Women workers in the Chilwell factory, pictured about a year before the explosion.
July 1 1918, Chilwell–The demands of the war, and especially 1915′s shell crisis, had led to a huge increase in munitions production in the United Kingdom. One of the new factories was a shell filling plant near the village of Chilwell in Nottinghamshire; there, a predominantly female workforce filled artillery shells with amatol, a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate. The exposure to TNT in many cases turned their skin yellow, leading to the nicknames “Chilwell Canaries” or “Girls with the Yellow Hands.” TNT also brought with it more dramatic risks, as was dramatically evidenced on July 1 when eight tons of it were consumed in an explosion at the factory. 134 workers were killed, and many more injured. Lottie Martin recalled “men, women and young people burnt, practically all their clothing burnt, torn and disheveled. Their faces black and charred, some bleeding with limbs torn off, eyes and hair literally gone.”
The cleanup began almost immediately, and the factory would return to production the next day. But this came at a high psychological cost. Bert Smith recalled that a “wagon was piled up with…half-naked, blackened bodies and the arms and legs were hanging over the side. There was blood trickling out of the back of the wagon. I felt like I had a nest of rats inside my belly…what I saw there I will never forget if I live to be as old as Methuselah.” Only thirty-two bodies could be identified; the rest were buried in a mass grave. As was typical, German or Irish saboteurs were blamed by many. The cause of the explosion was never determined, but an accident seems the most likely.
