Greenwich Gas - many ideas

Greenwich Gas - many ideas

My three previous articles about gas in Greenwich have told the story up to a point where by the mid-1830s there were two gas works in the immediate area.  One of them, owned by the Bankside based Phoenix Company, was in Thames Street at the point where the Ravensbourne meets the Thames.  The other had been built for the London and Greenwich Railway, and was alongside the railway on the Deptford bank of the Creek.   It had since become an ordinary public supply gas works owned by the Deptford, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe Gas Company.

Just outside the Greenwich area was another gas works which was also a competitor for Greenwich custom. This was the South Metropolitan Gas Company, set up in the Old Kent Road in the late 1820s.  It had been originally a 'cannel' gas company, which meant that the gas was made from a special type of coal.  However, early on this company had been wracked by internal financial mismanagement and fraud. In 1836 London had been rocked by a massive explosion when their disastrously designed purifier house had blown up.  Things changed in 1840 when a Thomas Livesey was appointed to manage the Old Kent Road Works and this company soon became a force to be reckoned with in south London. Although no-one could have foreseen it in 1840, within forty years they would become the leading gas company in south London.

It was soon to turn out that two gas works was not enough for Greenwich! One of the main problems was that local ratepayers, and the vestry, were not happy with the price were charged by the gas companies for street lighting – suspecting the gas companies, who largely held local monopolies, of profiteering.  These complaints could probably be echoed in every town and village in England.  In London they led to what became known as the 'consumer movement'.

In Greenwich the vestry began to put pressure on the local gas companies at a time when it was claimed that the general price in London for gas was 9s. per thousand cubic feet.  Both Phoenix and South Met. Gas Companies offered to sell it to the Greenwich Vestry for 6s. per cubic foot.   Despite this price reductions in 1841 the Greenwich Vestry broke its agreement with the Phoenix Company and took its custom to the cheaper Deptford and Bermondsey Company. The latter set about laying pipes in 'all directions'.

The existing gas companies were not the only people who hoped to get in on lighting the streets of Greenwich. Over the next few years a number of others appeared who hoped to get some custom. Some of them had novel solutions to the problem.  Some of them claimed to use neither gas nor oil. In 1834 The Kentish Mercury carried an advertisement for 'H.N.Robinson & Co's Patent Petroleum Naphtha Lamps'. This was said to be a 'substitute for gas or oil' - despite the fact that 'petroleum naphtha' by any stretch of the imagination must have been a sort of oil. 'Naphtha' is another word for oil distilled from coal tar. The lamps were said to  'effect a saving of 50%, with a brilliant silvery, white flame, require little trouble, and no attention while burning, consume their own smoke, emit no sparks, free of grease and dirt and are not liable to get out of repair'. Which makes one wonder why they never caught on!  They were made by Henry Robinson's  'Impenetrable Aromatic Paint Co.'. Based in the Minories near the Tower of London but for sale in Blackheath Hill.

A number of others developed what were effectively oil lamps in this period – one, who must have been a close neighbour of Mr. Robinson, was Mr. Beale of Whitechapel who was soon to move his factory to East Greenwich.

In 1843, the Kentish Mercury carried an advertisement for the Bude Light Co. This had already been used in a number of places, including the House of Commons. It was the brainchild of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, a Cornishman, who had, like Beale, designed a successful steam road vehicle. In Bude, his home town, there is currently a scheme to erect a light outside his old home for Millennium year. Gurney designed both oil lamps and the precursor of 'lime light' which became well known for stage lighting. His scheme also involved a system of mirrors to enhance the light and a ventilation scheme for indoors.

Gurney's advertisement was followed by a visit to the Greenwich vestry of 'two persons' from his company who offered to install street lighting at a saving of  'at least 50 per cent'. They were asked to provide detailed figures but nothing seems to have come of it.

