The Origins of the Royal Navy

Summary

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Dan Snow's History Hit

Episode: The Origins of the Royal Navy

Release Date: December 15, 2025
Host: Dan Snow
Guest/Guide: Rob Smith (local historian)

Episode Overview

In this immersive episode, Dan Snow embarks on a rainy walking tour of Woolwich Dockyard, the hidden crucible of the Royal Navy, alongside local historian Rob Smith. The episode uncovers the Dockyard's extraordinary role in the rise of British maritime power—from the first purpose-built warships of Henry VIII, through industrial innovation, to the Victorian age of steam. Through candid conversation, site exploration, and lively anecdotes, Dan and Rob bring alive the human stories, technological leaps, and enduring marks (and erasures) of London's maritime heritage.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Woolwich Dockyard’s Importance

• [01:51] Dan Snow dreams of visiting Woolwich Dockyard at the height of its power, describing it as “ground zero for the Royal Navy, the most successful military institution ever created.”
• The Dockyard once teemed with shipbuilders, engineers, and naval innovation; now, it’s mostly housing estates and shops, with only subtle historical remnants.

2. Foundations of the Royal Navy under Henry VIII

• [06:11] Deptford and Woolwich were central to the “birth of the Royal Navy,” with Henry VIII establishing not just fleets but also the necessary administrative and industrial infrastructure.
• [07:48] Henry VIII commissioned the Henri Grâce à Dieu—“by the grace of God”—the largest warship of its era, built at Woolwich as a statement of royal and naval ambition:
  • “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.” (Rob Smith, 06:41)
• Introduction of gunports allowed guns to be mounted low on the hull, pioneering new warship designs even if initially plagued with maneuverability issues.

3. Dockyard Innovations: Dry Docks, Workforce, and Industrial Organization

• [13:09] Explanation of dry docks and their critical function in maintenance and new shipbuilding:
  • “Dry docks are probably more important than ships in the birth of a navy, aren’t they?” (Dan Snow, 13:21)
• Workforce detail: Up to 140 people were needed to build a wooden warship, from carpenters to caulkers, coopers, and, in later centuries, women making sails.
• [16:21] The ‘mast pond’ was used to season masts for up to a year, preventing warping.
• Labor conditions were harsh. Workers could be “impressed” (forced to serve) until 1702, and experienced naval discipline, even punishment by lash.

4. Labor Rights, Struggles, and Community

• [17:45] An early form of workers’ protest: wives picketing to have husbands home for breakfast after changes to shift patterns.
• 'Chipping rights' allowed workers to take home wood chips; disputes over 'illegal chips' persisted into the 19th century.
• [33:39] Strikes occurred in 1739, 1742, and 1744, often leading the government to pacify or even threaten strikers, an early sample of London’s labor movements.

5. Elizabethan Expansion and Stuart Intrigue

• [19:27] The Vanguard, first built in Woolwich, played a role against the Spanish Armada and Barbary pirates—setting a tradition for reusing iconic ship names.
• Rob Smith recounts corruption under Robert Mansell, who funneled government contracts to his own glassworks:
  • “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.” (Rob Smith, 21:21)
• [28:00] The Pett dynasty dominated shipbuilding in Woolwich, culminating in the extravagant and divisive Sovereign of the Seas, whose cost contributed to the political crisis leading to the English Civil War.

6. The Rise and Transformation of Industrial Woolwich

• [38:07] The shift to iron, steam, and industrial shipbuilding in the 19th century brought new skills and workers.
• Rob describes the surviving Victorian boiler-making factory and its unique multi-flue chimney:
  • “It had six different flues 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.” (Rob Smith, 40:08)

7. Legendary Ships & Famous Voyages

• [34:54] HMS Beagle, built at Woolwich, became Charles Darwin’s vessel for his groundbreaking voyage:
  • “He brings along this young scientist called Charles Darwin, heard of him... The famous voyage of the Beagle leads to Darwin’s work on the Origin of Species.” (Rob Smith, 35:54)
• [41:14] The Agamemnon (a hybrid sail/steam ship) participated in the Crimean War and in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable—though early cable-laying failed due to mismatched components!
  • “One wound clockwise and one anti-clockwise... and it sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. So they had to come back again two years later and do it once more.” (Rob Smith, 41:29)

8. Decline, Legacy, and What Remains

• Woolwich’s limited river access and crowding led to Chatham’s rise as the main dockyard; most original structures were demolished post-WWII.
• [44:53] The Dockyard became an army supply depot, with narrow-gauge railways and repurposed buildings.
• “These symbols of London’s role in maintaining its navy is such a big part of keeping the British Empire together.” (Rob Smith, 46:00)
• Despite the obscurity, Rob finds beauty in Woolwich’s surviving chimneys, tunnels, docks, and echoes of history.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Dan Snow [01:51]:
  “This really was ground zero for the Royal Navy, the most successful military institution ever created. Yes, come at me.”

