One of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in the world happened one Monday morning in November 1944, killing more than 70 people & 200 cows.
It was the result, not of an enemy attack or stray German bomb dropped on rural England, but the accidental detonation of 4,000 tons of high explosives stored in an abandoned alabaster mine in Staffordshire.
So that is the second war time disaster which took place in the neighbouring county of which I had never heard, until I read about it over half a century later, in this case in Matthew Parris’s column in The Times.
There is a good reason for this – the whole thing was hushed up until 1974 when an inquiry blamed negligent work methods.
At the time they perhaps thought it just bad luck, the kind of thing that sadly happens when the country is at war. Perhaps the officer in charge was judged to have done a fine job, keeping his head & coping with the aftermath.
At least he got his OBE in due course
