So – back to the industrial railways book. I'm flicking through at random for one of the many, many Greenwich and Woolwich industries mentioned. Let’s start with Christie & Vesey Ltd of ‘Riverside Greenwich’. The book says they were earlier “Christie's Wharf Ltd - (incorporated 3/5/1929”).
It gives a map reference – but of course Vesey’s Wharf is a block of houses jutting out into the river at the end of Anchor and Hope Lane. So that’s where they were?? Or is it?
Articles from railway magazines of the 1920s and 1950s featured the Angerstein railway – still running between the Blackheath rail tunnel and the river. They tell us that the freehold of 16 acres of the wharf area was acquired in 1912 by “William Christie and Sand Gravel.Co., Ltd,” who were “large sleeper importers and creosoters.” They built a “large creosoting works and sawmills” and thus “the district has become a very important timber centre”.
They describe Christie's Wharf as “adjoining Angerstein Wharf”- which means it must be one of the two wharves still in use by the aggregate firms which operate on the Angerstein Railway today.
They say it was completed just after the war – so in the early 1920s– and is “one of the finest ferro-concrete piers of its type on the Thames”. They say it can take larger steamers than any other wharf in the reach with 26 ft. 6 in. of water at high tide spring tides, and 6 ft. at low water with a “proper chalk bed where steamers may lay in safety”. It is “equipped on the most up-to-date lines, 15 400 ft. in length” and is “a very good example of what might be done on the Thames banks” and the wharf handles “over 30,000 tons of sleepers and 30,000 tons of timber, deals and telegraph poles” and this is done with “steam travelling cranes, which run on 4 ft. 8in. roads from the wharf back into the works”. Christie's Wharf they say can “give steamers loaded with timber quicker despatch than any other place in the Port of London”. They also describe the railway tracks on the works, and nine steam travelling cranes are employed in the handling of the sleepers and timber – and this is where our directory of London industrial railways comes in and 1953 Ordnance Survey map shows “an internal narrow gauge tramway - Ten steam cranes operated on the standard gauge lines”
The 1920s railway magazine finally notes that “60,000 tons of timber.... annually… passes over the Southern Railway Company's …. and during the Baltic season it is no uncommon sight to see train after train leave the wharf composed entirely of timber traffic”.
What else can we find? Turning to the ever helpful net Google finds, bizarrely copies of the Straits Times – and a list of wills from the 1930s with the headline “Timber Importer Leaves £69,059.” This refers to an. Andrew Charles Christie who has died at the age of 54 and which gives two addresses “Warning Camp House, Warning, Arundel, Sussex" and “5, Royal Crescent, Brighton”. He was apparently the chairman of Christie's Wharf – and yes there really is a place called Warning Camp just outside Arundel, and you can visit the gardens in the summer. Family history sites reveal he was Scottish, and came from Stirling where his father was a timber importer – and according to the ancestor hunters so were other family members.
So – this was clearly a large and important industry which employed a lot of people. Yet we seem to know very little about it. It is very likely that there are some remains of it in the shape of one of the two aggregate wharves. In fact I understand that the Greenwich planners still call it ‘Christie’s Wharf’ although Christies and their timber are long gone. I am far from clear about Vesey – since what we now know as Vesey’s wharf is some distance from the Angerstein railway and must have been a different site. Has anyone any knowledge – ideas?? When did Christie’s cease work? What were their Scottish connections?? Has anyone the time and inclination to sort all this out??
Angerstein Wharf. Southern Railway Magazine Dec 1925 & Nov. 1951.
“Industrial Railways and Locomotives of the County of London” (Industrial Railway Society 2008 compiled by Robin Waywell and Frank Jux)
Pix to come - sorry I am not so silly as to reproduce the OS extract, interesting though it is
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