• Rob Smith [06:41]:
  “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.”

• Dan Snow [13:21]:
  “Dry docks are probably more important than ships in the birth of a navy, aren’t they?”

• Rob Smith [17:45]:
  “A lot of the wives of Woolwich came down to the dockyard to protest and had a camp outside the gate, saying that they wanted their husbands back for breakfast.”

• Rob Smith [21:21]:
  “During Elizabeth First’s Navy, there was an expectation there’d be a bit of money went missing... but no one tells you how far is too far.”

• Dan Snow [23:45]:
  “It’s a remnant of that Georgian architecture surrounded by this 1950s building. Yeah, it’s a great think about what it must have looked like here.”

• Rob Smith [35:54]:
  “He brings along this young scientist called Charles Darwin, heard of him… the famous voyage of the Beagle leads to Darwin’s work on the Origin of Species.”

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Timeline of Key Moments (Timestamps)

• 01:51 – Dan describes his historical time-travel fantasy to Woolwich Dockyard.
• 04:24 – Dan meets Rob Smith on location, setting out on their tour.
• 06:11-07:59 – Discussion of Henry VIII, the inception of the Royal Navy, and building of the Henri Grâce à Dieu.
• 13:09-13:45 – The role and innovation of dry docks.
• 16:21 – Mast ponds and ship masts discussed.
• 17:45 – Labor unrest: workers’ rights, strikes, and innovative community traditions.
• 19:27-20:38 – Elizabethan Woolwich, the Vanguard, early corruption.
• 28:00-29:43 – The Petts, the Sovereign of the Seas, and tax revolts.
• 33:39-34:45 – 18th-century professionalization, strikes, and early steam revolution.
• 34:54-36:46 – The Beagle and Charles Darwin’s seminal voyage.
• 38:07-40:08 – Victorian industry, the steam/iron transition, factory chimneys.
• 41:14 – Laying the transatlantic cable with the Agamemnon and Great Eastern.
• 44:53-46:38 – Dockyard’s decline, military reuses, and surviving structures.
• 46:38–47:05 – Conclusion and how to join Rob’s walking tours.

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Episode Tone

The episode is lively, curious, and peppered with both humor and awe at the city’s layered past. Dan’s irreverence (“I screamed incoherently into a microphone about the Royal Navy”) meets Rob’s storytelling charm and deep expertise.

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How to Explore More

• For tours with Rob Smith: Footprints of London (footprintslondon.com)
• For more on Woolwich's hidden history, consider re-listening to Dan’s back catalogue or visiting London's lesser-known heritage sites.

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Summary compiled for listeners and history enthusiasts who want a comprehensive yet engaging look at this formative chapter of Britain's maritime story.

Transcript

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But first, There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.

[Dan Snow]

Hi folks. Welcome to Dan Snow's History.

[Narrator/Producer]

If you asked me if the time and place where I would go if I could time travel, if I could.

[Dan Snow]

Go back in history, what I would.

[Narrator/Producer]

Love to do is pop down for.

[Dan Snow]

The day to take a stroll around.

[Narrator/Producer]

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 or the Agamemnon. It's where exploration 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 to 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 casual cafes and lots of new build developments. 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 center. There's also remnants of the Mars pond and one enormous chimney and mega factory, 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 and 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. He's 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 hit 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 and 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 Dan Snows history here, enjoy.

[T Mobile Announcer]

T minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

[Dan Snow]

God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity.

[T Mobile Announcer]

Never to go to war with one another again.

[Rob Smith]

And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

Well, I've just alighted from the train here in Woolwich Dockyard. Any day that I head towards a place with dockyard in the title is 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.

[Rob Smith]

Hi there, Dan.

[Dan Snow]

Right, where were you going? Where are you taking me?

[Rob Smith]

Thank you for coming down to this 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.

[Dan Snow]

We should give people a sense of the geography.

[Narrator/Producer]

We're.

