- Foxtrot U475
- Zebo
- Belgians in Letchworth
- St Pancras Station and Hotel
- Request
- News from Crossness
- Woolwich walk
- Another obscure gas works
- Restoration of cranes in Docklands
- 159news.pdf
Peter Skilton's note on the Russian Submarine U475 which has been in London just over a year (GLIAS Newsletter June 1995) makes clear just how claustrophobic the interior appears to visitors. One is overwhelmed by the sheer number of pipes and valves. Just how could anyone ever learn what they are all for let alone find room to live in the tiny spaces left for the crew.
The Foxtrot class were built at Sudomekh near Leningrad 1958-71 for the Russian Navy and were the second most numerous type, more than 76 being made. As Peter says a most successful design, from 1972 the class was superseded by the Tango class (Foxtrot & Tango are NATO names). From 1968 Foxtrot submarines were supplied new to India, Libya, Cuba etc. India still operates a small fleet of them.
Displacement is 1,950 tons on the surface and 2,500 dived and a Foxtrot is 300 feet long carrying a crew of 75. Power is diesel-electric, three diesels provide 6,000 bhp and there are three electric motors coupled to three shafts producing 5,400 hp. This gives a surface speed of 18 knots and 16 knots submerged. Surface cruising range is about 20,000 miles but it was quite common to refuel these submarines at sea greatly extending their endurance. The Foxtrot class were armed with torpedoes, six 21-inch tubes in the bow and four 16-inch tubes in the stern and 22 torpedoes were carried. In normal operating conditions a Foxtrot would dive to about 800 feet but in an emergency could dive to almost 1,000 feet.
The Foxtrot in Greenwich at Long's Wharf, U475, was in active service with the Russian Baltic Fleet for 27 years, until April 1994. In 1976 she had been modified for use as a training submarine for foreign submariners from India, Libya and Cuba. Last summer she came to London from the naval base at Riga in Latvia under the command of Captain Vitalij Burda towed by a Russian Navy tug to the mouth of the Medway. The tug refused to come up-river and the tow to Woolwich was completed by a local tug.
U475 is the only Russian submarine in Britain, now owned by Russian Submarines UK Ltd. Bob Carr
Website: www.sovietsub.co.uk
A box of Zebo seen for sale in Pearces hardware shop in the High Street, Chesham, about a year ago prompts the question, what exactly is Zebo? It had been said that Zebo was a thing of the past long since unobtainable and yet there it was. Is the Zebo trade still going, in a niche market (the box looked quite new), or was the box exceptionally old stock? It was evening and the shop closed so no enquiries were possible at the time. If any GLIAS member remembers Zebo and can say what it was used for please write in. Bob Carr
Letchworth in Hertfordshire was the World's First Garden City, based upon the ideas of Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928). It was intended to create a self-contained community where work, home and leisure would all take place in healthy country-like surroundings away from the crowded industrial towns of the 19th century. Naturally such a scheme attracted many idealistic people with a wide variety of beliefs.
In May 1903 a tract of land was bought 3,818 acres in extent astride the Cambridge branch of the Great Northern Railway and with relatively few level areas. Following a competition the plan for Letchworth was drawn up by Barry Parker (1867-1947) and Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), both with Derbyshire backgrounds. In 1904 construction work began and a competition to design a 'cheap cottage' costing not more than £150 produced a plethora of examples. The following year an exhibition was visited by more than 60,000 people when 121 cottages were to be seen.
By 1911 the population had reached 5,324 but during the Great War nearly 3,000 Belgian refugees (GLIAS Newsletter February 1995) came to live in the town. In 1915 the steelfoundry of Kryn and Lahy was set up by the railway in the factory area of Letchworth making munitions and a large proportion of the workforce there was Belgian. Unlike Birtley in County Durham in the Hertfordshire town the Belgians were quickly integrated into the local community. The distinctive social atmosphere of Letchworth and the fact that it was a new town probably had much to do with this. Bob Carr
Now really clean on the outside the St Pancras railway station and hotel in the Euston Road is in its predominantly bright red brick colouring a strong contrast to its subdued and some would say more tasteful rival King's Cross next door. Built with a view to advertising East Midlands building materials which could all be brought to London by the Midland Railway there is indeed more in St Pancras Station than the Hathern terra cotta mentioned by David Perrett (GLIAS Newsletter December 1994).
An East Midlands product that can even now be obtained from the Whistlestop Food and Wine shop inside the station is the pork pie, a delicacy long associated with Melton Mowbray where it originated as a by-product of Stilton Cheese making. GLIAS members who buy pork pies in London will note that they often come from Nottinghamshire or Lincolnshire. The present writer was brought up in an East Midlands town where people literally queued in the street for pork pies and they were even said to be eaten for breakfast.
