When we think of the food we eat, we think of it in terms of fuel – this is especially the case with starchy food, those made from flour because they are broken down into sugars and then converted slowly into energy in a form the body can use (unless we eat too much of it, then it is turned into fat). However, workers in factories around the world are very aware of the amount of energy trapped in flour: working with large amounts of it can be a dangerous business. Factory explosions have occurred causing damage, injury and death.
The worst accident in the British Isles caused by flour happened on 9 July 1872 at the Tradeston Flour Mill in Glasgow, a century and a half ago. An explosion ripped through the mill seriously injuring 16 and killing 18, among them a mother of three with her three-month-old baby. What caused it? A report published in the journal Nature reported that the ‘origin [was] conclusively traced to the striking of fire by a pair of millstones caused by the stopping of the “feed” or supply of grain to them, and the consequent friction against each other, the result being the ignition of the mixture of air and fine flour dust surrounding the millstones.’[1] It might have been self-contained were it not for the cloud of flour, the explosion itself created. The mill was set up so that several mills were working together in a row, run by steam power, each explosion setting up another sending a cascade of flour bombs ripping through the building.[2] The most recent flour explosion in the UK occurred on 18 November 1981 in the Bird’s Custard factory in Banbury, Oxfordshire where a cloud of cornflour[3] exploded injuring nine.
It has been theorised that it was a flour explosion that exacerbated the Great Fire of London in 1666 when an oven exploded next to several sacks of flour. The (alleged) bakery on Pudding Lane was owned by King Charles II’s own baker, Thomas Farriner. The blaze would continue for five days, destroying 13,500 houses and many important buildings including St Paul’s Cathedral. It killed just six people.
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Notes
[1] Accidental Explosions. Nature 478–479 (1875).
[2] Dalgetty, L. (2022) ‘Remembering the Glasgow Flour Mill explosion that killed 18 people’, Glasgow Live, 10 July.
[3] Bird’s Custard isn’t thickened with egg, but with cornflour/starch and it is by far the main component, the others being colouring and a very fake vanilla flavouring. For more on custard click here.
British Food: A History 