I'm going to rattle on for a bit...
There are many influences that inform the lunacy that Auntie Brigit drags around with her.
One of these is the late Derek Mcintosh "Blaster" Bates. Dad had two LPs of his after-dinner speaking and I grew up with these with the old boy's mischievous grin as an accompaniment.
Dad never told me the finer points of chemistry, although he did buy me a chemistry set when I was quite young and showed me how to make a mess and upset mum in the process. I forget the name of the manufacturer of said chemistry set, but it was very popular in the seventies.
Dad had little time for growing crystals of copper sulphate. Making hydrogen, hydrogen sulphide and ammonium chloride smoke screens were more in keeping with his impish humour.
The humble chemistry set was supplemented with various substances available to a builder who also had the head of Avon Schools as a close friend. I remember there being a large tub of strong hydrochloric acid in the top shed, acquired, supposedly, for the purpose of cleaning algae from the swimming pool. I don't remember any family members going missing at this time, but I do recall some fun being had and all manner of things meeting a fizzy demise.
Dad had a delightful chemistry book, borrowed from his school library and never returned. It was published in 1897 and I wish I still had it. It was a real beauty. I was relieved of it by the chemistry teaching staff at Millfield when we were engaged in experiments that would most probably see us arrested should they ever come to light. I knew every word in the book which is probably why I didn't notice it's disappearance for a while.
It had the recipe for mercuric fulminate. This was a Victorian recipe book, let us remember, and they were generous with their portions...
It's a wonder we didn't blow Somerset to smithereens, but then there's no stopping a chemistry teacher once his fuse is lit. I'm sure we've all been there. Nitrogen triiodide, phosphine smoke rings, what's next? Be it Clifton College or Millfield, the chemistry staff where as naughty as the kids that they taught and a blind eye was turned to the various borrowings that used to find their way from lab to student den. Not a word was said when mine blew asunder as my lead azide manufacturing plant ripped the place apart. Bristol had its very own Flixborough that afternoon.
Dad contrived a lime kiln one day and loaded it with Mendip limestone. Later, we marvelled at the heat that calcium oxide will generate when a rainfall passes by.
There was a large tin of weedkiller in the top shed and it knew (in the biblical sense) a quantity of flowers of sulphur with dramatic results, much to the delight of my wee brother, a recent convert to the cause.
We had ammonium perchlorate, magnesium powder, nitrating mixtures and knowledge that would turn the IRA as green as their isle. Should the Somerset Freedom Fighters ever sound the clarion call...
(Talking of the IRA and the Mendip Hills, the latter is populated with quarries which naturally attracted the interest of the former. Our local plod nicked two of them as they were walking out of Westbury Quarry, a third made a run for it, but the terrain is not easy going and the local lads soon made their local knowledge count.)
Back in Clifton, a gentleman from ICI Explosives Division was called in to deliver a talk to a small lecture theatre packed with fifteen year old lads. (You read correctly - who could be so stupid as to give chapter and verse to the very people most likely to blow the school to buggery?) It was a show with a practical slant. The fellow had brought some samples with him and borrowed liberally from the school's chemical store. That told us what was in there (and an SAS-unit-in-prospect made a successful reconnaissance during the wee small hours...)
During this delightful discourse, our man lit two Bunsen burners and left two ten-foot metal bars warming in them while he explained their purpose.
At either end of the lecture room were two small stacks of engineering bricks, each with a tuppenny piece on top. Over these were laid a small sheet of aluminium which in turn was coated with crystallised ammonium perchlorate. He had a small dropper bottle containing carbon disulphide in which was dissolved phosphorus.
He put two drops on each of the aluminium plates and let the carbon disulphide evaporate to leave a fine coating of phosphorus on the fine coating of ammonium perchlorate. While the evaporation was taking place, he decided to tell us about the greatest explosion in recorded history: Krakatoa. He gave a most enlightening discourse and we understood that the sea floor caved in and a full cubic kilometre of water was vaporised in a matter of seconds.
By now, his irons were ready. He donned his gauntlets and brought the first iron to bear on the aluminium plate by the window. It went with an almighty explosion and a mushroom cloud billowed forth and filled the room. We'd had our hand over our ears on his advice, and distracted by his Krakatoan history lesson, we forgot about the other.
He duly dropped it on the other plate with similar result. Everyone's ears were still ringing on the Sunday.
He passed the aluminium sheets around afterwards and both had a perfect imprint of the Queen's head from the tuppenny piece.
Some days later, an "SAS unit" relieved a laboratory of a quantity of ammonium perchlorate, carbon disulphide and phosphorus.
I was the school's star chemistry pupil and I'm a fool for reading maths at university instead. During my A-level practical, the mystery substance in the brown envelope presented itself as orange crystals of a very distinctive shape. Assessing ammonium dichromate by sight alone, I brought the attention of my fellow students by way of a coughing fit. Half of the sample was sacrificed to the "volcano experiment" and everyone proceeded with the formalities of qualitative analysis.
