I have written extensively in the past about Hiram Maxim, who was one of the most influential industrialists of his era. There was a second foreign born engineer and inventor who worked in the area at around the same time as Hiram Maxim; his name was Thorsten Nordenfelt, who you can see in the photo above - click on it for a larger view. Nordenfelt was born in Örby outside Kinna, Sweden, the son of an army colonel. The surname was and is often spelt Nordenfeldt, though Thorsten and his brothers always spelt it Nordenfelt, and the 1881 Census shows it as Nordenfelt. He was a Swedish born and educated man who married a British woman and moved to the UK; initially they lived at an address in the Uxbridge Road, Paddington, after migrating to the UK in 1867. Thorsten and his British brother in law started a business trading high quality Swedish steel for British railway rails and engineering fittings. After a while, he founded the Nordenfeldt Arms and Ammunition Company, which manufactured a variety of medium calibre deck mounted guns for arming motor torpedo boats and coastal patrol vessels. The guns were manufactured in Erith (as you may gather, in Edwardian times, Erith was a major centre for weapons manufacture, and many locals were employed in the factories). The problem that Thorsten Nordenfelt had was that he was an excellent engineer, but an absolutely terrible businessman. His arms factory was losing money hand over fist, and after much pressure from his bank – Rothschilds – Nordenfeldt was forced to merge his company with Maxim to form the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition company, with Maxim as the majority shareholder. Two years later Nordenfeldt was declared personally bankrupt, and lost complete control of the company, leaving Maxim the benefactor. Not to be deterred, Nordenfeldt and his family upped sticks and moved to France, hoping to start afresh. He set up a new company designing arms, and developed a revolutionary new breech mechanism for the French 75mm field gun. This all went swimmingly until he received a letter from Maxim’s lawyers, reminding him that he had signed a non compete clause that Nordernfelt had signed upon leaving the Maxim Nordenfelt company. The case went as far as the House of Lords, and was found partially in Nordenfelt’s favour, but by this time he had grown heartily sick of the arms business, and decided to go into the then brand new submarine business instead. He formed a new company with a vicar and keen amateur naval architect called the Reverend George Garrett. They jointly designed a new submarine – the Nordenfeldt One, which weighed in at fifty six tons, was 19.5 metres long and had a range on the surface of 240 kilometres, powered by a one hundred horse power steam engine which gave the vessel a speed of nine knots. It was armed with a single torpedo, and a deck mounted gun. It had to shut down the steam engine before it could dive. It was accepted by the Greek Navy, but never saw active service, and ended up being scrapped in 1901. A Nordenfeldt Two submarine was later built, followed by a Three, which was larger at thirty metres long; It did have one claim to fame – it was the first ever submarine to successfully fire a torpedo at a target whilst fully submerged. The final Nordenfeldt submarine was the Four, which was commissioned by the Russian Navy, but in sea trials it proved to be unstable and very unseaworthy, and ended up running aground off Jutland. The Russians refused to pay for it, in yet another commercial disaster for Nordenfeldt. He then decided to call it a day and retired to Sweden, where he died in 1920 aged 78. Some small signs of Thorsten Nordenfelt do still exist in Erith. Nordenfeldt Road, off West Street is one link, as was the Nordenfelt Tavern at 181 Erith Road – a local pub named after the man; it is now long closed and converted into flats, and so another link with our past is severed.
