In my last London Docklands post, we were making our way slowly downstream on the Thames. We’d left the pandemonium and over-crowding of the Tudor docklands – and the 1500s – behind us. London’s port had become a victim of its own success, with traffic volumes surging, but ships only permitted to load and unload from the legal quays.
The explosion of trade was driven by English merchants scanning the horizon for new trading opportunities. Fleets returned heavily laden with goods, both legitimately traded, and it must be said, sometimes appropriated by force. The first queen Elizabeth was happy to give permission to relieve any foreign ship of its cargo.The crown got a cut of profits, after all.
Speculate to accumulate
You only have to look at the number of merchant companies set up in the 16th to 19th centuries to appreciate how the English followed in the commercial steps of the Hanseatic League. As the adventurers discovered new lands, merchants exploited the trading opportunities. The new ambitious middle classes in England were eager to speculate on such exciting ventures. Investment in a new-fangled joint-stock exploration and trading company might result in substantial riches, in return for taking a modest financial risk.
In good company
We’ve already met Elizabethan explorer Richard Chancellor of the Merchant Adventurers, later renamed the Muscovy Company. He negotiated trade deals with the Tsar of Russia, mainly selling English wool. In return, the company bought furs – an important fashion item in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. With a further nod to fashion, the company also traded in whale bone. This was a prerequisite for any well-dressed lady from Elizabethan times onwards, to provide stiffeners for her corsets and skirts.
There was a ready market for whalebone in Britain for hundreds of years, until steel started to take over the corsetiere job, from the 1850s. Have you ever wondered how Elizabeth Tudor managed to wear a skirt that was wide enough to shelter a small group of children? A whalebone hoop was the answer.
Golden Virginia
The Virginia Company (founded 1606) nicely demonstrates how the “newfoundlands” of America offered money-making opportunities. In Virginia, the idea was to grow a colony around the newly established base of Jamestown, and then exploit the natural resources around, such as wood. With the expansion of the navy, England was always on the lookout for new sources of timber. But more importantly, the new colony supplied the English market with tobacco. Its crop was considered far sweeter in taste than the home-grown version…
To those raising their eyebrows, yes, it’s perfectly possible, and currently legal, to grow your own tobacco here in the UK. You can buy the seeds online. You just can’t sell it – the Treasury needs the revenue from highly taxed foreign imports! Modern day Chancellors are merely following in the footsteps of James I. In 1620 he prohibited the growing of tobacco at home. He wanted to rake in tax revenues from the tobacco imported from Virginia. Prohibition meant that home production didn’t interfere with the new colony’s emerging major export.
Tobacco Road
When I was researching the history of tobacco imports for this post, I remembered as a kid of 6 or 7 upwards I was often sent to the corner shop by my grandad, clutching two half-crown coins (that’s five shillings in old money). I had instructions to buy “half an ounce of Golden Virginia and a packet of Greens”. The latter were the cigarette papers favoured by said grandad. He always told me that I could buy myself an ice-cream with the change. Half an ounce of tobacco is the equivalent of around 20 cigarettes, for a cost then in today’s money of around 12 pence. Inflation’s a terrible thing.
But what a piece of living history, a nicotine habit fed from the same overseas source, for over four hundred years! I think nowadays though, there’s every chance that pure Virginia tobacco might be mixed with crops from cheaper markets such as China, although Golden Virginia’s current owners don’t publish that data.
And by the way, yes, it was illegal to sell tobacco products to children. Inconvenient laws such as these were ignored by all and sundry in 1960s London.
Going global
Travelling further north in the New World, the Hudson Bay Company traded primarily in furs, and had a monopoly in that market until the 1850s. Astoundingly, it still trades today, although nowadays as a retail store. When strolling down a Toronto boulevard on holiday a few years ago, I did a double-take. I spotted the company’s gold plate on the wall outside a Department store.
