Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Origins of the Royal Navy About this episode Henry VIII wanted to have the most powerful Navy in Europe; he also didn't want to have to travel very far to get it. Around 1512, he built a colossal Naval dockyard on the southern banks of the Thames in London up river from his Greenwich Palace, where he set about building the biggest ships the world had ever seen.
Today, you can still find the telltale signs of the history that took place here if you know where to look. Dan joins London tour guide and friend of the podcast, Rob Smith, to trace the beginnings of Britain's Navy and tell the curious tales of early life in the dockyard, the mega ships, the disastrous failures and incredible innovations that made Britain a naval superpower in the 16th century and beyond.
If you'd like to take a tour with Rob, you can check out his events here: https://footprintsoflondon.com/live/guides/rob-smith/
Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore
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1:37 Dan Snow? Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. If you asked me if there's a time and place where I would go if I could time travel, if I could go back in history, what I would love to do is pop down for the day to take a stroll around, take in the atmosphere, the sights, the sounds of London's historic naval dockyards on the south-eastern banks of the Thames, around Woolwich. This really was ground zero for the Royal Navy, the most successful military institution ever created. Yes, come at me. It was where Henry VIII built and maintained his fledgling Royal Navy in the early 16th century. And over the centuries, it's where great warships were constructed, like the giant
2:21 Dan Snow? HMS Nelson or the Agamemnon. It's where exploration vessels sailed from, like the Beagle that took Darwin to the Galapagos. It was a hub of innovation, it was a hub of industry from the Tudor age, the steam revolution. This was an engine of the British Empire. And here's the weird thing, hardly anything remains, hardly a jot survives. Today, those historic dockyards on the south bank of the Thames, well, they're long gone, all of them. And in their place, nearly entirely now, housing estates and shopping streets and cafes and lots of new build developments. But there are still the telltale signs of the history that took place there. You can see old slipways, old dry docks, and you can see an 18th century administrative headquarters
3:04 Dan Snow? with a magnificent clock, now a community centre. There's also remnants of the Mars Pond, and one enormous chimney and mega factory, which is still in use today from the age of steam. But you have to know where to look. And it just so happens that a local historian, friend of the podcast, Rob Smith, does know where to look. He knows all the hidden historical treasures around this wonderful place, and he's a masterful tour guide, he's a great storyteller, you can book a tour with him through Footprints of London. And after you hear this, you may wish to do just that. Me and my history hit team donned our waterproofs because it was the rainiest day of the year, and we went to explore London's historic dockyards, to trace the story of the navy and Britain's maritime power at the very heart of where it all began. Now, producer Marion Day Forge obviously wore unsuitable
3:49 Dan Snow? footwear, I screamed incoherently into a microphone about the Royal Navy, and editor Dougal Patmore saved the day at the end of it all. It's classic Dan Snow's history hit. Enjoy.
4:24 Dan Snow? Well, I'm just alighted from the train here in Woolwich Dockyard. Any day that I head towards a place with Dockyard in the title is a good day for me. And it's particularly good because I'm here to meet Rob Smith. How are you doing, Rob? Good to see you.
4:36 Speaker 04 Hi there, Dan.
4:37 Dan Snow? Right, where are you going? Where are you taking me?
4:39 Speaker 04 Thank you for coming down to this quite obscure location now, Woolwich Dockyard Station. So Woolwich was home to this huge military industrial complex, building ships for the Royal Navy in the Dockyard and building guns for the Royal Artillery and the Royal Navy in the arsenal.
4:57 Dan Snow? We should give people a sense of the geography. We're sort of in Greater London, aren't we? But we've come east, we're east even of Greenwich, people have heard of.
5:04 Speaker 04 We're in South East London, so we're in the London borough of Greenwich still. We're beyond the Thames Barrier, so we're going to see a bit of the River Thames shortly. We're surrounded by what would have been part of the military industrial complex. On the other side of the station, there are big tunnels which stores for the Royal Artillery. And if you look in this direction, you can see the chimney. This was the chimney from the Woolwich Dockyard that was used later on in the period when they were actually building the boilers for steamships here. So it's a great survivor of London's industry.
5:36 Dan Snow? It's such an important reminder that London, obviously, is the political capital. It was also a massive industrial city as well.
5:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a shame really that London's industry has become forgotten. There's a lot of great industrial stuff here, but shipbuilding was also really important. So you don't really think of London being a shipbuilding city, but it's a city which was made on the fortune of ships. So obviously you were going to build them here. So ships built here for the East India Company and for other commercial uses, but also for the Royal Navy, the two big dockyards, Woolwich and Deptford. And I'm going to show you around the site of Woolwich Dockyard today.
6:10 Dan Snow? And Deptford and Woolwich, well, they're right at the birth of the Royal Navy, weren't they? I mean, these are early... Early fifteen hundred, so this is Henry VIII, which most people locate the birth of what we call the Royal Navy today. In that key period with Henry VIII establishing the bureaucracy, the dockyards. It sort of created the institution of the Royal Navy.
