Conyer Creek: Butterflies, Bricks & Barges.

Coastguard station & smuggling

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 116*

These cottages were built sometime between 1818-1829 to serve a coastguard station. During the Napoleonic Wars a culture of free trade developed through smuggling gangs. In response to this the government formed The Kent Coast Blockade. Originally stationed on the HMS Ramillies anchored off the downs, in 1818 the force moved ashore, occupying martello towers & new stations where necessary. The blockade had three divisions & the so-called left division included Conyer Creek. 

The purpose of this coastguard station was initially therefore in the protection of revenue however in the mid 19thC the role of stations shifted to one of Naval reserve. While sea safety & life saving was also amongst their responsibilities this was not their primary function until the 1920s (along with coastal observation). Coastguard cottages were provided for the station staff & from the Admiralty era tended to be connected with few entrances. It’s thought this was to make them easier to defend should they come under attack.  

Smuggling in the area of Conyer has a long & prolific history. It’s said that in the 18thC local farmers could not recruit labourers on account of illegal trade undermining the local economy in goods such as tobacco, tea, brandy, silk & lace. Consequently the farmers were themselves forced to survive through activities like owling - the practice of smuggling English wool to France. Smuggling was taking place here as late as 1939 & one notable local story tells of an illicit consignment of tea. When coastguards heard it was stored in a Conyer house the occupants quickly assembled it into a bed which a lady occupied, her face dusted in flour. On hearing the occupant was suffering from ague the alarmed coastguards searched the rest of the house & the tea remained undiscovered.

Oil Mill & Richardson’s Cement works

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 7*

In 1788 an oil mill was built on this site which was advertised for sale in 1797 as possessing 5 pairs of stones & presses. These were used for crushing seeds to produce oil, while the byproduct of seed cakes would have been sold as animal feed. 

In the mid-19thC the building was acquired by Charles Richardson as a cement works. It was fitted with 5 beam engines for cement milling & expanded to 8 bottle kilns throughout its life, four of which produced Portland cement. Chalk was brought to the works along the tramway from pits near Teynham. Surprisingly the plant lacked a train link & therefore relied on the nearby quay & barges for exporting its product. By the time it was eventually sold in 1912 it had a number of associated structures including a warehouse, engine rooms & a steam crane. The works is estimated to have produced 5,000 tons of cement per year at its height.

Richardson's Dock

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 73*

A dock here served the Cement works which relied on barges for transporting its produce. Bags of cement were wheeled across the road before loading into barges via sliding chutes installed on the edge of the wharf. Across the road were the large barrel shaped kilns used for drying slurry into a powder known as clinker. These were demolished in WW2 when there was a demand for brick rubble & hardcore, which was needed for building airfields & runways. By contrast the steam engine from the mill on the site was scrapped & sent from Dover to Germany in 1939. Beyond the kilns & following the road were a series of washbacks - large settling tanks used for mixing slurry from the primary raw materials chalk (limestone) & clay (from mud), before it was introduced to the kilns & dried into clinker. Unloaded at the dock was mud from barges which was pumped through an overhead chute, over the road & into the washbacks. Much of this came from nearby Fowley Island, dug by workers known as muddies. Coal was also unloaded for driving the steam powered mill, which ground the chalk in preparation for mixing in the washbacks. Charles Richardson also had a brickfield at Teynham & his bricks, which can be identified by the initials CR were also loaded here. Richardson's owned numerous sailing barges & wharves at Vauxhall, London.

WW1 heavy anti-aircraft battery

( Image Source )

In 1917 the site of a 3-inch 20-hundredweight anti-aircraft gun emplacement lay on a site behind these buildings. The name refers to the internal diameter of the gun barrel as well as its overall weight (including the breech). These guns were also used by Naval warships in WW1 & in WW2 they were mounted on submarines. As an anti-aircraft gun this one would have employed a high-angle mounting for targeting Zeppelins & bombers. The gun was notable for the stable & relatively high altitude flight of its 16lb shells, which required the crew to aim between 9-18 seconds ahead of their intended targets.

Parish Wharf & Ship Inn

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 44*

The frontage here formed a public wharf which could be used by the community. It was commonly used for the unloading of manure & straw muckouts brought from London & used locally as fertiliser on fields. Sometimes local farmers had markets in London with the accompanying horses & stables, in which case it was policy to import their own dung. The unloading of manure was notorious for its smell & the flies it brought with it, which inevitably found their way into the pub. It was said that you had to keep your hand over your beer when a dung barge came in & locals joked that you couldn’t fall over drunk, so thick was the pub with flies. A stalwart of the local community the Ship Inn occupies what was originally a bakers’ shop, built in 1642. In 1802 an alehouse license was procured for trading alongside the bakery & by 1830 it was only vending alcohol. In 1856 it became known as The Ship Endeavour, presumably named after Captain Cook's famous ship, before later reverting to the original name. 

