Explosives and Fireworks Manufacturing Industries
Notes on some of the individual explosives and fireworks manufacturing company histories have been included at the end of this section.
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The rules require explosives to be clearly marked, pre-world war two the rules were:
On the outermost packaging there shall be affixed in conspicuous characters by means of a brand or securely attached label or other mark the word 'Explosive', the name of the explosive, the number of the class and division to which it belongs and the name of the manufacturer or sender.
The classes mentioned were:
| Class | |
| 1 | Gunpowder |
| 2 | Nitrate Mixture |
| 3 | Nitro-compound |
| 4 | Chlorate Mixture |
| 5 | Fulminate |
| 6 | Ammunition |
| 7 | Fireworks |
The rules also classified various types of 'fireworks', including:
Aluminium torches, magnesium torches, Confetti Bombs and Joke Bombs (A 'Confetti Bomb' is presumably akin to the modern 'party popper' however I have no idea what a 'Joke Bomb' might be!)
Snaps for Christmas crackers fell under the same rules as cases of safety matches (the cases had to be lined with thin metal sheet).
For the last few thousand years (up to the 1980s) mining has been an important industry in the UK, in support of the mining and quarrying we have had an attendant explosives industry. Also Britain, as an Imperial Power, needed a substantial armaments industry (mainly for dealing with other Imperial Powers), and since the 14th century that has meant having an explosives industry as well.
The first widely used explosive was gunpowder, a sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal mixture. This is a fairly slow burning explosive by modern standards, but served to fire muskets and cannons (first used in the 14th Century).
The ingredients are all solids so they are ground down to a powder before mixing, they are then put in a roller mill to compress them down into a solid cake. This cake is then further compressed (originally with a hand operated screw press) to produce solid blocks of powder (doing this gives you the optimum rate of burn), this material is then ground to produce a granular powder. This is then run through a sieve to separate the sizes, and usually de-dusted as well, before being 'polished' in a mill with graphite, to produce shiny pellets of a consistent size (the stuff you see people pouring into cannons in films). These pellets are then dried in an oven (not a very hot oven!), providing they do not get damp they will fire well and consistently.
The first gunpowder factory in England was set up at Faversham in the 16th century, this was later nationalised in the mid 19th century to supply the British armies with gunpowder. By the later 18th century two more factories had opened in the area (they were all closed by ICI in the 1930s due to the risk of invasion over running the site).
Gunpowder was used for mining and quarrying from the 17th century, although it was the 1870s before someone invented the 'safety fuse' which is a rope with gunpowder wound into its core and burns at a predictable rate. Gunpowder works were set up close to the centres of demand, although they were situated outside built up areas for obvious reasons.
By the 19th century fireworks, as an entertainment, had gained in favour and small firms making these sprang up in various locations. Many of these smaller firms bought-in the gunpowder, adding the extra elements themselves to produce the colours and rates of burning they required. Even today gunpowder is produced in considerable quantities, mainly for use in pyrotechnics.
In the mid 19th century there were several changes in the military use of gunpowder, necessitating new methods of preparing the stuff. Gunpowder was not the ideal propellant for rifled guns, the smoke it produces gives away your position, obscures your vision and clogs up the barrel of the gun but it was the 1880s before viable 'smokeless' alternatives were developed.
In the 18th and 19th centuries explosives favoured the use of highly nitrated compounds. An early example being Picric acid or trinitrophenol (TNP), first mentioned in the later 18th century. This was originally made by nitrating substances such as animal horn, silk, and natural resin using nitric and suphuric acids, but in the 1840s ways were found to synthesise it from phenol The Russians managed to make a form suitable for putting in artillery shells toward the end of the 19th Century and Picric Acid then became an important military explosive. The British made it mainly at a site in Kent called Lydd, so they called it lyddite. It is difficult to handle, it is not very stable itself and it eats metals, forming even more unstable and explosive metal salts. In spite of this it was used as a blasting agent in mines and by the military in both World Wars.
It in the mid 1840s trinitrocellulose ('gun cotton') was invented (by Dr Christian Schonbein, of the University of Basel). This is cotton or other cellulose fibres treated with sulphuric and nitric acid, it is about five times as powerful as gunpowder. The first guncotton factory in the world was set up in an existing gunpowder factory in Faversham (Kent) in 1847 but there was a mishap resulting in a serious explosion. Production was halted at the site until the 1870 when it resumed at a nearby purpose built works.
