The Killing Factories World War I at Home

These lethal shells are being filled with high explosives

at a critical point in World War I.

They were definitely working flat out

to produce as many shells as they could.

To halt production would have spelled catastrophe for the troops.

You can see why it happened.

You can see the pressure on people to produce the shells.

For reasons still unclear,

the building where high explosives were mixed blew up.

The whole of the place was in a state of chaos, people screaming...

I looked towards Chilwell

and I saw the wall of black smoke rising to the sky.

The explosion on that hot summer's evening killed and injured

more people than anywhere else on the Home Front in a single incident.

Vital war work was brought to a standstill

only while they buried their dead.

And to tell the story, we have film of the factory,

just discovered in a garden shed.

A mile from Chilwell, the station at Attenborough

had its platform extended to cope with the huge munitions workforce -

around 10,000 men and women by 1918.

They got off the train, many of them here at Attenborough,

and they were starting work at six o'clock.

12 hours lay in front of them,

handling very dangerous explosives,

because this was the Home Front.

Modern warfare demands artillery shells.

Today, production is efficient and safe.

It's also adaptable to cope with unpredicted demand.

There's an extra capacity, the third shift, if you like,

that's available to produce higher volumes.

-Are you ready for war?

-Yeah.

I mean, the surety of supply

is one of the most important things to the MoD,

and having investment in facilities like this

enhances the surety of supply.

But at the start of the First World War the military leaders

were expecting a mobile conflict, with cavalry charges,

not trenches and machine guns.

There were British officers who visited the American Civil War,

in the 1860s, where trench warfare was around

and machine guns were around. They considered that to be an aberration.

We thought it would be a much more

open war, as the Boer War was,

where there'd be a lot more movement.

The shell shortage led to a political crisis at home in 1915

and David Lloyd George became head of the new Munitions Ministry.

He grasped the scale of the crisis,

and that the war would be lost without shells.

The Ministry of Munitions is set up

and one of the first things they do within a year is they create

73 new ammunition factories that made everything from

raw explosive to empty shells and then the national filling factories,

which Chilwell was one - Number 6 Filling Factory -

that married up the empty shell and the raw explosive

to fill high explosive shells.

Brought in to help was the unlikely figure of Viscount Chetwynd.

Godfrey John Boyle was 51, and had been a cowboy in Texas.

A sheriff. A pioneer. But also a civil engineer.

His granddaughter is Philippa Luard.

They were also building bridges out there, being engineers

as well as cooks and cowboys.

In the early 1900s - this is 1906 -

he was breeding Dexter cattle, Berkshire pigs.

In the late summer of 1915,

Lord Chetwynd set out from Nottingham

and found a site for his shell filling factory at Chilwell.

He sketched his design for the plant.

It was not too close to a main rail head,

so he couldn't blow the railway up, but he had access to it.

There weren't too many people living there, so if it blew up

there weren't going to be devastating casualties.

The land was on the main Nottingham Derby road, which he had rerouted,

and built the shell filling factory in fields below a wooded hillside.

He was not going to be tied by red tape.

Anybody who tried to interfere with him was seen off very firmly.

And that's how he was able to build Chilwell so quickly.

Lord Chetywnd also realised that he needed to employ women

because so many skilled men had enlisted.

8th of January they filled the first shell. It's not long.

In this vast space, the filled shell store,

the ammunition was ready and waiting to go to the front.

Women worked here and were filmed for propaganda

to emphasise their importance in the process.

Something never seen before World War I -

a woman in a boiler suit. Because it was practical -

the long skirts got caught in all the equipment

and they're putting on rubber boots

because people were terrified there would be a spark of any sort.

You got out a wooden mallet. You just bashed it.

This was a shell heading for the front that...was going to explode.

They were being patriotic, they were doing their bit for the country.

Huge incentive to these girls

who've never, ever been asked to do anything before like this.

They felt they were part of the whole effort

to keep the men at the front

and keep them supplied with weapons and ammunition.

The long shifts caused problems. Many women were reported to pass out

after 12 hours continuous work without eating.

Lord Chetwynd, mindful of efficient production, came up with a solution.

His staff occasionally fainted, which was very dangerous.

He sacked them on day one and on day two he took them on again

at a reduced wage.

But he gave them a free breakfast

and they eat as much as they liked.