6:29 Speaker 04 Henry VIII is very much trying to establish himself as one of the great kings of Europe. And to do that, you've got to have a good military. I just wanted to point out Lord Warwick Street.
6:40 Dan Snow? What's that about?
6:41 Speaker 04 Well, there was a pub called the Lord Warwick. Lord Warwick is John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, who, childhood friend of Henry VIII, and gets appointed to be Admiral in charge of the defence of the North Sea. And eventually then given this role of being the person who's in charge of building up the navy. Henry VIII has rather sort of been goaded into war with France. He wants to prove himself to have the best navy and he wants to build the largest ship in Europe. Probably the largest ship in the world at that time, which was constructed here at Woolwich. But at the time, they didn't really have very large ships. What they'd done at that time up until then was often use commercial ships and put a few cannon on board.
7:27 Speaker 04 But he wanted to really have a dedicated navy constructed here at Woolwich. So he commissions the building of a ship, the like of which has never been seen before. A ship which is called Henri Grasse d'Ur. There'd been a ship in the navy of that name during Henry V's time. So it was really a reference back as well to the great days of Henry V.
7:49 Dan Snow? Classic Henry VIII, that cosplaying as his illustrious forebear, Henry V. So Henri Grasse d'Ur, Henry by the grace of God, so a massive statement.
7:59 Speaker 04 It was a huge ship. So we're talking about a ship which was thousand ton draught, that's twice the size of the Mary Rose. A ship with mounted twenty huge bronze cannons. You can actually see some of those cannons in the Tower of London, in the Royal Armouries collection. And it's almost fearful imagining being on a wooden ship with those guns on board. Just the recoil of them would have been really shocking. So to build this ship was going to take a dockyard which they didn't have the capacity to do before, so we needed a new dockyard. Why not build it right next to the Royal Palace at Greenwich, so Henry doesn't have to go all the way down to Portsmouth to see the supervision of the project. Now the Henry Grasse d'Ur, it's a ship which has got a lot of new features in it, one
8:44 Speaker 04 of them gun ports. So prior to that, guns had been mounted on ships on the decks, but it made the ships very top-heavy, so there was only a limited amount of firepower that you could put there. But this incorporated the new invention of gun ports which would open up on the side of the ship, so you could mount the guns close to the waterline, which didn't make the ship so top-heavy. But unfortunately, it was still a very heavy ship with these twenty cannons on board, and there was always a bit of a manoeuvrability problem with the ship. So it was put under construction, ready to go to war with the French, but unfortunately it took so long to build, it was two years under construction, and by the time the ship had been built, the war was over.
9:27 Speaker 04 So it becomes a ship which is used by Henry VIII for ceremonial occasions, and it appears in the wonderful Antony Roll, which is a record of all of his ships, so you can see it in the Antony Roll. You can see these wonderful streamers that it has flowing behind it.
9:44 Dan Snow? I used to have that. This is the kind of kit I was, that was on the wall of my bedroom when I was a kid, that picture, the Henri Grasse d'Ur.
9:51 Speaker 04 I think you could get it as an airfix kit as well.
9:53 Dan Snow? Well, I was too lazy to do that, but I liked looking at it. And as you said, he loved his palace at Greenwich, he was born in Greenwich, wasn't he? So for him, this is a very kind of important corner of his kingdom.
10:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you can also, as you get more into your midlife crisis period, you don't want to go travelling too far if you want to play with your naval ships. Now, unfortunately, with the war being over, the Henri Grasse d'Ur didn't see much action, and it gets rebuilt, not in Woolwich, but further down the river in Erith, but then goes back into battle in that war against the French in which the Mary Rose is sunk.
10:26 Dan Snow? Because of its gun ports as well, so yeah, it's a period of innovation, isn't it, and mistakes were made.
10:31 Speaker 04 It appears in that amazing drawing of the Battle of the Solent, where we got the distressing sight of the Mary Rose sinking, and the Henri Grasse d'Ur is in the periphery of the battle. It got close enough to fire its guns once, and then was blown by the wind in the opposite direction, and then took no more part in the battle again. And it lasted into the era of Edward VI, but he was not really so keen on the navy as Henry VIII was. The ship caught fire here at Woolwich on the second day of Queen Mary's reign. Unfortunately, we've got no trace of where it is apart from the things that are left in the Tower of London.
11:10 Dan Snow? What's so interesting to me is becoming strong at sea, it's about having ships, of course, and men to sail them. But what Henry VIII is really doing here is creating the kind of land infrastructure, the ability to commission ships, dry docks, and then a bureaucratic infrastructure to support that fleet. And that's the sort of first step on the road to British naval greatness, isn't it?
11:30 Speaker 04 A lot of that is Lord Warwick's doing, setting up the infrastructure. And so it's, you know, the greatest compliment you can pay to someone in London, name a pub after them.
