Casting Forth Wild Fire

The firework show, the burnt effigy of Guido Fawkes, the post carnival display and the new year celebrations. Woven into the fabric of society, and taken for granted in this age of lasers and technical wizardry, the history of pyrotechnic displays is a long one, and remembrance in the UK of the events of 5th November 1605 and the actions of Guido Fawkes, Robert Catesby et al merely supplant an older tradition.

Public pyrotechnic displays in Europe celebrated Saints’ days, religious festivals, State coronations and great victories in battle. A contemporary print showing a Nuremburg display in 1570 is one of the earliest pictorial records of fireworks in action, although knowledge of pyrotechnics had existed in China and India for centuries, and the refining of saltpeter to produce explosions is described in a book written in 1214 by Friar Bacon, born in Ilchester, Somerset.

At the 1487 coronation of Henry VII’s bride Elizabeth, at the head of the Lord Mayor’s river procession, was the “Batchelor’s Barge garnished and appareled above all others and carried a dragon spouting flames of fire into the Thames”, and in 1533 Anne Boleyn was taken from Greenwich to Westminster for her coronation, escorted by “a foyste or wafter full of ordnance, in which foyste was a great red dragon continually moving and casting forth wild fire”. This practice was the norm for many years as part of the Mayor of London’s water pageant, as evidenced by an entry in the City Book which reads: Paid to John Kellock for the charge of the foyste and a galley and for his services with men, shot, powder, cassocks and all other necessaries… £32.10.0d.” (£32.50 in modern coinage, around $68). No clue is forthcoming as to the need for cassocks.

Public displays with formal set pieces were rare before the Elizabethan age, but once it became known that Elizabeth enjoyed them, there was a fervent desire to fulfill her wish. The first major display occurred in 1572 when she visited the castle of the Earl of Warwick, Master-General of Ordnance. Two canvas forts erected on the Temple Fields were alternately attacked by 200 performers armed with qualivers and harquebuses, whilst defended by discharges of fireworks and 20 pieces of ordnance from the Tower of London. A display that wouldn’t have a prayer getting past the health and safety regulations today.

In 1613 London’s River Thames was closed from Lambeth to Temple Stairs for incendiary barges manned by fire-workers to celebrate the marriage of James I’s daughter, while the Master-gunner of England, William Hammond, “did perform many ingenious exploits with great bombards, shooting up many artificial balls of fire”. The presence of the Master-General of Ordnance and the Master-gunner of England at these two large public displays set a precedent, maintained until 1856, that the provision of fireworks for occasions of national rejoicing was the duty of the Ordnance Department, leading to the appointment of Firemasters under the Comptroller of the Fireworks, and in 1672 the Firework Laboratory was established at Woolwich.