The 1212 fire of Southwark - 450 years before the Great Fire of London in 1666

There's an interesting article in this week's edition of Southwark news by Joey Millar about a fire that took hold of London in 1212, killing over 3000 people.  That was 454 years before the famous Great Fire of 1666.  It's not Rotherhithe, but it's only down the road at London Bridge, and it's interesting!  The fire broke out in Southwark where wind carried it across the bridge (which was lined with tall wooden buildings), with nearly 7.5% of the population of London dying in the blaze.  For the full story see the article on the Southwark News website. 

Local history videos on the SE16.com website

I haven't mentioned the excellent SE16.com website for a while, which is an oversight.  I receive their weekly newsletter, and wouldn't be without it.  This week they have posted a link to a video of a terrible fire in 1936 in the Surrey Commercial Docks, and on the same page are links to other brilliant videos from SE16's past.  Do have a look - they are really excellent.

The above is a screen grab of the video on the SE16.com website
http://www.se16.com/3686-1936-newsreel-clip-of-surrey-docks-fire

Arson at Brunswick Quay, Greenland Dock

The Brunswick Quay Residents Association (BQRA) have sent out a message asking residents to be careful to secure their wheelie bins after another deliberate fire was set in a bin in one of the recessed entrance areas beneath a block of flats along Brunswick Quay in the early hours of Saturday 29 August.  The photographs on this post show some of the damage that was inflicted.  As you can see, the burning was extensive and the blistering of the surfaces shows how hot it became under the roof, putting the overhead apartment at serious risk.  The wooden doors hiding metres and electrical equipment were completely burned off, leaving the equipment exposed to the fire.  Matters could have been much, much worse.

This is the second time this year that a fire has been set in a bin. The previous one was very serious and could have resulted in loss of life.  The fire caused so much damage to the flats that the residents were forced to leave their homes whilst reconstruction work took place, and the scaffolding for the repairs is still standing.

The police are investigating the arson but are reminding residents to minimise the danger of a serious fire in their properties by locking bins away where possible, padlocking bins, or at least placing them so they are not located directly underneath properties.  Obviously, removing combustible items from beneath the flats is also recommended. Such examples of arson should probably serve as a warning to anyone in the area, not just Brunswick Quay, who keep their bins in recessed areas beneath flats or upper floors of houses.

Two life-belt stands have also been burned down in Russia Dock Woodland, which may suggest that the Brunswick Quay examples could be be part of a larger problem.

Today a bin full of wood has been left by the entrance under one of the apartments in Brunswick Quay, and this is being reported to the police because it looks suspiciously like a pre-made bonfire.  Should you seen anything else suspicious, feel that anyone is behaving suspiciously or are concerned by anything unusual, please contact the police immediately. 

  

 

 

Visitor Ships 4: Canadian Pacific at Surrey Commercial Docks 1920s - 1940

The Surrey Commercial
Docks in the 1920s.
Click to enlarge

This is the fourth in an occasional series about ships that visited the Surrey Commercial Docks.  The docks lived to receive ships that travelled to London from all over the world.  No commentary on Rotherhithe's history would be  complete without a conversation about the ships that occupied and visited the docks, from un-powered lighters and sailing barges to vast cruise ships and cargo carriers.  Although there were exceptions, like the Cunard A-Class liners that moored at Greenland Dock between the wars (discussed on an earlier post), most were cargo transporters.  

This post looks at the the Beaver class cargo ships owned by the enormous Canadian Pacific company, which was as well known for its passenger cruisers and its trains as it was for its cargo ships.  The Beaver class ships that visited the Surrey Commercial Docks specialized in transporting perishables between Canada and Europe, and were an excellent example of strategic planning for the difficult trans-Atlantic crossing, where variable conditions made it difficult to keep to timetables.

A Beaver class cargo ship, with the "goal post masts"
clearly on display.  These were used for loading
and unloading cargo, independently of dockside
machinery.

The Canadian Pacific's Beaver ships were cargo carriers, and all of them were built to the same basic specification in the late 1920s, at builders on the Tyne and the Clyde in Britain. Canadian Pacific ran cargo ships weekly to London's Surrey Commercial Docks from Canadian ports at Halifax, New Brunswick and St John.  The advertising poster on the right shows a Beaver class ship on the Thames, with the distinctive brown sails of the Thames barges in the background and a steam tug approaching her.

