Dan Snow's History Hit - The Origins of the Royal Navy

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Henry VIII wanted to have the most powerful Navy in Europe; he also didn't want to have to travel very far to get it. Around 1512, he built a colossal Naval dockyard on the southern banks of the Thames in London up river from his Greenwich Palace, where he set about building the biggest ships the world had ever seen. Today, you can still find the telltale signs of the history that took place here if you know where to look. Dan joins London tour guide and friend of the podcast, Rob Smith, to trace the beginnings of Britain's Navy and tell the curious tales of early life in the dockyard, the mega ships, the disastrous failures and incredible innovations that made Britain a naval superpower in the 16th century and beyond. If you'd like to take a tour with Rob, you can check out his events here: https://footprintsoflondon.com/live/guides/rob-smith/Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's history here. If you asked me if there's time and place where I would go, if I could time travel, if I could go back in history, what I would love to do is pop down for the day to take a stroll around, take in the atmosphere, the sights, the sounds of London's historic naval dockyards on the south-eastern banks of the Thames, around Woolwich. This really was ground zero for the Royal Navy. The most successful military institution ever created. Yes, come at me.

It was where Henry VIII built and maintained his fledgling Royal Navy in the early 16th century. And over the centuries, it's where great warships were constructed like the giant HMS Nelson or the Agamemnon. It's where expiration vessels set sail from, like the Beagle that took Darwin to the Galapagos. It was a hub of innovation. It was a hub of industry from the Tudor Age the Steam Revolution. This was an engine of the British Empire. And here's the weird thing.

Hardly anything remains. Hardly a jot survives. Today, those historic dockyards on the South Bank of the Thames, well, they're long gone. All of them. And in their place nearly entirely now, housing estates and shopping streets and cafes and lots of new build of elements. But there are still the telltale signs of the history that took place there. You can see old slipways, old dry docks, and you can see an 18th century administrative headquarters with a magnificent clock, now a community centre. There's also remnants of the Mars Pond and one enormous chimney in Megafactory, which is still in use today, from the age of steam. But you have to know where to look. And it just so happens that a local historian, friend of the podcast, Rob Smith, does know where to look.

He knows all the hidden historical treasures around this wonderful place, and he's a masterful tour guide. is a great storyteller, and you can book a tour with him through Footprints of London. And after you hear this, you may wish to do just that. Me and my history at team donned our waterproofs because it was the rainiest day of the year, and we went to explore London's historic dockyards to trace the story of the Navy in Britain's maritime power at the very heart of where it all began. Now, producer Marion Day Forge obviously wore unsuitable footwear. I screamed incoherently into a microphone about the Royal Navy,

and editor Dougal Patmore saved the day at the end of it all. It's classic dance nose history here. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is first in black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift-off and the shuttle has cleared the power.

Well, I've just alighted from the train here in Woolwich Dockyard and any day that I head towards a place with Dockyard in the title. It's a good day for me. And it's particularly good because I'm here to meet Rob Smith. How you doing, Rob? Good to see you. Hi there, Dan. Right, where were you going? Where are you taking me? Thank you for coming down.

So it's quite obscure location now, Woolwich Dockyard Station. So Woolwich was home to this huge military industrial complex, building ships for the Royal Navy in the dockyard and building guns for the Royal Artillery and the Royal Navy in the Arsenal. which give people a sense of the geography we're sort of in greater London, aren't we? But we've come east, we're east even of Greenwich

people have heard of? We're in south-east London, so we're in the London Borough of Greenwich still. We're beyond the Thames barrier, so we're going to see a bit of the River Thames shortly. We're surrounded by what would have been part of the military-industrial complex. So on the other side of the station,

there are big tunnels which stored stores for the Royal Artillery. And if you look in this direction, you can see the chimney. This was a chimney from the Woolwich Dockyard that was used later on in the period when they were actually building the boilers for steam ships here. So it's a great survivor of London's industry. It's such an important reminder that London, obviously,

it's the political capital. It was also a massive industrial city as well. Yeah, it's a shame really that London's industry has become forgotten. There's a lot of great industrial stuff here, but shipbuilding was also really important, so you don't really think of London being a shipbuilding city, but it's a city which was made on the fortune of ships. So obviously you were going to build them here.

