Gunpowder Plots_A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night

by Antonia Fraser

  gave advice not only on such country pursuits as hunting and hawking, but also dealt in very great detail with the making of fireworks for pleasure.

  Howlett’s instructions for making fireworks such as ‘Red fiery Stars’, and ‘Girondels or Fire-Wheels’, would have required an investment in tools and materials. It was the simple and accessible squib that was the great leveller, and feared as such. In accounts of ‘Tumultuous Disorders’ on the streets, on Bonfire Night and other occasions, this was the firework that seems to have caused most trouble. In 1678, for example, there are references to ‘the numerous platoons and volleys of squibs discharged’. The squib was simply composed of a small, strengthened paper tube, perhaps like Roger Bacon’s child’s toy, packed, though not too tightly, with gunpowder; and ignited by a fuse. It was troublesome to the authorities because it could be so easily made, perhaps with gunpowder taken home from an authorized factory or other place of legitimate use. Yorkshire miners, for example, made squibs for blasting by filling rolled paper tubes with powder, and these could then easily be used for domestic purposes such as cleaning chimneys, or on Bonfire Night. As a variation, a smaller, powder-filled and flattened case could be bent into a zigzag to make a ‘Jumping Jack’, known abroad as an ‘English Cracker’, perhaps because of its disorderly use in this country. When fired at one end and thrown to the ground there would be a small explosion at each bend of the tube, and the ‘jack’ would jump about alarmingly. The image of the unpredictable squib or jumping jack, fizzing, squirming and jumping along the ground with the crack of small explosions, takes us back to the beginning of the firework story, to the ti lao shu, the ‘earth rat’, which had so alarmed the Chinese empress-mother in the mid-thirteenth century.

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  Fireworks provide us with a very unlikely window on the world. Through this we can look back to ancient China, India, the Arab and the Western worlds, to see the close conjunction of alchemy, the experimental method and technological processes; we can be puzzled by a product that can be at once so destructive but also give so much delight; which can be used to celebrate public events by imparting a message of power, but is also capable of great spectacles ‘devised for plesure’. There can be changes of scale as well as of function: the squibs in the streets, and the modest fireworks and bonfire in the back garden which delighted so many families in the twentieth century, before the present greater emphasis on safety obliged us to return to the public celebration of Bonfire Night. Above all, these fireworks for ‘triumph’ enable us to place in human perspective the dreadful power of the fireworks for ‘real’ – it was after all that later empress-mother, Victoria, whose portrait in lights at her Jubilee on a machine 200 feet long and 180 feet high, included fireworks which to the consternation of the pyrotechnicians refused to behave with propriety, so that her aerial image winked beguilingly at the crowd. But, spectacular as they are, such firework celebrations are of a transient nature, designed for a special occasion. Only Bonfire Night has achieved a 400-year-old niche in the national memory, and despite the window it opens on to an earlier world of hatred and fear, its present position is due more to a reinterpretation than to a continuity of tradition. It may now be a simple delight in shared bonfires and fireworks that gives the Fifth of November so secure a place in our calendar that it will never be forgot.