[Dan Snow]

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.

[Rob Smith]

We're in southeast 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. Was surrounded by what would have been part of a military industrial complex. 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 steamships here. So it's a great survivor of London's industry.

[Dan Snow]

It's such an important reminder that London, obviously it's the political capital, it was also a massive industrial city as well. Yeah.

[Rob Smith]

It's a shame, really, that London's industries 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. Two big dockyards, Woolwich and Deptford. And I'm going to show you around the site of Woolwich dockyard today.

[Dan Snow]

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 VII, which most people locate the birth of what we call the Royal Navy today. In that key period with Henry VIII establishing the bureaucracy, the dockyards, it sort of created the institution of the Royal Navy.

[Rob Smith]

Henry VIII's 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.

[Dan Snow]

What's that about?

[Rob Smith]

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 VIII has rather sort of been 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 off often use 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 Henri Grassad. There'd 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.

[Dan Snow]

Henry V. Classic Henry vii cosplaying as his illustrious forbear, Henry V. So Henry Grass, Adieu, Henry, by the grace of God. So, yeah, a massive statement.

[Rob Smith]

It was a huge ship. So we're talking about a ship which was thousand ton draught, 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 Armories 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 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 Grass, adieu. It's a ship which has got a lot of new features in it, one of them gun ports. So prior to that, guns had been mounted on ships on the decks, but it made the ships very top heavy, so there was only a limited amount of firepower that you could put there. But 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 there's 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 a record of all of his ships. So we can see it in the Anthony Roll, we can see these wonderful streamers that it has flowing behind it.

[Dan Snow]

I used to have that. This is the kind of kid I was that was on the wall of my bedroom when I was a kid. That picture Henri Grass idea.

[Rob Smith]

I think you could get it as an Airfix kit as well.

[Dan Snow]

Well, I was too lazy to do.

[Rob Smith]

That, but I like looking at it.

[Dan Snow]

And as you said, he loved his palace at Greenwich. He was born in Greenwich, wasn't he? So for him, this is a very kind of important corner of his kingdom.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. And you can also, as you get more into your midlife crisis period, you don't want to go traveling too far if you want to play with your naval ships. Now, unfortunately, with the war being over, the Henri Grass Ajo didn't see much action and it gets rebuilt not in Woolwich, but further down the river in Irith, but then goes back into battle in that war against the French in which the Mary Roses sunk because of.

[Dan Snow]

Its gun ports as well. So, yeah, it's a period of innovation, isn't it? And mistakes were made.

[Rob Smith]

It appears in that amazing drawing of the Battle of the Solent where we got the distressing sight of the Mary Rose sinking. And the Elri Grass Aure 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 was 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.

[Dan Snow]

What's so interesting is becoming strong at sea is it's about having ships, of course, and men to sail them. But what Henry VIII is really doing here is creating the kind of land infrastructure, infrastructure, the ability to commission ships, dry docks, and then a bureaucratic infrastructure to support that fleet. And that's the sort of first step on the road to British naval greatness, isn't it?

[Rob Smith]

A lot of that is Lord Warwick's doing, setting up the infrastructure. And so it's, you know, the greatest compliment you can pay to someone in London. Name a pub after them.

[Dan Snow]

Oh, I live in hope. So look, we're just coming down. Finally we can see the table. Thames, Father Thames in all its glory. It looks a bit grey and brown today. Sludge like, look. 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 runs perpendicular to the Thames. And that is a slipway, is it? Wow.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. So this is one of the slipways from the woolwich.com. they've been built and rebuilt obviously, many, many times in the dockyard's history, but we think this one dates back to 1830s.

[Verizon Announcer]

Wow.

[Rob Smith]

So you can see if you look over the other side, the lovely brick work 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'd have a big wall of mud at the end of the dry dock and when it was time to float the ship out, they just knock down the mud wall. But it could take, it could take weeks to knock down that.

[Dan Snow]

So you say what a dry dock is. So it's. A dry dock is something that you can build a ship without getting wet. So you build it in a dock like this, but at one end you've got a lock gate or, 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.

[Rob Smith]

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. So this was one of the things that came in at Woolwich to improve the situation.

[Dan Snow]

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 effectively. That is so important, isn't it?

[Rob Smith]

Yeah, it's really industrializing shipbuilding rather than making it. You build a ship and then it takes another long time to build another one. Here you keep copying the same design and turning them out.