Chilwell also had its own band, which gave lunchtime concerts and,

like other factories, had its own ladies football team.

They had sports fields, they had a band, they had amusements

as well as work. He knew that was essential.

In the north-east of England, shell casings were made at Birtley,

another munitions community which grew up for a different reason.

Only recently was the original factory reduced to rubble.

But when it stood in 1916 it was uniquely staffed by Belgians.

Most were injured soldiers,

brought across the Channel to help the war effort.

Their homes were purpose built on a self contained estate.

It was a very strange situation.

Nobody could actually define what it was.

One writer said it was "Not quite a part of Belgium,

"but certainly not a total part of Britain."

And it was referred to as a "colony"?

Yes, the Belgians called it their colony.

It was a garden city.

It was neatly laid out with rows of houses - they were called the "huts"

by the locals - all with gas,

water, electric light

and indoor loos.

They had their own shop and it still stands.

One of only two buildings left of what was called Elisabethville.

These men, though,

85% of them were wounded,

therefore somehow incapacitated,

produced over 2.5 million shells

at a rate far better than any other munitions factory in the land.

The shells casings were sent by rail from Birtley to be filled with TNT

made in the mixing house at Chilwell.

Bob Foster was its foreman.

You've got the TNT coming up from one place

and the nitrate of ammonia coming up from another.

Onto the conveyer vans.

When your machines were full, you'd drop them into your mixer,

which was the floor below.

Lord Chetwynd's Chilwell was by far the biggest mixing operation

in the country. He ensured that TNT was produced on a massive scale.

Chetwynd's technique fascinates even today's experts.

Taking basic machinery that was used for crushing coal or milling flour

and putting together a slightly Heath Robinson construction

to create two separate milling plants -

one that milled TNT, one that milled ammonium nitrate -

ladle the dry mix into a shell

and then a hydraulic press would then press it down.

I've seen in some instances women with wooden mallets

actually doing this to get the powder down.

They'd knock it down and it created that pocket, which is where

the explosive is going to sit and where the fuse'll sit eventually

when it gets ready to fit with its fuse.

The Nottingham plant produced most of the high explosive shells

fired at the commencement of the Battle of the Somme.

Despite the huge barrage, there were many duds,

landing in the mud among the barbed wire and failing to destroy it.

The Germans were able to dig in and resist the attack

at a cost on both sides of tens of thousands of lives.

There's evidence the government knew about the fuse problem

in the months before the Somme.

Right about 1917,

new fuses came in and two things changed the game for the artillery.

One was the ability to better predict

how and where the shell would end up,

because we had calculated how barrels had begun to wear.

So we could time time-fused to actually have them

function above the ground. And the direct action fuses,

the fuses that actually required to hit something to set the fuse off,

became much more sensitive through the incorporation of new technology.

The Munitionettes were the poster girls of the war effort,

frequently photographed and filmed.

Production hit extraordinary heights but how effective were the shells?

This is an example of a high explosive shell used to produce

a large quantity of fragments from when it explodes.

It was filled with high explosive, usually in this case it was

filled with lidite, one of the earlier forms of high explosive.

And when it functions, all that fragmentation

is created from the actual body of the shell itself.

That's a very nasty sight, isn't it? Just...bits.

Yes, and scattered over quite a wide area as well.

So, as you can imagine, those smaller bits,

which will move at very high velocity, quite high speed,

you know, have got a lot of energy,

when those hit you are going to cause horrible injuries.

-And they're hot as well, aren't they?

-And hot, yes.

Shells meant danger at home as well, and not just the risk of explosion.

They wear masks and gloves.

At the time they thought this would prevent any problems.

These were girls who were known to us now as "canary girls."

Because their skin turned yellow.

And their hair went a sort of orangey colour.

And they were absorbing poison.

And several of them died.

They got sick quite often but such was the rate of work that

they'd be back soon after a couple of days rest.

Throughout the war across the country there were huge blasts

at munitions factories, heard for miles, the night sky like daylight.

It was said you could read the newspaper by the light of some

factories that burned all night.

What was left? Very little.

Oh, goodness. There were explosions.

There were accidents.

And here they are in all their formal mob caps

and little badges and... munitions dresses.

At the funeral.

To reinforce confidence in the factories,

and underline their national significance, King George V

ventured into the plant at Chilwell, a proud Lord Chetwynd at his side.

