At around lunchtime on Sunday 2 April 1916, a fire broke out at a gunpowder mill near the village of Oare, a remote spot in the middle of the open marshes of north Kent. Within an hour, the fire had led to an explosion that destroyed buildings across the Thames Estuary in Essex and killed more than 100 people, scattering their bodies over nearby fields. Tremors were felt as far north as East Anglia. Aside from a few cursory notices in the newspapers the following week, the event went largely unnoticed and was forgotten outside the local community.
The incident is recounted in remarkable detail in The Great Explosion, a new book by the writer and art critic Brian Dillon. At first, Dillon seems an unusual fit: his previous books have included In the Dark Room, a memoir about childhood, family illness and grief, and Tormented Hope, a portrait of nine artists, each of whom suffered from debilitating hypochondria. So how did he come to research the story of an obscure munitions disaster during the First World War?
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