Pop, Crackle and Bang

When​ I was growing up, there was only one name for the fifth of November: ‘Bonfire Night’. Much of the excitement lay in anticipation, which gained momentum in the last week of October, brushing confidently past Halloween, not yet the extravagant rite of autumn it has become. Like all memories, this flies back as a scatter of images: pestering Dad for an old shirt and trousers; tying up the arms and legs and cramming in newspaper; a balloon for a head in the hood of a coat; and, with a friend from down our street, begging outside Woolworths. ‘Penny for the Guy,’ we cried, feebly, like a pair of Victorian urchins.

Our haul – usually four or five pounds – was spent on one thing. ‘Light up the sky with Standard Fireworks!’ the TV advert sang, an invitation received like a command. All children knew the story of Guy Fawkes’s failing to blow up Parliament in 1605, but nothing of the anti-Catholic core of its commemoration, a calendar custom so culturally embedded that the nation was still at it three centuries later. But then, for us, Bonfire Night was all about feeling not thinking, an atavism of self-enchantment, a ripple in time from our ancestors outfacing the cold, dark harbingers of winter with heat and light. And what better way to make light than with fireworks? Even the lid of the box was gaudily thrilling, like a fairground or circus. And beneath lay a tessellated array of shapes in comic-book colours, with daring names like Volcano, Spitfire, Chrysanthemum Fountain and Jack in the Box.

After an eternity of waiting, the big night arrived. We gathered at the end of the garden, Dad with a torch stomping about in his duffel coat, arranging things. The small bonfire was lit, and we gazed into the flames licking round the Guy like a sacrifice to the old gods. There were sparklers, and we wrote our names on the night. Mum brought out buttery baked potatoes, chipolatas and tomato soup. Then came the fireworks, too few and too small to fend off demons, but still magnificent, a spell to deepen the intimacy we felt with one another as a family, as well as some primeval anxiety pricked by the death of summer. The next morning, as we walked to school, there were spent rockets in the gutters and the scent of woodsmoke and gunpowder hung in the air.

John Withington’s meticulous history of fireworks begins with childhood memories that resemble my own: his Bonfire Nights were in Manchester in the 1950s and mine two decades later in Kent, but almost everything was the same. Fireworks were the centrepiece, not just a means to an end, an exuberant son et lumière, but numinous objects in themselves. Back then we were part of the ritual: we owned and controlled fireworks, unlike today, when most families attend organised displays, which are vastly superior to anything I ever saw, yet essentially passive events. There were firework displays, of course – but we never went, and I felt sorry for children who didn’t have their own smoky conclaves with family and friends.

The appeal lay, as ever, not only in togetherness or spectacle but managed exposure to danger. The potential for harm in a box of fireworks was enticingly real. Public information films, shown on TV during commercial breaks, and narrated in teacherly RP, added irresponsible use of fireworks to a litany of juvenile perils that included climbing electricity pylons and stumbling into quarries. Fireworks were to be kept in a metal biscuit tin and removed one at a time (as if!), and the golden rule was never return to a lit firework that appeared to have gone out. The fear was delicious and infectious, and where officialdom left off urban myth took over. Everyone claimed to know someone who knew someone who had been blinded or lost fingers. I once picked up a spent yet red-hot sparkler and became a casualty, led away screaming.

When we were a little older – the years of feral, bike-riding independence – we discovered the pleasures of owning our own pocket-money explosives. Fireworks were portable bombs with blue-touchpaper fuses. Newsagents sold bangers (ten pence a pop), slender rockets and a box of matches, no questions asked. They knew we were up to no good. We threw the bangers – now banned in the UK – like grenades; rockets were fired horizontally from garden walls so they shot down the street to end up who knew where. This felt both bad and acceptable, misconduct just about excused by high spirits. Other boys, we heard, mixed weedkiller and sugar in Bluebell polish tins, and took hammer-and-nail to live ammunition, which, remarkably, could be found at the Royal Engineers’ easily accessed training ground.

The joy of fireworks surely predates the written record. Withington begins his story with the earliest prototypes: simple sticks of bamboo that went bang when tossed into a fire. In ancient China these were meant to repel evil spirits but also just made people jump and laugh. When the bamboo was filled with ‘fire chemical’, things got more interesting. Once again the Chinese top the credits, though Indians, Arabs and Greeks had their own daredevils mixing sulphur, saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and charcoal – in China, that meant the charred pods of the soap-bean tree. The recipe for gunpowder may have come from the kitchen, where meat was cured with saltpetre; sulphur was an ingredient in medicines. The optimal blend and its uses, including as an elixir, came from accident and experiment. A ninth-century Chinese text, the Classified Essentials of the Mysterious Tao of the True Origin of Things, told of a houseful of incautious alchemists burning the place down.

The main application of gunpowder was inevitably in warfare, which has its own volatile story, but the enterprise of refining gunpowder for entertainment ran in parallel, and its history traces a long line between celebrating life and causing death. The natural vitality of saltpetre was linked to the human body in the premodern taxonomy of correspondences. In China and India it was extracted from soil, but the richest source was urine. Latrines were farmed. In England, where parishioners were caught short during masses and sermons, even the untiled earth floor between pews was dug out to be milled into gunpowder.

