An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  In the caverns, 26 men died instantly in the blast. In the farm above their heads, five farm workers and the farmer’s sister-in-law were all killed. In the working mine next door, five men died from carbon monoxide poisoning; others made the long climb up the air-shaft to safety and a world in which the top-soil had gone from 1,000 acres of land, being scattered throughout the countryside. Some of it had gone up to 11 miles away, and what was left looked like the Western Front – only the Western Front became what it was after years of bombardment. This was instantaneous. There was so much mud and so many craters that they left the dead animals where they lay, and in the spring collected the skulls and ribcages left by the foxes. The stench was terrible.

  Where the farm had been was a smoking crater half a mile long, 300 yards or more across, of brown glistening sub-soil. Fifty years on, fir-trees have managed to take root, and although for decades no birds sang there and there was a terrible quiet, now I heard the croak of a pheasant from somewhere in its depths.

  I was walking towards the crater with John Hardwick and Roy Gregson. The county council, having given up trying to convert the crater into a rubbish tip, has suddenly become aware of its tourist potential and laid little paths for visitors. But mostly it is the villagers who walk them. As John Hardwick explained, while they would like people to know what happened here, they have no wish to see the busloads come to gawp. ‘For years this was a moonscape,’ he said. ‘Because the top-soil had gone, there was no end of attempts to drain the fields, only nothing worked. They were trying to make land out of something which wasn’t land any more.’

  The Ministry of Defence is still around, its yellow warning notices about unexploded bombs on the other side of the wire beyond the new paths – although what bombs would be left unexploded when 4,000 tons of high explosive goes off is a mystery. Now that the memorial is in place and paths laid, its civil servants are planting trees along the lip of the crater.

  We stared down into the crater, which covers an area of 12 acres. ‘The more you look into it the bigger it becomes,’ said Roy Gregson. ‘It’s the extent of it.’ Down below, someone had laid out a long straggling cross in white alabaster stones, the grass around it threadbare. ‘You must remember it was war-time,’ said John Hardwick, ‘it took three or four days for us to realise just how many had gone. Overnight this was a place of widows and orphans. And it was such a small village.’

  One school (closed). Two pubs. A post-office. A church. And a crater. That is all there is to Hanbury.

  But there is no mystery as to why its tragedy was forgotten. ‘It’s quite extraordinary what gets overlooked during a world war,’ said a spokesman for The Guinness Book of Records. The Allies were on the Moselle and every day the bombs were falling (‘Tremendous Explosion at Nuremberg’) when the war came to Hanbury. The coroner recorded a verdict of ‘accidental death caused by an explosion on Government property’, and the manager of the mine kept a black suit in his car for two months as the corpses were found. The school was a mortuary and one of the ladies washing down the bodies found that the first of these was her husband.

  As John Hardwick said, it was such a small village.

  Bunker

  N A LEAFY BIRMINGHAM suburb, in the sort of road where no one walks and where learner drivers practise three-point turns, a house is up for sale. Not the freehold, just the thirteen years of a lease left to run on a house where nothing terrible ever took place and no famous man lived. Yet we were there the same afternoon as Sky Television, which is not in the business of ogling Edwardian brickwork. Or walnut panelling. Or even gardens. We were all there because of something which for the last 36 years has been under the garden.

  Sandwell Metropolitan Council is selling Number 8 Meadow Road, Edgbaston, on behalf of the West Midlands Fire and Civil Defence Authority, and is inviting sealed bids in the region of £250,000. The council has provided a long prospectus, indexing in some detail the floor space and the bathrooms, but at the very end, after the garages and the stables, there is a hurried entry, where no square feet are given. ‘Underground bunker. Comprising an extensive range of rooms suitable for a variety of uses, subject to planning permission.’

  This, in the early days of the Cold War, would have been Birmingham’s Führerbunker. From here the cinder which had been the city would have been administered. It is the first time a major nuclear shelter has been put up for sale.

