Qualla: Deptford Dockyard

Deptford Dockyard: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Clarke, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 30 May 1593, in a respectable house in Deptford owned by a widow named Eleanor Bull, four men spent the day in a private room: Christopher Marlowe, the playwright; Ingram Frizer, a financial agent for the Walsinghams; and two intelligence operatives, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. According to the coroner's report, they argued over the bill. Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger. In the struggle the blade went into Marlowe's forehead above the right eye and killed him instantly. He was twenty-nine, and the foremost dramatist in England before Shakespeare took the title. He was buried the next day in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, fifty yards from the gates of the dockyard that had brought all the relevant men to the relevant town.

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Image: Paul Clarke | CC BY-SA 3.0

Deptford Dockyard: Henry VIII's First Yard

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SilkTork, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1513 Henry VIII founded a dockyard on the south bank of the Thames at Deptford Strand, eight miles below the city walls. Its 'Great Store-house' went up the same year — a brick rectangle 50 metres long and two storeys high, parallel to the river, marked with the royal cypher a...

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Image: SilkTork | CC BY-SA 3.0

Deptford Dockyard: The Knighting of Drake

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnYeadon, CC BY-SA 3.0. In April 1581 Elizabeth I came to Deptford to knight Francis Drake aboard the Golden Hind, the 100-ton galleon in which he had just completed the first English circumnavigation of the globe. The Queen ordered the ship preserved at Deptford Creek as a public exhibition — possibly ...

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Image: JohnYeadon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Deptford Dockyard: Peter the Great in Sayes Court

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Dunn, CC BY-SA 2.0. In January 1698 a 26-year-old Russian tsar arrived at Deptford with a delegation calling itself the Grand Embassy, officially incognito under the obvious pseudonym Pyotr Mikhailov. Peter the Great wanted to learn shipbuilding from the world's best practitioners, and the Royal Nav...

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Image: Mark Dunn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Deptford Dockyard: Cook, Vancouver, Bligh, Nelson

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nathaniel Dance-Holland, Public domain. Through the eighteenth century, Deptford specialised in smaller warships and in experimental work — copper sheathing trials against the ship-eating teredo worm, sea-water distillation, coal-pitch extraction. Several of the ships James Cook used on his Pacific voyages were refitte...

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Image: Nathaniel Dance-Holland | Public domain

Deptford Dockyard: The End and the Cattle Market

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C.R.B. Barrett, Public domain. Ironclads finished Deptford. The new iron-hulled warships needed deeper water and bigger machinery than the shallow Thames bend could offer. A parliamentary committee recommended closure in 1865 and the yard shut on 31 March 1869. The final ship built there, the screw corvette HM...

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Image: C.R.B. Barrett | Public domain

Deptford Dockyard: Convoys Wharf

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pierre-Charles Canot, CC0. Today the dockyard site is Convoys Wharf, owned for decades by News International for the storage of newsprint, now slowly being redeveloped for housing and commercial use. Archaeological digs in 2010-12 uncovered the slipways, the dry docks, the basin and the foundations of buil...

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Image: Pierre-Charles Canot | CC0