Docklands History Group meeting Wednesday 5th November 2014 The East Country Dock By Chris Ellmers, our President

Chris Ellmers, said that the East Country Dock (ECD), Rotherhithe, at the southern end of what became the Surrey Commercial Docks. He was interested in curiosities and enigmas of port history and this was a dock with very little recorded history. John Broodbank, for instance, in his monumental 1921 history of the Port of London, had only devoted half a page to it. The reason for this appears to have been the fact that the ECD archive had been previously destroyed.

Around 1702 the Howland Dock (later the Greenland Dock) had opened. It was intended for the laying-up and re-fitting of East India ships, and there were also shipbuilding slips and dry docks on either side of the entrance. From the mid-1720 it was used by Greenland whalers. The estate belonged to the Russell family. Early plans and views show a rope walk to the south of the dock and beyond that the very distinctively shaped, long and narrow, Rope Walk Field.

In 1763 most of the estate was sold to the Wells’ family, who were shipbuilders. The Greenland Dock continued to re-fit trading vessels and handle Greenland whalers. Later in the century some South Sea whalers were also handled there, along with grain and timber cargos. In 1803 the Wells sold the estate. By 1804, Moses Agar, an owner of East Indiamen and one of the original investors in the East India Dock Company, owned the Rope Walk field, but there is no evidence to indicate why exactly he had purchased it. He then sold it to David Matthews, a civil engineer living in Rotherhithe. He developed the land as a dock of around 2 acres, whose shape reflected that of the pre-existing Rope Walk Field.

In 1806 there is evidence from a newspaper report that timber was being sold at the ECD and in 1807 a newspaper report referred to it being used for floated timber and the storage of pitch and tar. The name of the dock reflected trade with the Baltic. Richard Horwood’s plan of 1807 was the first to show the ECD, but merely described it as a ‘canal’ – which is what it looked more like than a conventional dock. In 1807 the ECD was sold to a group led by Sir Charles Price, London’s biggest oil merchant, a City politician and a City MP. It was bought in trust for the ECD Company. At the same time Sir Charles was part of a syndicate – known as the Commercial Dock Company – that purchased the adjoining Greenland Dock. The ECD Company then began to negotiate a sale of its dock with the Commercial Dock Company, but they could not agree a price and it fell through. Consequently, the Commercial Dock Company focused on deepening and improving the Greenland Dock and adding new docks and timber ponds to its north.

In 1808/9 the ECD Company petitioned for an Act of Parliament permitting it to acquire more land for dock expansion. A survey of the land sought was carried out by David Matthews, Superintendent and Engineer to the company. The plan was to widen the ECD on the south, to build a linked triangular extension dock to the south, running alongside the Grand Surrey Canal, and to provide a link from this extension across to Dudman’s Dock, which lay on the river, next to the Deptford Victualling Yard. To the immediate south of the ECD the land intended for the extension and proposed works was owned by the City of London, the Evelyn Estate and the Grand Surrey Canal Company – so land acquisition might well have been a challenging prospect. The Act – which provided powers for the extension and additional funding, and incorporated the investors as a joint stock company – was finally passed in 1811.

In 1805 the shipbreaker and shipbuilder, Isaac Blight, whose yard lay immediately to the south of what became the ECD entrance was heading for bankruptcy. He made an illegal transfer of money to Mr Patch who then went to his house and shot him dead using one of a pair of Blight’s guns. In 1809 newspapers reported that the murder weapon had been discovered in excavations that were then taking place to deepen the ECD to take fully laden vessels – which confirms the fact that the dock had originally been built just to accommodate floated timber and barge traffic.

The financial prospects for the ECD Company and its proposed extension scheme were not great. The Baltic trade was embargoed under Napoleon’s Continental Scheme. The 1811 Act stated that the company had spent all of its money and incurred debt in acquiring and deepening the original dock. Whilst there were 118 named subscribers for the issued £100 shares, it was not clear how much had actually been spent on the purchase and works. At the time of the deepened dock’s formal opening in March 1811, however, share prices had dipped to £80, way down on the £90 they had been selling at in 1809.

There are clear clues that the grand expansion scheme had probably been abandoned around the time the deepened dock had opened. In August 1811 there was an advert for an auction, on the site, for a steam engine and construction and building materials. It is unlikely that these would have been sold if the extension was then still a reasonable possibility. Sir Charles Price was not on the list of subscribers in 1811, although his three sons were, which suggests that he had thrown his energies into the much better placed Commercial Dock Company, of which he was Chairman. When John Dudman sold his shipyard – which included Dudman’s Dock – in 1813, the ECD Company had not been in a position to secure it. Indeed, they are known to have ‘been in Want of Money’ and had to borrow substantial sums from the proprietors. By 1817, the Grand Surrey Canal Company had developed a timber pond on the site the ECD had sought to acquire for its main extension. The expansion scheme was effectively dead. The ECD would never be a real competitor with the Commercial Docks and the Grand Surrey Canal Company.

