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Faversham

Faversham is a town in Kent, England, in the district of Swale. It lies roughly halfway between Sittingbourne and Canterbury. The Parish of Faversham (Feversham) includes an ancient sea port and market town, being some 47 miles east of London, on the London to Dover A2 road and 18 miles east north east of Maidstone in Kent.

History

Established as a settlement before the Roman conquest, Faversham was held in royal demesne in 811, and is further cited in a charter granted by Kenulf, the King of Mercia. Faversham was recorded in the Domesday Book as Favreshant. The town has regularly throughout its history obtained curious royal privileges, and charters.

In the year 1147 an abbey was established near Faversham by King Stephen, whom along with his son, Eustace, the Earl of Boulogne and Matilda of Boulogne, his consort, was later therein laid to rest, thus acquiring a special status as one of only a number of churches outside of London where an English king is buried.

Sir Thomas Culpeper was later granted Faversham Abbey by Henry VIII of England during the Dissolution of the Monasteries around 1536. The Abbey was demolished directly after the Dissolution and its masonry was taken to Calais to reinforce that town's defences against French interests. In 1539, the ground upon which the abbey had stood, along with some adjacent land was passed to Sir Thomas Cheney, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports.

The town of Faversham is well known in Kent as a harbour and market community but is also at the centre of the county's brewing industry, home, as it is to Shepherd Neame, a notable brewery, acquired from the last heir of the Shepherd family, by Percy Beale Neame in the 1840s.

The years during the First World War saw an uncertain time for the Neame brewery. In the first instance, was the scarcity of labour from 1915 which soon became evident, as a number of employees turned to offers of higher wages elsewhere, including the local ammunitions works.

The Faversham munitions works

The story of the town?s munitions industry is less well known, although it too saw a boom in trade, was also affected adversely by the events of the war. Like the brewery, munitions production was not new to Faversham, it was some time about 1753 that the first of Faversham?s gunpowder factories was established, leading over subsequent years to a growth in development, that by 1786 saw in total three such factories in and around Faversham.

The first real problem arose shortly after the introduction of a new material, with the discovery in Germany in 1846 of guncotton, the first high explosive that was distinct from the more usual forms of propellant such as gunpowder, in terms of its superior destructive effect. Under agreement with the innovator, a professor of chemistry at Basle, Dr. Christian Schonbein, the first guncotton plant in the world opened at the Faversham Marsh Works, later that year.

On 14 July 1847 a disastrous explosion had killed 18 members of the staff and injured others. The detonation was heard as far away as Maidstone and only 10 of the dead could be identified. With only one accident of a less serious nature in 1899, the Cotton Powder Plant continued to prosper and by 1915 had expanded to cover a five hundred acre site including in its range of products along with guncotton, cordite, gelignite, nitroglycerine, detonators, dynamite and distress rockets.

The plant offered well paid work to men as far afield as Herne Bay and Margate and Faversham had become for a short period one of the centres of the nations munitions industry.

To lessen the expense of production for the war effort a cheap but highly volatile chemical amatol was introduced into the process of bomb and shell manufacture, this was at the Explosives Loading Company (ELC) site that had opened in 1912 next to the Cotton plant, which was the larger of the two operations.

The Great Explosion at Faversham

The very weather itself may have contributed to the origins of the fire that followed on the morning of Sunday 2 April, as the previous month had been typically wet but had ended with a short dry spell so that by that Sunday the weather was described as ?glorious?, but also provided perfect conditions for heat generated combustion to occur.

Its situation, in the middle of the open marshes of North Kent, and next to the Thames coastline being relatively remote and isolated is perhaps why it was chosen as the site for a munitions factory, and also explains why, on that occasion, when things went horribly wrong on 2 April 1916, with the great explosion that occurred at about noon, it was heard as far away as Norwich, Great Yarmouth and Southend, where domestic windows were blown out, and two large plate glass shop windows shattered way across the Thames estuary.

The East Kent Gazette of Sittingbourne covered the explosion on 29 April. Although recognising the need for some censorship, referred to the reply given in Parliament to the 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 of this kind to have happened at Faversham?s historic munitions works, the event of April 1916 is recorded as 'the worst ever in the history of the U.K. explosives industry', and yet the full picture is still somewhat confused, the reason for the fire uncertain, considering the sheer quantity of explosive chemical stored up in the locality, with a report indicating that a further 3000 tons remained in nearby sheds unaffected it is remarkable, and a tribute to those who struggled against the fire that so much of the nations munitions were actually prevented from contributing to the catastrophe.

The secretary of state for war, Earl Kitchener, had in 1914 written to the management of the CPC, and it is presumed the ELC, instructing 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.'

Source: The Great Explosion at Faversham by Arthur Percival MBE: also reprinted in Archaeologia Cantiana Vol. C. (1985).