Standing Well Back
19th Century

Discovering London’s bomb disposal facility from 1894

I have written before about the early British  EOD facility on Duck Island, a short distance from Downing Street, at the bottom end of St James’s Park, London. There, barely 100m from 10 Downing St is a small Island at the end of the lake, with a link to the road over a bridge.  The facility was established by Colonel Majendie and his assistant Dr DuPre in about 1894.  Col Majendie, had been working for the Home Office as Chief Inspector of Explosives for over 20 years by then having been first appointed in 1871.  During that time he had dealt with a wide variety of IEDs and associated investigations, and developed some C-IED procedures.  But the world was changing.  Following a visit to Paris that I discussed here and here,  he pushed hard for some similar facilities to the four French EOD facilities dotted around Paris at stratgic locations. The context at the time was an upsurge in anarchist bombings around the world. The 1890s were later described as “the decade of the bomb”. Majendie had undertaken overseas liaisons before, includng with the US authorities during the Fenian campaigns of the 1880s (many of the IEDs were made in the US and shipped to the UK, with US based support).  Majendie reviewed the French EOD techniques and liked what he saw.

Majendie recommended three such facilities be established in London, one on Duck Island to be adjacent to the seat of government, one in “The Gravel Pit” in Hyde Park, adjacent to the district of Oxford St and Mayfair, and one in the moat at the Tower of London, covering the banking district of the city.  Duck Island was the first and I believe that the Hyde Park facility may have existed as well, but I can find no evidence or suggestion that the Tower of London site was ever set up.  The facilities were housed in wooden sheds, (like in Paris) I believe with some form of earth mound in the manner of the French facilities. I understand that amongst the equipment  in Duck Island was a hydraulic press and a mercury bath contraption for lowering an IED into a mercury bath, dissolving the solder which held together some spherical-shelled anarchist devices.  Other devices were dealt with at Woolwich Arsenal Laboratories in some circumstances in a proofing lab there, which also had a blast proof cell.

The EOD facility at Duck Island (that’s my description, not Majendie’s) was operational from November 1894 and was still apparently in use in at least 1914 when some suffragette devices were taken there. IEDs were moved to the facility in the hand cart I described here or later in a specialist vehicle provided by the Army. I don’t know when it fell into disuse.  However in the 1980s the derelict wooden shacks were still there, hidden amongst rhododendron bushes and out of site, out of mind.

At this stage, for reasons that are unclear the Army was tasked with removing the facility, and that task fell to the Royal Engineers. A recce of the site was undertaken, and the remnants of the facilty (fundamentally a rotting wooden shed and its contents) was taken to Chatham and subsequently and regrettably lost or scrapped.  However in the last few days I have been given sight of some photos taken by the Royal Engineers on the recce, now held by the RE Museum .  Regrettably the Royal Engineer’s Museum own the photos and have not given me permission to republish them without a not insignificant licence fee. This website simply doesn’t have the budget for the license fee requested, so all I can say is that the photos appear to show what I believe is a hydraulic press, probably installed by Majendie in 1894. The photos are not too clear but the press appears to be somewhat more complex than the French version that I showed an image at the earlier link.  There appear to be a number of levers which may have been able to be adjusted remotely by attaching lines.  My assessment is that both the French and the British presses were used to “crack open” devices semi-remotely.  By this I mean set up with a specific action prepared, then activated from a distance by means of a rope or line on a lever, activating the press.  A typical anarchist device was contained in two halves of a metal sphere, soldered together.  It may be that a variety of other IED containers, such as tins and boxes could have been opened remotely by this method.  The lightweight wooden huts were cheap and easily repairable and the earth mounds would have been designed to stop shrapnel.

Without more detail, which I’m investigating, I cannot tell more, and I hope to persuade the RE Museum archive to allow me to reproduce the photos without the current expense they ask for.

The use of a hydraulic press is interesting. Majendie would have been very familiar with such presses, his role as Inspector of Explosives meant he investigated industrial explosive accidents and he developed much of the legal regulations surrounding explosives manufacture. Presses were used extensively in the explosive industry to press explosives into shape in gunpowder mills. Presses were also used for some explosive testing. As a former Superintendent of the Woolwich explosive laboratory, Majendie would have been familiar with their use.