The ECD Company carried on the bulkier Sufferance Wharf dutiable trades, such as tar, soft wood, grain and whaling. There was a massive pot for boiling whale blubber from Greenland, but little is known about its site. A plan of 1812 shows that the ECD also had a shed for tar from the Baltic, a yard for bonded timber, a new granary warehouse, and an old warehouse. There were no buildings on the south side of the dock as the limited land that the dock company owned did not permit it.

In 1815 David Matthews, who was the ideas man behind the design of the failed dock expansion scheme, left to become the engineer for Bridlington Harbour. By 1816 it was clear that the Company had been unable to pay the major loans made by proprietors in 1813 and these had to be covered by issuing them with new shares. By 1815, however, share prices had fallen to £45.

Things were to get worse. In 1816 the Company secretary, Gregory Jeremiah Briggs, was called before the Lord Mayor’s Court charged with embezzlement of substantial company funds. He absconded. The company published a reward in the paper for his apprehension describing him as 5 foot 9 inches high, ‘of sallow sickly complexion’ and with ‘a quick walk’ – which probably came in handy! He had formerly been a wharfinger with various businesses in Gravesend before he went bankrupt, in 1810, and subsequently moved to the ECD. He was not found. It seems likely that some company records – including share registers – were destroyed or went missing at this time. In a Court of Chancery case, of 1818, involving an imperfect lease relating to the Dog and Duck public house, originally granted by Moses Agar, it was stated that the plaintiffs were unable to ascertain who the ECD company shareholders were, or their addresses.

In mid 1820s the ECD Company objected to the proposals for St Katharine’s Dock. In 1824 the ECD handled only 48 vessels the whole year, although it was able to accommodate 28 ships at any one time. It had warehouse capacity for 3,700 tons of cargo. At this date it was the only London dock company not paying a dividend to shareholders. It obtained a new Act of Parliament in 1825 for authority to seek further financial backing and restructure its management. At that date it also owed an additional £8,000 to Joseph Boucock, one of its directors, who died that year.

Competition was to increase in 1829 when the West India Dock Company bought the City Canal for use as a timber dock. Timber, however, remained the most important trade at the ECD, followed by grain and oil products, especially the South Sea whaling trade. A useful supporting income came from the laying up of ships for re-fit, or sale. In 1832 one of Joseph Soames’ East Indiamen was in the dock, when the negligence of an inattentive boy ship keeper resulted in a candle setting fire to a sail and then to the hull. The dock’s hand pumped engine managed to extinguish the fire in an hour and a half, and before any of the fire insurance companies’ engines arrived.

In 1835 the Customs recorded only 16 vessels having used the dock, compared to 139 at the Commercial Docks and 116 at the Grand Surrey Canal. In the mid-1830s, there were various schemes to incorporate the ECD into mega canal and collier dock schemes, but these came to nothing. Trade remained in the doldrums and by 1840 ECD share prices had plummeted to just £10. In 1841, when the dock gates were losing two feet of water each tide, a salvage diver, Mr J. Frazer, was called in and managed to repair the sill and gates at a minimum cost, compared to the potentially ruinous estimate of £5000 given by ‘two eminent engineers.’

In the following decade, however, trade gradually increased. In the mid-1840s, it was one of the first docks to handle guano, from the West coast of Africa and Patagonia. In 1849 the dock handled 75 timber ships over the year. By 1850 the share price had gone up to £20 and a dividend of £1 per share was paid. Things were slowly on the up.

In the absence of the ECD Company archives, there is still much that we do not know about the dock’s operation, including details of its management and regulations for shipping, etc. Financial stringency, however, suggests that the number of direct employees were kept to a bare minimum. Even at the top, the Secretary doubled up as the Dock Superintendent. Timber was discharged by contract lumpers, or the ships’ own crews. Contract lumpers obtained their work at the contractors’ public houses. Deal porters were directly employed, on a casual basis, by the dock company. Work in the timber trade was hard and dangerous. In January 1848 an unemployed tanner working as a casual lumper discharging timber in the hull of a ship lost an eye, and was almost killed, when the mate threw a hammer at him. Grain and associated cargo discharge and storage was undertaken by gangs of Fellowship of Billingsgate Porters, who worked the three Rotherhithe dock groups under the direction of a Ruler of the Fellowship appointed by the City Corporation.

In 1850 the ECD Company agreed to sell the dock to the Commercial Dock for £40,000. An Act of 1851 confirmed this and allowed for the widening of the dock, the provision of a new entrance and its connection through to the Commercial Docks. The business of the ECD Company was wound up in December 1851. They had to advertise for shareholders to make any outstanding claims, so many were probably still unknown to the Secretary and Superintendent.

A works contract was subsequently let to the engineers, Walker and Burges, and the building contractors, Kelk & Co. The new South Dock, which had 6 acres of water, opened in August 1855. The total cost had been £190,000. The ECD’s name was lost save for an open timber storage area, named the East Country Yard, on its southern side. The Commercial Dock Company made further improvements to its docks and in 1864 it amalgamated with the Grand Surrey Canal and Dock Company, under the title of the Surrey Commercial Dock Company. By that time the ECD was already becoming a distant memory.

© Chris Ellmers

11 November 2014