There were also very probably a number of small private gas making plants in the area.  There was one at Deptford Dockyard, for instance and gradually as railways spread in the area  they built private gas and coke plants too.   Mysteriously in 1846 an advertisement appeared for an auction sale of equipment from a chemical works once belonging to Mr. T.Martyr, and described as all 'new and expensive'.  This included a 'gasometer and a retort' and seems to have been sited in Thames Street near the Phoenix Gas Works.  As late as 1860 Greenwich Hospital was able to use the threat of setting up their own private gas works to get the price of its gas from Phoenix reduced.

Clearly all this price cutting didn't suit the gas companies themselves and they began to get together to stop it.  The three gas companies supplying the Greenwich area began discussions and decided between themselves on who they would supply and who not.  This sort of practice was to become common in London. Although they called themselves  'Associations of Gas Companies' their main activity was to make agreements which would keep the prices up.  In 1844 an agreement was reached for 'an exchange of mains and rentals in certain parishes'. This meant that customers had to use the company which had agreed to cover their area and no other – which made shopping around for a lower price impossible.   The price-cutting Deptford Company was confined to those parts of Deptford which were in Kent, and the gas companies congratulated themselves of being free of 'ruinous competition'.

This was not a situation with which local businessmen could be happy and soon moves were afoot to set up another gas company which would be in the control of local traders and not part of a price fixing ring.  In 1846 a meeting was held at the Mitre Tavern, Deptford Bridge, to set up a gas company called the 'Tradesmen's Independent Gas Light and Coke Co.'.  Although no more was to be heard from this initiative it was part of a movement which was to reverberate around the area. Perhaps it is time to meet Mr. Croll.

Angus Alexander Croll came from Perth, in Scotland, where he seems, as a lad, to have developed a passion for gas manufacture.  He was later to tell touching stories of his activities selling bird cages in the street in order to finance his education.  At some time in the late 1830s he came to Greenwich and set up as a chemical manufacturer, or more likely, to work in one of the chemical factories which were springing up around Deptford Creek.  He took out a number of patents for chemical processes, none of which seem to have been very successful and by 1837 he had been appointed as Superintendent at a gas works in Clerkenwell. This was a very senior job and Croll's experience and expertise must have been of a very high level indeed- or he had friends with influence.

A movement began to grow up – apparently fanned by Mr. Croll  - for a gas works which would be owned and controlled by local people.  'Local people', of course, meaning local businessmen.   Croll was eventually to be involved in a number of such companies in London and elsewhere. Perhaps his most successful venture was the Great Central Gas Company, which, though based in Bow, was part of the City of London's plans for integrated public services.  South of the river, and nearer to Greenwich, Croll was involved in the Surrey Consumers Company which built a works in Rotherhithe. This was initially a very troublesome outfit which was to provide another source of competition for the existing Greenwich gas companies. In the short term the original builder of the works was Tom Hedley, son of the Mr. Hedley who had previously been involved in Greenwich. Events escalated at Rotherhithe to an extent  that Tom Hedley was forced to barricade himself in while Croll's mounted a siege breaking operation from outside – involving the usual gangs of navvies armed with pickaxes and spades.  This was not the only such confrontation in which Croll was involved.  A long poem about his activities reads, in part:

                 "For ever in the gaseous war,

                 May Crollious General be

                 And when again he leads his men

                 May I be there to see"

These ideas led to new initiatives in Greenwich.  In 1849 an advertisement appeared in the Kentish Mercury for  'Cheap gas, Pure gas, Brightly Burning Gas'. This had been placed by the 'Metropolitan and Provincial Illumination Company' which planned to 'embrace the parish precincts of Greenwich, Deptford, Woolwich, Charlton, Eltham, Lee and Lewisham'.  What was advertised was four lectures on the 'chymistry and physics of artificial illumination' to be held in Mr. Larkham's house in Silver Street.

