The Thames Ironworks E-Book

Brian Belton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Located in the heart of London's East End, the Thames Ironworks might be described as characteristic of the industrial and social landscape of the Victorian era. This successful enterprise, headed by the respected Hills family, undertook projects in shipping, civil engineering, electrical engineering and motoring. But as well as providing employment, the ironworks was also central to the social lives of its workers. Its football team, founded by Arnold Hills in 1895, was destined to become world famous as West Ham United. Author Brian Belton explores how the Victorian values of commercialism, religion, philanthropy and patriarchy that made this giant of industry a success were inextricably linked with a sense of fair play, competitive spirit and the growth of football as a national obsession. Peppered with the songs and memories of a treasured cockney region, this is an entertaining portrait of ships, industry, sport and, most of all, the people of the Docklands communities that relied on the ironworks for their daily bread.

Leseprobe

HMS Himalaya.

Thames Ironworks.

CONTENTS

Title

Foreword by Iain Dale

Introduction

1  Ditchburn, Mare and Rolt

2  Expansion

3  The

Warrior

4  ‘How He Ploughed the Raging Main’

5  1895/96: The First Season

6  The

Fuji

7  All Things Bright and Beautiful …

8  The London League: 1896/97

9  The

Albion

10  The Boys from the Memorial Ground: 1897/98

11  Professionalism and the Southern League: 1898/99

12  The End of the Beginning: 1899/1900

13  Readying for War

14  Lifeboats

15  Frank Clarke Hills

16  The Hills Boys

17  Ironworks Fade, Hammers Appear

Appendix 1  With the Iron Workers: A Visit to the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company

Appendix 2  Results

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

FOREWORD

As we prepare for the move to the Olympic Stadium, I guess all West Ham fans are becoming more and more aware of the history of the club. I have to say I have often wondered what the club’s founder, Arnold Hills would have made of the move. I suspect he would approve, as he was the architect of the move from the Memorial Grounds to Upton Park.

As we all know, West Ham United was officially formed in 1900, but the club’s forerunner was the Thames Ironworks, founded in June 1895 from the remnants of the Old Castle Swifts club, as announced in the Thames Iron Works Gazette. The founders were one of the shipbuilding company’s foremen, David Taylor, who was a local football referee, and the owner of the company, Arnold Hills. Hills had a particularly enlightened attitude to employment and was well known for coming up with ideas to improve the lives of his employees. Initially playing as amateurs, the team featured several works employees including Walter Parks (clerk), Thomas Freeman (ships fireman), Tom Mundy, Walter Tranter and James Lindsay (all boilermakers), William Chapman, George Sage, William Chamberlain and apprentice riveter Charlie Dove.

Thames Ironworks’ first game took place on 7 September 1895 against the Woolwich-based Royal Ordnance Reserves. It was played on the ground of the by then defunct Castle Swifts at Hermit Road, Canning Town. The game ended in a 1–1 draw.

In June 1897 the club moved to a new stadium at the Memorial Grounds in Straford, financed, of course, by Arnold Hills. It cost £20,000 to build. Season tickets for the 1897/98 campaign were priced at 5s, with admission for individual matches costing fourpence.

At the start of the 1897/98 season, the club’s owner Arnold Hills wrote the following message to the team’s players:

To the players:– As an old footballer myself, I would say, get into good condition at the beginning of the season, keep on the ball, play an unselfish game, pay heed to your captain, and whatever the fortunes of the first half of the game, never despair of winning, and never give up doing your very best to the last minute of the match. That is the way to play football, and better still, that is the way to make yourselves men.

(Quoted in Iron in the Blood)

The first sign that all was not well with the ownership of Thames Ironworks came on 7 March 1900 when it was reported in the West Ham Guardian that:

It is announced that the committee of Thames Ironworks FC are to consider some sort of reorganisation. A proposal is evidently on the table. For one who has it on authority says it will ‘if adopted, undoubtedly be to the club’s advantage.’ This is good news. Supporters are tired of seeing the club so low down as fourth from the bottom.

The club’s owner, Arnold Hills, was having cash flow problems, having agreed to buy John Penn & Sons, and needed to raise funds. He knew he couldn’t pump further money into a football club. Shortly before the season’s end the West Ham Guardian reported that local people would be asked to buy 500 shares at £1 each, with Arnold Hills matching the sum. A few weeks later the West Ham Football Club Company Limited was formed. However, some shares remained unsold for several years. Thames Ironworks resigned from the Southern League and were wound up in June 1900. On 5 July, West Ham United Football Club was formally registered and elected to the Southern League in Thames Ironworks’ place. It may not have been the ending Arnold Hills had wished for, but there is little doubt that Mr Hills remains the great grandfather of the club we know today.