So ships built here for the East India Company and for other commercial uses, but also for the Royal Navy. There are two big dockyards, Woolwich and Deptford. And I'm going to show you around the site of Woolwich Dockyard today. And Deptford and Woolwich were there right at the birth of the Royal Navy, weren't they? I mean, these are early 1500s.

So this is Henry VIII, which most people locate the birth of what we call the Royal Navy today in that key period with Henry the 8th, establishing the bureaucracy, the dockyards. It sort of created the institution of the Royal Navy. Henry Eighth is very much trying to establish himself as one of the great kings of Europe. And to do that, you've got to have a good military.

I just wanted to point out Lord Warwick Street. What's that about? Well, there was a pub called the Lord Warwick. Lord Warwick is John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, who, childhood friend of Henry VIII and gets appointed to be Admiral in charge of the defence of the North. sea and eventually then given this role of being the person who's in charge of building

up the navy. Henry 8th was rather sort of being goaded into war with France. He wants to prove himself to have the best navy and he wants to build the largest ship in Europe, probably the largest ship in the world at that time which was constructed here at Woolwich. But at the time they didn't really have very large ships. What they'd done at that time up until then was often used commercial ships and put a few cannon on board. But he wanted to really have a dedicated navy constructed here at Woolwich. So he commissions the building of a ship, the like of which has never been seen before. A ship which is called Omri Grasadieu.

There's been a ship in the Navy of that name during Henry V's time. So it was really a reference back as well to the great days of Henry VIII. Classic Henry VIII, cosplaying as his illustrious forbear Henry VIII. So Henry Gras had you, Henry, by the grace of God. So a massive statement. It was a huge ship. So we're talking about a ship which was a thousand-ton draft. That's twice the size of the Mary Rose.

A ship with mounted 20 huge bronze cannons. You can actually see some of those cannons in the Tower of London, in the Royal Armouries Collection. And it's almost fearful imagining being on a wooden ship with those guns on board. Just the recoil of them would have been really shocking. So to build this ship was going to take a dockyard which they didn't have the capacity to do before. So we needed a new dockyard. Why not build it right next to the Royal Palace at Greenwich?

So Henry doesn't have to go all the way down to Portsmouth to see the supervision of the project. Now the Henry Grasadjit, it's a ship which has got a lot of new features in it. One of them, gun ports. So prior to that, guns have been mounted on ships on the decks. But it made the ships very top heavy, so there was only a limited. so there was only a limited amount of firepower that you could put there but so this incorporated the new invention of gun ports which would open up on the side of the ship so you could mount the guns close to the water line which didn't make the ship so top heavy but unfortunately it was still

a very heavy ship with these 20 cannons on board and it was always a bit of a maneuverability problem with the ship so it was put under construction ready to go to war with the french but unfortunately It took so long to build. It was two years under construction. And by the time the ship had been built, the war was over. So it becomes a ship which is used by Henry VIII for ceremonial occasions. And it appears in the wonderful Anthony roll,

which is the record of all of his ships. So we can see it in the Anthony roll. You can see these wonderful streamers that it has flowing behind it. I used to have that. This is the kind of kid I was. That was on the wall of my bedroom. I was a kid, that picture of that Henri Grasadio.

I think you could get as an air-fix kit as well. Well, I was too lazy to do that, but I like looking at it. And as you said, he loved his palace at Greenwich. He was born in Greenwich, wasn't? He said, for him, this is a very kind of important corner of his kingdom. Yeah, and you can also, as you get more into your midlife crisis period, you don't want to go travelling too far if you want to play with your naval ships. Now, unfortunately, with the war being over, the Henri Grasadieu,

didn't see much action, and it gets rebuilt, not in Woolwich, but further down the river in Eryth, but then goes back into battle in that war against the French in which the Mary Rose is sunk. Because of its gun ports as well. So yeah, it's a period of innovation, isn't it? And mistakes were made. It appears in that amazing drawing of the battle of the Solent, where we got the distressing site of the Mary Rose sinking, and the Henri Grasse Adieu is in the periphery of the battle. It got close enough to fire its guns once, and then was blown by the wind in the opposite direction. and then took no more part in the battle again.