Back at the end of August. I wrote it some length about the sudden and shocking closure of radio station Time 107.5 FM. Although this station was located in Romford and was initially projected to cover the London borough of Havering, it was extremely popular with residents on the south side of the River Thames, including many located in the London Borough of Bexley. The very sudden sale and closure of the radio station caused a major shock to such an extent that it was covered in the National press. Almost none of the staff were aware of the closure until it was announced on air and it has caused a major loss to communities in East, Southeast London and North Kent. Not only did the station provide entertainment and music, but it was paramount in providing information on local community activities. charity campaigns and all kinds of local activities. It was especially known for its charity fundraising activities at both Easter and Christmas for underprivileged children and also for having regular monthly question and answer sessions with senior members of local councils and local politicians. Now the station has been sold off to a large broadcasting conglomerate and no longer operates. There is one less local voice. It has been suggested that local people retune their radios to Maritime Radio on 96.5 FM. As some readers may be aware, I am a licenced radio amateur with an advanced class licence. I have some extremely powerful and sensitive radio equipment and some very efficient antennas. Yet I find reception of Maritime Radio almost impossible. The signal is extremely weak and very scratchy, even with high-end equipment. If I find this difficult, I do wonder how other people get on. I am a great believer in local community radio and support the concept, but in the case of Maritime radio, the signal for me is certainly too weak. Another radio station located in the area is Meridian Radio which broadcasts to the hospitals including the Queen Elizabeth and the Memorial Hospital on Shooters Hill. Ironically, whilst it has a very active website and many busy staff whilst I was in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for nearly a month, I never saw a single representative from the radio station or heard anything about the station at all. In fact at the time I had no idea it was still operating. This is ironic. As in the late 1980s I was a volunteer for the radio station and used to present a listener request show on Sunday afternoons for patients. This involved me going round the hospitals- at the time including the then open Brook Hospital on Shooters Hill and getting record requests from patients on the wards. Quite often this was the only contact apart from medical staff. That's some of the patients had at the time. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital was exclusively for military personnel and I had to have a special ID pass card to get into the building past the armed sentries on the gate. This was at the time of the troubles and attacks by the IRA were greatly feared. I was quite surprised to discover that Meridian Radio was still operating. Bearing in mind, I heard absolutely nothing from any station volunteer whilst I was a recent patient in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I suppose that in a time when so many people have streaming radio and video services on their mobile devices that the requirement for hospital radio is far less than it used to be. Nevertheless, the fact that the station is still running does beg the question why it has such a high profile online yet impractical terms such a low profile in reality in day-to-day activities within the hospitals in which it is supposed to operate. Whilst I was a patient I did ask a couple of staff about Meridian Radio and they knew nothing about it and as such until I did an online search I thought the station was non-operational nowadays. At one stage, a hospital radio station was not only a great bonus for patients and staff but it also provided a launching point for budding radio presenters looking for a start in a broadcasting career. Some years ago I wrote an article about the hospital radio station at Erith Hospital, which I am revisiting now with some updates and revisions. These are Derek Smith's memories of the volunteer - run radio station:- "My involvement started in about 1973 when I was given contact details for the Chairman. I rang him and was invited along to the studio in the old surface air-raid shelter just inside the gates. The building had been used as a storeroom but at some time the radio equipment rack for the BBC had been put in to supply the three bedside channels. If I remember correctly the channels were Radio 1, 2 and 4. I could never really pin down when Radio Erith actually started - there was a sort of vague 'about 5 years ago'. The station was run by a committee headed by the founding member Dennis Burrage, who I seem to remember lived in Slade Green. He must have been well into his 40s when I joined and I believe he has since died. There was also an elderly lady named Joyce, who lived in a very dilapidated house in Queens Road while waiting for re-housing. The engineering member of the committee was Terry Brett, a BBC engineer who had been building a new studio mixer (when time allowed - which wasn't often). In terms of presenters other than Joyce and Dennis there was Brian Lee, another chap who was OCD about Johnny Mathis, and Alan. The last named was a great experimenter and would often sit at home getting steadily drunk making up tapes to play on his show. His 'piece de resistance' was to mix Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of The Moon with The Clangers - interesting but not quite sure what the patients made of it! Finally there was Peggy, the hospital switchboard operator, who presented the Wednesday night request hour. I was 'interviewed' and sound checked and given the job of engineering the request show. The studio was small and consisted of a small 'green room', the studio control room and a presenter's booth. The control room was set for both engineered and self op programmes. Peggy was a great laugh but always presented her programmes with style - the patients loved her. Together we revamped the hour long request show as a two-hander before Peggy disappeared and I carried on with a general music programme for another hour. Normal