11:40 Dan Snow? Oh, I live in hope. So look, we're just coming down. Finally, we can see the Thames, oh, the Thames in all its glory. It looks a bit grey and brown today, sludge-like, very much a post-industrial landscape, lots of wharves on the far side, lots of industrial buildings. But here in front of us, there's a piece of water that sticks out into the Thames, if you like, so it runs perpendicular to the Thames, and that is a slipway, is it? Wow.
12:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, so this is one of the slipways from the Woolwich Dockyard.
12:10 Dan Snow? That's very cool.
12:11 Speaker 04 They've been built and rebuilt, obviously, many, many times in the Dockyard's history. But we think this one dates back to the 1830s.
12:18 Dan Snow? Wow.
12:19 Speaker 04 So you can see, if you look over the other side, the lovely brickwork over there. So this is where ships would have been launched out into the Thames. Ships building in the 1500s, when they launched a ship, it was a bit more of an undramatic affair than you might imagine now. So what they tended to do was they would have a dry dock where the ship was constructed up to the point where it would float. And then they'd have a big wall of mud at the end of the dry dock, and when it was time to float the ship out, they'd just knock down the mud wall.
12:52 Dan Snow? That's interesting.
12:53 Speaker 04 It could take weeks to knock down that.
12:55 Dan Snow? So did you say what a dry dock is? So a dry dock is something that you can build a ship without getting wrecked. So you build it in a dock like this. But at one end you've got a lock gate, or in your case, a wall of mud. And then when you get rid of that, the tide can come in and the ship just floats out.
13:09 Speaker 04 That's right. In the Elizabethan period here, they actually invent a lock gate which would open up to wooden gates at the end. And it's much quicker to launch the ships then. So this was one of the things that came in at Woolwich to improve the situation.
13:20 Dan Snow? The weird thing is, dry docks are probably more important than ships in the birth of the navy, aren't they? Because that kind of spending on those big land-based projects, meaning you can do maintenance, you can build ships more effectively. That is so important, isn't it?
13:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's really industrialising shipbuilding, rather than making it. You build a ship and then it takes another long time to build another one. Here you keep copying the same design and turning them out.
13:45 Dan Snow? So the dates are quite early in Henry's reign, isn't it? So this dock goes to what, 1512?
13:49 Speaker 04 It's 1512 they start work on the first ship, Omri Gras Adieu.
13:53 Dan Snow? A year later, you start work at Deptford. So this is a kind of deliberate pivot to becoming a maritime power, isn't it?
13:59 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah. There's been a big transformation during the time of the Duke of Northumberland's being in charge of the Council of Marine Causes. And it's really setting up that infrastructure and that administration, which makes it all possible. So it was a lot of work involved in the construction of these ships. I think about 140 people involved in the construction of a wooden warship. Well, from the 1500s really up to the 1700s. So you've got all the carpenters who put the ship together. But you need the people who are sawing all the wood to size to make the planks for the ship to start with. So a lot of people involved moving things around, so a lot of labour is involved.
14:42 Speaker 04 Then there are more specialised jobs. You have corkers, so these are the people who make the ship waterproof. So you're putting waterproof material into all the joints to make sure everything floats.
14:52 Dan Snow? Yeah.
14:53 Speaker 04 You've got joiners making all the precise bits of furniture and the fittings of the rigging. Riggers themselves, so that was another special job, fitting all the rope to the sails. And sailmaking. Sailmaking later on, it often became women's work. And so you'd often have the sailmakers were women whose husbands had been in the Royal Navy and been killed in combat. And it was seen as a pension role for making sails. And then the all-important job of Coopers. So Coopers make the barrels which store all the supplies on the ship. So all of that would have been going on in the shipyard. An incredibly busy place, a lot of people employed here. Now, you also need a huge amount of space for storing all the timber.
15:38 Speaker 04 You don't want it getting totally wet before you've even started work on it.
15:42 Dan Snow? We should point out to people who are listening to this that it is absolutely chucking it down with rain today. It's a proper Sherlock Holmes London day here. So yeah, if you leave wood out in these conditions, as you've spent years or you've stopped piling wood and then building ships, it would go to ruin, wouldn't it?
15:57 Speaker 04 True, but there was also some wood which you wanted to get wet. So the masts of ships were usually made from a single tree. But if you took that tree, just chopped it down and then put it into the ship, the mast would warp when it got out into the salty sea conditions. So they matured the masts in what's called a mast pond. So they'd often be left in the mast pond, sometimes as long as a year.
16:19 Dan Snow? I wonder where it would have been here, do we know where it would have been?
16:21 Speaker 04 Well, the mast ponds, they were a little bit further down the river. And we're going to go past the site of them later on.
16:28 Dan Snow? Oh brilliant.
16:29 Speaker 04 So yeah, lots of work. Not necessarily very happy workers here though. So up until 1702, the workers in the Woolwich Dockyard were impressed. That's a bit like the press gang that were...