And it lasted into the era of Edward VI, but he was not really so keen on the Navy as Henry VIII was. The ship caught fire here at Woolwich on the second day of Queen Mary's reign, and unfortunately we've got no trace of where it is apart from the things that are left in the Tower of London. What's so interesting to me is becoming strong at sea

it's about having ships, of course, and men to sail them, but what Henry VIII is really doing here is creating at the kind of land infrastructure, the ability of commission ships, dry docks, and then a bureaucratic infrastructure should support that fleet. And that's the sort of first step on the road to British naval greatness, isn't it? A lot of that is Lord Warwick's doing, setting up your infrastructure. And so it's, you know, the greatest compliment you can pay to someone in London, name a pub after them. Oh, I live in hope. So look, we're just coming down. Finally we can see the Thames, oh the Thames and all its glory.

It looks a bit grey and brown today, sludge-like. Very much a post-industrial landscape, lots of wharves on the far side, lots of industrial buildings. But here in front of us, there's a piece of water that sticks out into the Thames, if you like. So it's run perpendicular to the Thames. And that is a slipway, is it? Wow. Yeah, so this is one of the slipways from the Woolwich Dockyard. They've been built and rebuilt, obviously, many, many times in the Dockyard's history. but we think this one dates back to 1830s.

Wow. So you can see, if you look over the other side, the lovely brickwork over there. So this is where ships would have been launched out into the Thames. Ships building in the 1500s, when they launched the ship, it was a bit more of an undramatic affair than you might imagine now.

So what they tended to do was they would have a dry dock where the ship was constructed up to the point where it would float. And then they had a... have a big wall of mud at the end of the dry dock and when it was time to float the ship out they'd just knock down the mud wall but it could take it could take weeks to knock down that so you say what a dry dock is so it's a dry dock is something that you can build a ship without getting away it so you build it in a dock like this but at one end you've got a lock gate

or in your case a wall of mud and then when you get rid of that the tide can come in and the ship just floats out that's right in the Elizabethan period here they actually invent a lock gate which would open up to wooden gates at the end, and it's much quicker to launch the ships then. This was one of the things that came in at Woolwich to improve the situation. The weird thing is, dry docks are probably more important than ships

in the birth of a navy, aren't they? Because that kind of spending on those big land-based projects, meaning you can do maintenance, you can build ships, more effective. That is so important, isn't it? Yeah, it's really industrialising shipbuilding rather than making it, you build a ship,

and then it takes another long time to build another one. and here you keep copying the same design and turning them out. So the dates are quite early in Henry's reign, isn't it? So this doc killed to, what, 1512? It's 1512, they start work on the first ship, Omri Grasse Adieu. Year later he started work at Deptford. So this is a kind of deliberate pivot to becoming a maritime power, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah. There's been a big transformation during the time of the Duke Northumberland's being in charge of the Council of Marine Causes. And it's really setting up that infrastructure and that administration. which makes it all possible. So it was a lot of work involved in the construction of these ships. They think about 140 people involved in the construction of warden warship, well, from the 1500s really up to the 1700s.

So you've got all the carpenters who are putting the ship together, but you need the people who are soaring all the wood to size to make the planks for the ship to start with. So a lot of people involved moving things around, so a lot of labour is involved. involved. Then there are more specialised jobs. You have corkers. So these are the people who make the ship waterproof. So you're putting waterproof material into all the joints to make sure everything floats. You've got joiners making all the precise bits of furniture and the fittings of the rigging.

Riggers themselves. So that was another special job, fitting all the rope to the sails. And sailmaking. Sailmaking later on, it often became women's work. And so you'd often have the Sailmakers were women whose husbands had been in the Royal Navy and been killed in combat, and it was seen as a pension role for making sales. And then the all-important job of Coopers. So Coopers make the barrels, which store all the supplies on the ship. So all of that would have been going on in the shipyard, an incredibly busy place. A lot of people employed here.

Now, you also need a huge amount of space for storing all the timber, because you don't want it getting totally wet before you've even started work on it. We should point out to people who are listening to this that it is absolutely chucking it down with rain today. It's a proper Sherlock Holmes London Day here. So, yeah, if you leave wood out in these conditions as you spend years or you stop piling wood

and then building ships, it would go to ruin, wouldn't it? True, but there was also some wood which you wanted to get wet. So the masts of ships were usually made from a single tree. But if you took that tree, just chopped it down and then put it into the ship, the mast would warp when it got out into the salty sea conditions. So they matured the mass in what's called a mass pond.