By their nature presses are pretty resilient pieces of equipment  – take a look at the hydraulic press channel on YouTube for a feel of what they are capable of.

Some key points :

  1. The facility then was a copy of the French facility, to some degree, and the French EOD/C-IED methodology appears to have been utilised (with variantions) by Majendie and Dr DuPre from 1894.
  2. The site was operational for at least 20 years.
  3. The British and French were not the only EOD operators active in the 1890s in C-IED. See details of New York’s Owen Eagen here http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/1/14/the-eod-operator-who-dealt-with-more-ieds-than-anyone-else.html
  4. The facility remained derelict until the 1980s or 1990s but was then demolished and scrapped. The organisation sent to deal with it probably had no clue as to its historical importance.
19th Century

Shopping for IED Components, Then and Now

Modern terrorism today, where it occurs in the West, frequently revolves around terrorists obtaining innocuous materials from which they make explosives and IEDs.  Over recent years Police in the UK and elsewhere have engaged with pharmacies, chemist shops, fertiliser suppliers and others seeking support from the proprietors to report suspicious acquisition of explosives or other items for IED components. On occasion in the last few years legislation has been discussed which might limit the availability of such things as acetone, peroxide and sulphuric acid.  These modern concerns are sensible and a useful “flag” set to trigger – on occasions, in the last few years, successful police operations have interdicted terrorist attacks by being alerted when a terrorist attempted to buy components or precursors for an IED.

Readers of this blog will know that I have a theme of seeking older patterns for what we regard as modern characteristics of terrorist use of IEDs, and there are useful antecedents here.  I have being studying the court transcripts of historical trials and there is a nice example here:

In the 1880s and 1890s, terrorist IEDs were quite common in major European cities like London and Paris. This meant that the public were aware of the threat, suspicious of certain activity, and police operations were significant, as was their engagement with suppliers of material that might be of use to those with evil intent.

In 1894, two Italian anarchists, Guiseppe Farnara and Francis Polti were prosecuted for possession of explosives with intent to endanger life and property. The two had been attempting to make IEDs with pipe work purchased from engineering companies , to be filled with explosives manufactured from supplies purchased from chemists.  The two Italians had tried to purchase iron piping from an engineering firm run by a Mr Cohen at 240 Blackfriars Road in London. One of the managers who worked for Mr Cohen, Thomas Smith, was suspicious of the Italians and the purpose for which they were acquiring the pipe. He persuaded the Italians to return to the shop at a future date when he would have the piping and end caps ready for them.  Mr Smith then reported his suspicions to the local police station, and a team of police officers subsequently “staked out” the premises waiting for the Italians to return. Smith was also able to elicit that the suspects were having other pipework supplied by another company, Millers, of 44 Lancaster Street Borough Road. The police were able to follow that line of investigation too. So, Cohen’s establishment was staked out and Smith was given clear instructions on how to engage in a dialogue with the terrorists.  The terrorists were put under a major surveillance operation , involving quite a number of police and followed around London. I’m intrigued as to what we would regard as a highly proficient surveillance operation, comparable to today’s surveillance operations – for example, a police sergeant described how a terrorist, carrying the IED components from Cohen’s, was followed on to an omnibus. a total of four police officers, part of the surveillance team, operating undercover, were also aboard that same bus. One sat in the seat immediately behind the suspect. After leaving the bus, the suspect apparently carried out anti-surveillance drills, looking for tails. At this point he was arrested. Subsequent investigation of the suspect’s living accommodation found explosive recipes and IED manufacturing instructions along with other chemicals including a bottle of Sulphuric Acid. The instructions were disguised as a recipe for “polenta”, and appear to be a chlorate explosive of some kind which would be initiated by the addition of acid.

The terrorists had approached Taylor’s drug company of 66 High Holborn and bought two pounds of Sulphuric Acid in a bottle.

In the trial the government explosive chemist, Dr DuPre gave expert evidence to the manufacture of the explosives. Col Majendie, the Chief Inspector of Explosives and the nearest equivalent to the head of the bomb squad also gave evidence. Interestingly the court transcript is deliberately vague, I think, when describing the initiation system, and the “polenta”  explosive.