[Dan Snow]

So the dates are quite early in Henry's reign, isn't it? So this dockyard's what, 1512.

[Rob Smith]

It's 1512 they start work on the first ship, Henri Grass, a dieu year.

[Dan Snow]

Later he start work at Deptford. So this is a kind of deliberate pivot to becoming a maritime power, isn't it?

[Rob Smith]

Absolutely, yeah. There's been a big transformation during the time of the Duke of 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 sawing all the wood to size to make the planks for the ship to start with. So awful lot of people involved moving things around, so a lot of labour is involved. Then there are more specialized jobs. You have caulkers. So these are the people who make the ship waterproof. So you're putting waterproof material into all the jobs 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 sail making. Sail making. Later on it often became women's work and so you'd often have. The sail makers were women whose husbands had been in the Royal Navy and been killed in combat and it was so seen as a pension roll 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. Incredibly busy place and a lot of people employed here. Now, you also need huge amount of space for storing all the timber. You don't want it getting totally wet before you've even started work on.

[Dan Snow]

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. You spend years, or you stop piling wood and then building ships, it would go to ruin, wouldn't it?

[Rob Smith]

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. The mast would walk when it got out into the salty sea conditions. So they matured the mast in what's called a mast pond. So they'd often be left in the mast pond, sometimes as long as a year.

[Dan Snow]

I wonder where it would have been here. Do we know where it would have been?

[Rob Smith]

Well, the mast ponds, they were a little bit further down the river and we're going to go past the site of them later on. 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.

[Dan Snow]

That were rounded up and put.

[Rob Smith]

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, 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, they're 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 gate, saying that they wanted their husbands back for breakfast.

[Dan Snow]

God, that is not relatable. My wife would be thrilled. I was away for breakfast.

[Rob Smith]

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 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 certain, like butchers 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 were called illegal chips. And they. Workers in Woolwich.co 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 and until 1801.

[Dan Snow]

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 these days. It's a reminder. There would have just been ferries right up and down the Thames.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah, it's a crossing point of the Thames, the 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 1800s, when there were lots of ship workers 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're a bit aggrieved that they couldn't get a free way to get across the Thames here.

[Dan Snow]

Well, because there's still huge, big ships coming up to the London dockland. So you just couldn't build the bridges here, could you? Because you couldn't get there. You couldn't under the bridges. Yeah.

[Rob Smith]

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 have Vanguards 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 Grass Aux, 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 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 Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who's not a great guy to hang around with, so he falls a bit out of favor 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 attack on the coast of Algeria against Barbary pirates. It was finally scrapped in 1630. So it was a ship which had.

[Dan Snow]

Had over 40 years put in a shift, didn't it?

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. So Mansoor, he becomes one of the master shipbuilders here at Woolwich dockyard. And one of the things you could do in the early Stuart Navy is it was very ripe for corruption. And Mansell's definitely accused of a lot of the funds that go into 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.

[Dan Snow]

It's just huge government spending. There's going to be that opportunity, isn't there too?

[Rob Smith]

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.

[Dan Snow]

And then if I look down there to the east, is that another one of the other docks there? Sticking it is.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. So there's another of the dry docks has survived here, and we're going to walk a little bit further, further along the Thames and see some from a later period. So these were the ones built to maintain steamships?

[Dan Snow]

Well, it's pouring with rain. We're hiding under a balcony. I might let you go first. Regular listeners, the podcast will be unsurprised to learn that Mariana Day Forge, the producer, is wearing inappropriate footwear for this exped. How are those trainers doing, Mariana? Okay, not gonna lie, the toes are wet, but it's like a light. You're wearing like a light plimsol. And just for reference, just for reference, everyone, I am wearing a rugged outdoor waterproof shoe.

[Rob Smith]

Even your backpack has a cover.

[Dan Snow]

And. And she's teasing me because my backpack has got a rain cover on, which is sensible. Look at this.

[Coca-Cola Announcer]

Wow.

[Dan Snow]

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 pond scum. It's a massive piece of engineering, isn't it? When's this from?

[Rob Smith]

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 this, 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. We might be a time to call in at the cafe, the Clock House, if it's open, which was the administration center for the dockyard. And they've got a cafe inside.

[Dan Snow]

Okay.

[Narrator/Producer]

Look at this.

[Dan Snow]

This is glorious, isn't it?

[Rob Smith]

Yes. This is the Clock house, built in 1787. It's the way to keep track of what's going on in the dockyard.