The modern firework took shape with a few fairly simple innovations, such as enclosing the gunpowder in paper tubes. This was probably the nature of the thumb-sized toy encountered in 1267 by the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, who, with forgivable exaggeration, recorded a noise ‘exceeding the roar of strong thunder and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning’. Paper could also be wrapped around canvas compartments to add stages to a firework’s incandescent lifespan. Fuses meant no longer having to toss fireworks on a bonfire, and crimping off one end effected propulsion or the frantic dance of the jumping jack firecracker (also now banned in the UK). What Withington remembers as ‘rip raps’ were called in China ‘ground rats’, an errant example of which, in the 13th century, distressed the empress dowager Gongsheng during a display staged in her honour. Another crucial development, which the Chinese had certainly cracked by the fifth century (though probably much earlier), was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.

China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and flowers and lights, like an allegory of Creation. As well as inventing rockets and bangers, the Chinese established the basic designs of the Roman candle, which emitted a torrent of sparks (once, to our delight, up Dad’s flared trouser leg), and the Catherine wheel. Ours were nailed to the apple tree, spun madly and usually broke free, careening around our legs. You haven’t lived until you’ve been chased by an angry firework – or, at least, the ones that go off safely tend to be forgotten. The hazardous ambitions of an imperial Chinese official called Wan Hu are a case in point. He is remembered for attaching two kites and 47 rockets to a chair, hoping to become the first man in space. The experiment went according to plan, the story goes, right up to the moment his 47 assistants lit the fuses, whereupon there was a colossal explosion and Wan Hu disappeared – possibly not into the stratosphere.

Such accidents happened because there was too much saltpetre in the mix. By tweaking the recipe, and adding oil, pitch and beeswax, gunpowder could be made to burn in a slow, controlled way. For reasons obscure, even semen found its way into the concoction. With some alterations to the internal architecture of the firework, this so-called ‘flying gunpowder’ turned a pipe bomb into a serene missile: the taper-bearer could stand back and enjoy rather than having his hand and face blown off. By around 1350 the Chinese had perfected a multi-stage rocket that gave birth to a brood of squibs, a device which had a mainly military function associated with the evolution of cannon and handguns.

Exploration, imperialism and war were facets of the same late medieval and early modern venture, supported by shipbuilding and cartography, metallurgy and gunpowder. Travel and trade brought fireworks both offensive and benign to the European world. By the 16th century, crowds in Florence and Siena beheld huge wooden wheels, lavishly decorated, spinning on poles and emitting glittering cascades from attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla feel ‘as if all the air in the world is filled with fireworks, and all the stars in the heavens are falling to earth – a thing truly stupendous, and marvellous to behold’. Reformation and Counter-Reformation audiences were more liable to think of the Apocalypse than the Creation, partly because the descent of the stars was believed to portend the Second Coming. In Protestant Britain, fireworks streaking across the firmament were man-made versions of comets and other celestial phenomena interpreted as providential signs and portents.

Such wonders were staged to flaunt royal or papal power, or to enhance mystery plays and mock battles. Art harmonised with science, and big names got involved. Michelangelo is said to have designed firework displays and, according to Vasari, Leonardo built a walking, roaring lion that disgorged fiery birds and flowers. Experts entered the picture, such as the Dutchmen hired by Henry VIII; Elizabeth I, who had a soft spot for fireworks, created the position of ‘Fire Master of England’. A massive display at Warwick Castle in 1572 resulted in several houses being burned down (the queen raised a £25 compensation fund from her loyal subjects), and three years later Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, had his Italian pyrotechnician pull out the stops at Kenilworth in a final, futile bid to win Elizabeth’s heart.

Her successor, James I, was also a firework fan, despite or perhaps because of the fact that he narrowly escaped assassination by history’s biggest firework, placed in an undercroft beneath the Palace of Westminster. A year later, in 1606, he poached a fire master from Christian IV of Denmark, and in 1613 put on a breathtaking show along the Thames to mark Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Prince-Elector Palatine of the Rhine. By this time, two opposing European firework schools had emerged: one Catholic and baroque; the other, led by Protestant Germans, simple, secular and precise.

These schools had more in common than antagonists made out. Desire for ever more amazing spectacles was universal, exemplified by the career of Martin Beckman, a Swedish mercenary tasked with arranging fireworks for Charles II’s coronation in 1661; he held the post of royal fire master for the next forty years. Unfazed by confessional differences, Beckman put on great shows that lightened the royal coffers and set fire to Londoners and their homes – even after 1666, when incendiarism became a touchy subject. All this time, James I’s deliverance was marked on 5 November each year with bonfires and bells and squibs hurled through the air, not just because it was popular to hate Catholics but because these festivities were a legal requirement and remained so until 1859.