Nitroglycerine is made in a similar way to gun cotton, substituting glycerine for the cellulose, but this is a dangerously unstable liquid explosive. The military had little use for this, it was too dangerous to handle and as it was such a high explosive it was difficult to make a gun to use it in. However Alfred Nobel found he could soak the nitroglycerine into a clay like material and produce sticks of high explosive that were (comparatively) safe to transport and handle. He called this stuff Dynamite and in 1871 set up the British Dynamite Co with its headquarters in Glasgow and the factory on a nearby sandy peninsula (the sand was good as it allowed them to easily make up blast walls around the various buildings).
Guncotton was used to make the first 'smokeless' explosives for rifle cartridges in the 1880s, first was the French Poudre B, closely followed by the British (Nobel's) Ballistite. However these early smokeless propellants tended to become unstable if stored for any length of time.
Cordite, a mixture of nitro-glycerine, guncotton and petroleum jelly was developed at the end of the 19th century, this proved a much better explosive for small arms ammunition, it was even used to power anti aircraft rockets in World War two. Cordite is now obsolete and production ceased in the United Kingdom, around the end of the 20th century, with the closure of the last of the World War II Royal Ordnance cordite factories at Bishopton.
TNT or trinitrotoluene is a yellow coloured solid material, originally produced as a dye in the 1860s. It was 1901 before it was used by the military as it is very hard to 'set off'. TNT is much less powerful than dynamite but you can fill a shell with it and fire it from a gun without it going off in the process, it is so insensitive that in 1910, it was exempted from the UK's Explosives Act 1875 and was not considered an explosive for the purposes of manufacture and storage. TNT is a poison and just handling it turns your skin yellow, as the girls working at the munitions works found in World War One. From TNT they then developed a wide range of explosives, mostly for military use, such as Amatol, Cycotol, Hexanite, Pentolite and Torpex.
High explosives were manufactured at several sites around the UK, notably at the Nobel Industries works near Glasgow, at the Government factories in Kent and at locations in Wales. The site at Faversham had a small explosives plant (not owned by ICI) but in 1939 they switched to making an explosive-substitute based on a large reusable steel cartridge filled with carbon dioxide. The product, Long Airdox, is still in production and the premises still needed to be licensed under the 1875 Explosives Act as gunpowder was used in the detonator.
Modelling an Explosives Works
Production of small arms ammunition and filling shells for artillery was done in large multi-storey factories, several of which were government owned 'arsenals' sited near large towns, but the manufacture of the explosives used was located well away from populated areas.
Explosives manufacturing was generally done on a well dispersed site, so a mishap in one area would not 'take out' the entire works. This is slightly problematic from a model railway perspective, but the rail connection tended to be on the periphery of the site, with internal transport often handled by the firms own narrow gauge system.
Several explosives works made use of narrow gauge railway systems (originally using small steam locomotives, changing to petrol engines after World War One) to move materials about the site. At some sites, notably firework factories, they used manpower (one factory in the UK at Faversham still uses man power, probably the last 'mandraulic' system in use in the UK). Hence for a model railway you can represent such a works with an exchange siding, with the standard gauge line running alongside a raised bank on which the narrow gauge siding is laid. You do need to add some detail to the scene to confirm the nature of the industry and this can easily be done using a few distinctive buildings.
At the rail interchange, as well as gunpowder vans you would see regular shipments of chemicals in sacks and drums, carried in sheeted opens and vans. You would also see acid tankers for sulphuric and nitric acid arriving (although I suspect most acid was handled in carboys inside the factory areas). As the site will be in a remote location the railway company might lay on a workers special, I believe the last four wheeled coaches running on main lines in the UK were used for such workers trains in Wales in the 1960s.
The buildings were rather varied in character, from the photographs I have seen there was very little general clutter, just empty space with buildings, small tank farms and huts scattered across it.
The pre-war Nobel works had a large main building, with associated pipe and girder work and two large chimneys, after the war this was replaced by a larger, lower, industrial building, but on the dispersed site were many smaller buildings generally made of lightweight materials (the modern version of such buildings are designed to turn to dust in the event of an explosion).
Those buildings where the more dangerous jobs were done often had thick tapering walls, made by setting up a wooden frame, filling this with earth and covering it with sheets of corrugated metal (invented in 1825). The roof was flat and usually covered with turf (just to hold it in place). In the event of an explosion the walls were intended to remain in place and the roof was supposed to blow off, reducing the affected area. The building sat on a brick or concrete pad, the walls were about six feet thick at the bottom, three feet thick at the top and the corrugated metal sheets were held on by thick timber beams bolted to the wooden frame. The door was usually just an opening in the side extending right up to the roof and the narrow gauge line often ran into the building itself (to minimise the risk of people dropping things).