They'd often be left in the Mars pond sometimes as long as a year. I wonder where it would have been here? Do we know where it would have been? Well, the Mars Ponds, they were a little bit further down the river. Okay. And we're going to go past the site of them later on. Oh, brilliant. So yeah, lots of work. Not necessarily very happy workers here though.

So up until 1702, the workers in the Woolwich Dockyard were, impressed. That's a bit like the press gang that were... Really? Just round it up and put to work. If you were a skilled carpenter or a joiner in London, you had the risk of being told, now you work at the Woolwich Dockyard, and sorry, there's no chance for career change, you have to work here until the contract was finished. And they had very harsh conditions, naval discipline applied to the workers here. You could end up being whipped or facing the lash for misdemeanors. But the workers, they fought back as well.

So one of the things that they introduced in the 1600s is a clock to make sure that everyone knows when the shift has begun and shift has ended. But the workers at Woolwich were allowed to go home for breakfast. So four shifts a day, one before breakfast, breakfast to lunch, lunch to tea, and then an evening shift. You were allowed to go home for breakfast. And they try and put a stop to this in the 1600s because they say that it's wasting too much time than going home for breakfast. and a lot of the wives of Woolwich came down to the dockyard to protest and had a camp outside the gates saying that they wanted their husbands back for breakfast. God, that is not relatable.

My wife would be thrilled if I was away for breakfast. Another of the perks that you had in the Woolwich dockyard was you were allowed access to chips of wood, which were the byproduct of making the ship. So they call this chipping rights and the workers are allowed to take home what they're called legal chips. So chips, which had been hacked off a piece of wood to make it the right shape, you were allowed to take them home at the end of your shift,

and then you could sell them on to things like butcher's shops, which would put them over the floor or pubs, they'd put them on the floor there. Or you could use them on your fire. You make a little bit of extra there. But there were also what we're called illegal chips, and they'd pick workers in Woolwich Dockel get accused of actually cutting bits of wood up into bits of chips,

which was perfectly good bits of wood so they try and put a stop to the chipping rights and this is a thing which causes disputes in the dockyard right the way up until 1801 I can imagine so we've just come now to the riverbank this is great, we've got the Woolwich Ferry there there's very few working ferries on the Thames

it says it's a reminder that would have just been ferries right up and down the Thames Yeah it's a crossing point in the Thames Woolwich ferry going back right to medieval times In fact the current Woolwich Ferry Well in its modern form goes back to the end of the 1800 when there were lots of shipworkers and dockyard workers wanting to go over to the other side of the river from Woolwich. And they'd built loads of bridges across the Thames in West London.

They were a bit of grieve that they couldn't get a free way to get across the Thames here. Well, because there's still huge big ships coming up to London dockless, so you just couldn't build the bridges here, couldn't get their tallmasts under the bridges, yeah. So, it Navy expands during the time of Queen Elizabeth first. One of the ships built here during that time is the vanguard. So we've had, that's a real great Royal Navy name. We've had vangards right up until the current day. The very first vanguard was built here in 1586. It was one of the ships which went to fight against the Spanish Armada.

It's a small ship compared to like the Henri Grasse-Aju, but it's a very nimble ship. And it's one of the ships which can sort of weave in and out of the Spanish, the Battle of Graveling in the small. second part of the armada battle. Later on it becomes the ship of Sir Robert Mansell. So he's one of the great admirals

of Queen Elizabeth First Navy. Gets involved with Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, who's not a great guy to hang around with. So he falls a bit out of favour during the very last time of Queen Elizabeth First reign. But the Vanguard

goes on to another illustrious part of his career when it goes on an attack on the coast of Algeria. against Barbary pirates. It was finally scrapped in 1630, so that was a ship which had had over 40 years service. That put in a shift, didn't it? Wow.

So Mansell, he becomes one of the master shipbuilders here at Woolwich Dockyard. And one of the things you could do in the early Stewart Navy is it was very ripe for corruption. And Mansell's definitely accused of a lot of the funds that go into shipbuilding, shipbuilding here going missing. He also decided that the Royal Navy should only buy glass from one source. So all the glass that was used in anything involved in the ship came from,

oh Mansell's glassworks here in Woolwich. So yeah, there was a lot of accusations of corruption here. It's just huge government spending there's going to be that opportunity, isn't there? Yeah, I think especially during Elizabeth First Navy, there was a sort of expectation there'd be a bit of money went missing and it was just like don't go too far but no one tells you how far is too far and then if i look down there to the east is that another one of the other docks there sticking in it is yes there's another of the dry docks have survived here and we're going to walk a little bit further along the thames and see some from a later period so these were the ones built to maintain steamships well it's pouring with rain we're hiding under a balcony i might