[Dan Snow]

It's a remnant of that Georgian architecture surrounded by this 1950s building. Yeah, it's a great think about what it must have looked like here. You listen to Dan Snow's history.

[Rob Smith]

Don't go anywhere.

[Narrator/Producer]

There's more to come.

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Santa.

[Rob Smith]

Santa. Did you get my letter?

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He's talking to you Bridges.

[Santa's Helper]

I'm not that of course he did.

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[Dan Snow]

Nice.

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[Rob Smith]

Oh, it's a bit warmer in here.

[Dan Snow]

That's perfect. Now we've come to the cafe in this community center where we are going to have a cup of tea. Like all true Britons, this will restore. So we've now settled into the cafe. We've got a cup of tea. We're in this glorious Georgian building. If we need tell the time, we can pop our heads outside and look at the clock above us.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. So having a clock tower which faced four ways was really important, but it was also important for reorganizing the shipyard. This building, it was organized 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 and would meet. It's a clever bit of design.

[Narrator/Producer]

That's interesting.

[Dan Snow]

So it was a building that was deliberately designed to encourage collaboration.

[Rob Smith]

Absolutely, yeah. So the dockyard in the 1600s had been more or less the preserve of one particular family, great shipbuilding family, the Petts. So we have a Peter Pett, who is born during the time Queen Elizabeth I, and then Phineas Pett, who becomes ship builder to King James I and then Charles I, then his son, so 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.

[Dan Snow]

Oh, yes.

[Rob Smith]

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 hull, 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 costs just keep rising and rising, so you have to invoke ship money to pay for it. Now, ship money was normally only charged during wartime.

[Dan Snow]

It's taxation.

[Rob Smith]

Yes. A tax which would normally be only paid by people on the coast. They're the ones who are defended by the navy, so 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 paying taxes. Outrageous. And this is part of the chain of events which leads to Charles of the becoming so unpopular in London, which leads to the chain of events in the English Civil War.

[Dan Snow]

And that was all down to his desire to get more ships out of the yard here.

[Rob Smith]

Extraordinary. Yes. 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 of Bromley. So there's an area called Petts Wood there, which is named after the Petts family.

[Dan Snow]

So obviously oak wouldn't come to maturity quick enough for them. But it's.

[Rob Smith]

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 Pet, 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 Pepys pays a lot of visits to the Woolwich dockyard in his time. In his diaries, he mentions coming here 10 times. There's a nice entry for February 12, 1666, where Pepys had start to worry about what Pet's doing down here and worried about the corruption. So he comes down to investigate and he says up by candlelight about 6 o', clock, it being bitter cold weather again, after all our warm weather, and by water down to Woolwich ropeyard and there to the dockyard to inquire at the state of things. And went into Mr. Petts 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 own 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 heretofore being much taken with this kindness, I wade to Blackwall and Deptford to satisfy myself there about the King's business. So no corruption to worry about after all, after being given all these free gifts.

[Dan Snow]

Outrageous peeps Just got bought off, didn't he?

[Rob Smith]

He got bought off, yeah. A Woolwich 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 when 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.

[Dan Snow]

Now the sun's come out.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah, we've got the sun come out now. So the rest of the story is best taken outside.

[Narrator/Producer]

Let's go. Let's get outside.

[Rob Smith]

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 press 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 ship builders 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 those. So, you know, 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.

[T Mobile Voiceover]

Right.

[Dan Snow]

So it's a constant issue trying to.

[Rob Smith]

It's a constant issue. They're not always successful dock workers here, but it's one of the first examples of London workers flexing their muscle in a sort of unionized way, which obviously comes to the four more in the 1800s with a 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 said, we've had wooden ships for years, why should we change now? So Bentham's ideas were not adopted until another 30 years later. But some of the earliest steamships for the Royal Navy are built here in Woolwich dockyard.

[Dan Snow]

While walking through what used to be the dockyard is now filled, feels like just a suburban housing estate. It's weird, isn't it? What are some of the great ships that people know about that were built here?

[Rob Smith]

One that was really famous, but which was a very undistinguished ship at the time was HMS Beagle. So this was a small, humble, 10 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. He 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 they famous voyage of the Beagle leads to Darwin's work on the Origin of Species. But Fitzroy was a very devout 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 at a place called Pagliam on the Essex coast.

[Dan Snow]

You listen to Dan Snow's history it.