My view is that the device would have been designed to be thrown, and initiated when the device hits a target, so in effect was a very large impact grenade, such as the device used to assassinate the Tsar a few years earlier. But something more sophisticated is possible. Readers might wish to refer to some early blog posts about similar devices.

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2011/11/7/the-tsar-and-the-suicide-bomber.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2013/12/5/the-ied-technology-of-propaganda-of-the-deed-1884.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/10/5/the-curious-death-of-louis-lingg.html

I’m also intrigued by the use of the word “polenta” to describe a yellow chlorate based mix or compound, which seems to have similarities to these Irish chlorate based explosives that were encountered in the 1920s.

From this one case we can see that a population who were aware of IED threats in 1894 were able to report suspicious acquisition of components and that the police were able to act on those tips and plan subsequent detailed surveillance operations.

19th Century

The Horse’s Head and the Horse’s Hoof – VBIED Investigation in 1800 and 1920

I have posted before about the vehicle bomb attack in the failed attempt to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris in 1800, details here.  I have now uncovered some fascinating details about the subsequent investigation. This was an extremely high profile incident and initially focus was placed on “The Jacobins”, a political opposition to Bonaparte, or indeed the British. But I have found in the memoirs of a French dignitary details of a more thorough investigation headed by Fouche (who I have written about elsewhere).

The device used was in a container placed on a horse-drawn cart in the Rue St Nicaise.  The horse that was harnessed to the bomb vehicle had been killed on the spot, but apparently was “not in the least disfigured”. Fouche, the Prefect of Police, ordered that parts of the dead horse including its head be taken to all the horse dealers in Paris to see if they recognised it.  One of them indeed recognised the horse, and was able to direct the police to a specific house.  The woman who “kept the door” identified the occupants who were affiliated within a particular group  (the “Chouans” – a group of “Royalists” and not the Jacobins).  She was also able to detail how the leader of the group had worked on something placed in a “water-carrier’s barrel” over a period of six weeks.

The leader of the group, a man called St Regent, was still in the vicinity of the bomb when it detonated, and was thrown against a post, breaking his ribs. He “was obliged to resort to a surgeon”, and the surgeon betrayed him to the police.  He and an accomplice were guillotined.

In one of those fascinating parallels that I encounter occasionally on standingwellback, the VBIED attack on Wall St, New York City, in September 1920 also featured the remains of a horse as part of the investigation.

In this attack, 120 years after the Paris attack, outside the bank of JP Morgan, a horse drawn cart also exploded. In this explosion, however, the horse wasn’t left intact and was blown to bits, not least because the device contained dynamite rather than the gunpowder used in the 1800 device. The investigators were able to recover one of the hooves and took it to blacksmiths across the city.  The blacksmith was eventually identified a month later but by then the investigative trail had run dry.

We sometimes assume that modern day bomb investigators are a new breed of professionals in a new industry. while me way not see many horse drawn vehicle bombs these days, the modes of investigation go an awful long way back.

19th Century

Attacking Railway Lines with IEDs using Firearm Initiation Systems

I think I have a final piece of the jigsaw here, that links the IEDs used by Lawrence of Arabia, with IEDs used by Jack Hindon in the Boer War and now, the final piece, with a specific IED designed in the US Civil War.

My intent here is to show how a specific IED design, improvised from commonly available battlefield materials, that used the weight of a target train on a gun lock trigger mechanism to explode a charge, seems to have begun in 1864, and that design, or very close approximations of it were then seen in the Boer War decades later, and again in WW1 more than ten years after that.  It is of course possible that the design was independently invented – but my supposition is that it was not, and the concept was known by those who deal with explosives in one form or another. The attack mode proved useful in what we would call today “guerilla warfare”, often associated with a firearms firing on the resulting shocked and disorientated survivors.

