Simon Ings

Master of disguise: the British genius who concealed whole Allied battle lines

Frank Brock, unsung hero of the first world war was James Bond and Q in one

Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up in the Regent’s Canal, close to London Zoo. The crew of three were killed outright, scores of houses were badly damaged, the explosion could be heard 25 miles away, and ‘dead fish rained from the sky in the West End’. 

This is a book about the weird, if obvious, intersection between firework manufacture and warfare. It is, ostensibly, the biography of Frank Brock, a hero of the first world war. And if it were the work of more ambitious literary hands, Brock would have been all you got: his heritage, his school adventures, his international career as a showman, his inventions, his war work, his violent death. Enough for a whole book, surely?

But Gunpowder and Glory is not a ‘literary’ work, by which I mean it is neither selfconscious nor overwrought. Instead, Henry Macrory (who anyway has already proved his literary chops with his 2018 biography of the swindler Whitaker Wright) has opted for what looks like a very light touch here, assembling and ordering the anecdotes and reflections of Brock’s grandson Harry Smee about his family, their business as pyrotechnical artists and, finally, about Frank, his illustrious forebear.

I suspect a lot of sweat went into such artlessness, and it’s paid off, creating a book that reads like fascinating dinner conversation. I felt I was discovering Brock the way Harry had as a child, looking into his mother’s ‘ancient oak chests, filled with papers, medals, newspapers, books, photographs, an Intelligence-issue knuckleduster and pieces of Zeppelin and Zeppelin bomb shrapnel’.

Frank’s artificial fogs concealed whole British fleets, entire Allied battle lines

For eight generations, the Brock family produced pyrotechnic spectaculars of a unique kind. Typical set-piece displays in the 18th century included ‘Jupiter discharging lightning and thunder, two gladiators combating with fire and sword, and Neptune finely carv’d, seated in his chair drawn by two sea horses on fire-wheels, spearing a dolphin’.

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