70. 1917 Now were was I?

As I have left the subject of FAI alone for so long I need to retrace and get my thoughts back into his life..... where he was up to, where he was going.
All my paperwork and research have been tidied away into a new small shiny filing cabinet & I can’t find a thing.
To assist in bring my mind back to him I have been looking at what happened in 1917.
He was away sailing and doing his bit for King and Country where ever on the H.M.S Settsu and granny was a laundry maid in Edinburgh.

The first slice of 1917 I have come across was the Silvertown Explosion on 19th January 1917. Silvertown is in West Ham, Essex. The explosion happened in a munitions factory, which was producing explosives for WW1. Approximately 50 tonnes of TNT exploded.
It killed 73 people and injured over 400. 70,000 properties were damaged and 900 were wiped out completely.
Two years into the war Britain was facing a huge shortage of munitions so the Government commandeered the surplus manufacturing capacity of the factory, that manufactured caustic soda and soda crystals, to make TNT.
Despite the factory being in an extensively residential area it was deemed at the time to not be of risk.
I imagine it wasn’t the nicest places to work if you think about the lack of safe guards in place in Victorian built factories. The Factory Acts had been introduced and the 1844 Act specified that children between the ages of 8 and 13 could not work longer than 6 ½ hours per day either in the morning or afternoon, no child being allowed to work in both on the same day, except on alternate days, and then only for ten hours. Young persons and women (now included for the first time) were to have the same hours, i.e. not more than twelve for the first five days of the week (with one and a half out for meals), and nine on Saturday.
So with most of the men fighting in the war the factory would have been predominantly staffed with women and children.

The explosion was caused by a fire in the factory (probably someone having a sly ciggie break out the back). As most of the TNT had been loaded into train wagons awaiting dispatch the debris was strewn for miles firing red hot chucks of metal from the carriages. The damage was estimated at £2.5 million pounds (huge amount those days but the price of an apartment that probably stands not so far from the site these days!!)
As FAI came from this ‘neck of the woods’ I am sure this piece of news interested him, he would have known the area and maybe even known someone who worked there.

February 13th 1917 – Mata Hari was arrested for spying. I think FAI would have definitely noticed this on he had a love of the stage girls (as we have seen with his collection of postcards) and I guess Mata didn’t slip his attention either.
Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle I 1876 in Holland. In 1905 she became Mata Hari an exotic dancer. She posed as a princess from Java pretending to have been initiated into the art of sacred Indian dance since childhood. How wonderful she kidded everyone. It is a kin in my eyes to my great great grandfather being a Professor of Languages after living Brittany for 6 years. It would have been so easy to kid people then as forms of communication where not as they are now nor where the public as educated.
During WW1 Holland was neutral which meant Mata could travel freely across borders.
To avoid the theatres of war she took varied routes. She would travel to France from Holland via Spain and Britain. This of course caused suspicion. Also she was known to be the courtesan to may high ranking military officials at the time.
It is not known if at the time of arrest the tales she said were true or fiction. It was concluded, however, that the German spy H-21 was Mata Hari and she was executed by firing squad on 15th September 1917.

From this brief encounter with Mata Hari, I am intrigued to dig deeper, there are many conspiracy theories about her.

Her body was never claimed by anyone and was reportedly used for medical science. Her head was embalmed and kept in the Museum of Anatomy in Paris but mysteriously has disappeared circa 1954. The rest of her should be there too but non of her remains can be found