  ‘Actually we regard it as ancillary to the sale,’ said a man from the Estates Department. ‘So we haven’t bothered to reference it in terms of square feet. How big is it? Oh, it’s huge.’

  The only clue to dimensions comes in the lettering on the prospectus map where, just as on mid-nineteenth century maps of the African interior, there are no boundaries, just large letters. ‘We must be talking seriously big bunkers here,’ said the photographer.

  The cold air hits you first, and a mustiness. You go down the steps under the brambles (there are three entrances) and there is a long corridor leading to double doors, beyond which it continues. Near the double doors is a brass plaque dated September 20, 1954, which records that a long-dead Home Secretary cast a portion of the concrete in its construction.

  And for a moment you feel like Caernarvon and Carter peering into Tutankhamun’s tomb, for everything has been left as it was in readiness for the emergency which never came, ready for those ‘specific persons’ able to get here in those last five minutes. The store-rooms full of mattresses and camp-beds, the sacks of gas-masks, the projectors with the spools of film enticingly titled ‘Radioactive Fallout’. The addressing machines. The addressing machines? Presumably the specific persons, unable to break with the habits of bureaucratic life, would have gone on writing letters down here, but to whom?

  ‘This place has been used as a store-room for the last few years,’ said John Edwards, chairman of the West Midlands Fire and Civil Defence Authority. Councillor Edwards, with his seven-year-old twins, was making his first visit. A Labour councillor, he walked through the rooms as sternly as a bishop in an abandoned knocking shop, and even more sternly resisted the blandishments of the photographer to pose in a gas mask. His little boys romped in this great wonderful burrow.

  It would be possible to write a history of Civil Defence based on this place. There was the confidence at the outset in this gaily coloured poster: ‘The occupants of this room have taken precautions against the three-fold menace of the Hydrogen Bomb. Heat. Blast. Radioactivity.’ There were the detailed booklets with the sardonic tables (‘Over 600 roentgen: almost immediate incapacitation; mortality in one week’). And then a remarkable invitation: ‘Come for a relaxing weekend to the Welsh hills.’ This went on; ‘The exercise includes a major incident, involving search and rescue, first aid, communications, and ambulance recovery of casualties.’ Bliss was it in that day to be alive. The leaflet concludes: ‘Some time will be allowed for rest and relaxation if requested.’ But as time passed, the tone of the leaflets changed, until finally there was this, after Civil Defence had been changed to Civil Protection (and what a world of difference is there), a leaflet entided ‘How to Improve Credibility and Regain Public Support’. On a blackboard in a lecture hall someone had written in large letters, ‘Goodbye’.

  There were many leaflets illustrating the tying of knots, so that after three weeks, the length of time they were expected to stay, those ‘specific persons’, as the Home Office called them, would have been able to hang themselves without much difficulty. There was also a very large teapot.

  Inquiries so far have come from solicitors and accountants who see the house as so much office space; they have been vague as to what, if anything, they might do with the bunker. A perfect recording studio for a rock star, said the Sky soundman. Or acid house parties, sniffed Councillor Edwards. The caretaker Colin Billingham said only that he did not like to ‘come down here’ on his own. There was still the sense of what might have been, what might even be. I kept coming on heaps of flags which would have staked out a co
ntaminated area and the holiday posters at which the specific persons would have stared, knowing these too had gone.

  The bunker, said Councillor Edwards, was now surplus to their requirements. They had another one in Sutton Coldfield, an old Scout hut. An old Scout hut? Well actually it was made of concrete, was above ground and had once belonged to some naval cadets. He had been assured that it met Government specifications but, speaking personally, he would rather be outside it than inside if anything did happen.

  Built by Birmingham City Council, the bunker passed to the West Midlands County Council after the Heath–Walker local government carve-up. When that was wound up it passed to the West Midlands Fire and Civil Defence Authority, just like some vast Victorian sideboard passed down in the family which no one had the courage to throw away.

  ‘We have this statutory obligation to plan for nuclear war,’ said Councillor Edwards. ‘The Government gives out £100,000,000 a year in grants for that. But we have no obligation at all to plan for peacetime disasters. Given that peace is breaking out all over Europe and jumbos are jumping out of the sky, I find that perverse.’

