eastlondonhistory.com

St Katharine Dock is probably the best known of all the
old London docklands to outsiders .
While the huge docks of the Isle of Dogs and beyond were hidden to anyone but East Enders themselves, tourists and Londoners alike only have to wander a few yards east of Tower Bridge to be in the heart of one of the relics of the Pool of London.
It was also one of the first of the moribund docks to be brought back to life: long before Canary Wharf and Yuppie housing were a twinkle in the planners’ eyes, St Katharine’s Dock had become a berth for luxury watercraft and a popular watering hole, thanks to the Dickens Inn and the Tower Hotel.
Royal connections
The Dock was a hugely ambitious but, in reality, never particularly successful venture. It was carved out of the banks of the Thames in 1827, marking a triumph of commerce over religion and bringing to an end the area’s centuries of history as a sacred site.
When St Katharine’s Hospital was pulled down in 1827 it brought to an end an association dating back to 1148, when Matilda of Boulogne, the wife of the usurping king of England, Stephen, established a hospital for the repose of her two deceased children.
It was also the start of a
long association with queens
of England. In 1273, Queen Eleanor, the widow of Henry III, kicked out the Prior
and brothers who had
been purloining funds, and re-established St Katharine’s with a new master.
Philippa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III, was
next to grant funds and found
a charity to benefit St Katharine’s, and the two Henrys V and VI later became benefactors.
The hospital benefited
further when its master, Thomas de Bekington, later the Bishop of Bath and Wells, obtained a Royal charter of privileges in 1445.

21-day feast
Thomas had cut a marvellous deal. The precincts of the hospital were declared free from all jurisdiction, be it civil or ecclesiastical, other than that of the Lord Chancellor. And to bolster funds, an ann-ual fair was to be held on Tower Hill, starting on the Feast of St James and lasting a full 21 days.
Short of being declared an independent state with its
own tax-raising powers, St Katharine’s couldn’t have had it better.
And St Katharine’s even escaped the grasp of that great dissolver of holy establishments, Henry VIII. In 1526, the king confirmed its rights, supposedly as a favour to his new queen, Anne Boleyn.
But the hospital was too rich a plum to remain unplucked forever. And in Edward VI’s reign, its lands were seized by the Crown. Then Dr Wylson, the secretary to Elizabeth I, tore up Henry VI’s charter and swiftly drew up a new one, conveniently leaving out any mention of Tower Hill Fair. He sold rights to the fair to the Corporation of London for the sum of £466, 13s and 4d.
The beleaguered hospital was ravaged by fire in 1672, when 100 houses were destroyed, and a storm in 1734 razed 30 more. Then, during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, a Protestant mob tried to destroy the church – its sin being that it was built in ‘Popish times’.
In the end it was not the greed of kings, the vagaries of nature, nor the bigotry of rioters that ended St Katharine’s. Big business saw it off in 1825, when the church was demolished to make way for the new docks.
The Gothic building, with stalls dating back to 1340, was unceremoniously razed and the hospital was no more.

Nowadays, most of the traffic on the Thames consists of pleasure boats and tourist launches. The big ships dock downriver at Tilbury and couldn’t get into the Pool of London even if
they wanted to – the QE2 bridge at Dartford has sealed the city off forever from heavy vessels.
A century ago it was very
different. London was built as a port in Roman times, and back in the 1890s it was still teeming with craft of all
shapes and sizes, many of them built on the Thames and its tributaries.
And the remarkable story of one of those ships begins at Blackwall. Not a destroyer, or a grand liner but a plucky little steam coaster – the SS Robin – which defied all the odds to survive to this day.
For centuries, before the railways and metalled roads criss-crossed the country, the only reliable way to transport bulky goods was by ship. With the coming of steam power and the invention of screw propulsion, the steam coaster evolved – replacing the sail-driven ketches, brigs and schooners, which had plied their trade up and down the coast of Britain. And though the little coasters weren’t big or glamorous, they were as vital to the British economy as the deep sea fleet – carrying goods from Glasgow to Liverpool, from London to Newcastle, and distributing goods to and from the great ocean terminals to the smaller towns around the country.