Hut with metal sheathed blast walls
The blast-walled huts are very characteristic of an explosives works, they were introduced before World War One and have remained standard up to the present day.
However not all the buildings were so substantial, there were several standard brick buildings housing the offices and labs and at many works (notably the fireworks company sites) many buildings were be simple wooden huts, often rather ramshackle in appearance.
Where there were several buildings close to one another there was usually a blast wall, roughly the height of the building walls, between them. These were thick earth banks or berms of similar proportion to the blast walls of the hut shown above.
A water tower seems to have been a common adjunct, a standard model railway type would suffice for this, the Nobel works in Scotland had a pair of large wooden hooped water towers, mounted in timber trestles (these resemble the American railway water towers, so a US outline kit without the hinged filling pipe would serve). The sketch below is based on a photo taken in about 1900, it shows the twin water tanks and the compressed air reservoir used at the Nobel factory, all colours are guesswork (the odds are that everything shown was black, or very dark grey).
Nobel water towers and the compressed air reservoir
A friend tells of taking a train journey where the line ran beside a fireworks factory, the site consisted of a number of wooden huts, surrounded by berms. The buildings were very close to the track, so adding such a factory close by the line on a layout would be prototypical.
The reason it stuck in his mind was that a couple of the huts had evidently burned down at some point, leaving a blackened rectangular base in the bay. You might include a single burned down hut, but do not over do it, accidents at explosives factories are generally bad news, even where no one is injured. If there are more than a couple the firm can go broke. Accidents are impossible to avoid, in one case a warning sign badly secured to a wall fell down, landing on some detonators stacked on the floor beneath and setting them off. In another more serious instance it is believed a worker used the wrong type of metal tool, causing a spark that ignited the explosives being worked on.
Shells and cartriges
The military used a small explosive charge, typically mercury fulminate, enclosed in a 'percussion cap' and attached to the back end of the shell case to fire the round. The factories making these were sometimes in built up areas although most were set outside the towns. The example shown is based on a sketch of the Kynoch rifle cartridge factory in Witton near Birmingham in the mid 19th century. As can be seen there were no distinctive buildings associated with this work and the factory was not initially rail connected.
Cartridge factory
By the end of the 19th century this had become the largest ammunition factory in the UK, the core buildings remained as shown but the open land in and around them was now covered in more, broadly similar, structures with another tall chimney had been set up on the site close by the rearmost building shown and a number of bank-walled magazines (see above for illustration) in the field behind and to the right. By 1900 the works had a railway siding run from a line skirting the far side of the works, but I did not find any reference to any tracks laid inside the works area.
For artillery shells, and at the larger Royal Armouries and Ordnance factories a rail connection was standard but internally these generally used their own narrow gauge system.
Explosives & Ammunition Manufacturers
This summary is still under construction
Nobel Industries Limited (later ICI Explosives Division)
The British Dynamite Co. Ltd. was formed in 1870 by Alfred Nobel to produce and market his new explosive 'dynamite'. The factory was set up at Ardeer, on the coast at Ayrshire, production beginning in 1873. In 1876, following Nobel's discovery of blasting gelatine, Nobel's Explosives Co. Ltd. was formed, comprising Ardeer and also Westquarter Works for detonator manufacture.
In 1918 several important concerns were merged with Nobel's Explosives Co. Ltd. to form a new company called Explosives Trades Ltd., later renamed Nobel Industries Ltd. The new combined firm produced blasting gelatine, gelignite, ballistite, guncotton, and cordite and 'safety fuse' as well as several of the 'spin offs' from the original companies.
The firms involved included Kynoch Ltd. (mainly making cartridges and explosives but with several 'spin off' industries as discussed below), Curtis & Harvey (explosives), Eley (ammunition) and some metal processing firms such as Kings Norton Metal Co. (brass and copper strip rolling and rod extrusion as well as interests in coin minting and ammunition) and Birmingham Metals and Munitions Co. (rolled copper and brass and solid-drawn brass cartridge cases).
