Chapter Four
In 1803, when Stephen was 13 years old, John and his mother had a baby boy. Suddenly the household revolved around little George Hayter and Stephen missed both his father and Emily. Within a year Stephen Winckworth Silver had completed his schooling, packed his bag and set off for London with a letter of introduction in his pocket to a clothier named Arrowsmith who he’d been told by a friend’s father might take him on as an apprentice.
It took him three days to reach London. He hadn’t realised that St John’s Wood was quite a way out from the centre, but finally he reached the Arrowsmith premises. He didn’t present an appealing prospect in clothes dusty and rumpled from the journey, but when Arrowsmith saw the letter of introduction and recognised the clear innate intelligence in the boy’s eyes and conversation, he was taken on and permitted to sleep in an attic room.
Stephen Winckworth Silver worked hard. He worked long hours and made himself indispensable to his employer. When his apprenticeship was completed he began to make suggestions for improving and expanding the business, suggestions so effective that he was eventually made a partner, and by 1830 he’d outgrown Arrowsmith’s and set out on his own.
In the early days of the company he would often go and stand outside the building he’d taken on Cornhill and just look at the sign: S.W. Silver & Co. His name and his father’s name. It was the memory of his father that spurred him on, and when he saw that sign for the first time he’d nearly wept. At last, his father had some permanence. If Stephen had his way, the name would become immortal yet.
Before long the business had expanded to workshops in Bishopsgate and on the Commercial Road, and, with the increase in transatlantic travel creating a market for high-quality clothing for the traveller, a shop was opened in Liverpool, close to the port from where the steamers departed for America. By this time Stephen had moved to a fine house on Abbey Road which he shared with his wife Frances, whom he’d married in 1812, and their children, including his son Stephen William Silver, named for his late father and brother, who he hoped would go on to succeed him in business and keep the name alive. Indeed, even his initials fitted the firm. Which was no coincidence.
Stephen Winckworth Silver had a mind that never rested. There were always other lines to be explored, new markets to develop, new industries to investigate. When gutta-percha, a hard-wearing latex from the sap of a Malaysian tree, became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, Stephen was quick to take note of its waterproof qualities. His waterproof clothing coated in the substance was one of S.W. Silver & Co’s most popular lines, so much so that Stephen opened a small waterproofing works in Greenwich, on the south side of the Thames and at the terminus of the new railway link from London Bridge.
Stephen had big ideas for gutta-percha and soon realised that he would need more space; a location close to the city but with the potential for massive expansion, a site that could expand in time with his ideas and ideally outside the provisions of the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844 which restricted ‘harmful trades’ in the city. Cornhill was out of the question, as were Bishopsgate and Commercial Road. Liverpool was too far, he needed to be close to the port of London, ideally right next to the river, in order that the raw materials could be delivered and unloaded with the minimum of fuss and expense and the finished products shipped out in the same fashion.
He’d often walk down from the Cornhill office to the bank of the Thames, watching the river in action. The steamboats, the coal barges, the wherries, the east coast barges to-ing and fro-ing, loading and unloading at the busy wharves. He’d watch ships leaving London sailing to who knows where, picturing the estuary opening up to the rest of the world. It was standing there one day among the cacophony of ships and men and shouting and clanging and the parping of horns and breathy exhalations of steam whistles that Stephen Winckworth Silver realised that to expand the business in the way he truly desired he should look east.
Hiring a launch one day he took his board of directors and his sons down the river to show them a site he thought had great potential. It was a sunny, chilly winter morning as the boat passed the Tower and headed towards the rising sun, passing between the towering wharves and warehouses of Bermondsey and Wapping, passing the busy entrance to Greenland Dock, the shipyards of the Isle of Dogs, the naval victualling yards at Deptford, the old seamen’s hospital at Greenwich. As they passed around Bugsby’s Reach and the East India Dock basin the riverside became noticeably less congested and busy before the Woolwich dockyards came into view on the south bank of the river. Before long the only sound was the gwersh, gwersh of the engines, and the launch found itself alongside a stretch of marshy land on the north bank of the river.
Stephen Winckworth Silver led the men onto the deck from the saloon in which they had been warming themselves. They looked around, a little confused and very cold, breath clouds being whipped away to mingle with the steam from the funnel. Stephen had seen many changes in his decades in business: London, Great Britain and indeed the world had been transformed in an unprecedented fashion and he’d been here, in London, for all of it, at the very heart of British advancement. He had, after all, clothed the Empire, and he wasn’t done yet.
Stephen Winckworth Silver was nearly 60 years old now but the sparkle in his eyes was undimmed. His sons knew it, his fellow board members knew it, just as George Arrowsmith had spotted it nearly half a century earlier and even Emily at the Three Tuns before that.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘it’s a cold morning so I will not keep us out here long. I want you to look at the north bank of the river here and tell me what you see.’
Their heads turned, looking left and right, trying to work out what it was they were supposed to be looking at.
‘There’s nothing there, father,’ replied Stephen William Silver. ‘It’s a river wall and marshes beyond.’
