Thames Ironworks and West Ham United
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.