  It was a cold April day, but the warmth hit us as we came out of the bunker. What a long shadow that sentence casts. . . we came out of the bunker. There were ghosts around us, the last of Hitler’s court, but others as well, grey ghosts out of the future.

  The Bomb Factory

  HERE IS A MOVEMENT in the reeds, so slight it might have been the wind, then a head in water, a head as sleek and small as any which sat between the shoulders of a member of the Drones’ Club. And so it is, that just before 3.00 on a November afternoon, I see my first otter in the wild in the British Isles. I think I must have said, ‘Blimey!’, for at such moments a man takes refuge in the expletives of childhood. Then suddenly something is creaking into the air, not 20 yards from me, something large and grey and unhurried. A heron is rising like an old turbo-prop airliner.

  Fifteen minutes later, in woods now, a dead branch snaps underfoot, and there is a small shape dappled by the last sunlight. The fawn stares and in just three springs is gone. And I know exactly where I am. I am in the Garden of Eden.

  I have signed the visitors’ book at the security gate. I am wearing the hard hat with which I have been equipped, and I have read the ‘Safety Instructions’ leaflet over and over, lingering, like an examinee, on the rubric: ‘Thoughtlessness may endanger your life, and the lives of others. Read and keep this document, it is issued to you for reasons of safety and security.’ I am in the Garden of Eden, where nitro-glycerine was made. I am in Britain’s old Royal Gunpowder Mills.

  In 1991, as part of its ‘Options for Change’ programme, the Ministry of Defence was preparing to sell off some of its many assorted properties. It was an extraordinary moment, for once the British military acquires anything, it very rarely lets it go, and change, as usual, had been forced upon it, in this case by Mikhail Gorbachev who had declared, ‘I am going to do something terrible to you. I am taking away your enemy.’ He was also, indirectly, taking away Waltham Abbey.

  Some of the MOD’s remoter sites would tax the efforts of the country’s most imaginative estate agents to shift. But Waltham Abbey was the sort of property that developers conjure up on sleepless nights. Two hundred acres of it on the edge of London, within walking distance of the M25, within cycling distance of the M11. It breathed light industrial potential, houses as far as the eye could see, golf courses. The MOD called in the London development planners, CIVIX. On maps the site offered the even more heady prospect of a single development. Almost entirely surrounded by water, by the River Lea and by 4 miles of canals, it would be the perfect open prison, with middle-class conmen angling away the long summer afternoons. But there was also the greenery: why not a conference centre? All that was before the planners actually visited the site.

  ‘I’d been in tropical jungles, it was just that I never expected to find myself in one in England,’ said Dan Bone, a director of CIVIX. ‘All it lacked was parakeets. We had to go away and buy machetes, just to hack our way in, for we couldn’t see more than 20 feet in front of us. It was a year before I dared leave the tracks. I was that frightened of getting lost in Waltham Abbey.’

  It wasn’t just the undergrowth, it was what they kept finding in this place. ‘I’m an architect by training, but I’d never seen buildings like these, all thrown about in what seemed to be gay abandon in the woods.’ There were huge curving walls hung about with ivy, tunnels leading into darkness, and great fortifications, some of which were completely round in shape. Added to this was the crashing in the bushes which greeted their approach, the fluttering of large wings and weird cries. All that was needed was the odd arrow thwacking into a tree and some rhythmic subterranean chanting to have convinced them that they were in a lost world. Which in a sense they were.

  It is not known for certain how long gunpowder was made in Waltham. The first recorded date is 1665, by which time a former fulling-mill had been converted for gunpowder production, but there is a tradition, perhaps fuelled by the irresistible combination of monks and gunpowder, that it goes back to Crecy in 1346, the first time gunpowder was used by an English army. Guy Fawkes is said to have got his supply there.

