Wigram and Green

Wigram and Green was a shipbuilding yard based on the River Thames in London

• George Green (1767–1849) founded this London shipbuilding and shipping family. He was the youngest and only surviving son of John Green, a successful Chelsea brewer and his wife Mary (née Pritzler), daughter of a London sugar refiner.

• In 1782 George was apprenticed to John Perry (1743–1810), whose family had managed the Blackwall Shipyard on the Thames since 1708. He rose rapidly and married Perry’s second daughter Sarah early in 1796. Perry married Green’s younger sister Mary as his second wife in 1799.

• In 1797 Perry’s two sons by his first marriage and Green were made partners. The firm became Perry, Sons and Green.

• In 1798 half the business was sold to John and William Wells junior, formerly Deptford shipbuilders, becoming Perry, Wells and Green.

• In 1803, at John Perry’s retirement, part of the Blackwall estate was sold to the East India Dock Company. His remaining half share was sold to the Wellses.

• In 1805 Sir Robert Wigram (1744–1830) bought a large share and the firm became Wigram, Wells and Green.

• By 1813 Wigram had taken over all the Wells interest and it became Wigram and Green. He owned half the business, his sons Money and Loftus Wigram a quarter, and Green the remaining quarter. Robert Wigram retired in 1819 and sold his half to the other partners.

• George and Sarah Green’s first four children died young. Their fifth child, Richard (1803–63), was the sole survivor. After Sarah’s death in 1805 George married Elizabeth Unwin in 1806 and had six more children. The two oldest sons, Henry (1808–79) and Frederick (1814–76) continued the business with Richard. In 1829 Richard became a partner in the firm which was renamed Green, Wigram and Green'.

• Blackwall Shipyard (est. 1612) was founded by the East India Company for the building and repair of its ships. It later passed into the hands of Sir Henry Johnson and his family, under whom the Perrys became involved. The yard estate included a 17th-century wet dock. Adjacent land used for storing timber and grazing allowed expansion and the sale of various parts over the years. The Perrys and Greens also lived on the site.

• From the mid-18th century up to 1815 Blackwall was the largest private shipyard in the world. Warships for the Navy, Indiamen and other vessels were built there. In 1789–90, to the north of the original basin, John Perry excavated the Brunswick (or Perry’s) Dock. He built its flanking 120-foot mast house – a major Thames landmark until its demolition in 1862.

• By the 1820s Wigram and Green owned shares in East Indiamen. But with the end of the East India Company shipping monopoly due in 1834, the families diversified into ship-owning, separately and as partners. George Green’s first ship was the Sir Edward Paget in 1824 and he also became involved in building and operating South Sea whalers from 1829. After 1834 an increasing number of ships were built for both families at Blackwall and elsewhere.

• Between 1837 and 1862 one or more ships were built annually for the firm and they lost only four in that period. They began to make Australian voyages in the late 1840s and established a monthly service after the discovery of gold in Port Victoria in 1852. By about 1860 they had a fleet of 30 ships.

• In 1837 the Greens’s Blackwall-built Seringapatam introduced an advanced, larger design of vessel. Their general lines and smart operation gained the complimentary nickname of ‘Blackwall frigates’.

• In 1835 part of the Blackwall estate was sold to the Blackwall Railway Company for a maritime passenger terminus whose river interface was the Brunswick Wharf. In 1843, when the Wigram and Green partnership expired, the shipyard was divided down the middle. Money, Wigram & Sons retained the western half and what became ‘R. & H. Green’ the eastern.

• Wigram & Green built the first of many small steam vessels in the Blackwall Yard in 1821 and continued to do so for concerns like the General Steam Navigation Co. They experimented unsuccessfully in 1838–39 with auxiliary paddle power in their new Indiamen Earl of Hardwick and Vernon. After Richard Green’s death in January 1863 they acquired the auxiliary steamers Good Hope and James V. Stevenson for the Calcutta trade in 1871, and themselves built the full-powered Viceroy (1871) and Sultan (1873) for the same route.

• In 1902, with the decline of Thames shipbuilding, R. & H. Green became part of the well-known ship repairing partnership, R. & H. Green and Silley Weir. The Blackwall yard remained in use, with a major graving dock, but the main site was at the Royal Albert Dry Docks. P & O acquired control of the business in 1918 but Green and Silley Weir still had 8,000 employees in the 1960s. It was sold in 1977 to become part of the Government-owned River Thames Shiprepairers and closed in 1980.

• By 1895, Thames based shipbuilders were no longer viable due to their distance from coal, iron and steel supplies. Wigram and Green were one of the early builders of steam frigates, and were based at Blackwall in the 1850s.

Little else is known about the yard.

Sources of Information

• British Shipbuilding Yards. 3 vols by Norman L. Middlemiss
• [1] National Martime Museum