Commencing in 1868, the weekly society magazine Vanity Fair published full-page lithographic caricatures of what it judged ‘statesmen’ and ‘men of the day’. Among those caricatured in early editions were the novelist Wilkie Collins, the artist Frederick Leighton, the explorer H. M. Stanley, and the palaeontologist Richard Owen. However, the fame of these featured personages, which also consisted of royalty, nobility and members of parliament, did not in most cases endure beyond their lifetimes.
Included among these, numbered 139 in the list of statesmen, was Joseph d’Aguilar Samuda. The image, drawn by the artist Charles Lyall, shows a gentleman in a parliamentarian frock-coat holding his top hat in a mendicant manner. At the time of its publication on 15th February 1873, Samuda was Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets, having previously represented the constituency of Tavistock. He had begun his political career with the Metropolitan Board of Works, a forerunner of the GLC, representing the district of Poplar between 1861 and 1865. However, the caption given under the portrait names the aging gentleman’s other vocation – ‘Iron Shipbuilding’ – an enterprise for which he undoubtedly deserves better remembrance.
As Lyall’s caricature grossly implies, Joseph d’Aguilar Samuda was of Jewish descent. He was born on 21st May 1813 to Abraham Samuda, an ‘East and West India Merchant’ and Joy D’Aguilar.[1] Joseph was the couple’s second son, his brother Jacob having preceded him by 21 months. While Jacob spent his adolescence apprenticed to an engineer, Joseph received training in his father’s counting house. Thus, when the brothers went into business together in 1832, they combined practical knowledge with business acumen.
Initially, the pair focused on the production of marine engines to meet the Industrial Revolution’s burgeoning demand for steam-powered shipping. Another early venture was the construction of an ‘atmospheric railway’, a technology also investigated by rival engineers I. K. Brunel and William Fairburn. However, this pneumatic form of power production proved unworkable, and the Samuda Brothers returned to marine engineering with the aim of constructing their own steamships.
Wooden shipbuilding had been practiced along the Thames since the 16th century at the royal dockyards of Woolwich and Deptford. The Honorable East India Company had also built ships at Deptford before moving its operations downstream to Blackwall on the north-eastern side of The Isle of Dogs. This yard continued in operation under various owners until acquired by Wigram and Green in the early 19th century. The firm specialised in small steamers, East Indiamen, and later fast sailing ships known as ‘Blackwall frigates’. It was just east of Wigram and Green’s yard, at Orchard Place, on an isthmus bordering Bow Creek, that the Samuda Brothers established their first yard in 1843.
In an obituary published shortly after Joseph’s death in The Engineer magazine, it was claimed that ‘a sufficiently detailed account of the shipbuilding operations of the firm of Samuda Brothers, from the year 1843 to the present time, would constitute an excellent history of the rise, progress, and development of iron steam-ship construction’. In this period, all-metal ship construction was still in its infancy, with only two other London firms, Millwall Ironworks[2]; located on the western side of the Isle of Dogs, and Ditchburn and Mare; situated at Canning Town on the other side of Bow Creek, having similar ambitions to build iron ships. It was the latter firm that secured the contract to build the Royal Navy’s first seagoing iron fighting ship, Trident, launched into the Thames on 16th December 1845.[3]
Tragedy struck Joseph Samuda at the outset of the firm’s shipbuilding activities. On 12th November 1844, his brother and a number of employees set out on the Thames to test the machinery of a new iron steamer named Gipsy Queen. The 500-ton ship was powered by a pair of 150NHP engines based on an innovative ‘bell-crank’ design patented by Jacob. At the end of the trials, while moored off Brunswick Wharf at Blackwall, an explosion ripped through the vessel, killing ten of those aboard, among them Jacob. The cause of the blast was attributed to a faulty joint of the steam pipe connecting the boiler to the cylinders. A report in The Spectator journal opined that:
‘From some want of hold in the make of the joint, the great pressure of steam lifted it out of its socket, and it poured out a hot vapour into the engine-room. Mr Samuda was standing close to it and beneath it, and the steam must have been shot right upon his head. The engine room was soon filled with boiling water and steam. It is supposed that the sufferers must have died almost instantly; but an hour and a half elapsed before anyone could get into the place.’[4]
The 33-year-old Jacob was buried in the Sephardic cemetery on Mile End Road, an inscription on his tombstone naming him as ‘the first Jewish engineer’. Scarcely had the victims of the Gipsy Queen disaster been laid to rest and the firm suffered another setback when in March the following year a boiler explosion at the Orchard Place yard killed three more employees and destroyed several buildings. A dramatic sketch of this explosion was published in the Illustrated London News. In spite of these severe personal and commercial blows, Joseph Samuda continued to grow his ship-building business, and by 1852 had established a new yard at Cubitt Town on The Isle of Dogs.