In the age of revolutions, this injunction sat uneasily with town authorities. Street fires, satirical effigies, exploding gunpowder, flaming tar barrels and begging for Guys – an old tradition, it turns out – posed a serious threat to political hierarchy and public order. Crowds had ideas (and grievances) of their own and could no longer be relied on to bow to the ancien régime. The town of Guildford outlawed fireworks in 1795, though the ban was lifted in 1815, presumably under pressure to celebrate Waterloo.

By the​ 19th century, enthusiasts and their patrons were nearing the limits of improvement, in terms of both technical wizardry and aerial choreography. A full spectrum of colours became possible by using lithium for pink, caesium salts for indigo, rubidium for violet and so on. Potassium chlorate intensified coloration but became unstable when mixed with sulphur, which had to be replaced with powdered shellac. Magnesium, available in industrial quantities by the 1860s, made fireworks burn with vivid intensity. Aluminium did the same job, and combined with saltpetre made for louder bangs.

In Britain, the tall, full-bearded Charles Brock became the Willy Wonka of fireworks, an entrepreneurial magus who insisted on serious chemistry rather than reckless alchemy. He also had big ideas for the future of fireworks. Overcoming the Victorian connection between fireworks, pleasure gardens and prostitution, Brock cemented the place of pyrotechnic extravaganzas in public life. Beneath a canopy of soaring lights, sixty thousand people flocked to Crystal Palace in 1872 to give thanks for the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid fever. The queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 was celebrated across the nation. By then the Crystal Palace events, of which there were several each year, were being replicated in other towns and cities, notably with flamboyant displays in Manchester’s Belle Vue Gardens.

Business boomed. In bitter rivalry with another company, Pains, Brock extended his markets and manufacture to America, Australia, India and China, his firework shows fusing edification with awe and a pinch of patriotism. As in Britain, many events in these countries were themed: the Last Days of Pompeii, the Great Fire of London, the Siege of Sevastopol – any historical conflagration fitted the bill. Displays became ever more elaborate and popular down to the First World War, when recreational gunpowder was banned for the duration. Factories built in Huddersfield pivoted to fill grenades, among them Standard Fireworks, founded by James Greenhalgh, a draper’s son, in 1891. Production and consumption of fireworks continued to expand in the 1920s and 1930s until the next war shut things down again. In 1946, however, the government ordered a majestic victory display along the same stretch of the Thames where King James had celebrated his daughter’s wedding 333 years earlier. The ‘Big Bomb’, a gigantic explosive shell, filled London’s skies with what to the News of the World looked like ‘golden rain’.

In the postwar era companies popped up all over: Wessex, Astra, Lion, Rainbow, Benwell’s. By 1959 Benwell’s had an annual output of twenty million fireworks. In the same year, Standard Fireworks was listed on the Stock Exchange, the backbone of its business not the big displays but retail in shops, where children begging with Guys could buy a big box for a few shillings. In 1964 Ron Lancaster, a teacher at Kimbolton School (his subjects, appropriately, were chemistry and divinity), founded Kimbolton Fireworks. Lancaster’s reputation grew to the extent that he was employed as an adviser for the queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, though his methods remained charmingly low-tech. ‘I have a small hydraulic compressor,’ he explained, ‘but a lot of the powder is just knocked in with a stick.’

Yet the market for private, domestic use was contracting, largely due to tightening regulations. Fireworks caused several hundred injuries each year, many involving children. As back-garden parties waned, fewer accidents were recorded, which was good news for A&E departments but not for manufacturers. Famous companies merged or went bust. In 1987 Standard bought Brocks, once leader of the pack, for just £55,000. By then the price of a selection box in Woolworths had shot up. Children stopped guying, fathers’ wardrobes remained intact, and public displays costing £1000 a minute took over. In 1998 Standard went into receivership and was bought by Black Cat Fireworks, based in Hong Kong – thus ending (with the exception of Kimbolton) UK-based production, and returning ‘flying gunpowder’ to the place where the fascination had begun. In the 21st century, Halloween with all its commercial trappings surged past Bonfire Night in a cloud of sulphurous smoke.

Today, fireworks are still let off on 5 November, on 4 July, on New Year’s Eve; at weddings, balls, birthdays and gender reveal parties. (In 2020 a pyrotechnic device ignited at a gender reveal party in California killed a firefighter and burned down twenty thousand acres of San Bernardino and Riverside counties.) But opinion is divided over whether they should be allowed at all, mainly because of the noise. Opponents speak up for scared pets, wild birds dropping from the sky, war veterans with PTSD and people with autism; others worry about the profligacy (especially in times of recession and austerity) and pollution caused by raised atmospheric levels of strontium, sulphur dioxide, nitric oxide, potassium perchlorate and other toxins, as well as paper, plastic and metal debris. In 2020 Sydney became the first city to declare its New Year fireworks carbon neutral. With each fresh concern, however justified, a little enchantment sputters out. The distinctive bang and crackle can still send me rushing to the window hoping to catch the decaying stars of some celestial bloom – in every burst of light and colour a pang of nostalgia. But the moment is too fleeting and, besides, the magical feeling has gone.