SS Robin was typical of the classic steam coaster design, which evolved in the 1840s and stayed the same until the 1950s. Her keel was laid down in Orchard House Yard, on Bow Creek, Blackwall, alongside that of sister ship Rook.
Shipwrights Mackenzie Macalpine passed the finished vessels on to the East India Dock, where they were fitted out and, on September 16, 1890, launched.
The pair of steam coasters now went their separate ways. Robin was towed to Dundee, where the famed engine builders, Gourlay Brothers,
fitted her boiler.
Rook had a long career, which sadly ended when she ran onto rocks off Clipperau Point near Holyhead on October 4, 1925. The vessel, now renamed Samoa, was a total wreck. But Robin would go through many owners and a change of name before she came to rest.
Robin’s maiden voyage began on December 20, 1890. Under the ownership of Arthur Ponsonby of Monmouth, 20 men signed on at Liverpool for a voyage to Bayonne, in south-west France.
For the next decade, Robin plied her trade between Britain and Ireland – with side trips to French ports – hauling grain, coal, iron ore, china clay and railway steel.
Then, on May 17, 1900, Blanco Hermanos of Oviedo ,Spain bought the little ship. Renamed Maria, her work transferred to the north-west coast of Spain, working out of Bilbao. Then, in 1913, she shifted to Santander, under the ownership of Perez y cia.
The Maria ran coal from Gijon to Santander, and played her part in the First World War supplying iron slabs for the French Government, escorted by two destroyers to protect her from U-boats.
And so her work continued until 1966, when she had her first major refit – the coal furnaces were converted to fuel oil and the mizzenmast taken out. But it seemed that time had caught up with the coaster when, in 1974, she was finally sent to the breakers.
But there was to be a reprieve. The director of Britain’s Maritime Trust heard of the ship’s plight and, rushing to Bilbao, inspected the craft and decided she was worth preserving.
On May 24, 1974, the sole survivor of the once-mighty British steam coaster fleet was saved for the nation.
Maria was sailed back to Britain. At an average speed of 7.5 knots, running on an
84-year-old boiler, she reached Chatham in the Medway on June 17 at 11.30am.
Robin probably cost a few hundred pounds to build back in the 1890s. By the time restoration was complete it was estimated that a quarter of a million had been spent.
But one item cost nothing to refit – her name. And now she lives again as SS Robin, part of the Historic Ship Collection, and the final memory of the Blackwall’s shipbuilding past.

Many thanks to Joseph Brown of Poplar.

Exactly a century ago, a wealthy East End shipbuilder made an investment in a new sports ground for his works’ football team.
For Arnold Hills, it was another gambit in his long campaign to keep his workers away from the bottle and engage them in healthy outdoor pursuits. For the team, it was the first step that would take them to world fame and cup-winning glory.
When Hills’ father Frank Hills bought the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company in 1880, he took on a going concern – but one with a decidedly mixed pedigree.
The technology of iron and steel building was one of the new marvels of the science-obsessed 19th Century, and engineers everywhere were pushing back the boundaries.
Thames Ironworks was at the forefront, building the Warrior, the world’s first iron warship at its Orchard Road works in Blackwall in 1859.
But the launch of another battleship, the Albion, was less happy. Launches regularly drew huge crowds and the company constructed a vast grandstand to hold the throng. The Ironworks’ engineering skills let it down, literally, as the grandstand collapsed killing 200 people.
The company’s reputation was shot and, in 1880, the Hills family took over an ailing giant.
It was always an uphill struggle. Arnold Hills was determined to keep his 6,000 men in jobs and maintained the yard at Blackwall when a move downstream to Tilbury would have made more economic sense.
At the same time, the Thames industry was under increasing attack from bigger firms on the Clyde, Tyne and Mersey.
But Hills was no mere money man. Like many Victorian businessmen, he was a patrician with his workers’ welfare at heart.
He lived among them, in East India Dock Road and, after his short walk home, would spend evenings dreaming up schemes for their education and moral well-being.

The vegetarian Christian encouraged all his men to “sign the pledge”, to renounce the booze, but he knew that wasn’t enough. He had to give them a counter-attraction to keep them out of the pubs.
So in 1895, he founded Thames Ironworks Football Team.
The Football League had recently been founded and the game was quickly becoming a huge working-class sport.
The team quickly took off — so much that in 1897 Hills paid out for a new stadium at the Memorial Ground, which boasted a grandstand and hosted athletics and cycling meets as well as soccer.
Meanwhile, the shipyard was in trouble. And its swansong was also the end of the Thames as a shipbuilding river – in 1911, the Ironworks built the Thunderer, the last ship ever to be constructed on the capital’s great waterway.
Ironically, as the Ironworks itself foundered under the weight of competition, its offspring team went from strength to strength.
In 1900, the team were elected to the Southern League and became a Limited Liability Company in their own right — severing their links with Thames Ironworks.
And in 1904, under the new name of West Ham United, they moved to their present home in Upton Park.
Arnold Hills died in 1927. His legacy to the people of Blackwall was certainly very different to the one he planned. His ironworks couldn’t keep them in jobs — but at least he gave them their own football club to cheer.
The club’s engineering roots are remembered in the two crossed hammers on their crest. And that is why to this day you will hear the crowds at Upton Park chanting “Come on you Irons”, a chant and a nickname that dates back to the great shipbuilding days of the Thames.

