s third generation machine and was known as LEOIII/4.


Photo of the LEO III/4.

It was a successor to the original LEO computer which had been the first computer used for commercial business applications. According to Wikipedia, LEO IIIs “allowed concurrent running of as many as 12 application programs through the “Master program” operating system.”

In his article for the Greenwich Industrial History Society, Harry Pearman explains more about the LEO III.

“Files were stored on magnetic tape reels and data was entered by completing batches of forms, which were punched onto paper tape. Programs were written in a wholly numeric language called Intercede, and the primitive operating system required a great deal of operator intervention. LEO's principal benefit was the ability to print forms and tabulations at speeds of up to 1,000 lines a minute.

The first application was Rate Accounting and this was followed by Payroll, General Ledger Accounting, Job Costing, Stock Control, Creditor Payments, Miscellaneous Debtors, Transport, Housing Rents, Electoral Registration, Library Cataloguing and Land Use Registration. Subsequently The Forest and Bexley Hospitals and the Bloodstock Agency also used the services of the site.”

The LEO III computer was installed and operational in February 1963 but unfortunately, John Humphries would not live to see the Computer Building open. He died at the age of 58 at his home in Courtlands Avenue, Eltham, on November 19th 1962

Tributes were paid to Humphries by councillors and a report presented to a Special Meeting of the Council noted he had “given outstanding service to the Borough and that he will be greatly missed.”

Dense fog had prevented some councillors attending the Special Meeting so further tributes were paid the normal meeting a week later: they “expressed their deep sense of personal loss at his passing.”

His passing was recorded in the Mercury and the Kentish Independent. According to the Kentish Independent, “one of his great interests was music, particularly church music, and he was considered an organist of great accomplishment.”

The minutes of the Finance Committee meeting for December 1962 record the decision of the Joint Computer Committee to approve the name “John Humphries House.”

“The Joint Committee were unanimous that the valuable and untiring efforts in the computer sphere of the late Treasurer to the Committee (and Borough Treasurer of Greenwich) should be recognised in this way.”

The LEO computer was used at John Humphries House until 1975. By that time, local government had been re-organised – the London Borough of Greenwich had been created - and it was also becoming cheaper for organisations, and even home users, to own their own computers.

The building was still used by other council departments – Planning was based there for a time - but it was subsequently sold to a private owner.

As the council moved out, the building and its annex became home to a wide variety of small businesses and art studios. The Village Market was set up in the car park and would take place every weekend, causing much disappointment when it closed in 2009.

Various attempts were made by developers to revamp the site and do away with John Humphries House, and planning permission was given for a large mixed use development but when the housing market tanked, developers shied away from the risky project and the University of Greenwich stepped forward with a plan to redevelop the site and build a new library and School of Architecture.

John Humphries House will soon disappear from the local streetscape but its legacy will be in the pioneering use of computers and demonstrating a way in which boroughs were able to work together on shared services to create efficiencies – something that politicians still aspire to achieve today.

John Humphries House

Thanks to Greenwich Heritage Centre, Harry Pearman, Leo Computers Society and Dr Mary Mills.

Did you work at John Humphries House? Did you know John Humphries? Share your memories in the comments below.

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Local History, Stockwell Street, University of Greenwich

Mr Bugsby and the Coaling Jetty

November 10, 2010 By Dr Mary Mills

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.

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Local History

Nathan Thompson and the wooden nutmeg

October 19, 2010 By Dr Mary Mills

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’.

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Local History

John Mowlem and Granite Wharf

June 3, 2010 By Dr Mary Mills


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.

The Great Globe i Mowlem's YardMowlem’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!

Filed Under: Magazine Tagged With: Local History

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