‘You are absolutely correct, Stephen,’ his father replied, ‘but on this land, on this marshy, boggy, unlovely, unloved land, lies the future of the company. That is what you are looking at.’
The men all turned to look at him.
‘Gentlemen,’ he announced expansively, ‘S.W. Silver & Co badly requires new premises. Premises with space to expand and which have good access to transportation, both incoming and outgoing. Whereas in the past we have always looked for existing buildings, this time we are going to build our own, from nothing. Just here the new and largest works of S.W. Silver & Co are going to rise from these marshes and take the company into the future. These are exciting times, and this company is going to grasp the opportunity to not just capitalise on these times but to actively formulate them. Look again, gentlemen. I guarantee that within two years you will not recognise this stretch of river as the same which you see here today.’
Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the distance, back towards the city, a steam tug let out a mournful whistle. As Stephen Winckworth Silver looked across the brown water of the Thames towards his vision of the future there was a blue flash of colour from behind him as a kingfisher swooped low past the launch and plunged into the river. It emerged again with something in its beak and flew off low over the reeds towards the marshland and disappeared over the wall.
Chapter Five
Half a century after the death of Stephen Silver and a little over half a century before the Brunner Mond explosion of 1917, Constance Street didn’t exist and Silvertown didn’t exist. Indeed, until well into the 1850s the north bank of the Thames between Bow Creek and Barking Creek was almost entirely deserted, a misty, marshy expanse of boggy land with a couple of ancient trackways occasionally used by shepherds and cattlemen the only hint as to any human presence at all. The area didn’t even have a name: when Stephen Winckworth Silver first took an interest the stretch of riverside land was referred to merely as part of Plaistow Marshes, ‘opposite Woolwich’ or sometimes, colloquially, as ‘Land’s End’.
That is, when it was referred to at all. It was a place as mysterious as it was anonymous, the source of w
hispered, wide-eyed tales of strange, moving nocturnal lights that hovered above the ground and unearthly sounds that could come from no human, and rumours of dark, wild beasts with fire in their eyes that roamed the marshes at night.
This was never a benevolent place. In 1667, as London to the west recovered from the dual traumas of plague and fire, Sir Alan Apsley was stationed on the north bank opposite Woolwich with his regiment in case of Dutch invasion. The invasion never came but Apsley complained of the constant ‘fevers and agues’ endured by his men and strange lights and noises at night that had the crew speculating openly about the Devil himself stalking the empty wastes. Given the twin disasters that had befallen the capital over the previous two years it was no wonder they felt a malevolence lurking in the marsh.
By the start of the nineteenth century there was just one building between the creeks, a rambling pile known as ‘The Devil’s House’ that dated back to the early eighteenth century. Far from being the domicile of the scourge of Apsley’s sailors the house’s name apparently derived from the man who built it, believed to be a Dutchman named Duval about whom we know nothing, let alone why he chose such a bleak location to build what was, by all accounts, a fairly grand property in its day (it was even used as a landmark in navigation guides to the River Thames). By 1769 Duval’s pile had become a ‘house of entertainment’, its remote location allowing perhaps entertainment that was not entirely moral or scrupulous. Either way, in hindsight the building was as mysterious, enigmatic and sinister as its surroundings.
But all that was to change. As the nineteenth century got into its stride, science and industry were on the march and it would take more than a few mysterious lights and noises to keep those twin facets of progress from the boggy land opposite Woolwich. A decade before Samuel Winckworth Silver’s arrival it would also take, in the first instance, another remarkable man to impose his will upon the place.
One night in 1810, when George Parker Bidder, the son of a stonemason from Moretonhampstead in Devon, was five years old he was in bed listening to two of his older brothers arguing over the value of a pig. Each had made his own calculation, based on the weight of the animal, and each was utterly convinced the other was wrong. The discussion grew more and more heated and, irritated by the commotion which was preventing him getting to sleep, young George hopped out of bed, went to the top of the stairs, called down the correct figure, asked them to be quiet and went back to bed.
This was the first recorded instance of a rare numerical gift that led to Bidder senior taking George on the road as the ‘Amazing Calculating Boy’. George, it seemed, had a precocious natural talent for mathematics, extraordinary in any youngster but especially so for a boy of the most rudimentary schooling from the wilds of Devon. As his father realised when testing young George, the youngster could perform mind-bending mathematical calculations on demand in his head, and all while still in short trousers. Such was George’s fame that he was even brought before Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who was both enchanted and astounded by George’s charms and mathematical abilities.
After a brief flirtation with a degree course at Edinburgh University, at the age of 18 George joined the Ordnance Survey and subsequently drifted into engineering. He then rekindled a friendship with the railway pioneer George Stephenson that had first flared in Scotland and joined him in 1834 in the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway. Three years later Bidder was instrumental in the founding of the Blackwall Railway, work which took him to the brink of the nameless marsh east of Bow Creek for the first time. One day, as the railway works clanked and hammered away behind him, Bidder must have looked out across Bow Creek and the tufty, boggy wasteland beyond to see Woolwich in the distance, and had an idea.