let you go first regular listeners to the podcast will be surprised to learn that Marianna DeForge, the producer, is wearing an appropriate footwear for this ex-bed. How are those trainers doing, Marianna? Okay, not going to lie, the toes are wet, but... It's like a light, you're wearing like a light plimsoll and just for reference, just for reference, everyone, I am wearing a rugged, outdoor waterproof shoe. Even your backpack cover cover. And she's teasing me because my backpack has got a rain cover on, which is sensible.

Look at this! Wow, I didn't know this was here. This is astonishing. It's another huge dock heading in from the River Thames into what is now Woolwich. It is covered in green ponds gum. It's a massive piece of engineering, isn't it? When's this from? Yeah, so this is from the 1850s when the dockyard has really stopped building the biggest of ships now.

And it's mainly used for repair of steamships. So they would fit new boilers to ships here. So you needed much more wide capacity slipways than the last one we saw. See, this has got these lovely stepped down stone sides. It was originally built as a dry dock, so it shouldn't really have water in here. But after the dockyard closed down, this was a base for the Royal Marines, and this was the Royal Marine swimming pool. What?

So, you know, the Marines, they can pretty much swim in anything. But I wouldn't really fancy swimming in it today. There might be a time to call in at the cafe, the clockhouse if it's open, which was the administration centre for the dockyard and they've got a cafe inside. Okay, look at this, this is glorious, isn't it? Yes, this is the clockhouse built in 1787. It's the way to keep track of what's going on in the dockyard. It's a remnant of that Georgian architecture surrounded by this 1950s building.

Yeah, it's a great survivor. It makes you think about what it must have looked like here. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere, it's more to come. It's a bit warmer in here. That's perfect. Now we've come to the cafe in this community centre where we are going to have a cup of tea. Like all true Britons, this will restore them all right.

So we've now settled into the cafe. We've got a cup of tea in this glorious Georgian building. If we need tell the time, we can just pop our heads outside, look at the clock above us. Yeah, so having a clock tower, which phase four ways was really important. But it was also important for reorganising the shipyard of this building. It was organised around a central stairway, a bit like they'd done at Somerset House. And you had different departments all shared a stairway. So you couldn't say have the people.

who were in charge of designing the rigging, not knowing what was going on with the people who were designing the hull of the ship because they were sharing a building and sharing a stairway with me. It's a clever bit of design. That's interesting. So it was a building that was deliberately designed

to encourage collaboration. Absolutely, yeah. So the dockyard in the 1600s had been more or less the preserve of one particular family, great shipbuilding family, the pets. So we have a Peter Pett who is born during the time,

Queen Elizabeth I, and then, Phineas Pett, who becomes shipbuilder to King James First and then Charles I. Then his son also called Peter Pet is involved in shipbuilding here. And it's the building of one particular ship for Charles I. Which causes an awful lot of controversy here. It's a ship called the Sovereign of the Seas. So the Sovereign of the Seas was on a scale which hadn't been seen before. So this was a ship which included huge amounts of gold leaf on.

the whole, where all the ship's captain would have been, had a figurehead of a king on horseback trampling over seven other kings. And this was Charles's way of saying, like, I'm the top of all the kings in Europe. And it was a ship which no expense was spared on, which unfortunately the cost just keep rising and rising. So they have to invoke ship money to pay for it. Now, ship money was normally only charged during wartime. It's taxation. Yes, a tax, which was normally be only paid by people on the coast. They're the ones who are defended by the navies. They should pay for it.

But it's so expensive. They have to bring the ship money on inland and even then start to suggest that people in London should have to pay ship money. People in London playing taxes, outrageous. And this is part of the chain of events which leads to Charles Verz becoming so unpopular in London, which leads to the chain of events in the English Civil War.

And that was all down to his desire to get more ships out of the yard here. It's extraordinary. Yeah, so the pets, three generations of them building ships here, they are using an awful lot of timber. So there was woodland all the way through South London, but it starts to slowly disappear. You got through about 150 oak trees to make one of these ships. So you can see how quickly you would find there are not very many oak trees nearby.

