DEPTFORD POWER AND PRIDE
Dedicated to the memory of Roy Bourne, IEE
Article by Mari Taylor.
The story of a unique archive retrieval from a skip on Deptford Creek
During 1991 and
1992 the remaining abandoned structures on a square mile site at Deptford Creek
were dynamited in a series of dramatic demolitions. Deptford West station had long since gone.
What remained to be cleared were Deptford East’s chimney stack, boiler house,
its “ Alhambran Arches” and outlying administrative offices and buildings. The Deptford power plants, which together had
formed London’s biggest power station, had employed thousands; played an
important social and economic role locally and marked the beginning of a
technological revolution that has changed for ever the nature of electrical
production across the globe.
The first
Deptford Power station, later known as Deptford East, was the brain-child of
electrical engineering genius Sebastian de Ferranti.
Exactly a
hundred years after a defeated Ferranti had left the station, (defeated by
investors’ nervousness and a biased government inquiry), I was making video
recordings of the remaining buildings; and of the stages of their
demolition. I also interviewed
ex-shop-floor workers to record for posterity what life had been like at “The
Light”, as the power station was affectionately known locally. More extraordinarily,
I found myself retrieving archive material about the running of the power
station from industrial skips.
I have had this
archive material, which I have been told is an important collection, and,
because of difficulties placing it in the “right” place, it has been in my
cellar ever since !!
I certainly knew
very little about coal powered stations when I embarked on my mission to
preserve a video record of a disappearing generation of people and industry
that had contributed so much to my local area. My regular hectic job schedule
then included teaching video in community projects.
Whatever spare time, cash
and energy I had I put into getting the Power Station story down on tape. Time
and resources were pressurized. Attempts
to get grant aid for the undertaking were not successful. I had to beg, borrow
or buy tape and equipment myself. I videoed first and did the research
piecemeal as I went along. I was constantly frustrated by lack of proper
resources and how much more I could achieve if I had had them. As a consequence of having to use whatever I
could get hold of the recordings span three separate format – Hi-8, Super VHS
and Betacam. An obvious choice now is to
digitalize all, but that would incur considerable costs.
I recorded
before, after and during the dynamiting of Deptford East (including the
archeological dig on the East India Company and medieval site under the power
station) and made fast friends with Jim Rice who was photographing the site to
a similar schedule. Jim tipped me off
about skips full of archive material which was about to be cleared off the site
after demolition. I traced the owners
and got their permission to remove some of this after I assured them nothing
mentioning asbestos appeared to be there.
They gave me 48 hours. I
frantically tried to contact local history groups and libraries – but it was a
Friday afternoon and the people I spoke to have procedures and conventions that
take much longer than the required “immediate response team” would.
Which is why my
friends Helen, Alison and myself did our best alone and retrieved what, in our
self conscious ignorance, might be of importance. At one stage we were in the huge industrial
skip shoveling “archives” with spades that the workmen had lent us. The workmen were highly amused by our efforts
but they did more than laugh. They
actually emptied one skip of paperwork into another to make it easier for us to
shovel through !!
A small article
about it in the South London Press brought retired engineer and researcher Roy
Bourne to my aid. Roy was a committee
member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers with a special interest in
Deptford Power Station. He looked at the
archive collection and was very excited about it. His efforts to help me place this material in
exchange for resources to continue with my videoing work were also
frustrated. Unfortunately in 1995 I fell
seriously ill for several years and when I was well enough to try and pick up
the quest Roy himself had become ill.
Sadly he died and I lost a valuable mentor and friend. My own continuing ill health has to date
thwarted finding a satisfactory resolution to placing of the archives to my
satisfaction.
As Roy was an
authority on electrical engineering I quote his description in a letter to
Colin Hampstead of the Institute of Electrical Engineering regarding placing my
archive.