16:40 Dan Snow? Really? They just rounded up and put to work.
16:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, so if you were a skilled carpenter or a joiner in London, you had the risk of being told, now you work at the Woolwich Dockyard, and sorry, there's no chance for a career change. You have to work here until the contract is finished. And they had very harsh conditions. Naval discipline applied to the workers here. You could end up being whipped or facing the lash for misdemeanors. But the workers, they fought back as well. So one of the things that they introduced in the 1600s is a clock to make sure that everyone knows when the shift has begun and shift has ended. But the workers at Woolwich were allowed to go home for breakfast. So four shifts a day, one before breakfast, breakfast to lunch, lunch to tea, and then an evening shift.
17:26 Speaker 04 You were allowed to go home for breakfast, and they try and put a stop to this in the 1600s because they say that it's wasting too much time on going home for breakfast. And a lot of the wives of Woolwich came down to the dockyard to protest and had a camp outside the gates saying that they wanted their husbands back for breakfast.
17:45 Dan Snow? Really? That is not relatable. My wife would be thrilled if I was away for breakfast.
17:51 Speaker 04 Another of the perks that you had in the Woolwich Dockyard was you were allowed access to chips of wood, which were the by-product of making the ship. So they call this chipping rights, and the workers were allowed to take home what they called legal chips. So chips which had been hacked off a piece of wood to make it the right shape. You were allowed to take them home at the end of your shift, and then you could sell them on to things like butcher's shops, which would put them over the floor, or pubs, they would put them on the floor there. Or you could use them on your fire, you'd make a little bit of extra there. But there were also what were called illegal chips, and they, workers in Woolwich Dockyard get accused of actually cutting bits of wood up into bits of chips, which were perfectly good bits of wood.
18:36 Speaker 04 So they tried to put a stop to the chipping rights, and this is a thing which causes disputes in the dockyard right the way up until 1801.
18:43 Dan Snow? I can imagine. So we've just come now to the riverbank, this is great, we've got the Woolwich ferry there. There's very few working ferries on the Thames these days. It's a reminder, there would have just been ferries right up and down the Thames.
18:54 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a crossing point in the Thames, the Woolwich ferry going back right to medieval times. In fact, the current Woolwich ferry, well, in its modern form, goes back to the end of the 1800s, when there were lots of ship workers and dockyard workers wanting to go over to the other side of the river from Woolwich. And they'd built loads of bridges across the Thames in West London, and they were a bit aggrieved that they couldn't get a free way to get across the Thames here.
19:19 Dan Snow? Well, because there are still huge big ships coming up to the London Dockland, so you just couldn't build the bridges here, could you? Because you couldn't get their tall masts under the bridges, yeah.
19:26 Speaker 04 So, um, the navy expands during the time of Queen Elizabeth I. One of the ships built here during that time is the Vanguard.
19:34 Dan Snow? Oh.
19:34 Speaker 04 So it has, that's a real great Royal Navy name.
19:36 Dan Snow? Yeah.
19:37 Speaker 04 We've had Vanguards right up until the current day. The very first Vanguard was built here in fifteen eighty-six. It was one of the ships which went to fight against the Spanish Armada. It's a small ship compared to like the Henri Grasse Duke. But it's a very nimble ship and it's one of the ships which can sort of weave in and out of the Spanish, the Battle of Gravelin in the second part of the Armada Battle. Later on, it becomes the ship of Sir Robert Mansell. So he's one of the great admirals of Queen Elizabeth I Navy. Gets involved with Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who's not a great guy to hang around with.
20:18 Speaker 04 So he falls a bit out of favour during the very last time of Queen Elizabeth I's reign. But the Vanguard goes on to another illustrious part of his career when it goes on attack on the coast of Algeria against Barbary pirates. It was finally scrapped in sixteen thirty, so that was a ship which had had over forty years' service.
20:39 Dan Snow? Put in a shift, didn't it?
20:40 Speaker 04 Yeah. So Mansell, he becomes one of the master shipbuilders here at Woolwich Dockyard. And one of the things you could do in the early Stuart Navy is, it was very ripe for corruption. And Mansell's definitely accused of a lot of the funds that go into shipbuilding here going missing. He also decided that the Royal Navy should only buy glass from one source. So all the glass which was used in anything involved in the ship came from, oh, Mansell's Glassworks here in Woolwich. So yeah, there was a lot of accusations of corruption here.
21:18 Dan Snow? It's just huge government spending that's going to be that opportunity, isn't there?
21:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think especially during Elizabeth I Navy, there was sort of expectation there'd be a bit of money went missing. And it was just like, don't go too far. But no one tells you how far is too far.
21:33 Dan Snow? And then if I look down there to the east, is that another, one of the other docks there sticking in?
21:38 Speaker 04 It is, yeah. So there's another of the dry docks has survived here. And we're going to walk a little bit further along the Thames and see some from a later period. So these were the ones built to maintain steamships.
