Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A Corporation of West Ham Bravery Medal awarded to Sub-Officer H. Vickers of the Corporation Fire Brigade, for the Silvertown Explosion, 19 January 1917

Corporation of West Ham Bravery Medal, obv. heraldic shield, ‘Corporation of West Ham’; rev, ‘Presented for Bravery’, with shield bearing fireman’s helmet and axe, engraved ‘To Sub-Officer Henry Vickers’; edge inscribed, 19th January 1917’, 38mm., silver, with silver buckle on ribbon, in fitted case, slight edge bruising, otherwise extremely fine £600-800

A chemical works was established at Crescent Wharf, Silvertown, Essex (East London) in 1893 for the production of caustic soda. Production ceased in 1912 but the building remained. With the onset of the Great War and the huge demand for munitions, the plant was reactivated but was this time utilised for the purification of the high explosive T.N.T. The factory’s situation, within a densely populated area - a most unsuitable site for processing such a dangerous substance, being deemed secondary to the country’s wartime needs.

On the evening of 19 January 1917 a fire broke out in the factory. As the news spread, many living in the immediate area and knowing the nature of the plant fled. Others, like the plant’s chief chemist Andreas Angel (awarded a posthumous Edward Medal), knowing full well the danger they were in, rushed to tackle the blaze. Amongst the first on the scene were firemen from a nearby station, including amongst their number, Sub-Officer Henry Vickers and Fireman Frederick Charles Sell.

At 6.52 p.m. a huge explosion ripped through the factory, utterly destroying the place and devastating the surrounding area. The shock waves of the explosion were felt throughout London and the explosion heard over 100 miles away, and the resulting fires could be seen over 30 miles away. More than 900 homes were destroyed; a further 60,000 others were damaged to some degree; red hot metal was blasted far and wide causing subsidiary fires - a gas holder on the Greenwich Peninsula blew up as a result and many dockside warehouses caught fire. In human costs the disaster was devastating with 73 people loosing their lives - 69 in the immediate blast and 4 in the aftermath, with a further 400 injured. The blast ripped apart families, for amongst the dead, in addition to Sub-Officer Vickers and Fireman Sell, were Sell’s daughters, Winifred aged 15 years and Ethel aged 4 months, killed in their house nearby.

Naturally in wartime, earliest reports of the cause of the explosion featured German air attack or saboteurs but it required no external influences to supply a cause - the fire which started in the factory’s ‘melt pot’ room, quickly found further inflamable and explosive substances to feed it - some 50 tons of T.N.T. is known to have been loaded on railway wagons in the factory yards awaiting shipment.

Sold with a portrait photograph of the recipient and another of a fire-engine of the time; also with modern photographs of the memorial erected by the West Ham Corporation to commemorate members of the Corporation Fire Brigade and their families who had lost their lives in the conflagration. In addition are three letters addressed to Mrs Vickers, one from the West Ham Council, dated 12 February 1917, expressing their sincere sympathy and stating, ‘... The members of the Council felt that your husband as willingly gave his life and died gloriously as any soldier on the battlefield’. The second, from the Guildhall, Plymouth (the city Mrs Vickers and her family had moved to after the explosion), concerning the arrangements for the presentation of a medal. The third, from West Ham Council, dated 4 June 1918, concerning the payment of a pension from the Government’s and Mayor’s funds set up for victims of the explosion. Also with copied research.