Extracts of
letter from Roy Bourne to Colin Hampstead of the Institute of Electrical
Engineers 1st July 1998
“Mari
Taylor had achieved a remarkable rescue of a selection from the whole of
Deptford power station documentation which was on the point of being dumped and
lost for ever. Any decision made about the documents needs to be an informed
one and I believe that I am the only engineer to have looked at them. We will be
harshly judged by our successors if we make the wrong decision. …… There seem
to be two issues to be resolved relating to the documents. One is the importance of Deptford power
station post-Ferranti and the other is the historic value of the documents themselves. On the first issue we would all agree that
anybody following Ferranti was bound to be somewhat overshadowed in the popular
view, but from the informed technical view Deptford was fortunate in having
outstanding engineers and their actual achievements provided some historic
landmarks…..Ferranti’s immediate successor was D’Alton who had the job of
making the plant run efficiently to supply the load then on offer. He installed smaller direct-coupled
triple-expansion engine/alternator sets for the day-time load and got the whole
of the condensing plant in use.
D’Alton’s
successor was G.W. Partridge, acknowledged to be one of the outstanding
engineers of the day. He ended his
career as technical director of the London Power Company (LPC). The pioneering work on switching surges was
done at Deptford by Partridge and continued by Duddell. Partridge was widely consulted on switchgear
and switching problems. He remained at Deptford until the LPC was formed when
Leonard Pearce took over as engineer-in-chief to the new company which acquired
the power stations of the ten constituent companies.
Pearce’s first
design for the LPC was Deptford West power station which first sent out power
in 1929. It was designed to supply the whole of central London (in parallel
with selected local stations) so Ferranti’s plan for Deptford was fulfilled
within his lifetime by Pearce. More
plant was added until 1936, by which time flue-gas desulphurisation plant had
been installed. From then onwards
Deptford (East and West together) became London’s largest power station
(despite the popular view that Battersea held this position).
Some of the
notable historic achievements were: continuous generation on one site for 94
years; simultaneous generation and dispatch of power at three different
frequencies; use of the largest frequency changer and the largest single-phase
machines in the country; the first power station to supply the LCC tramways (in
1904); the first power station to supply a main-line railway in southern
England (the LB&SCR in 1909); the first (1920) and subsequently principal
power source of the SE&CR railway electrification which expanded to become
the largest suburban electric railway system.
On the issue of
the importance of the documents themselves and how they compare with the
existing IEE archive, particularly Croydon, the following points should be
made. One obvious difference is that the
Croydon archive relates to post-nationalisation while the Deptford archive
relates to pre-nationalisation.
The material in the
two archives is completely different.
The Croydon collection contains some control-room log books but mainly
comprises manufacturers’ manuals for the plant they supplied. The dates of these documents are such that
their contents are familiar to power-station engineers of my generation, hence
they are unlikely to be looked at for another generation.
The Deptford archive is a mixture of
technical, social and economic material.
Employee records and stores purchases would be of interest to the social
and economic historian. …………There is a
random selection of log books of readings which would have been taken on the
turbine-room and boiler-house floors by hand (before the days of automatic data
logging). By good fortune one of the
years preserved is 1947 when the industry went through its greatest crisis in
its whole history. This crisis has not
been adequately covered by any historian and I myself am keen to study these
logs for London’s largest power station with the prospect of writing a paper. I
have looked at all power-station documents I could find in any archives in the
country and have never found any like these Deptford documents showing the
actual performance of the plant………………………
On the historic
value of videos of power station employees it is relevant that when Bill Aspray
visited this country the S7 committee was enthusiastic about making sound
recordings of eminent retired electrical engineers. I believe this is very important work but you
may not get the information you expect from a chief engineer………………….
I believe that
video recordings of shop floor personnel who actually ran the plant can be as
significant as anything the chief engineer might say. Your own investigation into retired
engineers’ careers showed that shop-floor experience was valuable…………………..
It
is almost certain that the Deptford videos are unique…………………………
Further details of Mari’s story of Deptford
Power Station in a future issue.
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