DEATH'S GARDEN CITY

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21052, 2 March 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

DEATH'S GARDEN CITY

Visit to Shell Factory :: Concentrated Energy

(H. V. Morton in New York Times)

•pHERE ARE PARTS of England that show you what certain districts in this country must have looked like during the opening years of the industrial revolution. Factories are still invading the fields, and two worlds stand side by side; one symbolised by a haystack, the other by a chimney-stack. In this queer country agricultural labourers and mechanics bicycle home together. On one side of the road they grow crops, on the other guns are made. In this strange and not unattractive region I approached an explosive factory. Many of the workers arrive by special trains and step out on the factory’s own railway station. It is indeed a town ol T.N.T. No visitors are encouraged in this factory, even in peacetime, and now you are halted long before you get there by armed policemen, who take you behind a wire fence and question you. No one would be foolish enough to go there without a Government pass, but even with a pass you are not immediately made welcome. Police with holsters at their belts took my name and other particulars and telephoned for instructions.

cently was open country are miles devoted to the most deadly explosives known to man. But the odd thing about the place is that it Looks So Harmless and So Green. The art of building an explosive factory is to spread it out over an enormous area in order to lessen the risk of disaster. II the place is to blow up, it must do so in sections. So I motored for a mile or so along straight roads and over concrete bridges, and on each side of me, and dotted at regularly spaced intervals in the distance were huge mounds covered with beautiful green turf. Beneath each mound, deep in the earth, were dumps of T.N.T.. cordite and other dangerous materials. I found the main police station. I was again examined and asked to sign books, to be given in return an appropriately red and dangerous-looking card, proving that I had passed my examination with credit. The police opened some more gates, and I soon found myself led through administrative offices, as large and as lavish as a new town hall, to the room of the superintendent. I asked how he would define an explosive in a sentence. Without a second’s hesitation he replied: “An explosive is concentrated energy in a small space which, given certain conditions, will release itself.”

I was told to drive along Central Avenue and report at the main police station. The gates were swung wide and I entered the strangest place you can imagine. A good name for it camp into my mind: Death’s Garden City. Spread over what so re-