21:49 Dan Snow? Well, it's pouring with rain. We're hiding under a balcony. I might let you go first.
21:55 Dan Snow? Regular listeners to the podcast will be unsurprised to learn that Mariana de Forge, the producer, is wearing an appropriate footwear for this ex-bed. How are those trainers doing, Mariana?
22:05 Speaker 05 Okay, not gonna lie, the toes are wet, but...
22:08 Dan Snow? It's like a light, you're wearing like a light plimsoll. And just for reference, just for reference, everyone, I am wearing a rugged, outdoor waterproof shoe.
22:18 Speaker 05 Even your backpack has a cover.
22:21 Dan Snow? And, and she's teasing me because my backpack has got a rain cover on, which is sensible. Look at this! Wow, I didn't know this was here, this is astonishing. It's another huge dock heading in from the River Thames into what is now Woolwich. It is covered in green pond scum. It's a massive piece of engineering, isn't it? Where's this from?
22:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, so this is from the 1850s when the dockyarders really stopped building the biggest of ships now, and it's mainly used for repair of steamships. So they would fit new boilers to ships here. So you needed much more wide capacity slipways than the last one we saw. See, this has got these lovely stepped-down stone sides. It was originally built as a dry dock, so it shouldn't really have water in here. But after the dockyard closed down, this was a base for the Royal Marines. And this was the Royal Marine Swimming Pool.
23:18 Dan Snow? What?
23:18 Speaker 04 So, you know, the Marines, they can pretty much swim in anything. But I wouldn't really fancy swimming in it today. We might be a time to call in at the café, the clock house, if it's open, which was the administration centre for the dockyard, and they've got a café inside.
23:34 Dan Snow? Okay, look at this, this is glorious, isn't it?
23:36 Speaker 04 Yes, this is the clock house built in 1787. It's the way to keep track of what's going on in the dockyard.
23:45 Dan Snow? It's a remnant of that Georgian architecture surrounded by all this 1950s building.
23:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a great survivor.
23:51 Dan Snow? It makes you think about what it must have looked like here.
23:57 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.
24:07 Dan Snow? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.
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26:01 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
26:30 Speaker 05 Civil War, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.
26:39 Speaker 05 I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
27:08 Speaker 04 Oh, it's a bit warmer in here. That's perfect. Now, we've come to the cafe in this centre where we are going to have a cup of tea. Like all true Britons, it's all restored. So we've now settled into the cafe, we've got a cup of tea, we're in this glorious Georgian building. If we need to tell the time, we can just pop our heads outside and look at the clock above us. Yeah, so having a clock tower which faced four ways was really important. But it was also important for reorganising the shipyard of this building. It was organised around a central stairway, a bit like they'd done at Somerset House. And you had different departments all shared a stairway. So you couldn't, say, have the people who were in charge of designing the rigging not
27:53 Speaker 04 knowing what was going on with the people who were designing the hull of the ship, because they were sharing a building and sharing a stairway with me. It's a clever bit of design. It's interesting. So it was a building that was deliberately designed to encourage collaboration? Absolutely, yes. So the dockyard in the 1600s had been more or less the preserve of one particular family, great shipbuilding family, the Petts. So we have a Peter Pett, who is born during the time Queen Elizabeth I. And then Phineas Pett, who becomes shipbuilder to King James I and then Charles I. Then his son, what's so called Peter Pett, is involved in shipbuilding here. And it's the building of one particular ship for Charles I, which causes an awful
28:36 Speaker 04 lot of controversy here. It's a ship called the Sovereign of the Seas. So Sovereign of the Seas was on a scale which hadn't been seen before. So this was a ship which included huge amounts of gold leaf on the hull, where all the ship's captain would have been. It had a figurehead of a king on horseback, trampling over seven other kings. And this was Charles's way of saying, like, I'm the top of all the kings in Europe. And it was a ship which no expense was spared on, which unfortunately the costs just keep rising and rising. So they have to invoke ship money to pay for it. Now, ship money was normally only charged during wartime.
29:18 Dan Snow? It's taxation?
29:19 Speaker 04 Yes, a tax which would normally be only paid by people on the coast. They're the ones who are defended by the navies, they should pay for it. But it's so expensive, they have to bring the ship money on inland. And even then start to suggest that people in London should have to pay ship money. People in London paying taxes, outrageous. And this is part of the chain of events which leads to Charles' verse becoming so unpopular in London, which leads to the chain of events in the English Civil War.
29:47 Dan Snow? And that was all down to his desire to get more ships out of the yard here, it's extraordinary.
29:51 Speaker 04 Yes, yeah, so the Pets, three generations of them building ships here, they are using an awful lot of timber. So there was woodland all the way through South London, but it starts to slowly disappear. You got through about 150 oak trees to make one of these ships. So you can see how quickly you would find, there are not very many oak trees nearby. The Pets actually then plant out a plantation of timber, which is now in the London Borough of Bromley. So there's an area called Pets Wood there, which is named after the Pets family.
