James Glaisher: Meteorologist and Aeronaut extraordinaire and his connection to Millennium Quay, Deptford

April 27, 2020 Comments Off

Deptford local Sean Patterson shares the fascinating story of the man after whom his street is named

When I moved to Millennium Quay in Deptford four and a half years ago, the only remarkable thing that I knew about my address on Glaisher Street was its annoying habit of being auto-corrected to ‘Glazier Street’ by most computer programs. Not great for deliveries.

It turns out that the name may well be a corruption of Glazier anyway. It is the road that runs through the middle of the twenty-year-old estate in the map above. Deptford Creek is on the right and the Thames in front.

The large plot of land where Millennium Quay now sits has a rich history. It is opposite the bottom of the Isle of Dogs, and between the entrance to Deptford Creek from the Thames and the land now known as Convoys Wharf, once the site of Henry VIII’s original Royal Dockyard.

This all features on my long-running Deptford Charles Booth walk for Footprints of London, on which I explain that it was the original docks for the construction of East Indiamen ships in the early 1600s.

You can see it in this painting from around 1680, when the East India Company had left but were probably leasing it back. St Nicholas Church is just behind and this is where Christopher Marlowe is buried after being stabbed at a nearby meeting, hence Marlowe Court on the estate.

There is a bonkers statue of Czar Peter the Great at the Creek entrance as this is where he came to learn ship-building skills in 1697, famously trashing John Evelyn’s house, Sayes Court Manor, which he was leasing.

Many great ships were built at the Royal Docks next door and at the commercial docks over the next couple of centuries. They were built for the Seven Years and American Wars and also, sadly, specifically as Slavers. These commercial docks in the late 18thC are brilliantly evoked in Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s recent bestselling historical murder mystery novel, ‘Blood and Sugar’.

The site was later used by the brilliant Liverpudlian electrical engineer Sebastian Ferranti to build the world’s first large commercial electricity power station, sending electricity to the West End from 1889.

Producing electricity wasn’t actually so hard, but Ferranti realised that to transmit large amounts of it over large distances required good cabling, and crucially, A.C. rather than D.C. (the ‘Current Wars’ is a subject for another blog). The ruined coal landing stage is a familiar site on the riverfront now and a great spot to see varied bird life.

The later version of the power station was decommissioned in 1983 and the estate built around the millennium, hence the name, which brings us back to Glaisher St. and James Glaisher.

While following one of Dan Cruikshank’s walks around Greenwich/Blackheath in ‘London, A Portrait of a City in 13 Walks’, I spotted a blue plaque on Dartmouth Hill in Blackheath bearing the name of the street I live on.

I finally knew who to look for. As it turns out, had I spotted him being played by none other than Eddie Redmayne in the 2019 movie ‘The Aeronauts’, my journey might have started there. More of that later, but I’m sure you can spot the resemblance to Redmayne in this picture of Glaisher!

I share a birthday with James Glaisher on April 7th (lockdown birthday for me this year). He was born in Rotherhithe, which brings him reasonably close to Millennium Quay.

A true polymath, he held many illustrious positions in his long life: Superintendent of the Department of Meteorology and Magnetism at Greenwich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Exhibition judge, President of the Microscopical Society, President of The Royal Photographic Society and others.

It is his founding membership of the Aeronautical Society that made him famous, however, and the extraordinary flights he undertook with balloon pilot Henry Tracey Coxwell are the subject of ‘The Aeronauts’. Perhaps that middle name ‘Tracey’ was the excuse for the producers to change Coxwell to a woman and cast Felicity Jones in the role.

On some tethered, and many untethered, flights Glaisher measured all sorts of atmospheric phenomena including air pressure, temperature, humidity etc. and his discoveries pushed forward our understanding of the atmosphere at increasing height and of the existence of a stratosphere. He really did go very high indeed.

This was dangerous stuff and the main action of the movie concerns a flight to 28 thousand feet, probably higher, when Glaisher lost consciousness and Coxwell had to climb up the balloon to release a frozen gas valve so they could descend.

Pigeons were released at various heights with calculations on them so that if the mission failed the information would not be lost. Some of the pigeons died anyway, probably from the lack of oxygen and the freezing conditions.

So famous was the flight, that Punch featured a poem about it:

Tis true that these two men did go
Six miles towards the sky;
But as for Icarus, we know
That story’s all my eye.
Then what’s the use to hear about
Old heroes fabled acts
When now they’re beaten out and out
By wonders that are facts.

Glaisher didn’t always get his ‘facts’ right though. His interest in the atmosphere had previously led him to speculate during the 1854 cholera epidemic that temperature and pressure might be a factor in the evaporation of the putrid Thames, thus conveying the disease to humans. This is the pre-bacterial and completely erroneous ‘miasma’ theory popular for hundreds of years.

Ten years later, during another cholera epidemic, he claimed to observe a ‘miasmic blue mist’ between Rotherhithe and Greenwich, a location neatly matching the riverfront at Deptford and Millennium Quay itself. I’ve seen many strange goings on at the waterfront here but the only miasmic mist is from the frequent visitors who find it a convenient spot to smoke large amounts of skunk.

In conclusion, there doesn’t seem to be a definite connection to this exact spot, but this Rotherhithe boy would certainly have passed through Deptford on what was a ‘stratospheric’ social climb to the heights of a very posh Dartmouth Hill. And it turns out he didn’t just have a road on a modern housing estate named after him, but a crater on the moon too.