The Old Kent Road kid who rose to great heights in gas

A gas works does not seem to be the best place for a child to grow up in. But George Livesey always remembered his childhood in the Old Kent Road with affection and had happy memories of the gas works as his first playground.

George Livesey was the dominant figure in the late 19th Century gas industry – from his base in the Old Kent Road Gas Works he challenged gas company managements in London, and beyond; stamping his ideas on their often unwilling systems.

In writing articles about him and his work I need to write about his work as a gas company manager, director and – eventual eminence – but also look back at his own roots as well as that of the industry he inherited.

George Livesey

His childhood in the gas works seems a good place to start. I’m afraid he began life in North London. We meet our hero. George Livesey, born in Islington to Thomas and Helen Livesey in 1834. In 1839 the family moved to the Old Kent Road for Thomas’ new job as a clerk at the Old Kent Road gas works.

The Old Kent Road gas works dated from the late 1820s. Like many other small gas works it was set up by people who were perhaps rather less than honest. It had been designed by an eccentric engineer and a major explosion in 1836 had wrecked most of it.

The gas works was built on the Old Kent Road with a frontage on the Grand Surrey Canal. In the 1840s it would have been very different to a works of the 1970s, or even the 1880s. This was a small works with a relatively low make of gas, on a busy main road as town gave way to country and much of the land would have been empty. However housing and other industries were gradually moving into this area and it was in some way a distinct village on the outskirt of Camberwell.

Old Kent Road Gas Works site (Google)

The Livesey family moved into a house in Canal Grove – Thomas and Helen, five year old George, and three year old Ellen.

When I first started researching Livesey I was enchanted by Canal Grove. The only way to reach the cottages was through a scruffy wooden door in the Old Kent Road. They were utterly charming. Since then they have been regenerated and have luxuries like road access. They predate the gas works by a few years and were used by them to house senior staff.

Southwark Blue Plaque - devised by Southwark News , Southwark Heritage and Southwark Council

In the 1841 census – a year after moving to Peckham – they were just another young family. Thomas Livesey, son of a greengrocer and Helen, daughter of a potato salesman living, with their two young children, in a two up-two down cottage opposite a canal and backing onto a gasworks. They did have one servant, a teenage ‘skivvy’ and mother’s help. Thomas may have been ‘management’ but I think it is a stretch to call them ‘posh.’

The 1851 census reveals that next door to the Liveseys in Canal Grove, was Thomas’ father’s brother, frequently unemployed, William, with his family, and a couple of doors down was Helen’s brother, carpenter, George Hewes.

In George’s childhood is one he ‘played about the works’ and there was nowhere there where a child was not allowed to go and play. He described 'The first gasholder I remember being built was in 1840’ – when he was six.

"I was playing about the tank, and running along the planks one evening, as I had not got the rhythm of the plank, the next instant I found myself in a puddle at the bottom of the tank, fortunately not hurt," he writes.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/rotherhithe/over-150-new-homes-approved-former-gasworks-despite-residents-concerns-about-contaminated-land/

His companions were other boys - some of whom grew up to be employed in the Old Kent Road works and remained lifelong friends. In those days families lived near the works and many children came daily to ‘bring father’s dinner hot in a basin' - and if they stayed no one seems to have minded. Even forty years later it was as seen normal for boys to be on the giant East Greenwich Gas Works site. In the 1880s one was crushed under the wheels of a locomotive driven by a neighbour and no-one seemed surprised that they were there and getting ‘rides’ from the drivers. Even the coroner didn’t seem to think this was anything particularly wrong.

The nearby Surrey Canal was itself a source of games. George remembered ‘fields, hens, foxes’ and in the canal itself ‘reeds, rushes, flags, water lilies, willows’.

The Grand Surrey Canal

There was ‘bathing, fishing, boating’ and on summer evenings hundreds of boys would swim and dive from the bank. George joined them and as he got older taught younger boys how to swim. They dived from and under barges moored alongside the Gas Works wall – surfacing in 'water covered in tar’. In later years a diver’s suit – kept for emergencies which might need breathing apparatus – hung in the clock tower of the Old Kent Road Works scaring the children and filling them with ‘awe’.

One of George Livesey’s earliest memories was the delivery of the company’s first barge in 1841, when he was seven. This was to be used for the transport of coal from collier ships brought to the company’s wharf from the Thames, via the canal. The barge was brought second hand from one of the company’s directors - Joseph Heathorn who was described many years later as an ‘old sailor who used to sail his own ships’ but who was really a City based ship-owner. The barge was called Thomas and had come from Thomas Farncombe’s wharf in Bermondsey. Farncombe, a wealthy wharfinger, was the company chair. Men from the works lined the canal banks as the barge arrived and ‘all gave three cheers’.

In old age George described: ‘We were ready for a swim, and sat in the open stern of Thomas – it was our favourite diving platform . I remember there John Edmonds, always known as ‘Jack the Sailor,’ and our old pensioner John Durrant, now 95 years of age, who I once saw jump in the Canal with all his clothes on to save a fellow creature’s life.'

The workforce would still have been relatively small and most would have lived only a short distance from the works so families would have known each other. Although retort house workers were then working the later notorious twelve hour days, often home was just across the road and many of the neighbours worked their too. If a child played in the works no one seems to have minded – and it was safe because many people on site would recognise the child and know the family.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/news/community/there-used-to-be-37-pubs-on-old-kent-road-now-theres-only-two/

On the canal bridge stood a store owned by a Jonathan Hinchcliffe. George Livesey remembered this as a timber store but Hinchcliffe described himself as a stonemason. In 1845 a group of working men - some from the Gas Works - began a temperance society there. George was then eleven and ‘just a boy swimming in the canal’ but he was encouraged to come into meetings by the men from the works. There was, he said, ‘a lot of religion about in those days’. It was the start of what was to become his second career, in the temperance movement.

George never spoke about any school days and this remains a mystery. He must have had some schooling although perhaps not a formal ‘education’. His brother, Frank, ten years younger went to Dulwich College - so, where did George go? He started work at 14, as his father had done, so a formal secondary education is unlikely. Did he attend a local elementary school? Was there a reason he never spoke about his schooldays?

I have found one obituary which says he attended a succession of ‘private schools’ – maybe that means the sort of small establishment which proliferated in those days, where unmarried daughters of clergy taught small children how to read and write. Presumably Frank went to Dulwich College because increased prosperity meant the family could afford to give him an education which would have been beyond their means when George was school age.

George’s funeral procession

He started work, unofficially, at the age of 14, running messages . At the board meeting of January 1, 1850, with the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of London in the Chair, it was resolved ‘that Master G. T. Livesey be appointed assistant in the Company’s offices.’ He was sixteen and about to launch his career.

The biography of George Livesey

At last I’ve published my biography on George Livesey which I began in 1978!

Over the years I’ve seen him described as a ‘great Prince of industry’ and shown as a top hatted cartoon capitalist.

He is known as a gas engineer with new ideas and bigger and bigger gas holders and he changed the 19th century gas industry nationally – forcing regulation of profits. But he was brought up in the Old Kent Road Gasworks and never really left it. In Peckham and Lambeth all his life he was a temperance, Band of Hope, activist and a lay worker in local churches.

He achieved new ways of bringing gas for light and cooking into the homes of ordinary working people – but he saw trade unions as ‘outsiders’ which got him in a lot of trouble. So better described as a charismatic maverick – who Peckham should remember as – perhaps – one of theirs.”