The motto, barely readable in my poor photograph, is “Pro Pelle Cutem”, which translates as, “a pelt for a skin”. Some think that this refers to the company’s policy of fair trade with the indigenous people in North America.
I’m constantly delighted when writing these posts, how everything connects to everything else… you’ll recall from my last Docklands post that Dowgate quay was one of the Elizabethan legal quays, next door to the Hanseatic League’s Steelyard. Fur imports landed at these quays for hundreds of years…
When I was wandering in that vicinity, taking photographs for that post, I passed a bar that gave a nod to its furry past: The Pelt Trader! And the address of the Skinners livery company? It’s at 8 Dowgate Hill, pretty much opposite that bar.
“A nation of shopkeepers”
It didn’t stop there in North America. English explorers, funded by hopeful speculators, did what this nation of shopkeepers did best – they set up shop in the far reaches of the globe. The names of the new merchant companies tell the story: The Levant Company, set up early on in 1592, traded with the mighty Ottoman Empire, with company offices in Constantinople.
A quartet of companies were formed in the 1700s: the South Sea Company (with an interesting financial tale, for another post); the African Company, the Guinea Company and the Sierra Leone Company. Shamefully by our standards, these companies were also responsible for helping set up the Atlantic slave trade.
In the 1800s, entirely new continents ,and consequently new markets sailed into view, leading to the creation of the Van Dieman’s Land Company, the South Australia Company, the British North Borneo Company, and many others. You can also glimpse Britain’s participation in what was called “the Scramble for Africa”, as Victorian explorers penetrated the interior of the continent, prompting the creation of the Royal Niger Company and the Imperial British East Africa Company, to name just two.
Now for the London geography – a map might help…
The Jewel in the Crown
The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed a glaring omission, the undisputed king of all these merchant enterprises:
The East India Company. It was set up in 1600, to develop trade around the Indian Ocean. But it became much more than a mere trading company. For a considerable time, it was the de-facto controller and governor of colonial India and Hong Kong. Its reach covered everything, from the administration of the civil service, to providing strong-arm security against rebellion and protest.
The company’s private army of around 250,000 men at certain times outnumbered Britain’s own standing army. Its sharp elbowed tactics resulted in a monopoly over trade in the Far East. Immense riches flowed to its investors. And it controlled this vast empire from its premises in Leadenhall Street in the City of London. They stood where the very modern Lloyds building stands now.
The company showed its financial might when it decided to set up its own independent shipyard in 1607, to build and maintain its fleet, further downstream from the cramped legal quays. The first of its shipyard sites was in Deptford, on the south bank of the river. As I’ve written earlier, Deptford had a long history and experience in ship-building, thriving under Henry Tudor’s patronage.
Down to Blackwall
But the Company soon outgrew its Deptford yard, and so business moved even further downstream in 1614. The East India fleet sailed back over to the north bank, with the building of the Company’s new dockyard at Blackwall, just past the Isle of Dogs.
The new yard didn’t handle imports or exports, which were still at the mercy of the legal quays upstream, but at least they had room to build and maintain their fleet. In 1661, that renowned diarist, Mr. Pepys, in his capacity as an government official on the Navy Board, recorded a trip by boat to Blackwall dock. There he spotted …”a new merchantman, which is to be launched shortly”.
Whale meat again
Later in that same century, some canny London businessmen eyed up what was going on at Deptford and Blackwall. They decided to follow suit. The Howland Great Wet Dock, was built at Rotherhithe on the south bank in the early 1700s. It dwarfed the smaller building yards that were servicing the legal quays. These could only handle one or two ships at a time. But the timber-lined Rotherhithe dock covered over twelve acres and could accommodate up to 120 ships. Not only that, the new facilities provided much-needed protection for craft against bad weather and storms. The voracious and keen eyed East India Company, always on the lookout for new premises to refit its ships and to find safe harbour, became an important customer.