The pets actually then plant out a plantation of timber, which is now in the London Borough Bromley. area called Pets Wood there, which is named after the Pets family. Oh really. So obviously Oat wouldn't come to maturity quick enough for them, but it's quite nice forest. Yeah, it's amazing now. It's a lovely place for Londoners to walk through. So the pets, they are responsible for the shipyard. The last of the Pets, Peter Pett, attracts the ire of Samuel Pepys, who suspects he's been cutting corners using cheaper supplies and then pocketing the money and involved in corruption.

So Peep's pays a lot of visits to the Woolwich Dockyard in his time. In his diaries, he mentions, coming here ten times. There's a nice entry for February 12th, 1666, where Peep's had started to worry about what pets doing down here and worried about the corruption. So he comes down to investigate. And he says, up by candlelight, about six o'clock, it being bitter cold weather again,

after all our warm weather and by water down to Woolwich, and there to the dockyard to inquire at the state of things, and went into Mr. Petz, and there, beyond expectation, he did present me with a Japan cane with a silver head, and his wife sent me with him a ring, with a Woolwich Stone, which is now much in request, which I accepted, the values not being great, and knowing that I had done them courtesies, which he did in his very high terms. Then at my asking did give me an old draft of an ancient built ship given him by his father of the bear in Queen Elizabeth's time. This did much please me, it being a thing I much desired to have,

to show the difference to build ships now and hereto-for. Being much taken with this kindness, I away to Blackwall and Detford to satisfy myself there about the king's business. So, well, no corruption to worry about, after all, after we've been given all these free gifts. That's outrageous, peeps. He just got bought off, didn't me? He got bought off, yeah. Willits Stone apparently was a thing that was very precious.

in that period it was just a little lump of flint that you got by the side of the river and you cut them in half you sometimes got a likeness of a person's face i don't know how alike they were but if you mounted one in a ring it was seen as a good luck sign now the sun's come out yeah we've got the sun come out now so uh the rest of the story it's best taken outside let's go let's get outside so there's a change in 1702 when they get rid of the impressment of workers here. I mean, you've got to get a bit more serious about building ships at that stage. You don't want people who've been pressed ganged into doing the job. Those kind of workers are not like the best workers. So they get a bit more professionalised. There was still

a lot of problems in the dockyard when they tried to cut down on wages. Sometimes you'd get gaps in fighting and wars where they said, well, we don't need all these shipbuilders now, so let's just lay them off. So there were occasions where, well, there's no provision. for them once they've been laid off. And everyone lives right next to the dockyard, so there's no work for them. And so there was a lot of anger in the dockyard about that. And this leads to strikes in 1739, 1742, and 1744.

The strikes really cut home when there's a war on, though. So the government's desperate to get ships built. So the strikers were often bought off during wartime, but occasionally also threatening troops to be brought in. Right. So it's a constant issue. It's a constant issue. They're not always successful at dot workers here,

but it's one of the first examples of London workers flexing their muscle in a sort of unionised way, which obviously comes to with a four more in the 1800s where the dot workers strikes them. But the Woolwich Dockyard did that beforehand. Now, this gets through to the Royal Navy, and one of the people in charge of the Navy at the time, Samuel Bentham, who was the inspector of General Naval Works

in 1795, said we should switch over to using metal skin ships with steam engines, because that means that these Republic of Wood, as they called down here, would lose its power. But, well, one of the things is the steam engines and metal skin ships are just not advanced enough to do that at the time. And the Royal Navy often like doing things the way they've always done them before. And so we've had wooden ships for years. Why should we change now? Sir Bentham's ideas were not adopted until another 30 years later. But some of the earliest steamships of the Royal Navy

are built here in Woolwich Dockyard. While walking through what used to be the dockyard, isn't it? It feels like just a suburban housing estate. It's weird, isn't it? What are some of the great ships that people will know about that were built here? One that was really famous, but which was a very undistinguished ship

at the time, was HMS Beagle. So this was a small, humble, tan gun sloop which was used for the coronation of King George IV. And it was one of the ships which sailed under the old London Bridge as part of the coronation. But it then goes on as commissioned

to carry out exploration work and goes out on a long journey along the Argentinian coast where, after a while, the captain had gone through a state of depression and ended up shooting himself. And so the deputy for the captain Robert Fitzroy takes over the job

and then sails around Tierra del Fuego. We comes back to London and to his horror is then sent out back on another voyage on the Beagle, which could take up to six years along the Chilean coast. And he's so sure that he's going to end up in difficulties like the previous captain that he says, I'm going to take someone really interesting along with me to talk to. So he brings along this young scientist called Charles Darwin.

