Faversham explosives industry

On its outskirts were low-lying areas ideal for the culture of alder and willow to provide charcoal, one of the three key gunpowder ingredients.

The stream fed into a tidal creek where sulphur, another key ingredient, could be imported, and the finished product loaded for dispatch to Thames-side magazines.

At this time the British government was buying its supplies from the private sector, but the quality was often poor, and in 1759 it decided it needed its own plant.

In the 1680s a second factory was started by Huguenot asylum-seekers alongside another stream about two kilometres (1.2 mi) west of the town (at grid reference TR001623).

Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), then the owners, believing that war might break out with Germany, and realised that Faversham would then become vulnerable to air attack or possibly invasion.

Guncotton was not made again in Faversham until 1873, when the Cotton Powder Company, independent of the gunpowder factories, opened a new plant on a remote site near Uplees, about four km northwest of the town centre.

Deliveries of raw materials — cotton waste and sulphuric and nitric acids — could readily be made, and the product was easily dispatched by water.

The Davington light railway track was lifted; its three steam locomotives found new homes in South America, where at least one is thought to survive.

At 14:20 on Sunday 2 April 1916, a huge explosion ripped through the gunpowder mill at Uplees, near Faversham, when a store of 200 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) was detonated following some empty sacks catching fire.

The previous month had been wet but had ended with a short dry spell so that by that weekend the weather was "glorious", providing perfect conditions for heat-generated combustion.

Although recognising the need for some censorship, it referred to the reply given in Parliament to an appropriate question as "mystifying and ambiguous" and called for the fullest precautions to be implemented to "prevent another calamity of the kind" occurring again.

Although not the first such disaster at Faversham's historic munitions works, the April 1916 blast is recorded as "the worst ever in the history of the UK explosives industry", and yet the full picture is still somewhat confused.

And considering the quantity of explosive chemicals stored at the works – with one report indicating that a further 3,000 tons remained in nearby sheds unaffected – it is remarkable, and a tribute to those who struggled against the fire, that so much of the nation's munitions were prevented from contributing further to the catastrophe.

The Secretary of State for War, Earl Kitchener, had written to the management of the CPC in 1914, and it is presumed the ELC, informing the workforce on: "the importance of the government work upon which they [were] engaged ...

I should like all engaged by your company to know that it is fully recognised that they, in carrying out the great work of supplying munitions of war, are doing their duty for their King and Country, equally with those who have joined the Army for active service in the field".

The Nitroglycerin blasting cartridges produced by the factory were marketed under the names "Klorex" and "Perklorex", and then in 1931 the company changed its name to Heaters Ltd after changing over to production of the far safer Cardox blasting system, which was patented in 1931 by David Hodge and Cardox (Great Britain) Ltd.[4] This used a large reusable steel cartridge containing a detonator and a heating chemical (energiser), and the rest of the space is filled with liquid carbon dioxide.

The energiser, known as Heatox B, was involved in the only fatal explosion on the site, on 25 March 1939 when the manager Mr J Lapraik and Messrs E Harris and A Boorman were killed.

In 2001 Long Airdox was sold to Deutsche Bergbau-Technik (DBT) which is owned by RAG Coal International AG, based in Essen, Germany.