Of late a particularly fine example of the East Midlands Pork Pie obtainable from St Pancras has been that made by Saxby Brothers Ltd of the Melton Bakery, Wellingborough, Northants, established in 1904 and still a family business. These celebrated Midland pies come in traditional white waxed paper wrappers proudly printed with gold medals and with no anachronistic plastic in sight. To the pork-pie connoisseur they are well worth their somewhat higher cost. The railways also had an association with a Saxby's which was something to do with signals but that is another story.
Survey of London volumes 43 and 44 — Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, The Parish of All Saints, Editors Hermione Hobhouse and Stephen Porter, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, 1994, £130.
For anyone in GLIAS the appearance of new volumes of the Survey of London is a great event and these two tomes are very industrial. It is a pity we cannot all rush out and buy copies but at this price most of us will think at least twice. Seeing the enormous amount being offered £130 is a not unreasonable amount to ask and the contents are essential reading for everyone interested in the past of Poplar, the Isle of Dogs and Blackwall. At least make sure a library accessible to you gets copies.
The sheer size and complex detail of the contents of these two volumes goes some way to explaining why no moderately comprehensive gazetteer of London's industrial archaeology has ever been published. Such works are generally available for most parts of Britain but it seems London has just too much industrial archaeology. The two volumes reviewed here cover only one Parish and after a hundred years the Survey of London has covered but a small fraction of the former LCC area.
However, volumes 43 and 44 present a very detailed survey rich in riverside industrial sites around the Isle of Dogs and there are very many references to a wide variety of sources including recent publications. It is gratifying to see the GLIAS Newsletter being quoted as a primary source. The coverage is wide ranging and topics that might be mentioned include the Thames Plate Glass Works, Trinity House Buoy Wharf, the Blackwall Tunnel, Blackwall Yard and Poplar Docks. There is a good section on Modern Docklands. The two volumes contain 872 large double column pages of text plus 160 pages of photographic plates and there are numerous excellent maps and line drawings. More than just architecture is covered and members will find much of engineering and technological interest. Highly recommended. Bob Carr
In 1892, in response to complaints about evil odours from the newly installed main drainage system, the Dorking Local Board installed vent pipes which were referred to in the local newspaper at the time as 'Wimbledon Columns' or 'Wimbledon Pillars'. Five of these still survive in the town. Attempts to discover the origins of the name have so far proved fruitless, and I should be grateful if any member can cast any light on this. Perhaps the design was first adopted in Wimbledon, or was it an invention of the Wimbledon Council Engineer? Replies please to D. Croome, 6 Launceston Gardens, Perivale, Greenford, Middlesex, UB6 7ET.
DESMOND CROOME
If compliments and congratulations constitute success, then Crossness Open Day 1995 was successful. The weather held fine and there was no undue odour from our rear neighbours. The last visitor had hardly left the compound before members of C.E.T. were starting work on next year's programme. Concurrent with restoration of the engine 'Prince Consort', conservation of the fabric of the buildings and the establishment of a museum of Sanitation and Health, guided visits are conducted for school children and other organisations.
I am happy to report that GLIAS was well represented by members visiting the site this year and on behalf of the members of Crossness Engines, thank all who attended and hope you will return to witness our progress. 'TOSHER'
In the afternoon of the Crossness Open Day Mary Mills led July's GLIAS walk round Woolwich. In the first 'Civic Reception" for a walk Greenwich's Deputy Mayor welcomed fifty plus members and others to the Borough before we set off from Woolwich Arsenal Station.
The walk took us past the Arsenal and along the river front to the ferry. In spite of difficulties leading to a slow turn around we took the ferry to North Woolwich where we walked downstream to look at old ferry sites and early municipal housing.
The walk ended at North Woolwich Station where the opportunity was taken to visit the museum. Some of the walkers took it even further by strolling back through the tunnel to South Woolwich. Danny Hayton
If I have any regular readers they may remember that in my article on Hawes" gas works I promised to come back and explain more about oil gas and oil gas works in East London. Here is a brief account of the Bow Oil Gas Works - a subject which, if properly written up, would take up much more space than the Newsletter will allow me. Here are some of the highlights.
We tend to think about 'gas works' as plants producing gas from coal. This has never been ontirely true; gas for lighting has been made from all sorts of material. In the early 1820s a number of public supply gas works used oil as a raw material.
The process was patented by John Taylor in 1915. Taylor is one of those Georgian engineers/entrepreneurs who set out to exploit, and change, the world in a variety of ways. (A recentish biography: Roger Burt, John Taylor, Moorland Books, 1977).
He has been described as 'the foremost mining engineer in Europe' but he sometimes described himself as 'manufacturing chemist of Stratford'. I have never been able to track down his Stratford chemical works - any information gratefully received - but the actual inventor of the oil gas process was his brother Philip, who lived, before 1824, in Bromley-by-Bow and was a chemist with a string of patents. There were several other brothers, all in key positions.
