The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a disaster on the Kent Marshes

The Great Explosion

Author: Brian Dillon

ISBN-13: 978-1844882816

Publisher: Penguin

Guideline Price: £18.99

In January 1946, a year after his rescue from Auschwitz, the Italian writer-chemist Primo Levi worked in a paint factory outside Turin. The factory, one of the largest of its kind in Italy, was a subsidiary of the Nobel-Montecatini industrial explosives company headquartered in Milan. Levi’s accommodation was spartan, with a view over the Piedmontese mountains and a stillness that surely was wonderful after the shriek and brutality of the Nazi camp. The SS had requisitioned the factory during the war, and by occupying it now Levi felt in some measure vindicated for the offence done to him as a Jew. In their retreat from northern Italy the Germans had blown up the ammonium-nitrate plant, and, along with American bombs, this had left much of the factory a twisted wreck.

I was reminded of the factory's wartime destruction while reading The Great Explosion, about the catastrophic detonation of a munition works on the Kent marshes in the spring of 1916. One survivor recalled: "My coat was entirely blown to pieces, my waistcoat torn in halves, and parts of my trousers were torn to rags . . . I was covered with falling mud blown from the crater."

I would have liked to have read Brian Dillon’s book when I visited Levi’s chemical-explosives factory back in the 1990s while researching his biography. It is an evocative, well written reconstruction – part history, part travelogue – of a Great War explosion that left 108 people dead and as many wounded.

Scant coverage

Not surprisingly, the incident received scant press coverage at the time: morale had to be kept buoyant on the home front. With a truffle- hound’s nose for a good story, however, Dillon gleans what details he can from archives and rare survivor accounts. Situated in a landscape flat and dream-like as a Dutch painting, the “archipelago” of Kent gunpowder works is today strewn with buried shrapnel and ordnance from the blast. Dillon (who moved to Kent from Dublin in 1995) has a WG Sebald-like gift for interrogating the landscape for its dismal past. Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford and other writers associated with Edwardian-era Kent are pertinently evoked.

The blast occurred a couple of kilometres outside the Kent market town of Faversham. Magazine depots full of TNT, guncotton (nitrocellulose) and ammonium nitrate combusted as a result of a fire, sending human limbs flying in all directions. Afterwards the factory complex was seen to be inundated in a wave of mud and debris. “Something terrible had occurred on the marshes,” Dillon writes.

Dillon (who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London) provides a fascinating history along the way of gunpowder’s evolution in the art of war. The Chinese used it in the 10th century, before the Europeans, in the shape of saltpetre-packed rockets. Gunpowder mixtures today vary greatly in their lethal force. Guncotton, a highly volatile substance, had been manufactured on the flatlands outside Faversham since the 1860s. Mixed with nitroglycerine (one of the most explosive compounds) it forms the main constituent of blasting explosive. Invented in Turin in 1847, nitroglycerine was responsible for much of the Kent damage.

Twenty years later, in 1867, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel patented the nitroglycerine-based dynamite. (Is it not ironic that a peace prize should be named after him?) Nitroglycerine was a Nobel-Montecatini speciality; Levi's short story Gun-cotton Tights tells how a factory worker darned herself a pair of flammable stockings during the German occupation.

Situated north of Faversham, the gigantic Cotton Powder factory at Uplees was at the of the 1916 explosion. So great was the blast that windows across the Thames estuary in Southend were shattered and tremors felt as far away as Norwich. An attempt was made to bring the fire under control, but the fire brigade quickly realized that the situation was hopeless. A crater 40m across and 7m deep had been left in what is still the worst disaster in Britain’s explosives industry.

Mud and carnage

In diligently researched pages Dillon likens the explosion’s aftermath to the spectacle of mud and carnage along the 1914-18 Western Front. Through poison gas, starvation, gunpowder and machine-gun fire the first World War killed and wounded more than 35 million people, both military and civilian. The figure is so monstrous, so unimaginable, that it numbs. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out drama of futility and wasted human lives. The Kent explosion, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, was thick with foreboding of still greater destruction, heralding a new age of atrocity and diminished individual responsibility for it.

As the conflict wore on, sympathy for victims was increasingly diminished by physical distance. Artillerymen were only dimly aware of the civilians and soldiers they targeted. If they could have seen the human devastation, how might they have reacted? Politicians, ideologues and army generals, by delegating unpleasantness down a chain of command, were able to ignore the moral consequences of their work. In Dillon’s view the explosion that convulsed Kent in April 1916 was kept a secret from the general public for political reasons.

With mixed results, Dillon intrudes details from his own life. Walks and cycles he took in the Kent edgelands around the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey provide an Iain Sinclair-like mapping of alien terrains. His reflections on landscape recall the British film-maker Patrick Keiller's recent book The View from the Train, which documents urban dereliction in London and its hinterlands. Among the detergent-tainted gravel pits and disused factories of contemporary Kent is an overlooked realm of vanished industrial endeavour, whose historical significance should not, in Dillon's view, be forgotten.

Unfortunately, readers are likely to find some elements of the personal detail irksome. Early on, Dillon lets on that he becomes nervous while filling out research forms in libraries and archives. “Then there is the humiliation of having the ordering process explained to me more than once.” Humiliation? How is this relevant to the story he has to tell?

The Great Explosion is at its best when it dispenses with personal revelation. The presence of self-consciously literary adjectives ("rufous", "plashing", "estuarine") do not detract from a work of real elegiac seriousness that goes to the heart of a case of human loss and destruction in England's sinister pastures green.

Ian Thomson's books include Primo Levi: A Biography