This company was one of the original members of ICI when it was formed in 1926, becoming ICI Explosives Division. In 1948 the Division was renamed the Nobel Division because by this time it was producing a range of materials which, although logically allied to explosives manufacture, were not them-selves explosive in character. This included a wide range of industrial nitrocelluloses and a range of acids, chiefly sulphuric acid, together with a number of heavy and fine chemicals. Following the de-merger of ICI in the early 1990s this company was purchased by Inabata & Company (a Japanese trading firm).
Fig ___ Nobel Industries logo
Cooke's Explosives Ltd.
With a works at Penrhyndeudraeth, North Wales, this company was controlled by ICI Nobel Division by the 1950s.
Kynoch & Co
George Kynoch became the formal owner of a cartridge making company at Witton near Birmingham in the mid 19th century (the sketch of the Lion Works cartridge works above shows the works a few years later). The firm expanded by setting up (or buying out) works producing the materials they used, they owned a separate brass rolling mill in Birmingham for example. Mt Kynoch was subsequently forced out by the company board but the name was retained.
In the 1890s the firm buys an explosives firm in Yorkshire (Shortridge & Wright), they also added a Siemens type steel plant and a brass rolling mill to the Witton works and set up a new factory in Ireland (for which they purchased two ships). They were offering gelignite, dynamite and 'Kynite' explosives and things went so well they built a new site in Essex, christened "Kynochtown".
By the end of the century they were also making bicycles and soap (as a by product of the glycerine manufacture for explosives). In the early 20th century they bought out several firms in Birmingham, including Hadley & Shorthouse (nails and brass and copper tubes and wire) and the Forward Engineering Company which adds gas engines to their existing engineering range (which included machine guns and roller bearings). They also expanded into the paper making business, opening a factory in Ireland. They then had a falling out with the UK Government over quality and hived off the Irish plant (renamed Irish Manufacturers Ltd.) but by this time they had set up an explosives plant in South Africa which was working hard to meet the demand from the gold mines.
World War One saw a prodigious effort by the company, which made over three and a half thousand million rifle and machine gun cartridges. After the war came the merger to form Nobel Industries, and under that regime Kinoch slowly transformed itself from primarily a cartridge and explosives firm into a cartridges and engineering company. In the 1920s the Eley cartridge works at Waltham Abbey was closed down and production centered at Lion Works (the Eley name was preserved by renaming all Nobel sporting ammunition 'Eley-Kynoch').
Following the formation of ICI in 1926 the board decided the firm should concentrate on metals, the name Kynoch was dropped with the formation of ICI Metals Ltd in 1929. The hard times of the 1930s saw a lot of reductions but the second world war brought a massive demand for the company products.
In the post war era ICI pioneered a range of 'new metals' for engineering, starting with titanium (a melting plant was set up at Witton and fabrication techniques were developed at Kynoch Works), this material was in demand for the nuclear engineering, chemical plant and other industries. Three years later it is joined by a second new metal, zirconium and after that hafnium, niobium, vanadium and, most demanding of all, beryllium (which required a wholly new factory).
ICI Metals Division joined forces with a former competitor, Yorkshire Copper Works, to form Yorkshire Imperial Metals Ltd. in 1958 which absorbs the businesses at Kirkby, Smethwick, Carolina Port (Dundee) and Landore. and in the mid 1960s this became Imperial Metals Industries. Although the company continued to produce Eley Kynoch sporting cartridges (using plastic for the cases from the 1960s) it them morphed fully into a high tech metals based company.
Burrowite Explosives Ltd.
Explosives and Chemical Products Ltd.
The Colliery Explosives Co. Ltd.
Thames Ammunition Works Ltd.
The Yorkshire Electric Detonator Co. Ltd.
British Fireworks Manufacturers
Most smaller firework manufacturers closed down in the 1970s, leaving just the larger Brocks and Standard Fireworks.
Brock's Explosives Ltd, more commonly known as Brock's Fireworks, originated in Swaffham, Norfolk, from where it expanded into its main site in Hemel Hemstead in the late 1950s (production moved to a Scottish site near Sanquhar in the mid 1970s). This firm was noted for laying on free shows for underprivileged children, leading World War Two pilots to refer to successful bombing missions as a 'Brock's Benefit'.
Brock's was taken over by Standard Fireworks in 1988 at which time the Scottish factory was closed as production was concentrated at the Standard works in Huddersfield. The Scottish factory was bought and used to make military pyrotechnics for some years.
Standard Fireworks were based in Huddersfield. In 1998 they were taken over by the Chinese company 'Black Cat Fireworks', at which time all production was moved to China, the Huddersfield site becoming the UK marketing and distribution centre.
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