Bird & White's barge building yard

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 101*

Boat building in Conyer probably goes back many centuries. Until the 18thC Fowley Island was much larger & rather than one creek running to the Swale there were several longer narrower watercourses, which would have limited the size of the boats which could navigate them. The earliest boats known to have been built at Conyer were Hoy sailing boats, which transported local goods such as fruit from the extensive nearby orchards to London & other markets. The ability to transport goods from the creek lay at the heart of Conyer’s industries throughout the industrial revolution & from the mid 19thC the workhorse of waterborne trade, the sailing barge, was being built here. Critical to local economic activity more than one Conyer merchant commissioned barges to be built in the local yard here for their own business. They would have been gaff rigged with a spritsail & flat bottomed with leeboards on either side. A gaff rig involves a four cornered sail on a sprit, with its distinctive angled peak which helps to give Thames Sailing Barges their famous & admired look. They needed to be flat bottomed to help them navigate the shallow creeks of the SE coast, which saw so much of their trade. As a consequence they couldn't have a keel beneath the boat & a liftable centre plate, which provides an alternative on other vessels, would take up too much valuable cargo space. Stability was instead provided by leeboards, large teardrop shaped pivoting keels located on either side of the hull.

The earliest sailing barges recorded as built in Conyer were constructed here by Josia Bird’s yard from 1866. Before this time fishing & oyster smacks were built & though earlier barges may have been constructed they were not commonly registered before the 1850’s. In 1890 Alfred Marconi White took over the yard from Bird & barge building in Conyer entered a new golden age. The White’s had built cutters in Broadstairs in the early 19thC & White’s father had opened a barge yard in Blackwall in 1880, where Alfred White junior learnt his craft. Much pride was taken in the barges produced here. As well as participating in trade around the Thames Estuary & SE coast in goods such as bricks, cement, coal, hay & fertiliser, they participated in the many local barge races. Sailing barge building in Conyer ceased at the outbreak of WW1 when it was preoccupied with the war effort, producing submarine defence boom components. Afterwards the yard continued to build lighter barges, which were used for offloading from moored sailing vessels & were towed or oared from wharfs & docks. Canal barges for use on the inland waterways also continued to be built for the Regents’ canal in London & notably for Waltham Abbey Gunpowder Mills in WW2. As barges were gradually outmoded in the mid 20thC though many Conyer built vessels were converted into houseboats or left to deteriorate in coastal areas & some barges built here may still be seen in the form of degenerating hulks, scattered around the SE coast, in places like Hoo on the Meday & Maldon in Essex.

Triangular earthwork enclosure

Image: Kent County Council 2020

An unidentified triangular earthwork here was included in the Rapid Coastal Zone Assessment Survey (Wessex: 2005). Little is known about this feature, which may have been connected to the local fisheries or oyster industry. 

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Butterfly Brickworks

Eastwoods was a company formed in 1815 by John Francis Eastwood, a military officer who probably served under Wellington. Throughout its lifetime (before it was split up in 1963) Eastwoods became a huge industrial empire especially focused on the manufacturing & transportation of bricks & cement. 

In 1885 Eastwoods built the first of its brickworks in Conyer, though bricks were a principal export for the creek from the early 19thC. It may have been named after the butterfly shaped dampers in the flues or the reputation the area had for its butterflies, which collectors came from afar to pursue. It used one hand-berth, where bricks were moulded & four others were machine run. Its machines were American & its kilns were made in Germany by Krupp. It had a pump, washbacks & a tall chimney eventually demolished in 1910 to be replaced by one standing at 185 feet. At this time the site was also modernised & scaled into a larger brickworks, with multiple continuous kilns linked to the chimney by flues. These kilns saw an uninterrupted flow of bricks through them, as one load was pushed in another ran out. By 1911 this process ran every day of the year using Monarch brick making machines & there were as many as 20 washbacks to cater for the greater scale. The process from start to finish took 7 days for each brick & it’s estimated then to have produced 12 million bricks a year, employing about 100 workers. Raw materials like clay & chalk were brought by tramway or dug nearby while mud & sand was brought by barge. Many of the bricks manufactured at Conyer went into large housing estates & famous buildings such as the House of Commons & the Royal Festival Hall. Eastwoods also owned more than 30 houses in Conyer, which supported the brickworks.