In the gas making process any oil could be used and it was thus useful for scrap from the soap and other oil based industries, including oils and fats which coal gas had made redundant as the raw materials of street lighting. The oil was liquefied and trickled down a hot metal pipe. The resulting gas was cooled and collected. It then went through a red hot iron pipe to a gas holder. Oil gas lacked the sulphur compounds found in coal gas, it thus was thought not to need purification and it was promoted as both safer and cleaner. John Taylor and his partner John Martineau (with relations at Whitbread's brewery) had an engineering works at Whitecross Street just north of the City, moving to Winsor Ironworks in the City Road. (I would like more information on that.) They made a range of equipment, including steam engines, printing and sugar refining machinery - chapters could be written about all of these. Oil gas making equipment was produced and supplied on a franchise basis - mainly in whaling areas - Edinburgh, Hull, Bristol, Liverpool and so on.
London was, of course, a major whaling port and a public supply gas works was set up near Philip Taylor's home at Bow. It is not clear exactly where this works was - a caption to an illustration in a Co-partnership Herald helpfully describes it as 'behind the houses in Bow Road'. The rate books list it as the first premises in Old Ford Road at the Bow end. It was clearly on the Lea. My guess is that it was on the piece of land which is today between Payne Road and the Bow flyover roundabout, shown as a chemical works on later maps. It was managed by Dr. Moses Ricardo (brother of the economist) and had been built to supply lighting for the Whitechapel Road. An Act of Parliament which allowed for gas lighting but, unusually, not the works, had many local industrialists among its subscribers together with some scientific associates of the Taylors and John Martineau.
An account of 'goings on' at the Bow Oil Gas Works would take up far more space than I have here. I have taken recently to starting lectures with an account of the events of the night of 5th May 1825 when Henry Holman went out to supper and followed his nose back home. Moses Ricardo was not the most effective manager in the world!
Taylor and Martineau wanted to build an oil gas works to supply Westminster. This was challenged by the coal gas interests and the subsequent public enquiry spread over two years. This is in itself a saga from which emerges a strong story about the rights and wrongs of gas purification methods. What also energed was a rats' nest of scandals at the Bow works. The enquiry stops abruptly, probably because the Bow works had been taken over by someone.or other, probably some of the less respectable elements of the Imperial Company. Stewart (Gasworks in the North Thames area) says that it became a coal gas works and was taken over by the British Gas Light Co in 1829, who sold it in 1852 to the Commercial Co., who closed it down. It would be interesting to check that with the records of the British Company if they ever come to light. My only comment is new management doesn't seem to have changed things much. In 1831 they were ordered by Bow Vestry to glaze their windows because of the 'quantities of deleterious matter being emitted' and to 'remove refuse' because of the cholera outbreak.
Sources for this article not already mentioned are:
Minutes of the London and Westminster Oil Gas Enquiry;
M.S. Cotterill, The Scottish Gas Industry to 1914;
P.J. Rowlinson, Regulation of the Gas Industry in the early Nineteenth Century 1800-1860; and Sir Arthur Elton, The Triumph of the Gas Lights.
Thank you to Michael O'Connor for sending me a cutting from The Times quoting a 1946 report about the Marsham Street citadels. I see that this refers to 'site of' old and new gas holders which implies that excavations for the holder tanks were used as a basis for the citadels rather than the tanks themselves. MARY MILLS
Restoration of cranes in Docklands
An article was published in the 'New Civil Engineer' of 23rd March 1995 about the restoration of cranes in Docklands. Some points in the article were inaccurate and others needed some clarification and a letter to Andrew Dick, the LDDC Conservation Officer resulted in the resolution of some issues. This note combines information from both sources.
There are 26 dock cranes surviving in the Urban Development Area - 24 being of the high pedestal type of 1953 and 1962/4 vintage. Two on the east side of Millwall Dock were refurbished 6 years ago; 5 more in the Millwall Dock, 6 in the Royal Victoria Dock, and 5 in the West India Dock have been refurbished in the past two years. The steelwork has needed to be extensively renovated and this has been carried out to such a standard that the cranes are expected to last 20 years before requiring further maintenance. Most of the mechanical and electrical equipment has been removed so they are only gaunt emasculated monuments - it seems a pity that at least some rigging could not have been retained.
Fortunately the two 6-ton travelling cranes at Poplar Docks are listed Grade II and English Heritage was insistent on rebuilding to near original specification. Regrettably however, they have been repainted in red and yellow - now they look like a McDonalds advert! The 'NCE' article says that the new colours were those of the original owner, the 'Northern' (sic) London Railway, yet NLR locos were in black livery, and the coaches varnished teak finish. From where then did the new colour scheme originate? Mr Dick stated that previously BR had painted these cranes in the colour scheme now adopted. I can't help but think that the grey finish the cranes had prior to restoration was more appropriate to their workaday activities.
The history of these two cranes is still unclear for although the works plates on the crane chassis show 'Stothart & Pitt 1960' they look antique and seem ill-proportioned with the bulk of the superstructure hardly matching the gauge of the rail track. However, is it possible that 1960 refers to a rebuilding date rather than construction date? Were these older cranes mounted on a new chassis in 1960? The LDDC was unable to clarify this point. Does anyone else know their history? DON CLOW