Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company

• 1. Introduction

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  The Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company built the ship that changed naval warfare forever. In 1860, HMS Warrior slid into the River Thames as the world's first all-iron warship, and when she was completed in October 1861, no vessel afloat could match her size, speed, firepower, or armour. She came from a yard straddling the mouth of Bow Creek, where the river meets the Thames at Leamouth Wharf, a place that most Londoners today would struggle to find on a map. Yet from that narrow spit of East London ground, ships sailed to Denmark, Greece, Russia, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.

  How did a business founded by two men making small paddle steamers become the largest shipbuilder on the Thames? What drove it to build iron warships when most yards were still working in timber? And why, after producing 144 warships and earning a reputation across the globe, did the company shut its gates in 1912, only to have its workers' football club outlast everything else it ever made?

• 2. Birth at Bow Creek

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  Thomas J. Ditchburn and Charles John Mare founded their partnership in 1837 at Deptford, with Ditchburn a shipwright and Mare an engineer and naval architect. A fire destroyed their original yard, and by 1838 they had relocated to Orchard Place in Blackwall, taking over premises left vacant by the defunct shipbuilders William and Benjamin Wallis.

  Their early work was modest in scale. They started with small paddle steamers weighing between 50 and 100 tons, then pushed into cross-Channel vessels, and by 1840 were building ships exceeding 300 tons. Among their early customers were the Iron Steamboat Company and the Blackwall Railway Company, for which they constructed several paddle steamers including the Meteor and the Prince of Wales. Those vessels ran between Gravesend and Brunswick Wharf. The Admiralty also came calling, awarding a contract for HMS Recruit, a 12-gun brig that ranked among the first iron warships built in Britain. The firm also built the P & O Company's steamers Ariel and Erin, along with a paddle steamer for Prussia. Within a few years the operation occupied three sites covering more than 14 acres.

• 3. Mare's Ambition and Collapse

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  Thomas Ditchburn retired in 1847, and Charles Mare renamed the business C.J. Mare and Company, bringing in naval architect James Ash, who would later establish his own shipyard at Cubitt Town. Mare wasted no time expanding. He bought land in Canning Town on the Essex side of the River Lea and set up a ferry service between the two sites. On that new ground he built furnaces and rolling mills capable of constructing vessels of 4,000 tons. The older Orchard Place site, hemmed in by the narrow spit at the river's mouth, was limited to ships under 1,000 tons.

  In 1853 the yard launched the SS Himalaya for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. She was briefly the largest passenger ship in the world before being converted to a naval troopship. That same year, the Argo became the first steamship to circumnavigate the world. By 1855 the workforce had grown to more than 3,000 people. Then Mare went bankrupt. The precise cause was disputed: some attributed it to delays in receiving payment for completed work; others thought the company had miscalculated the cost of its Royal Navy contracts. Whatever the cause, the books told a different story from the order book, which still held six contracts for gunboats and the contract for Westminster Bridge, later built in 1862.

• 4. Rolt's Rescue

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  Peter Rolt saved the company. Mare's father-in-law and a Conservative Member of Parliament for Greenwich, Rolt was also a timber merchant and a descendant of the Pett shipbuilding family. He was supported by Lord Alan Spencer-Churchill, another company director. The main creditors agreed to keep the yard running, and two employees, Joseph Westwood and Robert Baillie, were appointed works managers.

  In 1857 Rolt transferred the assets into a new limited company called the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding and Engineering Company Ltd., capitalised at £100,000 in 20 shares of £5,000 each. Rolt held five of those shares and served as chairman of the board. The Mechanics' Magazine, writing in 1861, called the premises "Leviathan Workshops". Large-scale Ordnance Survey maps from the 1860s show the main yard occupying a large triangular site along Bow Creek, with a quay stretching 1,050 feet. By 1863 the company could build 25,000 tons of warships and 10,000 tons of mail steamers at the same time. One of the first Admiralty contracts placed under the new structure was HMS Warrior itself, whose launch predated the formal reorganisation but whose completion fell under Rolt's watch.

• 5. A Global Arms Supplier

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  After the success of HMS Warrior, navies around the world placed orders with the Thames Ironworks. Ships were built for Denmark, Greece, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire. In 1868 the yard delivered the SMS König Wilhelm, the Prussian Navy's first iron-hulled warship. In 1884 came the cruiser Afonso de Albuquerque for Portugal. The Romanian Navy received a substantial fleet from the same yard: three small 45-ton gunboats, three medium 116-ton gunboats, eight 50-ton torpedo boats, and the brig Mircea, as well as the small minelayer Alexandru cel Bun.

  Perhaps the most consequential international order came in the 1890s, when the yard built two of the six British-built battleships that would form the main Japanese battle line in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The two vessels, IJN Fuji launched in 1896 and Shikishima launched in 1898, gave Japan part of the firepower it used against the Russian fleet. General shipbuilding on the Thames was struggling during these decades, squeezed out by northern yards with cheaper access to coal and iron. Many competitors closed after the 1866 financial crisis. The Thames Ironworks survived precisely because it had staked its future on the specialist work that northern yards could not easily match: armoured warships and ocean liners.

• 6. Arnold Hills and the Eight-Hour Day

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  Arnold Hills arrived on the board of directors in 1880 at the age of 23. By the 1890s he was managing director, and he used that position to do something unusual for the era. He voluntarily introduced an eight-hour working day for employees at a time when ten- and twelve-hour shifts were the norm in British industry. Hills was known as a philanthropist, and his concern for workers went beyond hours.

  In 1895 he helped set up Thames Ironworks F.C. as a football club for the yard's employees. Within two years the club had entered both the FA Cup and the London League. The ambition proved its undoing: the club's committee wanted to employ professional players, a move that required resources the original works team could not sustain. Thames Ironworks F.C. was wound up in June 1900. A month later, West Ham United F.C. was formed in its place. Hills also took on challenges beyond the yard itself: the ironworks of Kotri Bridge in Sindh Province, Pakistan, were produced between 1897 and 1912. In his later years, Hills petitioned Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, for new naval contracts. Churchill did not oblige. The yard shut in 1912, and within two years Britain was at war with Germany. HMS Thunderer, the last major warship the yard had built, launched in 1911 at 22,500 tons, fought at the Battle of Jutland.

• 7. West Ham's Iron Legacy

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  The Thames Ironworks closed, but the football club it spawned carried its memory into the twenty-first century. West Ham United's emblem features crossed hammers, representing the large riveting hammers used in shipbuilding. The club's supporters call their team "The Irons", a name that comes directly from the Thames Ironworks, and the chant "Come on you Irons" is heard at every home match. The wider football world knows the club as "The Hammers", though that nickname too traces back to the same tools.

  The connection goes beyond nicknames. After West Ham moved to the Olympic Stadium in 2016, the club launched a new badge whose shape is based on the cross-section of the bow of HMS Warrior, the iron-clad frigate that the yard launched in 1860. A ship built before the club existed, built before professional football existed, now forms the geometric outline of a badge seen by millions of supporters. The yard's site today is crossed by the A1020 Lower Lea Crossing and the Docklands Light Railway, south of Canning Town station. In 2012, during construction of the Crossrail project, archaeologists excavated part of the company's Limmo Peninsula site, finding physical traces of the works that once made this corner of East London the most formidable shipbuilding address in the world.