The story is an interesting one. Gunpowder had to be manufactured. In 1916 one of the places dedicated to the dangerous and difficult task was remote Kent. A fire broke out and led to a series of huge explosions. Deaths and injuries were not widely specified at the time for reasons of morale, but 109 men and boys were killed.
The explosives industry was a necessary, profitable but immensely dangerous one. It took the 1654 Delft explosion — in which Carel Fabritius was killed — for society to realise that explosives should probably not be manufactured in cities. The Kent disaster took place a couple of miles from Faversham, and the works had been built at a safe distance from the town precisely to limit the number of casualties in case of disaster. An incidental effect was that when the explosion did occur, it devastated an especially evocative and lonely part of the marshes, teeming with wildlife.
The search for a stable explosive material continued into the age of dynamite and TNT. By the first world war, the manufacture of explosives involved female labour as well as male — though in fact no women were killed in the 1916 disaster, which took place on a Sunday, when they were not expected to work.
The explosives works concerned was under a great deal of pressure to increase production. The Inspector of Explosives had, only that week, paid an unannounced visit, and had noticed that the Ministry of Munitions had delivered material far in excess of what could be handled, including 50 excess tons of TNT. On the night of Saturday 1 April, a small fire had already broken out and been extinguished between a boiler house and a TNT store, caused by sparks. Around midday the following day, a worker noticed that some bags piled up against building 833 were on fire.
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