Let’s just back-track a little: remember earlier in the post, when we eavesdropped on Richard Chancellor of the Muscovy Company negotiating with the Russians for furs? He didn’t only make trade deals for furs though; he negotiated for rights to hunt for whales in Russia’s terratorial waters. You might well ask, why such an interest for whaling rights? Surely not just for the modest market in whalebone for fashionable undergarments? And the English had never been much interested in eating whale meat.
It was all about the blubber. Whale oil was the favoured source of energy for lighting in England, at least until petroleum and natural gas fuels were developed by those clever Victorians. Whale oil burned cleaner and brighter than tallow, the down-market alternative made from suet, and was considerable less smelly.
Greenland Dock
So, it was all-change at Rotherhithe in the 1720s. The Howland dock was renamed Greenland Dock, and became a centre for the processing of whale carcasses. Buildings rose all around the dock, some equipped with boilers for the rendering of blubber into oil. Rotherhithe was a hive of blubbery activity. It was far more efficient to process the whale carcasses onshore, rather than on board ship, which had been the custom until the development of Greenland Dock. But then, by the 1840s, it had all gone, and the blubberhouses were pulled down, or converted to warehouses.
Why? You could say that the industry’s nemesis was William Murdoch. You may remember from Street Life, a post I wrote back in the mists of Wren Hunting history. William was the Cornish tin mine manager who worked out how to use natural gas safely as a source of energy. His house in Redruth became the first in Britain to be lit with gas. So progress took its course and within 50 years the whale industry in Rotherhithe had disappeared.
Under sufferance
Meanwhile, the traffic jams on the Thames worsened. Historians estimate that in 1800, almost 1800 vessels were competing for 550-odd berths. Something had to give to ease the congestion. The initial solution was to allow several second-tier quays to operate, “under sufferance”. Ships could moor at these designated sufferance quays while they waited for a berth at a legal quay. This way, they had protection from the perils of mooring mid-river, whether those perils were piracy, thievery or just bad weather. The owners wouldn’t have to pay duty until they off-loaded later at a legal quay.
Some sufferance quays actually allowed off-loading, at a reduced rate of excise. But the catch was that they were usually located in inconvenient locations. Most were on the south bank of the Thames, such as Hope Wharf in Rotherhithe and Scotts Wharf in Bermondsey, or even way downstream around Millwall on the Isle of Dogs.
And so the chaos on the river continued, until the late 1700s, when the exasperated shipowners decided enough was enough. Enough wasted time mooring mid-river, watching your cargo being spirited away by ne’er-do-wells while you waited, perhaps for months, for your berth in the pool of London.
The London Dock Company was founded in 1796. A lively consortium of owners, merchants and bankers secured the approval of their friends in parliament. They finally cut commercial ties with the legal quays in the pool of London. The company bought up land in the then sleepy marshlands of Wapping and the Isle of Dogs. They were going to run the show themselves…
Hiding in plain sight
On the north bank, I have to confess, there’s not a lot for the intrepid history hunter to explore, where the legal quays stood. The Great Fire of 1666 put paid to all the legal quays along the north bank, between Blackfriars and Tower Bridge. The fire took hold of a quay just south of Pudding Lane where the fire started. Its stored cargos of pitch,resin and brandy were of course fuel to the flames.
Although the legal quays were rebuilt after The Fire, they became prime targets during the the Second World War. The city of London took a pounding in the Blitz. When the war ended, why rebuild those old quays, when most commercial enterprises had long moved downriver to Wapping and Canary Wharf?
There’s more to see on the south bank, out of the flames’, although not the bomb’s, reach. At Rotherhithe the Ship and Whale pub echoes the area’s blubbery past. (Rumour has it that Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden would drink there during their early courting days). Greenland Dock is now a bustling marina, with water sports and all. You can explore Deptford’s maritime past on a day out, including a walking tour along Deptford creek.
But, wait for our final Docklands post, when we’ll travel down river to Wapping and Canary Wharf. There, the Georgian and Victoririan skeletons of London’s industrial past really are still in plain sight.
