A HISTORY OF SURREY 



tinued under different styles during the greater 

 part of the last century, and call for more 

 particular notice here. 



John Rennie, the son of a Scotch farmer, 

 was born in Haddingtonshire on 7 June 

 1 76 1.* At an early age he seems to have 

 interested himself in machinery, and visiting 

 England in 1784 after a short visit to James 

 Watt at Soho, Staffordshire, he came to Lon- 

 don to take charge of the w^orks at the 

 Albion Flour Mills by the south end of 

 Blackfriars Bridge. These mills w^ere a 

 great advance on any that had preceded 

 them, and were being erected on an exten- 

 sive scale, and fitted up with improved ma- 

 chinery by Messrs. Boulton & Watt. Their 

 novelty consisted in the use of cast-iron in- 

 stead of wood for every portion of the ma- 

 chinery. This machinery is stated to have 

 been the most perfect of its kind, and to have 

 been all designed by Rennie. The mills 

 were completed in 1787, and soon afterwards 

 Rennie commenced the Wandsworth mills, 

 which, on the destruction by fire of the 

 Albion mills in 1791, became the most con- 

 siderable near London." Rennie continued 

 to reside in Christ Church parish, South- 

 wark, where in 1 79 1 and 1794 his two 

 famous sons, George and John, who after- 

 wards succeeded him in the business, were 

 respectively born. About 1804, perhaps 

 earlier, he set up in business on his own 

 account in Holland Street, Blackfriars, whence 

 he and his successors until 1890 conducted 

 their vast engineering operations. At first 

 he is said to have employed but fifty men in 

 the Southwark factory, this number of course 

 not including the many employed by the con- 

 tractors of the various works superintended 

 by him.' 



Upon the death of the father in 1821 the 

 two sons, George and John Rennie, entered 

 into partnership, and the works in Holland 

 Street were continued by them for many 

 years. Although like his younger brother a 

 civil engineer by profession, the genius of 

 George Rennie was chiefly mechanical, and 

 to him fell the work of superintending the 

 manufacture of the great variety of machinery 

 which was executed by the firm. From 

 1 81 8 he held for eight years the posts of in- 

 spector of machinery and clerk of the irons or 



' See the articles on the Kennies by R. B. 

 Prosser in Diet. Nat. Biog., from which many of 

 the following particulars as to them and their firm 

 have been taken. 



•■ Brayley and Britten, Hist, of Surr. v. App. 

 25, 26. 



3 Ibid. 44. 



dies at the Royal Mint. He had considerable 

 practice as a railway engineer, and in 1846 

 was the chief engineer of the Namur and 

 Liege railway. He died in 1866. The 

 younger John Rennie, who completed as we 

 have said several of his father's most impor- 

 tant undertakings, carried on the greater por- 

 tion of the civil engineering business of the 

 firm. 



Among the works carried out by the firm 

 in Blackfriars were the first biscuit-making 

 machinery, corn and chocolate mills for Dept- 

 ford victualling yard and the machinery at 

 other royal victualling yards and dockyards, 

 in addition to many orders executed for 

 foreign governments. A short account of 

 the firm's operations about the year 1850 

 states that the usual number of workmen 

 then employed within the works was from 

 three to four hundred, ' assisted by steam- 

 engines that give motion to ingenious machines 

 for turning, planing, shaping, boring, punch- 

 ing, drilling and screwing in the most efficient 

 manner.' The following list of undertakings 

 which had at this date been carried out at 

 the Blackfriars works shows the great variety 

 of the firm's operations : the Royal Mint, 

 Tower Hill ; the Calcutta Mint ; the Mints 

 of Bombay, St. Petersburg, Lisbon and the 

 Anglo-Mexican ; the flour mills at Deptford, 

 Plymouth, Gosport, besides biscuit machinery 

 for each of those ports and for the French 

 government ; the smithery and various 

 machinery at Chatham, Sheerness, Woolwich, 

 Deptford, Portsmouth and Plymouth royal 

 dockyards, with rope machinery, diving bells, 

 cranes, engines, etc. for those places ; the 

 great armoury at Constantinople ; dredging 

 machines for Calcutta, Malaga, Valentia, 

 Barcelona, Amsterdam, etc. ; block machinery 

 for Russia, etc., steam ships and frigates.* 



George Rennie had taken much interest 

 in the screw propeller for ships, and his firm 

 built the engines for the Archimedes, in which 

 Sir Francis Pettit Smith's screw was tried. 

 In 1840 the Dwarf, the first vessel in the 

 British navy propelled by a screw, was built 

 by the firm. The firms which succeeded to 

 the business of the two brothers, Messrs. 

 George Rennie & Sons and Messrs. John 

 & George Rennie, Limited, confined them- 

 selves to marine engineering, iron and wood 

 shipbuilding and boiler-making. In the 

 ' sixties ' a branch establishment was opened 

 for these purposes at Greenwich. The Black- 

 friars works were continued until the year 

 1890, when they were finally abandoned, the 

 Greenwich works being apparently carried 



♦ Ibid. 44. 



416 