Heard of him. And they're both interested in plants and animals. So they've got something nice to talk about. So the famous voyage of the Beagle leads to you. to Darwin's work on the origin of species. But Fitzroy was very derout Christian and apparently was absolutely furious later on that he'd actually helped Darwin create the book

and spent the last few years of his life trying to heckle Darwin and stop him publishing the book. The Beagle itself, though, had a bit of an inauspicious sense. It was made a customs cutter. Spent its time on the Essex Coast looking for smugglers coming in and apparently can be found in the mud place called Paglesham on the Essex coast.

You listen to Dan Snow's history at this war coming up. I wanted to just really show you this wonderful building. So this was one of the boiler. one of the boiler making factories, which was built in 1838, when they convert over to building steam ships here. So roughly where we are on the other side of the road, where the mast ponds we were talking about earlier,

were located where these houses were. So you needed those for sailing ships, but you didn't need them for steam ships. So the mast ponds got converted into pools of water to be used by huge steam engines, which we used for stamping out giant plates, for the sides of ships and boilers in ships, which we can see took place in this building over here.

So this is just great, isn't it? This gives you a sense of what a Victorian factory looked like. Factories like this all over Britain was the workshop of the world. Beautiful yellow brick, lots of arches. Still quite handsome, the old Victorians. Lovely gable end here with a pointed roof and this massive brick-built chimney here stretching up. Wow, I'd probably 30 metres into the sky.

What would that have been for? Well, the buildings around here were associated with making the big metal plates for boilers on steam ships, which would be on a grand scale. So this building, built in 1838, was for stamping out metal plates. They've had huge steam hammers here. So it had been so noisy with the constant bang, bang, bang of those steam hammers, powered by big steam engines, which had been working away. And you just had all the whooshing sound of the steam coming forth. You'd have the constant stand of the steam engines working, all the workers coming and going, bringing things here. We're in a very noisy place along here.

Now, all the different buildings had their own steam engines working here. You could have ended up with lots of different chimneys for each one. But they had a very clever idea here, which was to create a central chimney for the whole dockyard, which is the chimney you see over here. So it had six different flus running into the base of the chimney, which would then let all the smoke go out of one, chimney, so you only have to pay to maintain one chimney. So that would have been absolutely

going full tilt the whole time, isn't it? It would have done. It was actually taller than it is now. Well, then the Ministry of Defense finally finished with this site in the 1980s. They took down the top 10 meters of the chimney so it was taller than this originally. There can't be many 19th century industrial sites like this left inside the M25, left inside Great Alam.

No, it's very rare chimneys like this. And chimneys are very hard and expensive to maintain. So we're lucky that this one survives. Lucky we're not an earthquake zone. This transition to an iron navy, does it successfully kind of break the unions here? I love the Republic of Wood. Did they end up being able to get their own way a bit more?

It becomes a different set of workers, really. You need a new set of skills. And gradually you start to get workers who are more experienced in metalwork and running boilers, running steam engines here. So yeah, it's a complete shift of the workforce. Often people would come from other parts of the country which had already had more experience of steam engines running here to work here.

One of the first steamships to be built here was actually a wooden hold ship called the Agamemnon. Oh, that classic naval name. Yeah, there have been lots of Agamemons, but this one was basically an old sailing ship design, but they'd redesigned it to incorporate steam engine with a screw at the end of it, which then turned a propeller, and so it could rely it on its sails, but also on its steam power. And that gets involved in the Crimean War, involved in the bombardment of the Vastopol and actually ends up running the ground in the Black Sea, but they managed to refloat the ship. Then later becomes involved in laying the first transatlantic cable.

So there's obviously a lot of gains to be made by having telegraph cables which run across the Atlantic, but a pretty hard thing to do. They needed ships of some great size to do that. One of the ships was Isabel and Brunel's Great Eastern, which was big enough to carry. the cable and the agamemnon had the other half and the two of the ships met mid-atlantic and joined the cables together unfortunately one half of the cable had been built down here in greenwich and one half had been built in liverpool and they hadn't consulted with each other and they both cables one wound clockwise and one anti-clockwise so when the agamemnon and the great eastern joined the

cable together it stayed together for about half a day and then just all the forces there unwound it and it sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. So they had to come back again two years later and do it once more. Not the fault of this dockyard or its workers. Not the fault of this dockyard, no, they're exempt from this one. But later on, after the dockyard starts to close down, part of the site is taken over by Siemens, the engineering company.