30:22 Dan Snow? Oh, really? So obviously oak wouldn't come to maturity quick enough for them, but it's a...
30:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's amazing now, it's a lovely place for Londoners to walk through. So, the Pets, they are responsible for the shipyard. The last of the Pets, Peter Pett, attracts the ire of Samuel Peeps, who suspects he's been cutting corners, using cheaper supplies and then pocketing the money, and involved in corruption. So Peeps pays a lot of visits to the Woolwich Dockyard in his time. In his diaries, he mentions coming here ten times. There's a nice entry for February the 12th, 1666, where Peeps had started to worry about what Pets doing down here, and worried about the corruption, so he comes down to investigate. And he says, "Up by candlelight, about six o'clock,
31:12 Speaker 04 it being bitter cold weather again, after all our warm weather, and by water down to Woolwich Ropeyard, and there to the Dockyard to inquire at the state of things. And went in to Mr. Pets, and there, beyond expectation, he did present me with a Japan cane with a silver head. And his wife sent me with him a ring with a Woolwich stone, which is now much in request, which I accepted, the values not being great, and knowing that I had done them courtesies, which he did in his own very high terms. Then at my asking did give me an old draft of an ancient-built ship, given him by his father of the bear in Queen Elizabeth's time. This did much please me, it being a thing I much desired to have, to show the difference, to build ships now and heretofore.
31:57 Speaker 04 Being much taken with this kindness, I wait to Blackwall and Deptford to satisfy myself there about the king's business." So, well, no corruption to worry about after all, after being given all these free gifts. That's outrageous, Peeps. Just got bought off, didn't he? He got bought off, yeah. A Woolwich stone, apparently, was a thing that was very precious in that period. It was just a little lump of flint that you got by the side of the river. And when you cut them in half, you sometimes got a likeness of a person's face. I don't know how alike they were, but if you mounted one in a ring, it was seen as a good-luck sign. Now, the sun's come out. Yeah, we've got the sun come out now, so the rest of the story is best taken outside. Let's go, let's get outside.
32:42 Speaker 04 So there's a change in seventeen O two when they get rid of the impressment of workers here. I mean, you've got to get a bit more serious about building ships at that stage. You don't want people who've been press ganged into doing the job. Those kind of workers are not like the best workers. So they get a bit more professionalised. There were still a lot of problems in the dockyard when they tried to cut down on wages. Sometimes you'd get gaps in fighting in wars where they said, we don't need all these shipbuilders now. So let's just lay them off. So there were occasions where, well, there's no provision for them once they've been laid off. And everyone lives right next to the dockyard, so there's no work for them. And so there was a lot of anger in the dockyard about that.
33:24 Speaker 04 And this leads to strikes in seventeen thirty nine, seventeen forty two and seventeen forty four. The strikes really cut home when there's a war on though. So, you know, government's desperate to get ships built. So the strikers were often bought off during wartime, but occasionally also threatening troops to be brought in.
33:43 Dan Snow? Right, so it's a constant issue.
33:46 Speaker 04 It's a constant issue. They're not always successful dockworkers here, but it's one of the first examples of London workers flexing their muscle in a sort of unionised way, which obviously comes to a fore more in the eighteen hundreds with the dockworkers strikes then. But the Woolwich Dockyard did that beforehand. Now, this gets through to the Royal Navy and one of the people in charge of the Navy at the time, Samuel Bentham, who was the inspector of General Naval Works in seventeen ninety five, said, we should switch over to using metal skinned ships with steam engines. Because that means that these republic of wood, as they called down here, would lose its power.
34:26 Speaker 04 But, well, one of the things is the steam engines and metal skinned ships are just not advanced enough to do that at the time. And the Royal Navy often liked doing things the way they've always done them before and said, we've had wooden ships for years, why should we change now? So Bentham's ideas were not adopted until another thirty years later. But some of the earliest steamships for the Royal Navy are built here in Woolwich Dockyard.
34:49 Dan Snow? Well, walking through what used to be the dockyard is now feels like just a suburban housing estate. It's weird, isn't it? What are some of the great ships that people will know about that were built here?
