The Silvertown Explosion

The Brunner Mond factory before the explosion

The Silvertown explosion occurred ninety-one years ago today, it might seen a strange subject for a posting but I was reading about it again recently and it's an interesting story that is worth re-telling.

I first became aware of the incident about thirty five years ago when my Dad took my brother and me on a trip round the Royal Docks. This was years before the regeneration that started in the 80's began and the whole area was a mixture of decay, past glories and wind swept quays - and a few big ships. We had gone to see one of the White Star lines container ships, basically because my Dad had built a wooden model of it and we wanted to see the real thing.

There are some bare facts about the explosion that when told to a twelve year old and his younger brother seemed amazing and difficult to grasp, now as a forty seven year old they are still amazing and difficult to grasp - this is simply because I have no reference points in my life to compare the facts with. The closest I have got to an explosion was just before Christmas when Janis, Nathalie and myself saw an unexploded shell being blown-up near Hurst Castle - that was a six inch shell and made quite a large bang, to compare that with the explosion at Silvertown would be like comparing an ants fart to a twenty one gun salute (ah, I've just remembered I have heard one of those at Horseguards Parade, anyway I digress).

The explosion itself took place at a munitions factory in the Silvertown area of East London. Silvertown isn't really much of place these days and it is only really famous for two things, the 1917 explosion and the fact that Tate & Lyle built their sugar refinery there. Anyway, back on the 19th January 1917 a fire broke out at the factory belonging to Brunner Mond and approximately 50 tons of TNT were ignited. The TNT was being stored in covered railway wagons for transporting, the explosion destroyed the whole of the building, neighbouring buildings and the Silvertown Fire Station - the destruction of this building leading to obvious consequences.

The Factory after the explosion

Now the immediate result of the explosion was bad enough but the massive explosion caused debris to be pushed up into the air and what goes up must come down. Unfortunately, in a scene that I think can be quite easily visualised by anybody who has ever watched a Tom and Jerry cartoon, red-hot chunks of rubble causing were spewed into the air and one of them came down in Greenwich, across the river and a couple of miles to the South west, on a gas container and ignited the 200,000 cubic metres of gas in the container creating a giant fireball.

The human tragedy was that sixty nine people died instantly, the number would rise to seventy three and over 400 were injured. In the immediate locality 900 properties were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, there were almost 70,000 properties damaged across London and the Home Counties by the explosion. Considering the size of the blast the number killed was very low, this is because the explosion took place at a time of day (6:52 p.m) when the factories were almost empty of workers and the houses that sustained the heaviest damage were mainly empty on their upper floors.

The explosion itself was heard up to one hundred miles away, people heard it in Guildford to the south west and near Norwich in Norfolk. The fire itself could be seen in parts of south Kent.

There is a monument to those who died in the explosion and it is situated by the side of North Woolwich Road, directly under the Docklands Light Railway and outside the entrance to Stone Centre or Tile Centre.

It's worth remembering, in these days when we feel that as individuals our opinion does not carry any weight in environmental issues, that neither the company nor the local population had wanted the production of TNT to take place at the factory. Brunner Mond had been producing caustic soda at the factory until 1912 when they closed the site. In 1915, as part of the war effort, the company came under pressure from the governments 'Explosives Supply Department' led by Lord Moulton to put the plant back into production, this time purifying TNT. So despite the reluctance of the company and the high population density surrounding the area, production began in September 1915.

As a further footnote the land that the factory stood on has never been built on, despite the redevelopment of surrounding areas, it has only been used recently as a Car Park, having stood as bare waste ground for nearly ninety years. A new factory was built in the 1940's on adjacent land but it was felt that to build a factory on the site which had been responsible for so many people's deaths was in bad taste.