There was actually two Siemens brothers, one who founded a company in Berlin, and one founded it in London. And some of those buildings are still there on site. It's an amazing place. They first make telegraph cables there and then later on making telephones. And Baker-like telephones made on the site here for a very long time. Now the chimney, when they decided to announce the closure of the dockyard in 1869,

the workers are not very happy about that. And they climb up to the top of the chimney and hang an effigy of the first lord of the admiralty from the top of it and then raise a black flag to commemorate the last day of the dockyard. In form of protests, I think they were really. easier ones to do. So Agamemnon one of the last ships to be fully built at Woolwich, but they still carry on maintaining steamships here for a little bit longer. But after a while, it's just harder and harder to build ships here. Some of the problem is all the competition from all the

steamships which are coming into the port of London. Lots of them arrive in the River Thames. You haven't got space to like bring big Royal Navy ships in and out of Woolwich. And so they start to lose a lot of the business down to the Chatham Dockyard, which is down in the Medway, much more space there. In fact, they actually moved some of the ship covers from Woolwich over to Chatham, and you can see some of them there in the historic dockyard. So the dockyard is wound down, but it doesn't stop the military industrial complex here. So the site of the dockyard is then taken over by the ordinance board who use it for storing stuff for the army to fight war and this building we have over here is one of those buildings from that era so it was a warehouse

store for things like huge number of tins of bully beef and the cavalry think about how much hay the cavalry would use on operations so they had a special binding machine for hay which could crush it down into small blocks which you could then load onto ships so this whole area became a place for army stores the building here is survivor of that era and so with that just including in the of the 20th century, First World War? Absolutely, yeah. So the army... Humming during the First World War.

Yeah, so the ordinance board, they own this site right the way up until the 1960s. It's quite badly damaged in World War II. So a lot of the older buildings wouldn't have survived, even if the Ministry of Defense didn't need them anymore. So what was left was largely demolished in the 1960s. So we don't have very much left. Now, to bring all of this amount of army supplies

in and out of the site, they had to have a railway. It was a small narrow gauge railway which ran along the site and a tunnel from the railway is just around the corner here. Let's have a look. So it's not a main line, it's a sort of branch line. Yes, they tended to use narrow gauge railways because they could get on tighter corners. Right. You have miles and miles of little railway lines running around here. It would have been amazing, wouldn't it? So this was the route of the railway into the site. Now that you mention it's obviously if it's a footpath today or a cycle route, it's amazing, is now?

It's amazing, isn't it? Only a hundred years this place has been so transformed. It's got these few remnants, these few ghosts of the past. Yeah, that's what I like about this site. It's not the most well looked after of tourist locations, but it tells a big story about Britain's history and maintaining its navy is such a big part of keeping the British Empire together. So these symbols of London's role in that. You're right, this Tokyo was a key component of the British military industrial complex at the very height of empire, right inside London. And now, hardly anything remains.

Yeah, not those salubrious of locations, but, you know, I quite like the idea it's a railway tunnel you can walk through. No one would know. That is great. Thanks so much, Rob. I've really enjoyed that. And how can people come on this tour, in fact? So if you look out for my tour, Uncovering Woolwich Dockyard, on website Footprintslondon.com.

You can find that walk and many other lots of great walks about London's industrial history and other things there. This is a very different type of history to the one that people usually associate with London. So thank you for showing it to me. Oh, thanks very much for coming.

Thank you so much to our guide, London historian Rob Smith. You can enjoy more of Rob. A lovely festive episode. A very appropriate listening as we're in the run up for Christmas. We did one with him a while back about the debauchery and excess

of Georgian Christmas in London. We've added it in the show notes for you to find. That's all from us on Dan Snow's History here. Make sure to check in next week for more episodes. We're going to be looking at the history of Christmas food. If that's not your bag, we've got Hitler's U-boat War because no matter what the season is, how festive you're feeling,

it's always time for a bit of WW2 history on this podcast. It didn't stop happening just because people are celebrating Christmas. Thanks for listening. Bye. Thank you.