Today we remember James Cook as the great explorer who ‘re-discovered’ Australia and as an enlightened sea captain who turned the tide against the scurvy and vicious beatings that were the lot of the British sailor.
We also remember Cook as a Yorkshireman, hailing from the beautiful coastal town of Whitby. But a new book, Captain James Cook Endeavours, by Julia Rae, charts the hidden story of Cook’s life in Ratcliff and Wapping — and suggests that his association with the Quakers of the East End may have played a large role in forging the captain’s humanitarian approach to his men.

When Cook was born in the little North Yorkshire village of Marton on October 27, 1728, his parents, James and Grace, could never have dreamt their son would rise to such fame. Cook’s grandfather had moved to Yorkshire from Roxburgshire in Scotland, probably to work on the flourishing alum trade around the port of Whitby, whose boats in turn ran the goods down to the London docks. James Cook Senior was a farm labourer who rose to become a manager — the expectation would have been that young James would follow in his father’s steps. But after being sacked from his job as an assistant in a haberdashers shop, Cook signed up as an apprentice on the merchant ship of Captain John Walker. He was set to work on the regular runs of the merchantman Freelove as it hauled coal from Whitby to Wapping.

For a young sailor disembarking in the East End there were many temptations, all designed to relieve him of his pay as swiftly as possible. In Shadwell and Wapping, every other house was a drinking den. Goods liberated from ships’ cargoes were traded openly and the most likely job option for a young girl was to become one of the thousands of prostitutes who worked the dockfront streets and taverns. The pious and pacifist Quakers were very different and, despite persecution, had managed to establish a Friends meeting house in Wapping at the close of the 17th Century.

Cook lodged with the Quakers and, in 1762, married Elizabeth Batts, one of their number. These connections may have played a key role in his developing an unusual compassion to his men and the ‘natives’ he encountered in his travels. By this time, Cook had joined the Royal Navy and settled in the East End. His skill in navigation earned him swift promotion, rising from ordinary seaman to officer. He was responsible for the successful piloting of the fleet which took Quebec from the French in 1759.

His part in the victory made Cook’s reputation and he was chosen to captain the Endeavour on the Royal Society voyage to make astronomical observations from Tahiti. Australia had been discovered by the Dutch in the early 1600s, but ignored by Europe since. Cook’s journeys along Australia’s eastern coast and New Zealand were epic but it was his insistence on lime juice, clean water, limited ‘grog’ and an improvement on the normal weevil-ridden ship’s biscuit that kept his men alive.

In 1779, Cook’s sure touch deserted him when he was killed by natives in Tahiti. Elizabeth heard the news back in Wapping 11 months later. The church register of St Dunstan’s in Stepney records the christening of several of the six Cook children, but in 17 years man and wife had spent a total of just four years together. Three years later, his widow left her home in Assembly Row, Mile End, to move away to Surrey and the voyage that took the Cook family to the East End was over.

Sir Walter Raleigh travelled the world in search of fame and fortune. But it was at opposite ends of what is now Tower Hamlets that the great adventurer had his two ‘homes’ – though one was his choice and the other the King’s. He was born in Hayes Burton, Devon, probably in 1552. After studying at Oriel College Oxford, the young Raleigh went to fight in the French civil wars between 1569 and 1572. Returning to England, the young adventurer found his first home in the East End. He reputedly lived in Blackwall, in a manor house that was finally demolished in 1890 to make way for the Blackwall Tunnel approach.Raleigh was a hero and became a prominent figure at Queen Elizabeth’s court. He became a firm favourite of the Virgin Queen but, despite her insistence that Raleigh stay at court, adventure was in his blood.

Overseas voyages and colonial ventures followed and he fought in Ireland in 1580-1. Raleigh’s sights were set farther afield and on greater fortunes, though. Humphrey Gilbert, a fellow Devonian, had long had dreams of getting one over on the Spaniards and settling America. His first expedition there in 1578 got no further than the Cape Verde islands. Gilbert returned home to raise funds for another attempt, and found an eager backer in Raleigh. He set off again in 1583 and annexed St John’s in Newfoundland. The expedition left no settlers, though, and Gilbert went down with his ship on the way back to England. Raleigh was ambitious to found a permanent colony and in 1585 led an expedition which established 600 settlers on Roanoke Island in Carolina. But a year later the colonists had to be evacuated.