West Ham United started their illustrious history in the Southern League, a league they remained in for the next nineteen years until their election to League Division Two. Their first season started with a bang, with a 7–0 victory over Gravesend with new signing Billy Grassam scoring four goals. He finished as top scorer with fifteen goals and the club ended up in a creditable sixth place. Off the field the club’s finances remained precarious with season ticket sales amounting to fewer than 200 and disappointing crowds.

By the end of the 1903/4 season, the club was verging on bankruptcy and only had the funds to pay one professional, Tommy Allison, over the summer. The club’s main benefactor, Arnold Hills, had also hit on hard times and was in no position to reduce the rent on the Memorial Grounds Stadium. Luckily, a local brewery stepped in and put up £20,000 to finance the building of a new stadium on the site of the Boleyn Castle playing fields off Green Street in East Ham. However, a further hitch occurred when the Home Office objected to a football club using the land, which was under the ownership of the Catholic Ecclesiastical Authorities. The new manager, Syd King, took it upon himself to see local Conservative MP Ernest Gray. Gray smoothed the path and the 1905/06 season opened at the Boleyn Ground with an emphatic 3–0 win against Millwall.

And there we have remained for more than a century. We all have our individual memories of both the good times and bad times – of seeing fantastic players grace our pitch, and of course quite a few ordinary ones. But rarely do we remember those who started it all more than a hundred years ago.

This brilliant book by Brian Belton not only pays tribute to the club’s founders and forefathers, it serves as a reminder to those who currently run the club that they are merely the club’s custodians. Let’s hope that in the year 2115 people will look back at the current owners and nod their heads in appreciation for the decision to move to the Olympic Stadium. Without that, West Ham would never have won the Champions League twenty times, they will say. Maybe.

Iain Dale, author of West Ham: When Football WasFootball and editor of

www.westhamtillidie.com

INTRODUCTION

Looking at the 1901 census, 15-year-old Samuel Poyser is detailed as a ‘carrier for a rivotter’. Sam was, at that time, working at the Thames Ironworks. John, Sam’s brother, was three years older and ‘a painter of ships’ during the same period. A third brother, 20-year-old Henry, was a ‘holder up for a boiler rivotter’. You can, without too much effort, find many other men listed in the census who lived in the Canning Town/West Ham area, who looked to the Ironworks and to shipbuilding in general as the means to obtain their and their families’ daily bread. Even at this point, the eastern reaches of London’s great river had a long history of nautical industry. It was a place that was defined by, and grew out of water and perhaps the principal means by which its influence touched and changed global society.

This book looks at the life and times of Thames Ironworks. It is a story of ships, industrial history and the people that made both. It has to be said, however, that it is hard to write such a chronicle without including a biography of the football club that was part of the Ironworks, the former reflecting the latter, its development and soul. For many years history forgot the Ironworks. Renewed interest at the start of the twenty-first century arose largely because of the company’s connection with the modern football industry.

The football team that represented Thames Ironworks and carried its name was the precursor of West Ham United, a club that was to become one of the most enigmatic of top professional sides in the English game. In fact, it would not be too far-fetched to say that West Ham carries, as part of its culture, echoes of the Ironworks it grew out of. If you like, the contemporary business could be thought of as being, in part, constituted on an archaeological ethos that is grounded in the great shipbuilding company that, for a time, dominated the district of West Ham as an enterprise, while shaping British and world maritime history.

A great deal of ink has been used on trying to describe the nature of West Ham as a football club. It is said to have a ‘way’, which brings to mind a sort of Zen-like persona. West Ham has been called a ‘family club’ and a ‘community club’, but quite what such expressions mean has never been clearly articulated. Perhaps these titles express something of a sense of belonging or a clear identity that is imbued through the club’s location in the East End of London. This area has long been associated with the cloudy concept of ‘community’ and the ethereal ‘loveable cockney character’: at once a scoundrel and a threat, an idiot or clown but simultaneously an intelligently crafty archetype. In short, a vicissitudinous contradiction in terms: a conundrum of personality resonant of the ‘cock’s egg’ from which the moniker is derived.