The visit of the King to Chilwell,

which was in the Illustrated London News.

"The Duke of Connaught has his spurs removed

"before entering the danger zone."

By the summer of 1918, the tide of war was turning,

and the British called for more shells for a final major push.

It's increasingly more and more explosives being used,

much more artillery being used to try and overcome the deadlock

of trench warfare.

At that time, 17-year-old Alec Clarke was working at Chilwell.

He said they were working continuously,

as there was this big push or battle going on.

And I don't know whether they did work 24 hours, I'm not sure on that.

But they were definitely working flat-out to produce as many shells

as they could.

The 1st of July 1918 was a hot summer evening.

All of a sudden the ground fairly shuddered underneath me.

EXPLOSION

You couldn't see nothing to start with cos it was

so dense with smoke and choked with powder.

You were all as black as tinkers.

And here are some horrifying pictures

of the mixing house explosion.

And what could be worse than to blow up the mixing house,

for heaven's sake?

I rang up Lord Chetwynd. Be about ten to quarter past seven.

And told him what had happened, the mixing house had blown out.

And he couldn't really believe it at the time.

So, he said, "Are you sure?"

I said, "Yes, milord, absolutely."

He said, "Oh, my God, I'm on my way."

My Aunt Eve, his daughter,

she was about ten at the time of the explosion.

She was in bed

and he came into her room, stroked her hair

and kissed her and said nothing and went out again.

And she knew something terrible had happened.

She'd obviously heard the blast.

A camera captures some of the Chilwell workforce,

many of whom would not survive the explosion.

139 died and hundreds were injured.

David Clarke's father was in the power station.

The whole of the roof of the building had come in.

The machines then were racing away due to the loss of load.

When he came round he'd been thrown on the floor.

And he was covered in bits of debris from the building and the roof.

And he was completely uninjured

but there was nobody else left of the staff.

They'd all disappeared.

Alec Clarke's subsequent actions led him to become

the youngest person ever to be awarded the OBE,

then a civilian award for bravery.

Basically, he shut the power station down.

I, who appeared to be the only one available at that time,

proceeded to close down the sets as best possible.

And the whole of the place was in a state of chaos.

There could have been more serious injuries to people in the wreckage,

and more extensive damage and the plant would have been

seriously damaged more than it was by the explosion.

This is Lord Chetwynd's own account of that day,

written 24 hours later.

"The staff and employees behaved magnificently.

"They never lost their heads and were at work recovering the wounded

"and injured even before the dust of the explosion had settled."

At the exact site of the explosion, which remains on MoD land,

is the memorial to the Chilwell factory and its workers.

They were very proud of the work that they did here.

-The actual number of shells filled - 19,359,000.

-Yes, yes.

-That's extraordinary.

-It was.

And after the explosion happened,

they got back to work within four days filling shells,

because the second battle of the Somme was taking place

and they were terribly short of ammunition.

I think he must have felt so guilty.

And quite apart was the effect on production,

which was one train of thought which must have been going through his mind

because it was so essential to have these shells filled.

The dead, the bodies of the people who'd been killed,

and the whole sort of negation of what he'd tried to achieve,

must have been very hard.

Most of those who died were buried in Attenborough churchyard,

only one of them identified.

Paula Hammond, whose father wrote his own description of the blast,

preserves the memory of the disaster

and has come to see the burial record.

Can't imagine 14 coffins and seven coffins here.

I knew that the Chilwell graves, as we call them,

were here in the churchyard,

but it's only when you look at details like this that it just...

I don't know, puts it all into perspective

and what happened in that period of time and how many families

and how many people it affected.

It's just awful. Awful.

Among the dead was Gertrude Cursley, whose name is remembered on a

housing estate which now covers much of what was the shell factory site.

Her relatives have been finding out more about her.

Hello, Kate. Pleased to meet you. Come on through.

To have a photograph taken like that, at the time, she must have felt

very proud of the uniform and the work she was doing.

And even though there were thousands of women working in munitions,

the letter rather gives away that they weren't expecting to say this

-about a woman, doesn't it?

-Yes. The papers have been altered.

If you look closely, they're all male orientated,

and the person that's written the relevant details for Gertrude on them

had been altered to "her" rather than "his" in many cases.

And her family was given compensation -

the equivalent of four years' wages.