Kestrel, Landrail & New Wharf

Image: Willmott (1972) pg. 31*

On aerial photographs from the 1940’s a wharf can clearly be seen here & the remains of it are traceable through squared timbers & iron fittings. Alongside it is an assemblage of deteriorating barge hulks. Two of the barges are known to be  Kestrel , built in London (1896) &  Landrail , built in Rochester (1894), both owned by Eastwoods. They were originally Thames sailing barges before their use as mud lighters, which saw them transport mud dug from places like Fowley Island to the Conyer brickworks via nearby wharves. Landrail was originally used for transporting Leigh sand, dug from the flats around Canvey Island & Southend, up the Thames & Regents’ canal to Brentford basin in West London, where it was transferred to lighters & went to brickfields in West Drayton. Sand was important to the brick manufacturing process for coating bricks so that they didn’t stick to each other or their moulds. Landrail won a trophy in its class for the most freights brought in 1897 (skippered by John Wheatley snr.) & is known to have been doubled later in its life. This was the process of fixing a second layer of planking over a deteriorated hull to prolong the vessels’ usability. A yarn involving Kestrel tells of an occasion when customers of the brickworks were taken on a complementary trip up the Thames by the barge’s skipper. The skipper took liberties with the ale laid on for the passengers &, somewhat worse for wear, he refused to turn back when they were afflicted by seasickness. He was subsequently dismissed. 

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Butterfly Wharf

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 106*

Butterfly wharf served the Eastwoods brickworks. A surviving tramway indicates the method by which materials like mud from Fowley Island, Leigh sand & coal for engines were transferred from the wharf to the works. At times this was by steam power at others pulled by donkey. The barge bed that lighters & spritsail barges could rest on when the tide was out can still be seen & the quayside itself is made visibly from waster bricks or burrs. These were the bricks, or welded collections of bricks, which fired badly or distorted in the firing process & therefore couldn’t be sold. It’s notable that the bricks have a yellowish tinge in their colour, which was a distinctive feature of the bricks made in Conyer on account of the inclusion of small amounts of chalk in the manufacturing process. 

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Fowley Island

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 78*

Seen across this channel is Fowley Island, an important source of mud for both the brick & cement industries. The island is visibly scarred by the activities of the muddies, workers employed in the menial & demanding task of digging mud in the winter using a fly tool. These looked like large wooden garden forks with a metal blade across the tips for cutting into the sometimes frozen ground. They would cut & load squares of 40lbs at a time. Mud Lighters,including the latter day Landrail & Kestrel, transported the mud from Fowley to the nearby wharves before it was added to local clay.

Fowley Island was also used for oyster production, for many years in the business of Max Holman. The cultivation on Fowley included beds for the pacific oyster, an invasive species which is most commonly eaten today, as well as the highly regarded native oysters. Beds for the pacific oysters lay in the channel between here & Fowley while the natives were bred on the other side of the island. On the eastern extent of Fowley are the traces of oyster beds, oblong structures where the molluscs were purged & stored before being transported. A donkey would take many oysters by cart to Teynham station & its said that when the donkey was unoccupied local brickies would borrow the cart for transporting them on crawls around the local pubs. Oysters were also rowed or steam paddled up the creek to be sorted in a packing shed near White’s barge yard, where they were organised into sacks. Occasionally Thames barges would bring oysters to Fowley from Essex, to improve the breeding strain. The oystermen used sailing boats called skiffs for working from, these were gaff rigged with low shallow sterns, which helped in hauling things on & off the boat.

Butt’s Rifle Range 

( Image Source ) © IWM Q 53544

On this site was the target for a firing range first marked on maps in the early 20thC. The line of firing is still visible through slight earthworks in the landscape. It stretched SW for 700 yards with firing points set at intervals of 100 yards, perpendicular to the firing line & on either side. 

A structure was also situated near this point, which accommodated workers in the oyster industry. There was a lavish room for the fisheries owner Max Holman who was said to spend many weekends there.

The Clondyke

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 79*

Prior to modernisation a second brickfield was built by Eastwoods in 1895. Named The Clondyke it was located just south of the older Butterfly Works. It consisted of 6 hand-berths for moulding & 10 washbacks. However the marshy ground was badly chosen & subsidence set in on a number of structures. After a few years it was decided to rebuild & integrate both The Clondyke & Butterfly Works into a larger & more up to date brickfield.