broadcasting was carried out from 7pm to 9.30ish, with extra hours on a Saturday afternoon and Sunday. We gradually attracted more young presenters but these were not always welcomed by the Chairman - who had very set ways. Erith being a small hospital, had very few listeners so we decided to spread our wings and raised enough money to rent a post office line to Dartford West Hill. This enabled us to broadcast to both hospitals simultaneously but relied on the hospital engineer at West Hill switching us on at set times. Unfortunately our Chairman had rubbed the guy up the wrong way and he could be less than co-operative, so we were broadcasting to nothing as far as Dartford were concerned most evenings. The friction between some of us younger members and Dennis came to a head in early 1977. There were big changes in the world of hospital radio but Radio Erith wasn't keeping up. Brian and I suggested we should move our studios to Dartford and broadcast back to Erith - Dartford being the much bigger hospital. This suggestion was met with mounting anger from Dennis, and at a hostile committee meeting Brian and I announced we were moving to West Hill and were in talks with the Hospital Administrator to find a suitable building to house the studio. West Hill were delighted and allowed us to use an old store room over A1 ward as the studio - one great benefit was that it had a couple of large windows that looked out over the hospital, which made us feel a bit more part of it. In July 1977 we attended the Dartford Show as the fledgling 'Dart Radio', and received a lot of support. Part of the money raised from the show was donated to us to buy equipment and by September 77 Dart Radio was operational. I left after about a year to join the local cable station 'Greenwich Television', and Brian went on to become a star in local politics. with the destruction of West Hill, Dart Radio moved in with Radio Joyce Green and has now been absorbed by Valley Park Radio at Darent Valley. Radio Erith continued on after we left but not for too long. Don't have a date for closure but it was winding down by the end of the 70s and with the closure of the operating theatres in the early 80s the need for a dedicated hospital radio station had gone. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures - there was an article about the station in the Erith Times in about 1975 I think, with a photograph of some of the presenters. Funnily enough the sign outside the old studio that you featured was made by me in 1974 - so it has survived OK (probably better than me!)" Brilliant stuff from Derek – many thanks for a fascinating recollection. It would be brilliant to think that Radio Erith could perhaps be resurrected as a local community radio station, though knowing the costs and bureaucracy involved in such an endeavour, I doubt that this is a wish that would be fulfilled, although I would love to be proved wrong. There was a short lived local radio station,which actually had studios in Erith, based on the Europa Industrial Estate in Fraser Road. This was a station called TGR Sound 103.7 FM. It was a volunteer run, not for profit station that went on air back in November 2006 and set out to provide community information and news, as well as both mainstream and specialist music programming. When it initially started, it was Internet only, but soon got an FM broadcast licence. To say the station was homespun would probably be probably under – describing it. There were many occasions when I would tune in and be able to hear a conversation going on in the studio, as the presenter had forgotten to switch the microphone off whilst they were in the middle of playing a track. Bearing in mind part of their mission statement was to train future presenters, a certain degree of mistakes were I suppose to be expected, but it did seem that things went wrong with depressing regularity – it was as if there was no supervision of inexperienced presentation staff. Coming from my own historical background in radio, it was very easy to work out what was going wrong and when, and it made for occasionally painful listening. TGR stood for Thames Gateway Radio. It was designed to be a community resource, not a commercially viable radio station. It was funded from a mixture of government and GLA grants. Once the recession began to bite, the funding soon dried up and TGR Sound was forced to close down. I am always supportive of local enterprises, but TGR Sound was really not very good at all, and it never really succeeded in finding an audience – I doubt that many people in the London Borough of Bexley realised that it existed, and if they did come across it whilst tuning around the radio dial, they probably thought that it was a particularly inept pirate. What do you think? Leave a comment, or email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
The aerial photo above was taken back in 1938; it shows what Erith looked like just prior to World War 2. The only readily recognisable building that is still in existence today is Erith Town Hall, in the bottom left of the photograph, which apart from having a third storey fitted to the building in the 1990's, looks remarkably unchanged. The building to the right of the Town Hall is the original Erith Fire Station, which was destroyed on the night of 21st/22nd January 1944. Local historian Ken Chamberlain wrote about it some years ago, saying:- "the Bexley Road station suffered a direct hit by a delayed action bomb. Several years ago I spoke to a survivor of the incident he recounted how they were in the engine room when they heard a loud crash and debris started falling about them. They ran out to see where the bomb had fallen. This action undoubtedly saved their lives as at that moment the bomb exploded. He claimed not to have heard a bang, but was stone deaf for six weeks afterwards. He did however suffer injuries. He was taken to Erith Hospital, treated and was back on duty in two hours. There were no fatalities. The 1907 building was demolished and a temporary structure was put in its place. The wartime control room remains as does a part of the entrance doorway. The temporary station remained until 12th July 1961 when it was replaced by the station that is now located in Erith Road, Belvedere". Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.
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