In bringing these together in a historical sequence I am in part repeating earlier blog posts. In uncovering the details I worked backwards but now I’m laying this out in sequential historical sequence, covering a period from the early 1860s to WW1.  I’m specifically looking here at attacks on railways where the weight of the train causes a trigger on a gun “lock” to be initiated – components of firearms were of course used in other sorts of IEDs over many centuries and I have blogged about that here, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

1. US Civil War. Union IEDs designed to attack Confederate trains.  As I have blogged before IEDs (then called “torpedoes”) were used extensively by both sides in the US Civil War, with perhaps the Confederates making most application of them. After the end of hostilities the Chief Engineer of the US Army, Brigadier General Delafield collated numerous reports on various Torpedoes used in the conflict and put them into a historical context, examining the efficacy and appropriateness of use.  I find it intriguing that Delafield, in the decade prior to the US Civil War was one of the US Army’s observers in the Crimean War which saw extensive use by the Russians of IEDs.  In the collated reports is a letter written to Brigadier General Delafield by 1st Lieut Charles R Suter, Chief Engineer in the “Department of the South, Hilton Head, South Carolina, on 26 October, 1864. The letter reads as follows:

By direction of Major General Foster, I have this day forwarded by Adams Express, a box containing a railroad torpedo, tools and drawings showing its use.

This torpedo was devised by Charles F Smith, 3d U.S.C.T.

We have not yet been able to try them on the enemy’s railroads, but they have been thoroughly tested in experiments. The magazine holds 20 to 30 pounds of powder, and this is sufficient to blow a car off the track besides utterly destroying it. Two magazines can be used with one lock and by regulating the length of the powder train, any car of the passing train may be blown up.  The accompanying tools are simple and light. The idea of the inventor was, to send small parties of men, 3 or 4 in each, with these torpedoes and return. Each magazine is a load for a man. Another man can carry the lock and another the tools.

The manner of laying these torpedoes is as follows: –

The spikes are drawn from three consecutive ties on one side.  A hole is then dug, and the lock placed as indicated in the drawing. The rail is then sprung up and iron wedges placed on the adjacent ties to keep the rail from springing the lock by its own weight. When thus secured, the lock is cocked and capped, and the box closed. The magazine is then buried in the proper place, and the connection made. By using a little care in excavating and carrying off the superfluous earth to some little distance, the existence of the torpedo would never be suspected. The bottom of the arched rail should just touch the lever. Any shock by the bending down the rail pulls the trigger and explodes the torpedo.

In our experiments, a torpedo of 18 pounds was exploded by giving a car sufficient impetus to run over it. The car was entirely destroyed, and rails, ties and fragments of the car were thrown in every direction. One rail was projected 40 feet. 

These torpedoes can probably be used with success in some of the larger armies. Their greatest efficiency lies in destroying the locomotive, which cannot be replaced, whereas a torn up track can easily be relaid.  the magazine should be tarred before being used.

I am, General,

very respectfully,

Your obd’t serv’t

CHAS R SUTER

1st Lieut, U S Engineers & Chief Eng’r D.S.

Here’s the accompanying diagram:

 

The diagram shows a “lock” from a firearm, with a lever engaging the trigger system. This has been “pre-packaged” is a small box with the initiation mechanism causing a fuze to be lit. The fuze is then connected to two containers (“magazines”) placed under adjacent sleeper ties.

Despite much research I cannot find a report of a “gun-lock” initiated railway IED in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, five years after the end of the US Civil War.  But railway IEDs were used, initiated by the weight of a train on the fuze removed from an artillery shell and was the subject of my last blog post here.

2. The Boer War.  Gunlock initiated IEDs were used by the Boers against British Trains in the Boer war in 1901.  Here’s a diagram of the adapated Martini-Henry gun lock. The similarities of the US Civil war design of 1865 are clear.


Pictures of actual gunlocks from these devices are at this page

3. WW1 – Lawrence of Arabia and Bimbashi Garland’s attacks on Turkish trains in Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia’s campaign against the Ottoman Turks in the Arabian peninsula in WW1 often attacked the railway lines running south. The IEDs that Lawrence used were pretty much identical to the Boer devices, but had been developed by his ordnance specialist “Bimbashi Garland” and former Ordnance Corps laboratory technician who had been co-opted in the Arab Bureau because of his interest in archaeology.  I have no doubt that Garland was aware of the Boer methodology and simply used the same technique. Details are here.