Cooper’s Yard & Co-op Wharf

Image: Sattin (1978) pg. 49*

Just to the NE of where the Swale Marina buildings lie, the edge of former Cooper’s Yard is traceable (though not publicly accessible). Active in the first half of the 20thC Charlie Cooper constructed barge boats here. In 1932 he converted a dilapidated harbour launch hull into a ketch rigged sailing yacht for Sylvia & Commander Lightoller. Sundowner as it was named became famous due to its participation in the evacuations of Dunkirk & can now be seen in Ramsgate Harbour. Commander Lightoller was already famous as the most senior surviving officer of the Titanic. He took Sundowner on an espionage mission in 1939, surveying the German coast near the East Frisian Islands, & captained the vessel in Operation Dynamo rescuing 130 troops. If you would like to learn more about Sundowner please see our “ Ramsgate Harbour: Coastal Emergency Trail ”. 

Before WW2 the yard was given the task of cutting material out of one particular boat to make way for extra water tanks, it belonged to a newcomer named William Edward Joyce. It was later discovered, when the boat was seized in Dover, that the spaces were actually used to accommodate secret transmitters. These were installed by Joyce for broadcasting information to Nazi Germany & he was eventually hanged for treason following trial at Nuremberg. 

Mercer’s wharf & Co-op wharf

Image: Willmott (1972) pg. 10*

To the east of the marina buildings are moorings where Co-op Wharf was situated. This saw the loading of bricks onto barges from trams which loaded at the Co-operative Brickfield (formerly Millichamp & Chambers) about a mile to the SW. At the point here a similar wharf was used by another company “Mercer’s” for the same purpose. The tramway Mercer’s used is still visible in the form of a raised embankment curving to the SW & eventually reaching Frognall, where the bricks were made. Coal & roughstuff was unloaded at the wharves to be trammed to the brickfields for fuel. 

By contrast to the giant Eastwoods these brickfields represented small independent brick manufacturers & were often owned by local businessmen. Such companies are alleged to have brought in “expert” brickies to work their fields from places like Essex. The eventual closure of their fields & associated wharves had a great impact on the amount of barge trade which came to Conyer. 

Allegedly locals would come here to “gripe” for “flatties” - the practice of wading out at low water & attempting to catch flatfish like flounder with your bare hands or by standing on them, before collecting them in a sack tied around the waist.

Blackett’s dock & pits in marsh

( Image Source ) CC National Maritime Museum

This dock was used by the local agricultural industries & would have served the nearby Blackett’s farm. Crops for market grown by local producers could be loaded here & dung was unloaded for use as fertiliser on the fields. Other agricultural products exported included straw & hay, which were stacked up to 8 bails high on specially adapted barges known as stackies. These precarious stacks made a challenging load for bargemen & hung over the gunwales, giving the boat an ungainly appearance. Not only were they susceptible to catching unwanted gusts of wind but they also completely obscured the tillerman's field of vision, requiring the mate to stand atop the stack & communicate careful commands by shouting down to the skipper. 

Near the dock pits in the marshland are visible, it’s probable these were related to the local oyster trade or fisheries in some way & may have been used as oyster pits.

Roman cremation urns

( Image Source ) Historic England

Three cremation urns were found here by gravel diggers. Roughly 7 inches high they lay 3 feet below the marsh surface & contained burnt bone & charcoal. Roman activity in N Kent is well known & cremation was the most common funerary rite practiced by the Romans in the early - mid period of occupation. Creeks & coastal sites provided access to seaborne trading networks & many villas & settlements have been found in such locations.

Seawall & possible saltworks

Before the seawalls were built creeks, sometimes visible now in the form of crop marks, would have run into the fields behind this point. The remains of pits visible in old photographs probably indicate traces of salt manufacturing. Historically coastal salt-production has often been situated on creeks using pits known as settling tanks at the high tide mark. This allowed the filling of pits with natural brine easier, which could then be further concentrated before encouraging the water to evaporate leaving salt residue, usually using fire. This method can be traced back to the Bronze Age in eastern England & is still in use in some parts of the world today. While nothing is known of the age of these particular remains, Essex & Kent are famous for their unique red hills. These were formed by the dumping of burnt clay material, a byproduct of the burning needed to evaporate the brine. Dating from the Iron Age through to early Saxon occupation these “hills” became particularly common at the time of Roman conquest. Salt was important to Roman military imperialism & sometimes Roman soldiers were paid in bags of salt; the word "salary" is derived from the Latin for salt.

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