[Narrator/Producer]

There'S more coming up.

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[Rob Smith]

I wanted to just really show you this wonderful building. So this was one of the boiler making factories which was built in 1838 when they convert over to building steamships here. So roughly where we are on the other side of the road would have been 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 steamships. So the mast ponds got converted into pools of water to be used by huge steam engines which we use for stamping out giant plates for the sides of ships and boilers and ships which we can see took place in this building over here.

[Dan Snow]

So this is just great, isn't it? This gives you a sense of what a Victorian factory looked like. There have been 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 well again probably 30 meters into the sky. What would that have been for?

[Rob Smith]

Well, the buildings around here were associated with making the big metal plates for boilers on steamships which would be on a grand scale. So this building built in 1838 was for stamping out metal plates. They had huge steam hammers here so it would have 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 cloud, constant sound of the steam engines working, all the workers coming and going, bringing things here 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 flues 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.

[Dan Snow]

So that would have been absolutely going full tilt the whole time, wouldn't it?

[Rob Smith]

It would have done. It was actually taller than it is now. When 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.

[Dan Snow]

There can't be many 19th century industrial sites like this left inside. The M25 left inside.

[Rob Smith]

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.

[Dan Snow]

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.

[Rob Smith]

It becomes a different set of workers, really. You need a new set of skills and gradually you start to get workers who more experienced in metal work 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 hulled ship called the Agamemon.

[Dan Snow]

That's a classic naval name.

[Rob Smith]

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 on its sails but also on its steam power. And that gets involved in the Crimean War involving the bombardment of Sevastopol and actually ends up running aground 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 Isambel King 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 and wound 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.

[Dan Snow]

Not the fault of this dockyard or its workers.

[Rob Smith]

Not the fault of this dockyard, no, they're exempt from the 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 are 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 decide 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 there were 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 steam ships 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 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 Ordnance 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. 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 place for army stores. The building here a survivor of that era.

[Dan Snow]

And so with that just including in the wars of the 20th century. First World War.

[Rob Smith]

Absolutely, yeah.

[Dan Snow]

So the army humming during the First World War.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. So the Ordnance 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, you know, 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.

[Dan Snow]

Let's have a look. So it's not a main line, it's a sort of branch line.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah. They tended to use narrow gauge railways because they could get on tighter corners.

[Dan Snow]

Right.

[Rob Smith]

You have miles and miles of little railway line mines running around here.

[Dan Snow]

It would have been amazing, wouldn't it?

[Rob Smith]

So this was the route of the railway into the site.

[Dan Snow]

Now that you mention, it's obviously it's a footpath today or a cycle.

[Rob Smith]

Yes.

[Dan Snow]

It's amazing, isn't only 100 years this place has been so transformed. It's got these few remnants, these few ghosts of the past.

[Rob Smith]

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. 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.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, you're right. This dockyard was a key component of the British military industrial complex at the very height of empire right inside London. And now hardly anything remains.

[Rob Smith]

Yeah, not the most salubrious of locations, but you know, I quite like the idea. It's a railway tunnel. You can walk through.

[Dan Snow]

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?

[Rob Smith]

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.

[Dan Snow]

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.

[Rob Smith]

Oh, thanks very much for coming.

[Dan Snow]

Thank you so much to our guide.

[Narrator/Producer]

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 to Christmas. We did one with him a while back about the debauchery in 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 hit. Make sure to check in next week for more episodes. We're going to be looking at the history of Christmas food.

[Dan Snow]

If that's not your bag, we got Hitler's U Boat War.

[Narrator/Producer]

Because no matter what the season is how festive you're feeling, it's always time for a bit of WWII history on this podcast. It didn't stop happening just because people are celebrating Christmas. Thanks for listening. By.

[Rob Smith]

Foreign.

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This holiday Verizon is helping you bundle up incredible gifts and savings. You'll get the latest phone with a new line on my plan and a brand new smartwatch and tablet. No trade in needed even on our lowest price plan. That's two gifts for your family and one for you or two for you and one for someone else or three gifts for you and only you. Either way, you save big on three amazing gifts up Verizon, all on the best 5G network. Visit Verizon today. Rankings based on Root Metric Truth score report dated 1 2025. Your results may vary. Service plan required for watch and tablet. Additional terms apply.

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This holiday season, millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car and head off for a family vacation. But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun. The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters, providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens. But they can't do it without your support. Please [e-mail].