Shortly before this, my chemistry teacher (a perfect likeness of Captain Pugwash and now a councillor at Wandsworth) wanted to know why I was unable to produce my homework.
"Couldn't be buggered, sir"
I had a fair clout upside the earhole.
Later I delivered a perfect dissertation on the mechanism of steam distillation, just to prove a point.
Later still, visiting the school for a reunion, I met Pugwash in the pub across the road.
"Reenie, you cow, did no work for two years and got an 'A'"
...referring to my A-level result, of course. To be fair, I'd done the work years before.
That's because I'm a chemistry geek.
I'll finish this rambling discourse with the obituary of the man without whose inspiration I would have enjoyed a life less troubled by neighbours, family, medical professionals...
The Independent >>Blaster Bates12th September 2006
Derek Mcintosh Bates, demolition engineer: born Crewe, Cheshire 5 February 1923: married 1946 Maud Lightfoot (one son, three daughters); died Crewe 1 September 2006.
Blaster Bates never expected to become a celebrity: he was a demolition expert whose stories amused his friends and then in the Sixties and Seventies came to the attention of a wider public. He could fill theatres, particularly in the North-West, with his one-man shows, but, through it all, he kept his demolition business going and in so doing gathered even more adventures for his records and stage shows.
He was born Derek Bates in Cheshire in 1923. His apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce in Crewe was interrupted by Second World War service. He flew bombers for the RAF and became a specialist in bomb disposal. He was intrigued by this work and planned to use his knowledge in peacetime.
In 1946, he started his own demolition business in Elworth; his van had the word of warning "Blasting" on the back and the company's slogan was "I'll blast anything". He changed the local landscape by demolishing over 500 tall chimney-stacks. In 1963, Bates blasted through rock to help build the M6. When he worked on the Oulton Park racing circuit, he had to contend with a courting couple in the grass and from this came his action-packed anecdote "The Naming of Knicker Brook". Everyone had great faith in what he was doing: he once blew up the underground vaults of a bank whilst business continued at ground level.
Even though Bates might walk around with explosives in his pockets, he was never seriously injured. He once hung by his fingertips at the top of a quarry whilst the fuses burned below, but was rescued in the nick of time. On another occasion, he had just laid explosives in a lake when the outboard motor on his boat stalled. He recalled that he "rowed away with a determination that would have won the Boat Race".
As a robust six-footer, Bates looked the part and he became well known as a raconteur at rotary clubs, where his regional accent and colourful language added to the amusement. Soon he was talking about the likes of Big Mick from Connemara on television chat shows including Parkinson. Asked how he might land a particular chimney-stack neatly into a confined space, he replied, "I've got a touch like a midwife." He had the repartee of a Northern comedian:
I've brought some of the gelignite with me. You'll notice it is like marzipan. Just the job for the mother-in-law's birthday cake. You get her to light the candle and you piddle off out quick.
His tale about the time he was hired to clear out a farm's septic tank contained some vivid descriptions:
Twelve seconds later, four and a half thousand tons of effluent leapt into the air. It climbed into the sky and, at 300 feet, it mushroomed out, and a shaft of sunlight hit it. You could see all the colours of the starling's wing, the greens and the golds and the browns, light and dark, and a lot of bottle-green in it.
Bates made a series of live albums about "The Explosive Exploits of Blaster Bates". The first volume, Laughter With a Bang (1967), recorded at the Congleton Round Table, was a huge seller and 1001 Gelignites (1968), TNT for Two (1969), Watch Out for the Bits (1971), Lift-Off (1973), Gelly Baby (1975), Blastermind (1980) and Hunting and Shooting (1984) followed. Although his albums and shows contained warnings about language, it was rarely worse than "bugger" or "bullshit".
Bates won trophies for shooting and rallying and would participate in Wall of Death stunts. To improve his chances on a hill climb, he would put home-made rockets on the side of his motorcycle. He undertook charity work and served as a special constable with Cheshire Police from 1968 to 1980. "He was an hilarious character and he enjoyed being what is called a community constable today," recalls Joe Roper, a former policeman who worked with him:
He used to take a stick of gelignite to his talks and he would light the fuse when he began. He would be telling his anecdotes and the fuse would be
getting shorter and shorter. When there was only a very small amount left, he would put it out. No one, of course, would be allowed to do that today.
In a sense, Bates set the path for the exploits of Fred Dibnah, but Bates's humour was coarser. In 2001, he had a stroke, but was able to continue with speaking engagements. He enjoyed his work, and he enjoyed talking about it, and said he was always sorry that he never got the call for the big one - Nelson's Column.
Blaster Bates at YouTube >>