However, the deeper, more concrete roots of the sporting institution probably gives us stronger clues about its foundational nature, both its qualities and shortcomings. This pedigree was set in the complexities of Victorian class politics, industrial commercialism, philanthropy, paternalistic entrepreneurialism and the religious and humanitarian conscience of a society premised on the exploitation of the poor by the rich. To understand West Ham United as an organisation, its relationship to football as a phenomenon and a social institution, one needs to know something about its origins so firmly founded on iron; you need to understand the ships and something of the men who conceived, designed, built and sailed them.

More than a decade ago I wrote Founded on Iron that detailed the history of Thames Ironworks Football Club. When I was asked to build on this by developing a readable history of the Ironworks itself I spent not a little time thinking about how this might differ from that original work. A full and comprehensive history of Thames Ironworks would be a tome of much greater proportions than the information and narrative encapsulated in the pages that follow. It would be a hugely protracted enterprise, which would probably demand of the reader a considerable level of technical and specialist knowledge, but certainly personal commitment, to fully appreciate or understand. However, the purpose of the book I have written is more diffuse than a project of the latter magnitude. What I offer is something of a general prospect of the character of an organisation as it shifted within the confines of national and world history, while providing a perspective on how the sporting phenomenon that was to be its lasting legacy, was shaped and projected into the future. As such, my project was to capture something of the genesis and enduring spirit of a seminal facet of East London life and culture that touched, was part of and influenced the history and shape of the modern world.

This being the case, what follows is an introduction to the Ironworks, built on three pillars. Fundamentally there is the industrial, social, commercial foundation, the development and eventual demise of the company. Just as I found when writing Founded on Iron, when I started to write this book I quickly came to the conclusion that this would unavoidably mean interweaving into the text the birth and embryonic growth of the football club that sustains and gives contemporary meaning and resonance to the Ironworks, and has been a lasting monument to the shipbuilding company. Although in this case the (literal) thread of the story would need to be reversed; it would need to be led and concluded by a focus on the Ironworks rather than the football club.

The final element of this history is the ships built by Thames. These continue to carry a cargo of historical and social insight. They were a creation of the world in which they were constructed, and as such they embody in their biographies important and often hidden aspects of the time and place whose influence, in many cases, helped mould today’s world.

Many of the craft built by Thames are listed as coming out of Blackwall, but most were, in fact, products of the Canning Town yard. Much of the documentation connected with the shipbuilding activity of Thames Ironworks was kept at the company’s Blackwall offices and it is this location that is often given credit for the firm’s contribution to the history of shipbuilding. This mainly administrative centre was moved to Canning Town in 1903, overlooking a dry dock. There was a small yard at the Blackwall site but the major shipbuilding projects of the Thames Ironworks were undertaken at Canning Town.

The company, in its time, was midwife to hundreds of craft of almost every type. It would be unrealistic to provide details of them all or even a majority in a publication of this size and scope. A full inventory would be a gargantuan project, covering every ship, vessel, construction and fabrication produced by Thames so choices had to be made. Considering this, I have looked to present components of the chronicle of industrial and sporting development, in unison. I have tried to portray something of the typical, the esoteric and the remarkable. I could have just gone for the latter of course, but that would present a skewed picture. I have tried to include at least a little bit of everything, but as in all such samples, there will always be more of one thing than another; this is no doubt a consequence of both conscious and unconscious forces – objectivity is confusingly a construct of subjective judgement.

So what we have is a representative selection of the ships built by Thames Ironworks, as well as touching on other constructions and innovations. However, I have looked to introduce ships and other craft that individually and collectively depict and, to some extent, personify and enact the impact and influence of the Ironworks in national and world history. The aficionado will undoubtedly protest at arguably vital omissions. I have not, for instance, included an exhaustive history of the Warrior, probably the most significant and lasting monument to Thames Ironworks. As much as I love that magnificent vessel (and I really do adore it, as an industrial and now also as an archaeological achievement, as well as in many other ways), robust and extensive electronic and hard histories are easily available. To merely replicate these would seem to be a waste of both the author’s and the reader’s time and energy. I have not provided a comprehensive biography of the Thunderer or the Albion, instead concentrating more on their impact on the history of the Ironworks.

For all this, ships are the underpinning element on which all that Thames Ironworks was or remains; West Ham United was ‘Founded on Iron’ and it is that heritage on which no mean legacy stands. West Ham United Football Club carries the mantle of the Ironworks and is its throbbing, vibrating, incandescent descendant. West Ham was incorporated on 5 July 1900 and, as the club minutes testified five days later, it was, like the ships, Thames- built, a product of the Ironworks.