There were five regular ships on the route based at the Surrey Commercial Docks:  Beaverford, Beaverhill, Beaverburn, Beaverdale and Beaverbrea, with other ships also operating on the route, including Beaverfir, Beavercove and Beaverdale.  The latter Beaver ships also used the Royal Docks in London.  The beaver theme derives from the company's logo which, from 1886 onwards, consisted of a crest topped with the image of a beaver, a Canadian national symbol and the ideal of a dedicated hard worker.  The exact form of the logo changed many times but the crest topped with the beaver were usually incorporated.

Beaverford. From Bower's "London Ship types"

All Beaver class ships were 9956 tons, 495ft long and 61ft 6ins wide, with single funnels.  Steam being more dependable at that stage than diesel, the the ships ran their propeller drives (screws) through Parson steam turbines and all the auxiliary equipment required to support them.  Innovative automatic stokers installed as an experiment on two were so successful that they were then installed on the others of the line to replace manual stoking. I love this description of the ships from Frank C. Bowen's 1938 London Ship Types (page 97):

The hull, which is 495 feet long by 61 feet 6 inches, with a load draught of 27 feet, wad designed after careful tank experiments to obtain the utmost seaworthiness and to maintain its speed in a seaway, and with its cut-away stem and cruiser stern achieved these objects most satisfactorily, while it is most sightly to the sailor's eye and has nothing of the sardine-tine lines which are usually associated with a purely cargo ship."

Each of the ships was kitted out with cargo handling machinery to enable swift offloading of the cargo into lighters, so that there was no need to wait around for dock-side machinery to be free or to off-load cargo by hand.  

Beaverfir

But it was not all about the machinery. The Canadian company knew that if they were to specialize in high-maintenance perishable cargoes and run efficiently to the precise timetables so important for transporting perishables, they would need a top quality crew as well.  Accordingly, a lot of thought went into the crew's quarters in order to both attract and retain a quality team. The crew was accommodated in cabins on deck rather than in quarters below deck, and these were unusually spacious and comfortable.  Bower again, most entertainingly (page 97):

The traditional forecastle with all its discomfort is abandoned and officers and men are all accommodated in the bridge deck superstructure amidships, having small cabins which ma be compared with the first class accommodation of many ships only a few years ago.  Some of the old timers, it is true, complain that these cabins admit too much fresh air and that it is no longer possible to stop all ventilation with an old pair of trousers, as it used to be in the forecastle, but generally speaking the amenities are fully appreciated by the better type of seamen for who they were designed.

The Canadian Cold Store, 1944

The cargo carried was varied, but included fruit, cheese, bacon, ham and lard, which had to be temperature controlled.  At a lower level of the ships' holds they also carried grain, specialized types of timber and other cargo that required higher than normal levels of care and maintenance.

In Greenland Dock the Canadian Cold Store was established in the early 1900s to accommodate dairy products and other perishables imported from Canada and its use continued until the war.  The warehouse was bombed and burned out during the Blitz in 1940.    The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) archive photograph, left, shows it with flames pouring out of it's roof and windows.  

Tragically, all of the Beaver ships were lost during the Second World War. Beaverdale, for example, was torpedoed in the North Atlantic during April 1941, with the loss of twenty one lives. 

By the 1950s half of the world's ocean going ships were powered by diesel, and steam ships were replaced almost entirely by the mid 1960s.  Many steam ships were re-engineered so that they could run on diesel, in much the same way that over a century previously sailing ships had been re-engineered so that they could run on steam power.

With thanks to Frank C. Bowen's 1938 London Ship Types
for a lot of the information in this post. 

My previous Visitor Ships posts:

Visitor Ships 1: The Cunard A-Class Liners at Greenland Dock
http://russiadock.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/mid-20th-century-cunard-liners-at.html

Visitor Ships 2: A snapshot of ships present in the Surrey Commercial Docks in the late 1950s
http://russiadock.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/a-snapshot-of-ships-present-in.html

Visitor Ships 3:  The sailing Onkers at Surrey Commercial Docks
http://russiadock.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/visitors-3-onkers-at-surrey-commercial.html

Rotherhithe's Downtown area

Rotherhithe in 1914, with
Rotherhithe village to the west and
Downtown to the east

Downtown is the area along Rotherhithe Street that sits in the area behind Surrey Docks Farm.  Trinity Church, which was destroyed during the war and replaced by a 1950s version that stands today, was built to serve the Downtown area, and had its own school room attached for local children (I've written about Trinity Church on an earlier post).  Downtown was a village in its own right, just as Rotherhithe village to its west was. Stuart Rankin describes it as:

"formerly a self-contained community with its own church, chapels, schools, shops and pubs.  It was separated from the rest of the civil parish by the great sweep of the docks and the swing bridges giving access to them.  It was said in the 1890s that some elderly residents had never travelled as far as Lower Road."   

