9. The Blakely Ordnance Company

It was not until the Companies Act 1862 that joint-stock limited-liability companies were permitted in Britain free of government regulation. It is possible that Blakely planned to raise capital from the public for a new ordnance works from that year. He was certainly looking at sites during 1863 for the manufacture of great guns. But it was not for another three years that a joint-stock concern with his name was to be promoted. In a letter written by Captain Blakely in May 14, 1867 he stated that this limited company was only created to provide cash for John Dent, his financial partner, whose own firm was in considerable difficulties with its trading interests in India and China.

The Prospectus for The Blakely Ordnance Company, Limited, June 1865

On March 24, 1864 Alexander Blakely took a lease of 80 years on a piece of desolate land from an educational charity at Bugsby’s Reach on the extremely isolated area known as Blackwall Point, near Greenwich, on the south side of the river Thames, with an 800 foot frontage on the river and 651 feet of depth. The construction of a new ordnance works commenced during 1864 on the river bank. In 1863 the site was entirely occupied by market gardens.

The Blakely Ordnance Company, Limited, was eventually formed in June 1865 with a joint-stock capital of £750,000. It was to acquire the assets of the partnership known as the Blakely Ordnance Company. The plant, premises and goodwill of the latter were valued at £375,000; this was to be paid to Alexander Blakely and John Dent as the price of their business in cash, shares and £150,000 in 6% debenture bonds. Captain Blakely was styled in the prospectus as the “Manager”, in fact the Managing Director. The balance of the new capital was intended to finance its expansion. The Greenwich site let to Captain Blakely by Morden College in March 1864 was assigned initially by him to the Blakely Ordnance Company and then, eventually, to the Agra Bank and Dent & Co. in security of its debts.

The Company was formally launched to the public in the City of London on June 12, 1865 with temporary offices at 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, in the City. John Healy was nominated as secretary, responsible for its legal affairs. The Blakely Ordnance Company, Limited, was duly incorporated with joint-stock limited liability in law on June 18, 1865.

                         This advertisement appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette during 1865

The prospectus of the Company detailed a capital of £750,000 in 30,000 shares of £25. On these a deposit £1 was payable with a further £4 was required on allotment, on the 1st issue of 20,000 shares, raising, with subsequent calls, £500,000.

The Directors of the Company were:

John Dent, 35 Grosvenor Square

Hon A Hobart, Captain RN, 5 Berkeley Square

William Needham, late of Butterley Ironworks

Frederick William Platt, Belswood, Hants

Captain Blakely, late RA, managing director

The bankers were Agra & Masterman’s Bank Ltd., 35 Nicholas Lane, London, EC; the solicitors, Cunliffe & Beaumont, 43 Chancery Lane; the share-broker, James Shepherd, Throgmorton Street, EC.

Captain Blakely wished to use well-known firm of Cazenove as the share-broker for the company projection but this was rejected by John Dent, for his own reasons. Agra & Masterman’s Bank, a concern known for its support of speculative enterprises in Britain and the East Indies, was also a connection of the Dent family.

The prospectus mentioned that the old company had had six years of orders from Russia, Portugal, Italy, Egypt, Sweden, China and Japan, Morocco, Turkey and states in North and South America, including the Confederate government. The profit in the last year was said to be £60,000. It had supplied 300 pounder and 600 pounder guns for both the Confederate States and the United States, 11 inch guns for coastal defence and 8 inch guns for the fleet in Russia, and guns for Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Italy. It had delivered by June 23, 1865, forty 600 pounder guns to Russia alone, at which time there was just one such piece in British service.

Its officers and managers were:

Captain Blakely RA, Managing Director

Josiah Vavasseur, CE, Resident Engineer

Daniel Campbell (late Royal Laboratory, Woolwich), Superintendent of the Laboratory and Shell Factory

General Charles Herrick Burnaby, RA, Proof Master

The limited company acquired all of the existing leases, plant, premises and goodwill for £225,000 payable in instalments over 2 years, and issued £150,000 in 6% debentures. All of the assets were valued by a competent engineer, and the goodwill valued at 2½ years purchase. The promoters of the Company guaranteed 15% dividend for 3 years from is creation. Captain Blakely’s patents were bought for 20% of his net profits for 7 years.

The Blakely Ordnance Company’s East Greenwich works

under construction in 1865

Picture courtesy Southwark Local History Library

The East Greenwich works employed 300 men in the foundry and machine shop.  According to John Bigelow, the abolitionist spy, writing in 1909, the machinery for the gun shops was made in Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool for the Confederate States and was purchased by the ordnance company for much less than it cost to manufacture. The works was supplied with crucible steel by Naylor Vickers & Company and John Kenyon & Company, both of Sheffield in the North of England, and later, as demand for its great guns grew, by Friedrich Krupp of Essen in Prussia. It was anticipated that a revolutionary new Bessemer plant making blasted steel rather than crucible steel would soon supply its needs.