BRIDGING THE GAP

In 1895 the owner of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, Arnold Hills, began to use a game to bridge the gaps between himself and his workforce. He founded and sponsored the Thames Ironworks Football Club. Football was chosen as a common language to meld management and worker into one efficient unit, but this opened up many more channels than Hills might have planned.

In its infancy football, as an organised affair, was in the hands of those who controlled society, the top of the social hierarchy who had been educated and trained to rule at public school and university. When a committee of workers took over Thames Ironworks Football Club shortly after it came into being, this was part of a nationwide incursion of working people into the development and organisation of the sport. It had been going on before 1895 and was to continue over the next twenty years.

Thames Ironworks Committee included its chair, Mr F. Payne; treasurer, Mr G. Johnson and secretary, Mr A.T. Harsent. The committee was: C. Hill, A. Dance, Cameron Firth, Selby, W. Proctor, G. Patterson, T. Dearl, T. Robinson, D. Large, D. Taylor, E. Smith, E. Bickford and J. Cearns. F. Payne, G. Johnson, A.T. Harsent, C. Hill, E. Smith were selected to form an emergency committee.

The symbolic nature of this cannot be denied. One of the tools of the elite, ruling groups to forward its interests and values, which were synonymous, was hijacked and, in a relatively short time, turned into a means of making money. This was the very type of usurpation that those who had monopolised the organised football for the best part of a century feared in a more general way. The take-over of football represented something of their worst fears for society overall.

Association football, in its professional incarnation, destroyed the Athenian spirit that had guided its development as a sport and led to its demise in the public schools and universities, to be replaced by Rugby Union. One of the final nails in the coffin of football’s elite age was banged home by West Ham United. After the ‘Hammers’ defeated the Corinthians, the most archetypal of the ‘Old Boy’ clubs, in the FA Cup of 1933, the former public schoolboys lost their exemption from the early rounds of the Cup, and eventually withdrew from the competition in protest. This can be seen to mark the last act of the start of the end of upper-class domination of the game.

However, the moneyed classes were quick to regroup. To paraphrase Gracie Fields in the 1930s, they were dead but wouldn’t lie down and they stayed in control of the administration of football. Although many of the new professional clubs, arising out of working-class associations, church groups, workers clubs and the like, were owned by the rising middle classes and businessmen, the old aristocracy of the game remained involved at club level. This involvement was mainly through share ownership and ongoing monopolisation of football’s umbrella organisations, such as the Football Association and Football League, which included control of the national teams of England, Scotland, Wales and, for the initial decades of organised game, Ireland.

Today it is a matter of some debate who actually ‘owns’ clubs. It depends on what one means by ‘ownership’. What is not in doubt is that money dictates the direction of the upper echelon of football, so apart from the ‘player revolts’ of the 1950s and ’60s, led at West Ham by Malcolm Allison and nationally by Jimmy Hill, the ‘football revolution’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seemed to have made very little difference in terms of where and with whom the organised power of the football presided.

This said, Arnold Hills wanted his footballing ‘Irons’, like his Ironworks, to be an extension of his personality, values and ambitions. While such intentions were never fulfilled, his shipbuilding company, as an organisation, existed for more than just the profit motive and more even than moving wonderfully innovative engineering ideas into reality. However, it must be said that some of these visions retrospectively look like something more akin to eccentric dreams than prospectively realisable innovation.

Thus the football team and the shipbuilders intertwine; one tells you about the other and to that extent they are historically symbiotic. However, as the industrial enterprise moved into the last phases of its existence, West Ham United was born as a quite different entrepreneurial incarnation.

So, what follows is neither a story of ships nor football. It is a tale of the synergy that existed between both, at a time and in a place which makes for a remarkable study of facets of the Victorian age that we have today inherited and continue to shape.

Ironclad Vasco Da Gama (as she was soon after her launch). A central battery ironclad, she was launched in 1876 and entered service with the Portuguese Navy later in the year. She served as the flagship of the Portuguese fleet for the majority of her long and peaceful career. She was rebuilt and heavily modernised between 1901 and 1903. Long-since obsolete by the 1930s, Vasco da Gama was finally sold for scrapping in 1935.

DITCHBURN, MARE AND ROLT

In a corner of today’s Canning Town underground station there is a memorial, reputedly fashioned using original iron from a nineteenth-century warship, clad in numerous concrete panels. These are inscribed with a eulogy that commemorates the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company which was located in close proximity to where the memorial now stands.