They got a total of £200 and it looks, from the compensation form,

that it's based on something like £50 per child.

Well, there are letters here, there's a photograph.

But there's also film, isn't there? Connected to this.

When I was a little boy, my uncle, he worked at Chilwell depot,

and he came by some 35mm film, which wasn't the sort of thing

which the general public would use at that time.

And the story goes that this was found at a jumble sale

or something like that,

and then it was subsequently put into store in his house until he died.

And then my auntie, his wife, put it up in the loft of the bungalow

she moved into as an old age pensioner.

And my cousin was then talking to me about this film.

I said, "I think it might be nitrate film.

"Perhaps we better be a bit careful of this."

So, he took possession of it and put it in his shed.

This is it. Hold it up to the light and you can see men in flat caps

in the shell store, differing from the official government film,

much less formal, more workaday.

The thought of seeing even Gertrude on this film,

cos it would be showing the people working there, no doubt.

It would be wonderful to actually see her walking about.

We've got a still photograph of her

but to actually to be able to see her and other people like her

working in these conditions would be a wonderful thing.

What was the precise reason for the deaths

of Gertrude and 138 others?

Lord Chetwynd said he knew.

It shows the devastation of the huge metal...

huge bits of metal absolutely twisted and blasted.

"The causes of the explosion are obscure.

"I cannot think of anything but sabotage."

Lord Chetwynd's views, though,

conflicted with the evidence at the official inquiry.

1907, the powder manager comes through

and he sees three people stood around one of the mixing buckets.

And one of the guys is the conveyer operator from the very top floor

of the mixing shed. It's a three-storey building.

And he says, "What's happening?" And the conveyer operator says,

"I'm missing a piece of metal from the conveyer belt.

"And we think it might have fallen into the mixing tub."

The mixing tub isn't stopped, it's still grinding,

mixing the amatol mixture.

The powder manager leaves the building

and five minutes later there's a big explosion.

-A bit of metal?

-Bit of metal.

Lord Chetwynd disputed this evidence and tried to discredit the witness

in a flurry of correspondence with the government.

He was deeply upset by it

and he was convinced that it was sabotage.

And he named the person concerned.

But they were never able to prove it.

Just four months after the blast

the factory closed when victory was declared in November.

Survivors like young Alec Clarke

found it difficult to live with their memories.

It did slightly affect him afterwards. There were...

He did help in getting people out the wreckage.

There were people with terrible injuries and others that

hadn't survived, with limbs missing and things like that.

But he only spoke about that once.

For Peter Cursley this is a first chance to see

the rescued film footage.

Never thought anything would ever come of it. It's such a mess.

Film...normally nitrate would last 60-80 years.

It's sticky cos it might be deteriorating.

If we don't copy it we lose it.

It would deteriorate and there would be nothing left.

The find also includes the original negatives of 1916 film stock.

It's planned to restore the film - it was damaged by water -

by combining the best of the original and the negatives.

But by using 1930s technology

a copy of it can be seen for the first time.

This is a really exciting discovery for us.

Very rarely do we have discoveries like this these days.

Thing is, it could so easily have got thrown away,

cos it looked like so much rubbish, didn't it?

A piece of history in a box nearly lost.

This is one of the most important films I have seen in many years.

It is a major find for the museum.

Perhaps Gertrude Cursley may eventually be found

on the restored film.

Hopefully if we scrutinise the film carefully, we may find her.

She's very distinctive, dark hair.

-She could be in there somewhere.

-Mm.

Smiling faces doing their bit for the war.

Perhaps they too might be recognised from family photographs.

Their reward - a royal telegram sent from Buckingham Palace

to Lord Chetwynd from the King.

"His Majesty asks you to thank them

"and tell them how he appreciates the splendid work that they have done,

"by which this glorious victory has been attained."

At Chilwell, they knew they had produced more than half of all

the high explosive shells fired by the British during World War I.

How many hundreds of folks it affected and how brave

they all were. And they were all back at work the next day

after this explosion happened.

You can't even imagine that today.

But they were very brave people hence it was called

the VC Factory because of the brave people who were working there.

Across the country, over a million people

worked in the making of munitions.

There were frequent accidents and explosions but it's the individual

stories which bring home to us that there was both danger

and courage on the Home Front.

MUSIC: TAPS