The Ashton-under-Lyne munitions explosion occurred on 13 June 1917 when the Hooley Hill Rubber and Chemical Works caught fire and exploded. The factory was engaged in the production of TNT for the war effort and was completely destroyed. Forty-three people were killed and most of the surrounding area was left devastated.
Contents
Preface
The Hooley Hill Rubber and Chemical Company was founded in 1914 by Sylvain Dreyfus and Lucien Gaisman. Dreyfus was born in 1866, in Alsace, France and was the nephew of Charles Dreyfus, founder of the Clayton Aniline Company. Gaisman was a Swiss national from Basle. The company established its first factory in Stamford Road, Audenshaw which was followed later by another factory at Chatham Street, Edgeley, Stockport.
War was declared against Germany on 4 August 1914 and the following day the company approached the War Office to offer its services. At first the company was rebuffed by the War Office, which later relented due to the chronic shortage of TNT. The total British output of TNT prior to the First World War had amounted to around twenty tons per annum. A sustained artillery barrage could easily expend many times that amount in a single day.
On 28 October 1914 an offer was made to the company to build a plant capable of producing around five tons of TNT per week. Following further negotiations a contract was signed on 26 November 1914.
The government awarded the company a grant of £10,000 towards the cost of erecting the plant. A former cotton mill in William Street, Ashton-under-Lyne, next to the canal was acquired. The building with its substantial brick walls and heavy concrete floors was deemed suitable for adaptation as a chemical plant. Its location however was far from ideal, being as it was in the midst of a built up area which included housing, schools, textile mills and a couple of gasometers. The first deliveries of raw TNT were scheduled to begin in March 1915. The raw TNT was sent to various other government run factories to be refined and crystallised. Production at the site quickly ramped up to around ten tons per week. By 1917, the capacity of the plant had been increased to around twenty five tons per week.
The accident
On the day of the accident, Wednesday 13 June 1917, it was business as usual at the works in Ashton-under-Lyne. Ironically, Lucien Gaisman was on his way back from a meeting in London to discuss the future of the company as an explosives manufacturer. A government report had recommended dispensing with smaller, less economic producers of explosives such as the Hooley Hill Rubber and Chemical Company.
Later that afternoon, Sylvain Dreyfus and a young chemist called Nathan Daniels were in the nitrating section of the works when the contents of number nine nitrator became unstable. Despite a frantic effort led by Dreyfus to bring the reaction under control, the contents of the vessel boiled over and set fire to the wooden staging around it. The fire quickly took hold, spreading to the roof of the building. The workers at the plant fought valiantly to bring the blaze under control, but it was all to no avail. Eventually the flames spread to a storage area where five tons of TNT packed into kegs was stored. A desperate call was made to the local police station for assistance at around 16.20pm and a few minutes later the works was torn apart by a colossal explosion. Most of the workers on site were killed instantly, including Dreyfus whose dismembered body was found in the factory yard. The factory building had been obliterated and two large craters scarred the site. The larger crater where the kegs of TNT had been stored, was approximately 90 ft by 36 ft across and 5 ft deep. The smaller, shallow crater was just below where the dryer and setting trays used for the final preparation of the TNT had been. Two gasometers in a nearby street were ripped open by the blast, sending a massive fireball hundreds of feet into the air. Hundreds of buildings in the surrounding area were damaged, leaving many of the nearby houses uninhabitable.
The casualties included forty-three people dead, over a hundred and twenty hospitalised and several hundred with minor injuries. Amongst the dead were twenty-three employees of the Hooley Hill Rubber and Chemical Works, along with eleven adults and nine children from the surrounding area.