At home, things for Raleigh were no better. The Third Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, was jealous of the adventurer’s position of court and of his special place in the affections of the Queen. He set about undermining Raleigh’s position, and his secret marriage to royal maid-of-honour Bess Throckmorton – in 1591 – leaked out. The Queen was furious. In 1595 Raleigh had another attempt at making his fortune, leading an expedition to Guyana in search of Eldorado, the legendary hoard of gold that the Spaniards had long sought. Raleigh was unusually popular with the native population, but the Queen was not so pleased. But on his return from yet another, fruitless adventure, he cut his losses by launching a career as a writer, with a hugely successful account of his exploits.

n 1603 the protection the controversial Raleigh enjoyed at court ended with the death of Queen Elizabeth. Raleigh’s attacks on the Spanish fleet had made him popular with the Queen, but the new king, James I, was determined to make peace with the Spaniards and crushed his Spanish adventures.In the same year it seemed Raleigh had at last outplayed his luck. He was convicted as part of the Main Plot, the scheme to replace the new king with his cousin Arabella Stewart. Sentenced to death, Raleigh found his second home in Tower Hamlets – the Tower of London.

For 13 years Raleigh lived under the threat of the executioner’s blade. Never a man to lack ambition, the condemned man busied himself by writing the History of the World. He hadn’t finished his magnum opus when his fortunes took an upturn. King James released Raleigh for another attempt at finding Eldorado. But Raleigh’s skills as an explorer hadn’t improved. All he found was Spaniards, and the Englishman was involved in a series of bloody clashes. It sealed his fate. He returned in 1618 to England and the executioner’s axe. He hadn’t found gold but the adopted East Ender will go down in history as the man who (probably) brought tobacco and the potato to Europe.

Tens of thousands of people flocked to the Isle of Dogs to see the biggest ship in the world being built.
She was the pride of Britain until, just before completion in the 1850s things began to go horribly wrong.
Because so much money had been poured into building the gigantic Great Eastern, cuts were made and risks taken. Several men died during the final stages of her construction. It was rumoured they included a riveter and his mate entombed between her twin hulls.
From then on, thoughts of the two trapped workmen made many of the crew nervous. Hollow knocking sounds were heard below decks at night and the ship was dogged by ill-fortune throughout her life.
It was a complete turnaround from the fortune that smiled on the ship when she was first designed by the golden boy of Victorian engineering, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Brunel had already built a tunnel under the Thames, constructed railways and designed the Clifton suspension bridge. Everything in his working life was big. Even his railway stations, like Paddington, were the size of cathedrals.
But he went a feat too far in creating an enormous steamship which could carry her own coals on a voyage to Australia and back. He needed a partner to bring the idea to reality and, in choosing John Scott Russell who owned a shipyard at Millwall, he chose the wrong man.
Russell was a braggart who could not live up to promises he made to Brunel. He failed, for instance, to find suitable land on which to build the huge ship.

As a result she was built in a far from ideal spot and had to be launched sideways into the Thames at Millwall.
The launching was a disaster. Huge crowds turned out on the appointed day when Miss Hope, daughter of a shipping company director, smashed a bottle of Champagne against the hull.
Chains took the strain of moving the 19,000-ton vessel but could not cope. They snapped, hurling workmen into the air. Brunel called a halt but, by then, one man was dead and four others badly hurt.
The launching ceremony was postponed with the ship having moved only four feet.
It took four months to drag the Great Eastern inch by tortuous inch to the water. By now the national press was hooting with derision and Brunel became ill with worry.
Even when the ship steamed out into the Channel, disaster was at hand. The skipper allowed too much steam to build up and there was an explosion.
Scalded seamen groped their way up on deck. One flung himself overboard in agony only to be mangled in the ship’s paddlewheel. Three more died before the day was out.
The Great Eastern limped back to port, her splendid Victorian fittings ripped to shreds, and did not re-emerge for a year.
Brunel died a broken man aged only 53 and, although the Great Eastern lived on for 30 years, she seemed jinxed.
She lost money as a transatlantic passenger steamer and was converted to the ignominious job of laying ocean cables.
Brunel’s dream, of using her on the Australia run, was never realised and eventually she was broken up for scrap.
Not much remains today of the Great Eastern apart from photos and souvenirs.
But visitors to Millwall today can, at low tide, still see the launching ways and piles that were built for Britain’s ill-starred queen of the seas.
For further reading: The Big Ship by Patrick Beaver; Brunel and his World by John Pudney.