Along with the Thames Ironworks, there were a number of other shipbuilding companies along the course of the River Thames. None of them survived to the modern era. In fact, Thames was the last major shipbuilding company based on the rambling old waterway to fade into history. However, this great industrial phenomenon did not appear out of the blue; it was no sudden incursion of the industrial age. The development and growth of the Ironworks represented much of the character of the Victorian age, the force that brought the company into the world, to be part of what would sustain that world.

In 1837 Queen Victoria succeeded her uncle, William IV, to the throne of England. She was the same age as ‘painter of ships’ John Poyser would be sixty-four years later, although ‘Vicky’ was not born east of the Thames and, even in 1819, she would not be subjected to the fact that infant mortality accounted for 25 per cent of all deaths at the time that John and his brothers came into the world over half a century later.

Three years prior to Victoria coming to the throne of the British Empire, the shipwright Thomas Ditchburn, who had been involved in shipbuilding at Rotherhithe, and naval architect Charles J. Mare joined forces to found the first iron shipbuilding yard on the Thames. Unsurprisingly, they called it ‘Ditchburn and Mare’. The modest location was laid out on the south side of the River Thames at Deptford. After a fire gutted the yard they transferred to the northern bank of the Thames, taking over a 5-acre, disused shipbuilding premises along Orchard Place, between the East India Dock Basin and the mouth of the River Lea. This area is often referred to as Bow Creek and it is where the Thames cuts a majestic curve away from the Isle of Dogs at Blackwall.

There had been shipbuilding at Blackwall since 1587, but the confined nature of the spit meant that only ships of less than 1,000 tons could be built there. At that time there was no convenient rail links and this made the cost of bringing in iron plate from the north prohibitive. This also caused delays in the delivery of raw materials. Mare saw that these difficulties could be alleviated by smelting wrought iron plate and building rolling mills on site. However, if this ambition were to be made a reality the company would need to relocate to allow an appreciable expansion of plant.

Charles Mare identified a site with the potential to facilitate what he saw as the necessary growth of the company. It was an area of open land, just across Bow Creek on the eastern bank of the River Lea where it melds with the River Thames in (what was then) the borough of West Ham, Essex. However, Mare’s partner, Thomas Ditchburn, didn’t feel secure about this location as it would be subjected to flooding from spring high tides. In those days, the River Lea at Silvertown Way was 50ft wide at low water, but over 200ft wide at high tide. For all this, Mare was so keen to undertake this new venture that he changed the nature of his partnership with Ditchburn and purchased around 10 acres of marshland for a new, larger yard on the northern, Canning Town bank of the Lea.

Mare staked out the site personally, aided by a young apprentice, Clement Mackrow, who was to become Naval Architect to Thames Ironworks. By 1843 two new slipways, capable of taking four ships each, were staked out for the purpose of building small iron steamers for the Citizen Ship Company. However, the first site of the Thames Ironworks, that was also to continue to be known as Ditchburn and Mare for much of the rest of the century, was also to produce several innovative iron racing yachts, including the most famous of these, the Mosquito, which was built in 1846. She was an impressive 70 footer with a 15ft 2in beam. She is included in the Guinness Book of Yachting Facts.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw a revolution in communications. In 1840 Samuel Morse patented his invention of the code that bears his name. The telegraph spread rapidly in the next ten years. It was also a time of colonial expansion and struggle. The Battle of Blood River in Natal, South Africa took place in 1838 which resulted in the defeat of the Zulus by the Boers. The British occupied Aden in 1839 and the Opium War between Britain and China began, which was to last until 1842. Britain was also involved in protracted and bloody hostilities in Afghanistan (a conflict that, as we know, never really ended). Turkey invaded Syria and was heavily defeated in the Battle of Nesib (part of the Turks’ lack of enthusiasm to openly intervene in more contemporary conflicts in and with Syria). There were rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, whilst New Zealand was in the process of becoming a British Crown Colony. The latter was ratified in 1840 under the Treaty of Waitagi. At around the same time the Treaty of London was signed whereby Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria agreed to limit Egyptian expansion. The British Navy bombarded Beirut and the Penny Post was introduced in Britain.

The Metropolitan Building Act of 1844 was a defining event in the history of East London as it introduced a raft of legislation that included the banning of toxic and noxious industry within the boundary of London. The County Borough of West Ham, wherein the new ironworks was situated, was located just outside the metropolitan area. Thus the eastern bank of the River Lea was encompassed in the immediate positive impact on manufacturing businesses (if not for the throats and lungs of local inhabitants) drawing development and relocation of industry to the area as a result. Mare’s move from the Blackwall side of the Lea to Canning Town was part of this.

