The Romance of Industry and Invention

by Unknown

ince early days, Woolwich has been an important centre for warships and war-material. Here ships were built and launched when England first began to have a navy of specially constructed men-of-war, for Henry VIII. established the Woolwich dockyard, and also appointed Commissioners of the navy, and formed the Navy Office. Some of the earliest three-deckers, or, as we may almost call them, five-deckers, were built at this dockyard; and of these the most famous was the Great Harry, so named after the king, which was launched here in 1514. For the period, the ship was a large one, being of a thousand tons burden; though we should not think much of her size now, when we have ironclads of over eleven thousand tons. There are models of her in the Greenwich Naval Museum, which is not far from Woolwich; and a curious lofty wooden castle she is, rising far up above the water-line, and offering a fair target, if the cannon of those days had any accuracy.

The Great Harry.

On June 3, 1559, Queen Elizabeth came down to Woolwich to witness the launch of a large ship called after her name. In 1637 a ship half as large again as the Great Harry was launched at Woolwich. She was the marvel of her days, and though named the Royal Sovereign, was more often called the Golden Devil, from the amount of mischief she wrought in the Dutch fleet. Her guns were probably of small size; but she carried enough of them on her three flush-decks, her forecastle, her half-deck, her quarter-deck, and in her round-house; for in her lower tier were sixty ports; in the middle, thirty; in the third, twenty-six; in her forecastle were twelve; in her half-deck were fourteen. She was decorated in the emblematical style of the time with gilding and carvings; and these designs were the work of one Thomas Haywood, an actor, who has left us an account of the ship which he adorned, in a quarto volume published the same year in which she was launched. We can imagine what she looked like, with her lofty forecastle and poop, the latter provided with five lanterns, one of which, we are told, was large enough to contain ten persons.

Old Samuel Pepys gives us many references to Woolwich in his famous Diary. He paid frequent visits to the dockyard on his duties as Secretary to the Admiralty, and seems to have looked after his business well. For instance, on June 3, 1662, he writes: 'Povy and Sir W. Batten and I by water to Woolwich; and there saw an experiment made of Sir R. Ford's Holland yarn, about which we have lately had so much stir; and I have much concerned myself for our rope-maker, Mr Hughes, who represented it so bad; and we found it to be very bad, and broke sooner than, upon a fair trial, five threads of that against four of Riga yarn; and also that some of it had old stuff that had been tarred, covered over with new hemp, which is such a cheat as hath not been heard of.' The next month he is looking after the hemp again, and writes: 'To Woolwich to the rope-yard, and there looked over several sorts of hemp, and did fall upon my great survey of seeing the working and experiments of the strength and charge in the dressing of every sort; and I do think have brought it to so great a certainty, as I have done the king some service in it, and do purpose to get it ready against the Duke's coming to town to present to him.' He adds pathetically: 'I see it is impossible for the king to have things done as cheap as other men.'

Of as early date probably as the dockyard, was the 'Warren,' the name by which the Arsenal was formerly called. This establishment seems to have begun as a cannon-foundry, and such, indeed, it chiefly continues to be. Moreover, in other days when the dockyard flourished, stores of ships' cannon were kept here, ready to be placed on ships as soon as commissioned. But now that the dockyard is a thing of the past, and now that the large building-slips, workshops, and ropewalk are empty, the cannon at the Arsenal are chiefly those for the royal artillery and for forts. The dockyard has been closed since 1869; its broad roads are deserted, its workshops are silent, and its large sheds are only used for stores; but the Arsenal has increased in magnitude; and the 'Warren,' in which, before the establishment of the Plumstead magazines, powder was proved ('before the principal engineers and officers of the Board of Ordnance, to which many of the nobility and gentry were often invited, and afterwards sumptuously entertained by them'), has now become an enormous establishment, covering acres of ground, and containing workshops provided with the most complicated machinery, and foundries of enormous size. It is round this Arsenal that we propose to take the reader.

Having gained admittance, the visitor is put in charge of a guide. The tapping of the great furnace is a remarkable sight. A stream of molten steel runs into a huge tank which can contain four or five tons of metal, and this tank is dragged off by some score of men to fill the various moulds. It is remarkable, also, to see a huge steam-hammer of some forty tons' force welding a mass of metal at white-heat.

The Arsenal is divided into four departments—the Laboratory, the Gun Factory, the Gun-carriage Department, and the Stores; and of these four divisions, the first two contain the chief things not to be found in very many other places.

The Gun-carriage Department has workshops both for metal and wood work, and each branch contains many subdivisions. There is nothing, however, in this department which is peculiar to the Arsenal, with the exception, of course, of the special articles which are manufactured; that is to say, forging, steam-carpentering, wheel-making, and so on, are carried out as they would be executed elsewhere. The guides always make a point of showing the wheel-shoeing pit, as it is called, in which the tyre is put on a gun-wheel. The machinery in this department is very complete, especially in the carpenters' shops, where the lathes which work automatically, and turn wheel-spokes and such things according to a given pattern, and the steam-saws for cutting dovetails for sides of boxes, and other machinery, are all constructed on highly ingenious principles. With regard to the articles constructed, the trail of a gun may be followed in all stages of its construction until it appears complete with its wheels, and ready for the gun to be placed on it. Here, too, may be seen the ingenious Moncrieff gun-carriage, by which the gun is only raised above a fortification at the moment when it is fired, the 'sighting' being done from below by an arrangement of mirrors.