The move to Cubitt Yard coincided with increasing tensions between Britain and Russia, which would culminate in the Crimean War. The conflict saw the introduction by Britain and her French allies of wooden-hulled ‘ironclad’ floating batteries. When these were demonstrated to be effective in naval bombardments, the Admiralty ordered three more of the type to be constructed entirely of iron, one order being placed with Samuda Brothers. That ship, HMS Thunderbolt, was launched into the Thames on 22nd April 1856. The Daily News reported that:
‘Her keel is framed like that of an ordinary iron ship, and the framework is entirely of iron, the top sides, for twelve feet downwards, being covered with teak planks six inches in thickness. Over these are bolted iron armour places four inches thick, and weighing from two to three tons each. These plates are laid over the whole surface above water; and it is stated that a shot or shell fired at her sides at a distance of 400 yards would produce no effect whatever.’
Thunderbolt’s claimed invulnerability was not to be tested in battle, hostilities with Russia having ended three weeks before her launching; and she was laid up at Chatham, later being converted to a floating pier. However, her design represented ‘the germ of a battleship’ that would eventually result in HMS Dreadnought.
By the end of the Crimean War, the Samuda yard was well-established, and by 1859 the company had constructed at least 40 vessels there. The Thames was then becoming the centre of iron ship construction, two of the most revolutionary vessels, Brunel’s Great Eastern and HMS Warrior, being launched on the Isle of Dogs within a year of the other. A response to developments across the Channel, Warrior was the first of several large all-iron ‘armoured frigates’ to be constructed by London yards in the early 1860s.
Meanwhile, a revolution was occurring in naval gunnery with the development of the gun turret, a concept advocated by the naval officer Cowper Coles. Keen to test out Coles’ invention, the Admiralty turned once more to Samuda Brothers to construct what would become the Royal Navy’s first iron turret ship. The resulting vessel, HMS Prince Albert, carried four 9-inch muzzle-loading guns in four manually rotated turrets arranged on the centre-line. Unlike later turret ship designs such as HMS Monarch and the ill-fated Captain, the Prince Albert did not carry sail. This fact and the absence of a poop and forecastle, which enabled her guns to fire over the bow and stern, restricted her role to coastal defence.
Prince Albert was launched on 29th April 1863, but a shortage of materials delayed her completion until February of 1866. During this period, Samuda completed another Coles-designed turret ship, this one intended for sale to a foreign navy. A smaller, more lightly armed version of the Prince Albert, the ship evidently attracted the interest of the American Confederate Navy, but was eventually sold to Prussia, becoming the proto-German state’s first armoured warship. SMS Arminius marked the beginning of Samuda’s successful warship export business as foreign navies lacking resources for iron ship-building looked to modernise their fleets.
Also launched at Cubitt Yard in 1863 was another unique warship. HMS Tamar was one of the Royal Navy’s first purpose-built troopships; she and her sister Orontes had been ordered as a response to logistical problems encountered during the Crimean War, when troops had been transported by charter vessels. The elegant clipper-bowed vessel was dual-powered, being equipped with a 500NHP screw engine and a barque sailing-rig. HMS Tamar had a long and eventful career. She was the only Samuda-built warship to be sunk during the Second World War, being scuttled on 11th December 1941 in Hong Kong harbour, where for many years she had served as a receiving ship.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 