a spark in your veins

Dr. Mary Mills of the Greenwich Industrial History Society will be talking about the future of Enderby House at the next meeting of the Shooters Hill Local History Group which will be this Thursday, 16th February. As usual it will start  at 8pm and it will be held in Shrewsbury House. Steve e-mailed the details:

The next meeting of the Shooters Hill Local History Group will be on Thursday 16 February at 8pm at Shrewsbury House.
The presentation by Mary Mills of the Greenwich Industrial History Society will be about the future of Enderby House on the Greenwich Peninsula.
Everyone welcome, a visitor fee applies.

Enderby House is a grade II listed building which has been neglected and fallen into disrepair over the years. It was built in about 1835 by the Enderby family who established a ropewalk and a factory for making sales on the Enderby Wharf site around the house.  In the 1850s a company called Glass, Elliot & Co took over the site and it was where they jointly made the first transatlantic telegraph cable as well as many other early telegraph cables. Later they were absorbed into the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon) which manufactured a second transatlantic telegraph cable at Enderby’s Wharf. This was successfully laid by the SS Great Eastern. Submarine cables were made by a succession of companies at Enderby’s Wharf up until 1975.

The area has since been redeveloped and the river front is now crowded with blocks of flats, with more being built. It is also the proposed site of a controversial cruise liner terminal: there is concern about the air pollution created by docked liners which will have to generate their own electricity using their diesel-powered engines because no shore-based generating capacity is planned. Enderby House is still standing, sandwiched between blocks of flats and the cruise liner terminal, but its future is  not entirely clear. The developers say they “are proud to be refurbishing the building into a Gastro pub and cultural hub for Greenwich”, but a group of local people have formed the Enderby Group to “secure the future of Enderby House and the cable loading equipment on the Alcatel-Lucent jetty as a permanent centre for telling the story of the sub-sea cable industry on this site, its key role in world-wide communications”. They have their own ideas about what should happen to the house and its surroundings to ensure that the area’s historical importance to modern telecommunications is not lost.

Thursday’s speaker is the secretary of the Enderby Group, so it should be a fascinating talk covering the history of Enderby House, and much more.

Shooters Hill Local History Group will be meeting on Thursday, 1st December at Shrewsbury House starting at 8.00pm. Steve wrote to me with the details:

The Shooters Hill Camcorder Club are putting together a local history film night for the Shooters Hill Local History Group on Thursday 1 December at 8pm at Shrewsbury House.
Short films will include ‘After the Storm’ about the 1987 storms; ‘Down to Earth’ featuring the tunnels under Greenwich Park and ‘The Princess Alice Disaster’ telling the story of the sinking of the passenger paddle steamer.
Everyone welcome.
A visitor fee applies.

Sounds like a really interesting meeting!
There’s an imposing memorial to those who died in the sinking of the paddle steamer Princess Alice near Woolwich in 1878. The inscription on the memorial tells the story of what happened:

The Saloon Steamer
“Princess Alice,”
Returning from a pleasure excursion
Was wrecked off Tripcock Point
By collision with
The steam collier “Bywell Castle,”
On the night of
September 3rd 1878.
It was computed that
Seven Hundred
Men women and children
Were on board,
Of these about 550 were drowned
One hundred and twenty were buried near this place.
To the memory
Of those who perished
This cross
Was erected
By a
National sixpenny subscription
To which
More than 23000 person contributed.

Shooters Hill Local History Group‘s next meeting is on Thursday, 20th October at Shrewsbury House starting at 8.00pm. Steve wrote to me with the details:

A presentation is being given by a member of the East Wickham and Welling War Memorial Trust to the SHLHG on Thursday 20 October at Shrewsbury House at 8pm. A visitor fee applies.
The presentation is about the WElling WILL REMEMBER THEM community project which received Heritage Lottery funding.
The project researched those men from the district who served and died in the First World War. See also www.ewt.org.uk

The East Wickham and Welling War Memorial Trust was established following the First World War to raise funds to construct a Memorial Hall  dedicated to the men from the local district who fell in the war. The hall is no longer in existence and the Trust re-registered as a grant giving charity in 1995. Since October 1995 the Trust has awarded grants of over £600,000 to the community, and is probably now the largest source of community funding in East Wickham and Welling.

The WElling WILL REMEMBER THEM project was set up in 2013 to research and tell the stories of the local men from East Wickham and Welling who fought in the First World War.  Local people were recruited as Research Volunteers to uncover the stories of the 105 men who are listed on their war memorial and to find out about other men from the local area who fought in the Great War.  They were assisted by Year 5 and Year 6 children at Foster’s School who researched some of the men who attended their school.

Sounds like another interesting meeting at the Shooters Hill Local History Group.