34:58 Speaker 04 One that was really famous, but which was a very undistinguished ship at the time, was HMS Beagle. So this was a small, humble Tangon sloop, which was used for the coronation of King George IV. And it was one of the ships which sailed under the old London Bridge as part of the coronation. But it then goes on as commissioned to carry out exploration work, and goes out on a long journey along the Argentinian coast, where, after a while, the captain had gone through a state of depression and ended up shooting himself. And so the deputy for the captain, Robert Fitzroy, takes over the job and then sails around Tierra del Fuego. He comes back to London, and to his horrors, then sent out back on another voyage on the
35:43 Speaker 04 Beagle, which could take up to six years along the Chilean coast. And he's so sure that he's going to end up in difficulties like the previous captain, that he says, "I'm going to take someone really interesting along with me to talk to." So he brings along this young scientist called Charles Darwin. And they're both interested in plants and animals, so they've got something nice to talk about. So the famous voyage of the Beagle leads to Darwin's work on the Origin of Species. But Fitzroy was a very devout Christian, and apparently was absolutely furious later on that he'd actually helped Darwin create
36:21 Speaker 04 the book, and spent the last few years of his life trying to heckle Darwin and stop him publishing the book. The Beagle itself, though, had a bit of an inauspicious sense. It was made a customs cutter, spent its time on the Essex coast looking for smugglers coming in, and apparently can be found in the mud at a place called Pagelsham on the Essex coast.
36:50 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more coming up.
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37:29 Speaker 05 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.
37:39 Speaker 05 I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipscombe and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
38:09 Speaker 04 I wanted to just really show you this wonderful building. So this was one of the boiler making factories, which was built in 1838 when they convert over to building steamships here. So roughly where we are on the other side of the road would have been where the Mars Ponds we were talking about earlier were located where these houses were. So you needed those for sailing ships, but you didn't need them for steamships. So the Mars Ponds got converted into pools of water to be used by huge steam engines, which were used for stamping out giant plates for the sides of ships and boilers in ships, which we can see took place in this building over here. So this is just great, isn't it? This gives you a sense of what a Victorian factory looked like.
38:53 Speaker 04 There have been factories like this all over Britain and it was the workshop of the world. Beautiful yellow brick, lots of arches. Still quite handsome, the old Victorians. Lovely gable end here with a pointed roof and this massive brick-built chimney here stretching up. Wow.
39:06 Dan Snow? Again, I'd probably thirty metres into the sky, what would that have been for?
39:09 Speaker 04 Well, the buildings around here were associated with making the big metal plates for boilers on steamships, which would be on a grand scale. So, this building, built in eighteen thirty-eight, was for stamping out metal plates. They had huge steam hammers here. So it would have been so noisy with the constant bang, bang, bang of those steam hammers, powered by big steam engines, which had been working away and you just had all the whooshing sound of the steam coming forth. You'd have the constant sound of the steam engines working, all the workers coming and going, bringing things here. We're in a very noisy place along here. Now, all the different buildings had their own steam engines working here.
39:51 Speaker 04 You could have ended up with lots of different chimneys for each one, but they had a very clever idea here, which was to create a central chimney for the whole dockyard, which is the chimney you see over here. So it had six different flues running into the base of the chimney, which would then let all the smoke go out of one chimney, so you only have to pay to maintain one chimney.
40:10 Dan Snow? So that would have been absolutely going full tilt the whole time, wouldn't it?
40:13 Speaker 04 It would have done. It was actually taller than it is now. Well, then the Ministry of Defence finally finished with this site in the nineteen eighties. They took down the top ten metres of the chimney, so it was taller than this originally.
40:26 Dan Snow? There can't be many nineteenth-century industrial sites like this left inside the M25, left inside Greater London.
40:31 Speaker 04 No, it's very rare chimneys like this, and chimneys are very hard and expensive to maintain, so we're lucky that this one survives.
40:38 Dan Snow? Lucky we're not on an earthquake zone. This transition to an iron navy, does it successfully kind of break the unions here? I love the Republic of Wood, did they end up being able to get their own way a bit more?
40:49 Speaker 04 Well, it becomes a different set of workers, really. You need a new set of skills, and gradually you start to get workers who are more experienced in metalwork and running boilers, running steam engines here. So yeah, it's a complete shift of the workforce. Often people would come from other parts of the country, which had already had more experience of steam engines running here to work here. One of the first steamships to be built here was actually a wooden-hulled ship called the Agamenmont.
41:16 Dan Snow? Classic naval name.
41:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, there've been lots of Agamanmons, but this one was basically an old sailing ship design, but they redesigned it to incorporate steam engine with a screw at the end of it, which then turned a propeller and so it could rely on its sails, but also on its steam power. And that gets involved in the Crimean War, involving the bombardment of Sebastopol, and actually ends up running aground in the Black Sea, but they managed to refloat the ship. Then later becomes involved in laying the first transatlantic cable. So there's obviously a lot of gains to be made by having telegraph cables which run across the Atlantic, but a pretty hard thing to do. They needed ships of some great size
42:00 Speaker 04 to do that. One of the ships was Isambel King Brunel's Great Eastern, which was big enough to carry the cable, and the Agamanmon had the other half. And the two of the ships met mid-Atlantic and joined the cables together. Unfortunately, one half of the cable had been built down here in Greenwich, and one half had been built in Liverpool, and they hadn't consulted with each other. And they're both cables, one wound clockwise and one anti-clockwise. So when the Agamanmon and the Great Eastern joined the cable together, it stayed together for about half a day and then just all the forces unwound it and it sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. So they had to come back again two years later and do it once more.
