On 19 January 1917 at 6:52pm, an explosion rocked Silvertown killing 73 people, injuring more than 400, destroying 900 homes, damaging around 70,000 properties and killing one horse.
The blast was reported to have been heard around 100 miles away. An investigation into the incident highlighted a number of dangerous safety issues at the munitions factory but the full report was not available to the public until the 1950s. This silence led to a number of local conspiracy theories on what caused the blast including German sabotage.
Britain had been fighting in World War I for two years and was facing a high explosives shortage. In 1915, the War Office ordered the manufacturing of TNT in an empty space of the Brunner-Mond Chemical business, a factory situated in a populated area.
A fire started in the factory on Friday evening, after most of the workforce had left, this fact no doubt limited the final death toll. Employees, firefighters and police officers were quickly on the scene after the explosion which killed 69 people immediately. It took until Sunday afternoon to put the fire out. The Minister of Munitions visited the area on Saturday, followed by the Prime Minister on Sunday.
In memory of those killed, Brunner-Mond erected a four sided stone pillar outside the factory site on North Woolwich Road in the 1920s.
The memorial also remembers those lives lost in service during the two world wars . The memorial was later moved closer to the river Thames where surviving family members met on 17 January 2017 to mark the 100th anniversary of this devastating incident.
To find out more about the explosion and local history visit Eastside Community Heritage at www.hidden-histories.org and for more on the history of Brunner Mond visit their Twitter page @bmhistory .
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