The situation caused a huge increase in the local population which made for cheaper labour. In 1841 the borough had fewer than 13,000 residents; by 1901 the area had a population of 267,000. This made West Ham the ninth most populous town in England. This influx put a massive strain on what facilities there were and on those that could be created over a few decades. Housing and concomitant sewage systems were by no means even close to adequate at any stage during this period of time. Indeed, much of the housing that was huddled within the vicinity of the Ironworks from the 1850s on would have been blatantly unfit for human habitation by even the most primitive standards.

Nevertheless, the situation made for a good time for the shipbuilding industry on and around the banks of West Ham’s patch of the Thames and throughout the 1850s and into the 1860s, East London firms in Limehouse, Millwall and Blackwall flourished as they were the first to have adjusted to the demand for large, iron vessels.

ARGO

By the mid-1800s Thames Ironworks had moved into crafting large scale ships like Argo. This was the first steamship to intentionally circumnavigate the world, as the New York Times of 19 November 1853 reported:

‘A Short Voyage Around the Globe’

The iron screw steamer Argo, recently arrived at Southampton, Eng., has been round the globe in 128 days. She was 64 days on her passage from Southampton to Melbourne, via the Cape of Good Hope. She is completely shipped rigged, and has an auxiliary steam power of 300 horse, to be used in adverse winds and calms. She has used 2.105 tons coal, about 17 tons a day, and has averaged 230 miles a day, about 9½ miles an hour during the entire voyage. In fair winds under canvas, the Argo made 13 and 14 knots an hour for successive days; and 11 and 12 knots, close hauled, with the screw feathered … Our Yankee clippers must look to their honors, if John Bull has got to building such vessels as the Argo. (Boston Traveller)

Argo was launched on 24 December 1852, constructed for the General Screw Steam Shipping Company, a British concern established in 1848 by James Laming which has an interesting history of its own. In the late 1849 it inaugurated a service between Liverpool, Gibraltar, Malta and Constantinople, deploying the new 500-ton Bosphorus, also an iron screw steamer. A few years later GSSSC were operating a mail service between the UK and Australia and, like many others, their ships were chartered as troop transports during the Crimean War.

Argo was an early incarnation of a screw-propelled vessel but she had a sail rig. Her screw could be feathered so she was able, if necessary, to become a totally wind-powered ship. In testing she achieved up to 10 knots under sail only, which was about the same speed she could make under steam. The transition from stopping the engines to sail could, remarkably, be effected in under seven minutes. Innovatively, and probably usefully, the screw could be raised for inspection while at sea.

With her four decks weighing in at 1,815 tons, Argo was nearly 245ft long, with a beam of 39ft and cost £75,000 by the time she went to sea. Argo had a complement of 120 and was made to accommodate 210 passengers.

Argo,being ahead of her times, adventurous and, in the worst case scenario, continuing to look to those who put faith in her, reflected the future character of the Ironworks and West Ham United. Her biography can be understood as an archaeological footprint in the history of the organisation and the football club that the following pages chronicle. That said, as you will read later, her crew were not always the best behaved.

On 8 May 1853 Argo set sail for Australia from Southampton, under Captain George Hyde. With 55 passengers and a full cargo of 375 tons, including jewellery to the value £11,500, there was just one stop planned to take on coal at Cape St Vincent. This was in response to steamships making the Australian run having a problematic reputation. As such, the single stop was part of an effort to provide a speedy passage.

After her sixty-four days at sea, on 14 July 1853 Argo arrived at Sydney, Australia only to be detained at her mooring in the harbour for a week due to the mutinous conduct of her crew. On arrival at, what was then, a British colony, they had immediately attempted to leave the ship. Acting on instructions given to him prior to leaving Britain, the ship’s skipper, Captain Hyde, had the crew taken into custody and detained on board a convict hulk until the ship departed for its return to Britain.

Argo left Australia on 27 August 1853 carrying 100 passengers and 103,766 ounces of gold, the value of which at that time was £567,777 (£7.5m nowadays). She had been scheduled to sail two days previously but Captain Hyde had to find new crew members, as he wanted to leave some of the men who had mutinied to serve out their sentences. They had physically assaulted him, even though the police had been present when he was attacked. However, it seems that the offenders found the food in custody relatively good and preferred their comparative idleness to the prospect of rounding the Horn under the command of their victim; this was completely rational and, as such, understandable.