Trinity Church, on which work began in 1837

Downtown and the area that we now know as Rotherhithe village were therefore two distinct entities in the Rotherhithe peninsula, connected to each other by Rotherhithe Street, but separated from each other by the docks and probably by the less definable sense of being two separate communities, particularly as their social infrastructure, with a church, school, pubs and other facilities became established and formed the centres of local activity.  People had no need to travel away from the community to find what they needed, and Downtown developed a personality of its own.

Downtown was downriver from both Rotherhithe village and London itself.  If it does not refer to its downriver location I don't know where the name Downtown would have come from, but I am sure that the fact that it was named at all derives from the idea that this was a community in its own right.  It seems likely, looking at the maps of the area, that the Downtown area's housing, consisting of terraces of small houses, was built to accommodate the infusion of dock workers and their families.

The heart of Downtown in 1868. The abrubt
bend of the road to the right is where today the
C10 bus turns off Salter Road to turn down
Rotherhithe Street, past Trinity Church on the
left and the Surrey Docks Farm on the right

The 1868 map shows a small community sandwiched between Acorn Yard and the docks to the west and the Thames with its wharves to the west.  The river frontage included the massive Acorn Wharf timber yard (now Surrey Docks Farm and formerly one of the shipyards of the magnificent Barnard shipbuilding family),  the even bigger Durand's Wharf, Trinity Wharf, Queen's Wharf, the tiny Albion Wharf, a cooperage, another big timber yard, a number of saw mills and Nelson's Dockyard. All of these will eventually be covered in future posts - there's enough to keep me going for another decade!

Whereas today Rotherhithe village, much further along Rotherhithe Street, almost on the opposite side of the peninsula, has a clearly distinctive personality based around St Mary Rotherhithe church, Downtown was bombed fairly catastrophically during the war and retains little of its original architecture.

Trinity Church and its vicarage were destroyed by bombing on 7th September 1940, the first night of the 39-day London Blitz, a tragically memorable day for London.  At 5.30pm 348 German bombers dropped incendiary bombs on London.  A distribution map compiled from Fire Brigade records shows where and how densely the bombs fell on that day across London. Another map, on the Guardian website, shows where they fell in Rotherhithe. The bombs hit Rotherhithe so badly that the fires were uncontrollable and had to be left to burn themselves out, largely due to the intensity of the fires in the timber yards. The area was evacuated and much of the Downtown area of Rotherhithe was lost in the blaze.  Trinity Church was one of the first churches to be destroyed by German bombing.  All that now survives of its interior is a charred metal cross, with a figure of Jesus, returned to Holy Trinity in 2002. In the modern churchyard are some of the old churchyard's rather lovely tombstones, leaned up against the churchyard wall.  As a result of the war, the area has been radically developed since the 1930s, particularly during the 1990s.

However, one or two local buildings survived the Blitz, including what became known as the Dockland Settlement, the fourth location for a charity started by a wealthy playwright called Reginald Kennedy Cox (http://www.docklandsettlements.org.uk/).  The Dockland Settlement incorporated what was clearly once a rather nice chapel, the Ebenezer Chapel (a Norwegian place of worship and seamen mission), together with a contemporary two storey house, which was also obviously once very attractive. The Ebenezer Chapel and the attached house were recorded by archaeologists of the AOC Archaeology Group before it was demolished, and that 33 page report can be found here on the Archaeology Data Service website.  It describes the chapel as follows:  "This was built in 1871 for the local Norwegian population. This building was recorded to Level 2 standard as defined by English Heritage Guidelines."  The photograph on this post is a screen-grab from that report, showing the Ebenezer Chapel, that stood at the site until recently.  There's a brief but good explanation of the background to the word Ebenezer (not a name, as I ignorantly thought, but from the Hebrew, meaning "stone of help") on the Missouri Conference website: http://www.moumethodist.org/news/detail/831.

The pastor's house was attached to the chapel.  This was a two storey building with a hipped slate roof that was probably contemporary with the chapel and certainly dated to the 1870s.   The Dockland settlement, complete with chapel and pastor's house, was demolished to make way for a new block of flats in 2013.

The 1870s Pastor's House, before demolition
(from the AOC Archaeology Group report)

Ebenzer Chapel, 1871, showing the porch to the southeast of the nave
(from the AOC Archaeology Group report)

The new development on the corner of
Odessa Street, where the Ebenezer Chapel and the
Pastor's house once stood, February 2015