H. M. Factory, Gretna was Britain's largest cordite factory in World War I. The government-owned facility was adjacent to the Solway Firth, near Gretna, Dumfries and Galloway. It was built by the Ministry of Munitions in response to the Shell Crisis of 1915. The capital cost was £9,184,000 (£ in ) and it covered . The cost of working it from September 1916 to September 1918 was £12,769,000, during which time it produced cordite valued at £15,000,000, though it was claimed that without it the cordite would have had to be imported from the USA at a cost of £23,600,000.
The Devil's Porridge Museum in Eastriggs, Dumfriesshire, commemorates the efforts of these workers during the World War I.
Layout
H. M. Factory, Gretna stretched from Mossband near Longtown in the east, to Dornock / Eastriggs in the west straddling the Scottish-English border. The facility consisted of four large production sites and two purpose-built townships. The facility had its own independent transport network, power source, and water supply system.
Site 1, Smalmstown was to the north of Longtown (at ). Site 2, Mossband was bounded on the west by the Caledonian Railway (now the West Coast Main Line), and the River Esk on the south and the east (at ). Site 3, Eastriggs was bounded to the north by the B721 and the Glasgow and South Western Railway, and south by the Solway Firth and the River Sark (at ). Site 4, Gretna was contained like Site 3 but it was adjacent to the Gretna township to the east (at ).
A military, narrow gauge railway was used to move materials and supplies around the sites. The network, which had of track, employed 34 engines. Electricity for the munitions manufacture and the townships was provided by a purpose-built coal-fired power station. The telephone exchange was handling up to 2.5 million calls in 1918. The townships had their own bakeries, laundry and a police force. The laundry could clean 6,000 items daily and the bakeries made 14,000 meals a day.
Water was taken from the River Esk, north of Longtown, through a diameter pipe to a pump house. From there it was pumped through a main to a reservoir. A filtration/treatment works could handle up to ten million gallons (45,000m) a day.
History
Construction work on H. M. Factory, Gretna started in November 1915 under the general supervision of S P Pearson & Sons. Up to 10,000 Irish navvies worked on the site as well as concurrently building the two wooden townships to house the workers at Gretna and Eastriggs. To prevent problems with the influx of construction and munition workers, authorities implemented the State Management Scheme which curtailed alcohol sales through the nationalisation of pubs and breweries in the vicinity. Medical issues at the facility were overseen by Thomas Goodall Nasmyth.
Munitions production started in April 1916. Engineers and chemists from nations throughout the British Empire were employed to establish the production of RDB Cordite. By 1917 the largest proportion of the workforce were women: 11,576 women to 5,066 men. The women munitions workers were known collectively as The Gretna Girls.
At its peak, the factories produced 1,400 tonnes of Cordite RDB per week, more than all the other munitions plants in Britain combined. Cordite was colloquially known as the "Devil's Porridge"; the name comes from the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who visited H. M. Factory as a war correspondent in 1916. He later wrote "The nitroglycerin on the one side and the gun-cotton on the other are kneaded into a sort of a devil's porridge; which is the next stage of manufacture...those smiling khaki-clad girls who are swirling the stuff round in their hands would be blown to atoms in an instant if certain small changes occurred". In 1917, when production reached 800 tons per week, King George V and Queen Mary visited the factory.