42:38 Dan Snow? Not the fault of this dockyard or its workers?
42:40 Speaker 04 Not the fault of this dockyard, no, they're exempt from this one. But later on, after the dockyard starts to close down, part of the site is taken over by Siemens, the engineering company. There are actually two Siemens brothers, one who founded a company in Berlin, and one founded it in London. And some of those buildings are still there on site. So amazing place. They first make telegraph cables there, and then later on making telephones. And Bakelite telephones made on the site here for a very long time. Now, the chimney, when they decide to announce the closure of the dockyard in 1869, the workers are not very happy about that. And they climb up to the top of the chimney and hang an effigy of the First Lord of the Admiralty from the top of it, and then raise
43:25 Speaker 04 a black Flag to commemorate the last day of the dockyard in form of protests. I think they were easier ones to do. So Agamemnon, one of the last ships to be fully built at Woolwich, but they still carry on maintaining steamships here for a little bit longer. But after a while, it's just harder and harder to build ships here. Some of the problem is all the competition from all the steamships which are coming into the port of London. Lots of them arrive in the River Thames. You haven't got space to like bring big Royal Navy ships in and out of Woolwich. And so they start to lose a lot of the business down to the Chatham Dockyard, which is down in the Medway, much more space there. In fact, they actually moved some of the ship covers from Woolwich over to Chatham.
44:10 Speaker 04 And you can see some of them there in the historic Dockyard. So the Dockyard is wound down, but it doesn't stop the military industrial complex here. So the site of the Dockyard is then taken over by the Ordnance Board, who use it for storing stuff for the army to fight war. And this building we have over here is one of those buildings from that era. So it was a warehouse store for things like huge number of tins of bully beef and the cavalry. Think about how much hay the cavalry would use on operations. So they had a special binding machine for hay, which could crush it down into small blocks, which you could then load on to ships. So this whole area becomes a place for army stores. The building here is survivor of that era.
44:55 Dan Snow? So was that just including in the wars of the 20th century, First World War?
44:58 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah.
44:59 Dan Snow? So this would have been humming during the First World War.
45:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the Ordnance Board, they own this site right the way up until the 1960s. It's quite badly damaged in World War Two. So a lot of the older buildings wouldn't have survived, even if Ministry of Defence didn't need them anymore. So, you know, what was left was largely demolished in the 1960s. So we don't have very much left.
45:20 Dan Snow? Yeah.
45:21 Speaker 04 Now, to bring all of this amount of army supplies in and out of the site, they had to have a railway. It was a small, narrow gauge railway which ran along the site. And a tunnel from the railway is just around the corner here.
45:33 Dan Snow? Let's have a look. So it's not a main line, it's a sort of branch line?
45:37 Speaker 04 Yes, they tended to use narrow gauge railways because they could get on tighter corners.
45:42 Dan Snow? Right.
45:43 Speaker 04 You have miles and miles of little railway lines running around here.
45:46 Dan Snow? It would have been amazing, wouldn't it?
45:48 Speaker 04 So this was the route of the railway into the site.
45:51 Dan Snow? Now that you mention it, it's obviously a footpath today or a cycling route. It's amazing, isn't it? Only 100 years this place has been so transformed. It's got these few remnants, these few ghosts of the past.
46:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's what I like about this site. It's not the most well looked after of tourist locations, but it tells a big story about Britain's history. And maintaining its navy is such a big part of keeping the British Empire together. So these symbols of London's role in that.
46:21 Dan Snow? Yeah, you're right. This Dockyard was a key component of the British military industrial complex at the very height of empire, right inside London. And now hardly anything remains.
46:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, not the most salubrious of locations, but you know, I quite like the idea. It's a railway tunnel you can walk through.
46:40 Dan Snow? And no one would know. That is great. Thanks so much, Rob. I've really enjoyed that. And how can people come on this tour, in fact?
46:49 Speaker 04 So if you look out for my tour uncovering Woolwich Dockyard on website footprintsoflondon.com, you can find that walk and many other, lots of great walks about London's industry, all history and other things there.
47:02 Dan Snow? This is a very different type of history to the one that people usually associate with London. So thank you for showing it to me.
47:07 Speaker 04 Oh, thanks very much for coming.
47:13 Dan Snow? Thank you so much to our guide, London historian Rob Smith. You can enjoy more of Rob in a lovely festive episode. A very appropriate listening as we're in the rouse of Christmas. We did one with him a while back about the debauchery in excess of Georgian Christmas in London. We've added it in the show notes for you to find. That's all from us on Down to Snow's History Hit. Make sure to check in next week for more episodes. We're going to be looking at the history of Christmas food. If that's not your bag, we've got Hitler's U-boat war. Because no matter what the season is, how festive you're feeling, it's always time for a bit of WW2 history on this podcast. It didn't stop happening just because people were celebrating Christmas. Thanks for listening. Bye.
47:57 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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