The Blakely Ordnance Company’s factory was a lofty brick structure 168 feet by 104 feet wide, with an iron-framed roof and galleries on either side. There was an engine house, a steam boiler house, a smiths’ shop, 41 feet by 38 feet, an octagon chimney shaft, about 70 feet high, a gas meter house, a brick building for the manager’s residence and office, detached stabling and double coach-house, a brick-built dock 21 feet wide, with a wharf and a wooden jetty protected by two “dolphins”. The works were served by iron tram rails with turntables at convenient distances.

A lone 7 inch Blakely rifled gun on a wooden compressor mount was installed on the northern arm of the wharf, ensuring that passing vessels were aware of  what was being manufactured at the new works.

Within the works were three horizontal steam engines and boilers, two giant self-acting gun lathes, slotting, punching, drilling, shaping and rifling machines, an overhead travelling crane, warehouse and wharf cranes, smiths’ forges and water mains, all lit by gas.

Adjacent were a range of seventeen brick-built workmen’s cottages each containing four rooms on two storeys and an attic, a block of model lodging-houses, unfinished in 1866, and a building intended for a coffee and reading room, baths and wash-houses, all constructed on three sides of an open square to the east of the road to the Ordnance works. These were later described as being five two-storey houses for managers, a terrace of twelve two-storey cottages for foremen, called Blakely Cottages, to the north side, and a four-storey block of tenements with iron galleries fronting each floor for the workers, known as Blakely Buildings, on the south side. The baths and wash-houses on the west side later became a mission hall. A large extent of land with a frontage on the river Thames remained vacant.

The entire works actually covered seventeen acres.

As well as providing thoroughly moral coffee and reading rooms, a public house was built near-by on a corner site, called the Ordnance Arms. Unfinished in 1866, it was advertised for sale, completed and opened later.

Loading a giders for a gun carriage on to a lighter on the Thames from

the southern arm of the wharf at the East Greenwich works in 1866

A 7 inch Blakely rifled gun stands guard on the northern arm of the wharf,

see Picture Book for a close-up of this gun

The immense suite of machinery and tools was made for the Company by some of the finest engineering firms in Britain: Smith, Beacock & Tannett, Buckton, Neilson, Robinson, Hulse, Scriven, Holdsworth, and Maclea & March. The outfit comprised:

100 pounder, 6.4 inch bore, 96 inch barrel, 8,000 lbs - £1,000

120 pounder, 7 inch bore, 100 inch barrel, 9,600 lbs - £1,200

200 pounder, 8 inch bore, 144 inch barrel, 17,000 lbs - £2,000

250 pounder, 9 inch bore, 144 inch barrel, 24,000 lbs - £2,250

350 pounder, 10 inch bore, 144 inch barrel, 30,000 lbs - £3,500

550 pounder, 11 inch bore, 144 inch barrel, 35,000 lbs - £5,500

700 pounder, 12 inch bore, 144 inch barrel, 40,000 lbs - £7,000

The pieces above 8 inch in calibre were available with longer barrels, up to 152 inches in length, the limit of their massive rifling lathes. The main supplier of steel to the works, and a part-finisher of many substantial components such as reinforcing bands and breech sleeves was the firm of Naylor, Vickers & Company of the River Don Works, Sheffield. Another supplier, in fact the only large-scale competitor to Naylor Vickers in the steel industry in the 1860s, until Henry Bessemer became established with his blasting process, was Friedrich Krupp of Essen in the Prussian Rhineland. The subsequent history of Vickers and Krupp in ordnance is well-known.

It was later estimated that the new models of great guns had a mean cost of £2,400 and took three months to build. Each wrought-iron compressor carriage to absorb the recoil cost £250, taking eight weeks to make, and the undercarriage or slider cost £300, involving eight to ten weeks work.

As an economic reference point it can be stated that in 1850 no gun in British service cost more than £100!

The firms of John Kenyon & Company, manufacturers of steel tools and “rollers, forgers, and tilters” of steel, of Middlewood Works, Sheffield, and Thomas Firth & Sons, of Norfolk Works, Savile Street Sheffield, also provided Blakely with forgings of crucible steel in the mid-1860s. Firth installed two massive Nasmyth steam hammers in 1863 specifically to forge gun barrels.