Argo arrived back in Britain in October 1853 to substantial acclamation, having become the first steamship to deliberately circumnavigate the globe. One passenger had died en-route, which was not bad going for the period. She had made the return voyage, rounding Cape Horn, in one day less than the outward journey.

Later, a month after transporting from Australia to England a huge amount of cargo for the Paris Exhibition, Argo was requisitioned by the government as a transport vessel and was fitted for cavalry in April 1855. In the same month Argo set course for the Crimea, transporting 190 horses, a troop of the Royal Horse Artillery and a battery of artillery that consisted of four brass 9lb guns, two 24lb howitzers, one 12lb rocket tube and ammunition.

On 7 March 1856 Argo left Southampton with C battery of Royal Artillery and horses, plus 210 tons of freight, which included guns and gun-carriages. She was heading once again for the Crimea.

Following hostilities, under Captain H.B. Benson, Argo was occupied shipping cargo and passengers across the Atlantic. However, in December 1857 she sailed from Spithead for India with detachments of troops, an event to warrant recording at the time:

The European and American Steam Navigation Company’s splendid ship Argo, under Captain Benson, will receive her troops this day alongside Portsmouth Dockyard jetty. Captain Benson had barely eight clear working days to metamorphose the Argo from a first-class Transatlantic passenger packet into a Government troop-transport, rendering necessary an entire revolution in the whole interior of the ship except the state saloon. This has been done in an able and masterly manner. The Argo is an iron ship, of 2,249 tons burden, 300-horse (screw) power, and the height between decks is 7ft 2in. She prepared for berthing 850 troops and about 50 officers. Her ventilation is unequalled. She has 68 port holes or scuttles on the troop deck, which is a clean sweep of space fore and aft, uninterruptedly presenting a line of benches and hammocks like a vista of stalls. She has also 11 ventilating shafts and a number of rotary ventilators in various parts of her, rendering the below berths as cool as the saloon deck. She is a good sailer, having Cunningham’s patent self-reefing topsails and every other modern improvement; she steams on an average nine knots, and only consumes about 35 tons of coal per day. It is estimated with such advantages, and most experienced officers, she must make at least as good a passage out to India as the Company’s other steamer, the Golden Fleece.

On New Year’s Day 1858 Argo arrived at St Vincent. An extract from a letter from the ship told how:

Every one on board is in excellent health and tiptop spirits, and I think I may say that there is not a discontented man in the ship out of nearly 900. Yesterday (the 2nd inst) we astonished the natives by having a cricket match, which went off very successfully – tents pitched and band playing. The Australasian, with the head-quarters of the 68th, and the Medway, which takes home this mail, arrived here yesterday afternoon, and we are consequently quite a party in this desolate island. Coaling is very slow here, labour being extremely scarce, and Captain Benson thinks the 6th about the time we shall get away.

However, the journey back from India was a different story. On 12 May 1858 Lieutenant R.G. Bell, of the 37th Regiment (who had left England in December 1857 in the Argo) died on board. He had been invalided home with consumption immediately on arrival at Calcutta, and re-embarked on her leaving in April. It was on 6 June that Lieutenant D. Hay, who took a prominent part in the defence of Lucknow1, died. He had also been sent back to Britain with consumption, said to have been caused by ‘fatigue and privation’. Later that month, arriving at St Vincent, four men had died among the invalid troops on the passage from the Cape, the ship had embarked from there at the end of May. By the time Argo reached Plymouth in early July the majority of the troops had contracted diseases from those who had embarked carrying disease. Three days later she arrived in the Thames with the invalid troops from India. They were landed at Gravesend and forwarded to Fort Pitt Hospital, Chatham.

From mid-1858 Argo returned to her transatlantic duties, having been chartered to the Galway Line. On her first homeward voyage for the Galway Line, sailing from Newfoundland on 28 June 1859, she ran onto a reef in thick fog, which thankfully involved no loss of life. The New York Times of Monday, 13 July 1859 reported:

‘Loss or the Steamer Argo − Personal Narrative of one of her Passengers.’