Chapter Six
In 1838 the world’s first suburban railway line had opened south of river, connecting London Bridge and Greenwich, nearly the entire route passing along a purpose-built viaduct that carried the trains way above the heads and roofs of south-east London; a marvel of nineteenth-century vision and engineering. The plan was to continue the line beyond Greenwich to Woolwich, but the nature of the terrain meant going under rather than over the inhabitants. Such was the extent of the tunnelling required that the fruition of the project was years away when George Bidder, who as well as having a brilliant mathematical brain also had a pretty gimlet eye for the main chance, felt a light go on in his head.
Instead of waiting for someone else to build the connecting line to Woolwich from Greenwich, why didn’t he just go a different way? If they began at Stratford and took the line across the empty marshland and introduced a ferry crossing to and from Woolwich at the other end they could surely pip the tunnellers to the Woolwich connection and, with the land so undesirable and the fact that no tunnels or viaducts were required, at a minimal cost.
Work commenced in 1846 and by June the following year the line had opened, looping round to the north of where Silvertown stands today, across land now occupied by London City Airport. Two steam ferries connected the railway with Woolwich itself while a clutch of basic cottages was built at the terminus, officially christened North Woolwich, to house some of the railway workers.
The initial success of the line was short-lived, as the tunnels south of the Thames were completed and opened in 1849, barely three years later and well ahead of the initial projections. In response Bidder and his business partners landscaped and furnished the North Woolwich Pleasure Gardens by way of an attraction for travellers. They opened in 1851, with bowling greens touted as the equal of any in the land and with a pier ready-made to welcome the pleasure steamers that chugged up and down the river between London, Gravesend and beyond, but the pleasure gardens’ lofty aspirations were not matched by the clientele. The remoteness of the location made laws and regulations more difficult to enforce, and the gardens soon earned a reputation for drunkenness and debauchery. Disapproving moralists campaigned to put an end to the bacchanalian shenanigans by taking the park into public ownership and banning drinking, but this would not be achieved until 1890. The fledgeling community by the river was demonstrating an early stubbornness and reluctance to be told what was good for it that would prove to be an enduring feature of the locality.
In 1851, as Stephen Winckworth Silver was showing his fellow board members the frankly unprepossessing site of his planned new waterproofing works, two brothers named Howard had just secured a couple of riverside acres of land halfway between the creeks where they would build a modest glass factory and a wharf. Silver opened his works immediately next door in 1852, initially purchasing a single acre but soon adding five more and, when the Howard Brothers’ factory failed, snapping up their premises too.
The year after Silver’s works opened came the development that would begin to establish and define the area when work commenced on the excavation of the Victoria Dock a short distance north-west of the Silver works. The growth of steam shipping meant the London docks further west were struggling to accommodate the larger vessels chugging and churning their way up and down the river. If London was to maintain its status as the world’s leading port then it was clear a larger capacity was urgently required and the land to the east between the creeks became the obvious location: it was certainly large enough and also more convenient as the ships didn’t have to sail as far inland. When ‘The Vic’ opened in 1855 it was easily the largest dock in the port of London. Flanked by vast new warehouses it was a marvel of maritime engineering and commercial ambition that would, within a decade of opening, be handling close to 850,000 tons of cargo a year, twice as much as the rest of the London docks combined.
Stephen Winckworth Silver died within weeks of the dock opening but he’d lived long enough to see his bold move in setting up on soggy ground east of London entirely vindicated. He didn’t, alas, live long enough to see the Silver name truly make its mark as he’d wished. Two of his sons, Stephen William Silver and Colonel Hugh Silver, assumed control of the company on the death of the
ir father and found a kindred spirit for their commercial ambitions in Charles Hancock, proprietor of the West Ham Gutta Percha company in Stratford. This mutual admiration led to Stephen William and Hancock taking out a new patent for producing waterproofing materials in 1862, and then two years later the amalgamation of the two companies into the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Company based at the Silver works.
When the waterproofing works had been established in 1852, construction also commenced on two purpose-built streets adjacent to the works providing housing for some of the workforce. Winchester Street and Twyford Street, muddy thoroughfares of very basic housing, ran north–south between Bidder’s railway and the river, the houses on the eastern side of Winchester Street backing right onto the works. The proximity to the river meant that at particularly high tides the streets were liable to flooding, but what they lacked in amenities they made up for in convenience: the residents no longer had to arrive by boat or pick their way along the river wall; they could now walk out of their front doors and be at work in barely two minutes.
By the end of the 1850s the works and this couple of residential streets were being referred to colloquially as ‘Silver’s Town’. Before long this was shortened to Silvertown. The first published references to ‘Silvertown’ appear in newspapers from 1858, and as the area saw some of the most rapid industrial expansion in history the name would stick.
Chapter Seven
The junior Silvers seemed to share their father’s instinct for opportunity. In 1859 the company staged a demonstration of submarine telegraphy, the use for which they felt their gutta-percha works might be best disposed. Two hundred ‘gentlemen’ travelled down the river by boat to see how undersea telegraph cables coated in gutta-percha would be totally protected from water damage. One contemporary newspaper report noted:
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