A close-up detail of the Blakely gun wharf in 1866

Three cannon lying across the tramway: left an 11 inch steel rifle,

centre and right two 9 inch “compound” guns of cast-iron, wrought-iron and steel,

with massive cast-iron trunnions

The rows of discs with centre-holes are copper gas seals for shells

These cannon were all to Blakely’s latest design, with steel tubes and multiple steel hoops and steel bands, so much different from his simple cast-iron, wrought-iron banded cannon of the early 1860s. The advance of metallurgy and the working of particularly hard metals had now permitted great guns to be made entirely of steel. Apart from small presentation pieces the new works concentrated on making great guns for battering, for fortresses and for warships; abandoning the provision of field artillery to sub-contractors.

Blakely offered the following projectiles in 1865:

Calibre.................................Shot..........................Shell

3.5 inches............................18 pounds.................15 pounds

3.4 inches............................12 pounds.................10 pounds 

2.5 inches............................6 pounds...................5 pounds

6.43 inches..........................90 pounds................66 pounds

5¼ inches............................56 pounds................45 pounds

4.62 inches..........................40 pounds................30 pounds

4.2 inches............................30 pounds................22 pounds

3½ inches............................20 pounds...............16 pounds

3.4 inches............................12 pounds................11 pounds

9 inches...............................370 pound proving cylinder

9 inches...............................300 pounds.............200 pounds

9 inches...............................270 pounds steel.....240 pounds steel

7 inches...............................130 pounds.............100 pounds

11 inches..............................600 pound proving cylinder

11 inches..............................400 pounds.............360 pounds

11 inches..............................500 pounds steel.....400 pounds steel

9 inches...............................104 pound spherical steel shot

11 inches..............................194 pound spherical steel shot

The list is based on a photograph showing the products of the Blakely Ordnance Company. There were several different patterns of shot and shell, possibly intended for land and sea service, which accounts for the apparent duplication in the smaller sizes. They all had the cupped copper disc sealer, patented by Captain Blakely in 1863, at the base.

Although Blakely had given up on trying to sell his guns to the War Office in London by 1865, all of his ordnance was proved by test-firing on the butts at Woolwich Marshes, next to the government’s arsenal. This explains the location of his new works, a few miles away from Woolwich along the river. The arsenal charged him £100 for each gun that used their proving grounds. 

                                                        Gun Lathe for Large Cannon 1867

                  Similar to the giant lathes at the Blakely Ordnance Works, East Greenwich

A set of photographs were taken to show the progress of the construction and operation of the East Greenwich works in the years 1865 and 1866. Prints of these still exist. It is clear that the manufacture of guns commenced before the factory was completed; only the largest patterns of ordnance appear to have been made at these short-lived works, but in some considerable numbers. The first of two massive jetties on to the Thames is seen with 11 inch cannon and recoil carriages being loaded by overhead travelling crane and swing derrick into a lighter for transfer to a seagoing ship. Piles of bricks and builders’ debris cover the foreground. Even more impressive is another, later,  photograph that shows the gun yard to the south of the works with the barrels of  forty or so great guns, sealed for shipment, laid out on rails.

But within a year it all went wrong.

John Dent proposed to Blakely in June 1865 that they sell the ordnance business and its plant, which until then they had financed from profits, to a public joint-stock company. He further proposed that this company promotion be handled by Benjamin Hardwick, a lawyer, writer on financial matters and money-lender, of  Clench, Smith & Company, “financial agents”, of 1 Royal Exchange Buildings, London, deeply involved in speculative finance and stock-jobbing. In the spirit of the age Hardwick had also been clerk to the Weavers’ Company and involved with other charitable concerns.

Of the £375,000 due to them for the business under the June 9 agreement with Hardwick the former partners, Blakely and Dent, were to receive £225,000 in cash instalments over two years. In July 1865 they were paid £70,000; nothing more was to be forthcoming. As part of the payment they were also allocated £25 shares as if fully paid-up. Blakely in June had 1,800 of the initial 20,000 shares, with a face value of £45,000. He was to buy more at the market price. Dent was allotted a further tranche.

The peculiar nature of the Hardwick’s stock promotion may be judged by the manner in which the balance of the money due to the two original partners was to be paid. They were to receive £150,000 in 6% debentures, redeemable by the limited company after three years, on June 30, 1868. The debenture was in the form of £1,000 negotiable bearer bonds with coupons. In effect Blakely and Dent were to lend this large sum of money to Company for the three years, foregoing any profits and rights to management that stock would involve.

Of the £500,000 sought at the initial offering less than £200,000 was to be raised by Hardwick and his friends in the City of London from real investors.

As Blakely was to mourn, “We had handed over our valuable business to a bubble company, receiving in exchange a mass of bills, bonds and shares”.