The Atlantic Royal Mail Steamship Navigation Company’s steamer Argo, Capt.Halpin left New York on Thursday, June 23rd, with two hundred passengers; her officers and crew amounting to about one hundred and twenty men. The voyage up to the time of the loss of the ship was as favorable as could be desired; the weather was fine, and the comfortable accommodations of the ship together with the attentive and gentlemanly deportment of the Captain and officers, elicited universal approbation. On Tuesday, morning, at about 3½ o’clock, Cape Pine was made, being about twelve mile distant. The ship’s course was altered, so as to clear Cape Race twenty miles. At about 4 o’clock a dense fog set in, the weather having been previously perfectly clear. A few minutes before six a fishing schooner was hailed, and we were informed that we were on the eastern side of Trepassey Bay, a mile and a half or two miles from land. The helm was put hard to port, and the course of the ship altered.

In five minutes the breakers were seen and the engines stopped and reversed, but too late. The ship struck a rock on Freshwater Point, on the eastern side of Trepassey Bay, and about seven miles from Cape Race. She struck so lightly that some of the passengers who were asleep in their berths were not awakened. She was fast aground, however, and soon began to thump violently and fill in the forward compartments. Minute guns were fired, and the boats got ready and supplied with provisions and water with the greatest promptness and order. The women and children embarked first and the coolness displayed by the passengers, officers and crew was truly remarkable and worthy of all praise. A landing was effected about a mile distant from the ship, and in the course of the morning, all the passengers were landed in safety. Every effort was made to save the ship, but in vain. Had it not been high tide at the time she struck, she might possibly have been got off. During the day the boats were constantly passing between the ship and shore. All the baggage in the state-rooms was saved, and various articles for the comfort of the passengers sent on shore. The baggage which was stowed below was lost.

Soon after the accident, Mr. Butterfield, of this City, at the request of the Captain, went, in a small boat, to Trepassey, about eight miles distant, and telegraphed to St. Johns for assistance, and to New York announcing the disaster.

As the place of landing was eight miles from any habitation, and no conveyance for the passengers could be procured before the next day, preparations were made for passing the night on shore.

Tents were made with sails, which afforded shelter for the women and children, but most of the men passed the night in the open air. The next day the steamtugs Dauntless and BlueJacket conveyed all the passengers to St. Johns, about eighty miles distant

The conduct of all, throughout this trying occasion, was commendable. The officers of the ship did every thing in their power to alleviate the sufferings of the passengers, and make them as comfortable as the circumstances would admit. The ladles, in particular, deserve much praise for the cheerfulness and courage with which they bore their perils and suffering.

During the day, the fishermen, in their boats, came in crowds around the wreck, and seemed waiting, like harpies, for their prey. It is true, in some instances, they assisted with their boats, but not without pay. Before night they had commenced their disgraceful work of plunder on the ship, and a hundred or two of them were to be seen stripping her of everything they could lay hands on.

As to the cause of the loss of this fine ship, various absurd and unfounded rumors have been afloat, as to the carelessness on the part of the Captain and his officers. At the time of the disaster, and for sometime before, all the principal officers were on deck, and among them an experienced coast pilot.

The loss of the ship must be attributed to the fog, some local attraction affecting the needle or particularly the force of a current which at times sets into Trepassey Bay with great power. Many ships have been wrecked near this place, and their loss has been ascribed to these causes.

The agents of the line, Mr Shea of St Johns and Mr Butterfield, were unremitting in their attentions to the passengers, and did everything to make them comfortable, ‘The Glasgow has been sent to St Johns, and will take over the Argo’s passengers. Some five or six of them returned in the Adelaide, which arrived at the port this morning.’

1.  Lucknow was the capital of the former state of Awadh, India. The Residency (the local office of colonial administration) within the city was laid siege to during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Following two successive relief attempts the defenders and civilians were evacuated, and the Residency abandoned. The protracted defence by the British was to be one of the key events of the uprising (there were over 2,500 casualties, mostly Indians; overall about 8,000 British troops faced 30,000 rebels).

EXPANSION

As Mare’s firm moved into the second half of the nineteenth century it prospered and expanded. At its height it was a 30-acre prime industrial park, split into two sites on either side of Bow Creek. It was more than capable of undertaking the largest contracts up to a capacity of 25,000 tons of warships and 10,000 tons of first-class mail steamers at the same time. Orchard Place remained the company’s registered address until 1903 and was linked to the main shipbuilding base in Canning Town by a chain ferry. At the zenith of its development this mechanism was capable of transporting 200 men at a time across Bow Creek, evidencing that the company was a major employer in the area.

Mare was fast building a reputation for inventive maritime design and development. He built the first screw-driven ship for the Royal Navy, Queen Victoria’s Royal Yacht Fairey. The propeller drive of the Fairey