The story is an interesting one. Gunpowder had to be manufactured. In 1916 one of the places dedicated to the dangerous and difficult task was remote Kent. A fire broke out and led to a series of huge explosions. Deaths and injuries were not widely specified at the time for reasons of morale, but 109 men and boys were killed.
The explosives industry was a necessary, profitable but immensely dangerous one. It took the 1654 Delft explosion — in which Carel Fabritius was killed — for society to realise that explosives should probably not be manufactured in cities. The Kent disaster took place a couple of miles from Faversham, and the works had been built at a safe distance from the town precisely to limit the number of casualties in case of disaster. An incidental effect was that when the explosion did occur, it devastated an especially evocative and lonely part of the marshes, teeming with wildlife.
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