  The site was ideal. There were the alder trees to provide the wood for charcoal, one of the ingredients of gunpowder. There was the water power from the River Lea to turn the mills and mix the ingredients, also the fact that from prehistoric times the river had been navigable (no one in his right mind would move gunpowder by road). The result was that this became the biggest gunpowder works in the country, so important that the government took it into public ownership on the eve of war with revolutionary France, some 200 years ago, and in public ownership it remained until 1991.

  Canals were dug, but the barges floating in and out were like no other, being lined in leather and poled by men, for horses bolted and men did not. Steam power came and a narrow-gauge railway, the trains running on rails made of copper, and in places, wood, to eliminate the possibility of sparks. By the late nineteenth century they were making nitro-glycerine there and gun cotton for the new high-explosive shells. It was then that the strange buildings went up, deep in woods already coppiced for alder, the thickness of which acted as a blast shield. Each building, for obvious reasons, was as far as possible from the others, which was why, when the first developers went in, they thought there had been no plan.

  But there was a plan, there always had been a plan. Huge mounds were thrown up, the earth lined with brick, passageways disappearing into the ground itself. The most spectacular of these was the Grand Nitrator, 140 feet high, in the depths of which a man sat on a one-legged stool, in case his attention wandered for a second, overseeing the nitration process. Below him was an oval pit of water, into which the nitro-glycerine could be plunged if the Grand Nitrator threatened to overheat. Names like this, and the goblin on the one-legged stool, are out of fantasy, except all this was real and just half a mile from the town centre.

  It was another world in there, down in the woods. The workers wore special uniforms made of calico, with no buttons or pockets, the fastenings made of string. Every day a section of the safety rules was read out to them, and once a month the complete set. At the peak of the Great War, 5,000 people were employed there, half of them women, and it is a remarkable comment on the safety procedures that in all the 300 years of the mills only 200 deaths were recorded. With those there was very little left to bury.

  By World War II, with Waltham Abbey in reach of enemy bombers, its importance had declined, and in 1945 it closed as a factory, only to open again the next day as a research establishment, specialising in every form of non-nuclear propellant. The fuel for the Blue Streak rocket was developed here, the explosive bolts on jet-ejector seats, even Giant Viper, that enormous ribbon of explosives shot into minefields which was used in the Gulf War.

  The last years were weird and wonderful, with many changes of name. ERDE – Explosive Research and Development
Establishment. RARDE – Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment. PERME – Propellant Experimental Rocket Motor Establishment. Most of these had no use for the bizarre buildings in the woods, so the green crept back. And not just the green.

  Herons, attracted by the coppiced alder, flew over the wire and made their nests. Time passed and it became the biggest heronry in Essex, with the result that in the 1970s a secret government research establishment was, irony of ironies, classified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, its explosions synchronised so as not to interfere with nesting habits. And somehow, under the wire, up the canals, came otter and deer and muntjak and rabbits, all of them safe within the security perimeter.

  It was into this wonderland that the men with the machetes came, followed by men from English Heritage and the Royal Commission for Ancient Monuments. And then Whitehall’s troubles really began. ‘The men from English Heritage and the Royal Commission couldn’t understand what they were seeing down in the woods. They’d never known anything like it,’ said Steve Chaddock, later appointed the archaeologist-on-site. ‘They said they needed to do an evaluation, but even before this, English Heritage decided to make it a Scheduled Ancient Monument, listing 21 buildings, one of them of Grade I, the same as Westminster Abbey.’

  So it was goodbye the houses as far as the eye could see, goodbye the light industrial use and the golf courses. At the MOD, civil servants peered into the unknown, fearful of what might turn up next. There was the little matter of the waste from hundreds of years, all tipped into the canals, for you don’t get the binmen calling when you run a nitro-glycerine factory. With English Nature, English Heritage and the Royal Commission peering over their shoulders, the MOD could not just send in the bulldozers, and the bill for decontamination alone came to £16 million in the end. All they got in return was £5 million for a tiny fringe of the site, some 10 per cent of it, where houses did get built. Powder Mill Lane, Powder Mill Mews.