According to Blakely the whole promotion was heavily ‘stagged’ by speculators looking to make money on an upward movement in the share price on its launch. Indeed the £5 shares traded at a premium of £2.625 and £2.875 during their first couple of months on the Stock Market. It attracted former-officers in the army, and others even less financially aware. Inevitably, after a few months more trading and profit-taking by Hardwick and other speculators this left “three-quarters of the shares in the hands of ‘dummies’...” unable to meet further calls.

And Dent still needed his money to bail out the China business. He took his shares and debenture bonds to banks and other lenders, pledging and discounting them at a loss to raise cash. Six weeks after the launch of the Blakely Ordnance Company, Limited, in August 1865, he left London for China. Over the following months the loans for which the bonds were used as security needed to be redeemed. Dent had gone, the limited company had little or no cash, so it was left to Blakely to pay off what he could. He, too, resorted to using his bonds as collateral. He borrowed £4,000 from the Metropolitan & Provincial Bank against £8,000 worth of the bonds. In February 1866 he deposited £17,000 in debentures with the New Zealand Banking Corporation in London, one of whose directors was Benjamin Hardwick,  who “gave value” for them.

Blakely had also given ten of the 6% debenture bonds, worth £10,000, to his sister, Isabella, in August 1865.

In April 1866 the London money market collapsed.

The money dealing firm of Overend, Gurney & Company crashed in April 1866, bringing down with it banks and investment companies throughout Britain. The trade of John Dent with China was already in trouble; Dent had fled the country and his debts in the previous summer. On May 14, 1866 the Ordnance company was compelled to assign the lease of the East Greenwich works to Agra & Masterman’s Bank and to Dent’s London agency to secure his loans. Then in June, Agra & Masterman’s Bank failed, followed quickly by the New Zealand Bank.

On June 28, 1866 Blakely, Platt and Needham, the remaining directors, were compelled to petition the Court of Chancery for the winding-up of the Blakely Ordnance Company, Limited. Exactly a month later, on July 28, 1866 the order for its winding-up was granted. Thomas Patrick, whose firm, Mark Patrick & Son, of 26 Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth, had built the East Greenwich works was co-petitioner for the winding-up.

When the works closed there were over 100 complete pieces of ordnance on hand at East Greenwich, including a 15 inch gun, a 13 inch gun, two 11 inch guns, with components for at least five more, ten 9 inch guns and parts for a further ten, plus thirty-eight field, mountain and boat guns of various sorts. On hand were 116 tons of tubes, jackets and trunnion rings, 110 tons of steel hoops and 510 tons of projectiles, including spherical steel shot, iron bolts and iron shells.

2.9 inch Blakely steel mountain gun 1865

Another picture of one of the last Blakely pieces made

Patent gun number 477, at Fort Nelson, Portsmouth, Hampshire

Picture courtesy David Moore of the Victorian Forts Society

The Blakely Ordnance Company, Limited, “manufacturers of and dealing in ordnance and other materials of war”, of Pall Mall East, London; Bear Lane, Southwark; and East Greenwich, had a paid-up capital of £180,512 10s on July 28, 1866. It then had liabilities of £297,564 14s. Its sixty-nine surviving shareholders each had to pay a further call of £15 per share to cover the firm’s debts to the builders of the East Greenwich factory and to its suppliers of steel, Naylor, Vickers & Company, Thomas Firth, John Brown, Low Moor, Friedrich Krupp, and to many others, as well as £4,170 12s 9d to cover the expenses of the liquidation.

In 1866 Captain Blakely held 3,568 shares in the Ordnance Company, and on its collapse was obliged to contribute £53,520 to its liquidation as the balance due on his stock-holding. From July 1866 all of his ordnance patents gradually became void as the money needed for the three-yearly renewal fees could not be found. To recover whatever assets remained Blakely’s first venture into joint-stock promotion, the Tavistock Ironworks & Steel Ordnance Company, Limited, followed the ordnance company with its own petition for winding-up on August 14, 1866.

Tho’ without the forges and lathes Blakely had had built Vavasseur continued the manufacture of cannon, assembling, rifling and finishing steel components roughly prepared by Firth’s Steel Works in Sheffield.Vavasseur also developed carriages to manage even larger cannon, in which he became something of a specialist. The small works at Bear Lane also manufactured Harvey’s torpedo for several countries from 1870 under contract of Captain John Harvey RN and Commander Frederick Harvey RN.

An advertisement that appeared in Engineering magazine on January 5, 1866

Could that be Captain Blakely behind the 11 inch gun?

J R Hamilton had been a Captain in the Confederate States Navy