In summary then I think it is clear that the use of a gunlock placed under a railway line to initiate an explosive charge began in 1865, with the invention by Charles Smith, for the Union Army.  This technique somehow found its way to the Boers in 1901, and then was copied again by Garland and Lawrence of Arabia in 1917.

19th Century

Attacking Railway Lines with IEDs – 1870

Readers of this blog will know I have written on a number of occasions about the use of IEDs against railway lines.  In one of the “threads” I have followed, I worked backwards from the use of such devices by Lawrence of Arabia in WW1, established that they had been developed and used in Arabia , by “Bimbashi” Garland, Lawrence’s explosive mentor, a former Ordnance Corps Laboratory technician, and traced the design of these devices back to the Boer War where they were used by Boer guerrillas led by Jack Hindon against the British. Devices under railway lines were also used by Russian Narodnaya Volya terrorists in 1879 and in many attacks since then.    In digging around the provenance of the Boer devices I found a vague reference to the experience of a Boer who had fought in the Franco-Prussian War 30 years earlier, that the Boer’s utlised.  Here’s a list of previous posts on the matter in the order I wrote them.

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/5/15/bimbashi-garland.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/6/6/garlands-first-ied-attack.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/6/ied-triggers.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/6/8/martini-henry-and-other-ied-initiation-systems.html

I have been digging around reports on the Franco-Prussian war for some time, hampered by my sadly limited language skills, looking for something that might indicate where the Boers had gained their experience of blowing up trains using a pressure switch activated by the weight of a train. At last I have found something that fits and it’s pretty interesting. In 1870 a young Royal Engineer officer, Lt Fraser, was observing the events of the Franco-Prussian war, a habit that many armies followed in the 19th century. Lt Fraser wrote a paper, published, in the Professional Papers of the Corps of Royal Engineers, Vol XX in 1872. The paper is entitled  “Account of a Torpedo used for the Destruction of a Railway Train on the 26th of October, 1870.”  As a reminder the word “torpedo” was used at the time to describe a much wider variety of explosive devices and munitions than is applied today.

Here is a brief extract from a third party source, as I await a hard copy of the publication in the post which I hope will contain more detail:

Learning that a Prussian troop train was to pass through Lanois (on the line between Reims and Mons) on October 26, 1870, they resolved to effect its destruction. How they operated is told by Lieutenant Fraser, R. E., who arrived on the spot shortly afterwards, and heard the story from some of the men engaged on the work. 

 

Any obstruction placed on the line would have been seen. Hence a different course had to be adopted. Selecting a spot where the line ran along a 12-ft. high embankment, to which a well-wooded slope came down on one side, the franc tireurs took up a pair of rails, removed the sleepers, cut a deep trench across the line, laid some pieces of iron at the bottom of the trench, placed on the iron a box containing thirty kilos (2 qrs. 10 lbs.) of powder, and fixed into the lid of the box a French field shell in such a way that, when the rail was replaced over the box, the head of the fuse would be just below the lower flange of the rail. In restoring the line again in order that there should be nothing to attract attention, the franc tireurs omitted one sleeper so that the weight of the locomotive should in passing press the rail down on to the head of the fuse. The party—some seventy-five strong—then withdrew to the shelter of the woods to await developments.   

 

In due time the train of forty coaches approached at the ordinary speed, the driver not suspecting any danger. When the engine reached the spot where the “torpedo” had been placed, an explosion occurred which tore up a mass of earth, rails and sleepers, threw the engine and several carriages down the embankment, and wrecked the train. Those of the Prussian troops who got clear from the wreckage were shot down by the franc tireurs under the protection of their cover. The number of the enemy thus disposed of was said to be about 400.

I think there is a clear link to the device I report in the my previous blogs about the depressing rail activating a pressure sensitive switch albeit in this case an artillery fuse, and not the trigger of a rifle breech as seen in the Boer War and used by Garland and Lawrence in Arabia.  The device too has a link to the earlier pressure sensitive devices, using artillery shells with contact fuses adapted to initiate on pressure used by General Raines in the American civil war in 1862.

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