At the same time a letter appeared in the Mercury from a Mr.William Radley who wished to address 'the Friends of Cheap Gas'.  He described how the new gas company had been proposed 'by a gentlemen living in King Street, Greenwich.  Radley himself had moved to Greenwich so as to avoid criticisms of being an outsider when the new gas company was set up – meaning that he would not be identified as the carpetbagger he actually was.  In trying to get the new gas company off the ground he spoke to 'Mr. James D***** ' who, he said, was more concerned with his spirit licence for his pub in Crane Street. A committee was set up of Mr. D***, M *****, C*****, L******, H****, P****, W***, T*****, H*****, T**** and R***** and a company registration was completed.  Why didn't these adherents to the cause of cheap gas want to be identified?  Although many meetings took place some of the nameless supporters withdrew leaving only three.  Mr Radley then remarked that 'a Phoenix was about to rise from the ashes of the lately defunct gas company.''  What did he mean? The Phoenix Gas Company was in Greenwich. and certainly not defunct!  He on to say that the 'South East Suburban branch of the above mentioned Metropolitan and Provincial Illumination Improvement Committee would form their own committee, for which he wanted help.

The conclusion is that Mr. Radley's proposals had not been well received by Greenwich tradesmen who had not supported him and inevitably this was yet another storm in a teacup. No more was heard.

Six months later a meeting of 'gas consumers of Southwark, Lambeth,  Lewisham Greenwich and Deptford' was held in the lecture hall Greenwich. The Chairman was Sir John Thwaites. Thwaites was a major activist in London politics, who worked with the City of London and the government on regulating the gas industry. He had been a supporter of Croll in setting up the Rotherhithe based 'Consumers' Gas Company and the meeting was to involve Greenwich in a London wide movement. This meant that the campaigns for cheaper gas were now taken forward in a very different way.  Local vestries became less important and London wide bodies took over the arguments.

By the late 1840s Deptford Works was in a great deal of trouble.  They had become incorporated in 1852 – a move which was, to quote Brian Sturt,  'a protective cover '.  Soon their works was up for sale and turned down by both South Met and Phoenix.   There was a long enquiry into the Deptford Company during the 1850s. It emerged that the gas company had been backed financially by the Deptford chemist, Frank Hills. It was eventually sold to the new Rotherhithe based Surrey Consumers gas company for £20,878,

There were to be more attempts to set gas companies locally but, as far as Greenwich was concerned, that really was that.  Negotiations undertaken by Sir John Thwaites and his successors meant that within the next fifteen years increasing regulation was imposed on gas companies by the Government. Eventually, in the late 1860s, London companies were asked to make themselves more efficient and it was seen that part of this was to force the smaller gas companies to amalgamate into large bodes which could have a monopoly supply over urban areas under strict government regulation.  By 1880s South London had just two companies – South Suburban which covered Lewisham and South Met. which covered the rest. Phoenix, Deptford and the Surrey Consumers had all gone. South Met. went on to build the giant gasworks on the site of where the Millennium Dome now stands.

There are a few things still to say.  One is to point to the role of some local industrial chemists in the gas industry.  Gas works did not only make gas.  The waste products of the gas manufacture, available in large quantities, were a useful source of raw materials for industrial chemists.  There was a great need for cleaner, less smelly, gas for use in peoples' homes. In order to remove this smell many chemicals needed to be taken out of the gas – substances which an enterprising chemist could use to make a lot of money. Two such enterprising chemists  - perhaps the most prominent such in London - were Frank Hills and Angus Croll, both of whom, as we have seen, were involved in Greenwich and Deptford gas up to their necks.

Finally, there are two or three mysteries.  If anyone from Greenwich asks about the gas holders which used to be in Roan Street – they are quite straightforward. The Roan Street site was a gasholder station built for the Phoenix Gas Company.  What has never been explained is the gas holder in Deptford by Blackhorse Bridge – which is variously marked on maps as 'Southwark Gas Works' or 'Surrey Gas Works' and which one writer has described as the 'Greenwich Railway Gas Works'.    The final mystery is that in June 1858

The Mercury announced that the 'Deptford Gas Works is in a state of great forwardness'. Anyone who has any ideas about what that was – please let me know.