Sunday, 20 April 2008
View from the barrier
Cold and horrid yesterday and the nearest I got to the Royal Docks Campus was looking at the river from the barrier site. There was a ship at the Tate and Lyle jetty - 'Ismail K' . Does anyone know any more about it?- and being at the barrier brings me to Siemens - the electrical engineering giant whose factory was in that area until the 1950s. Some one emailed me the other day asking for information on Siemens records. She is a family history researcher looking for info about her grandfather who , she says, hung himself at Siemens Cable works in 1929. She is wondering if there are any personal records of such things.
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2 comments:
Ismail K is a new Turkish ship built 2008 in Istanbul. She is registered there.
I have been pointed to an article by Bob Carr in the GLIAS Newslettter about the Tate & Lyle cane sugar refinery, at Silvertown .It says that in 1967 a substantial deep-water jetty was built at Silvertown at what is the largest cane-sugar refinery in the world. Ships bringing raw cane sugar call at Thames Refinery Jetty regularly- generally bulk-carriers with engines aft of about 15,000 tons gross and this is the only place left in Greater London where real ocean-going cargo ships can still be seen. The article goes on to point out that details of these ships can be found on the excellent PLA website (www.portoflondon.co.uk) — see In Port List, Departures List, Movement Forecast etc.
A large part of Siemens archives ended up in Henley's in Gravesend because both companies became part of the AEI empire and Gravesend was where they ended up. I know that in 2004 a large quantity of material was transferred from there to the Siemens Archive in Munich by a Dr Feldenkirchen. I am pretty sure that they have a web-site and it is in English. My contact in the past was very helpful he was Frank Wittendorfer frank.wittendorfer@siemens.com .
There is also the Uk based Siemens Brothers Engineering Society who produced an archive catalogue and I am sure that a copy of that is in the ( Greenwich)Local History Society library. Hope that this might be of some use.
Allan Green
agreen@porthcurno.org.uk
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