Factory Cooperage

Being a cooper required a five-year apprenticeship, reflecting the specialist knowledge and fine craftsmanship involved. Coopers used shaped staves of oak and painstakingly fitted hoops and heads, creating casks strong enough to hold liquids and salt meat, yet easy to roll aboard ship. Their skills were central not only to provisioning but also to naval logistics – the right casks preserved vital food and drink stocks and made their handling at sea efficient.

For coopers, this was demanding work – six long days a week, little annual leave, and constant noise from saws, hammers, and mallets. In the Victorian period, a cooper earned just under £60 a year – more than unskilled labourers, but far less than the high-ranking officers whose stores they helped protect.

On the ground floor, alongside the din of barrel-making, sponges, rammers, and gun carriages were stored here – key components for arming ships. The upper floor once also served as an armoury, holding a formidable range of weapons, from rifles and pistols to boarding pikes and machine guns, preparing the fleet for all possibilities at sea.

The original Factory Cooperage at Royal William Yard was a product of its time – built on a grand scale with the lessons of the Napoleonic Wars fresh in mind. During those sustained years of conflict (1793–1815), the Royal Navy’s need for barrels soared; casks were essential for storing and transporting supplies on long sea voyages. Demand for barrels reached extraordinary levels, with coopers working almost around the clock to meet the voracious needs of a global fleet at war. The scale of this effort shaped the design of the yard, however, this wartime demand proved exceptional.

As naval warfare and food preservation methods evolved, the huge volume of barrels was never needed again. By the later nineteenth century, new technologies – such as tinned food and alternative packing – meant far fewer coopers were required. Demand fell so sharply that by the time the role moved to the New Cooperage in 1899, only about a dozen coopers remained, and the new facility was much smaller and simpler in scale.

In wartime, especially during WW2, the Factory Cooperage took on new tasks. One story from the era tells of women testing signal lamps after dark, risking interception until sternly reminded by local police of the dangers of visible signals during blackout.

The building’s robust structure and central location made it ideal for storage and military needs: it became a workshop for armaments, with railway tracks laid for rapid movement of heavy ordnance stocks across the Yard. Its service didn’t end there – Factory Cooperage reportedly played a role even during the Falklands conflict of the 1980s, showing its remarkable adaptability.

A cooper’s skill was so vital aboard ships that coopers were sometimes kept on the crew, especially on whaling and long-haul voyages, to repair casks at sea. Apprentices completed their training with a tough rite of passage: being rolled around in their final barrel by senior coopers – a tradition that survived well into the 20th century.