3-034-764 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Siege Operations at Chatham: festoon of gun-cotton on the stockade, 1871. British Army training. Illustration of preparations for '...the blowing down of a stockade, by firing bags of gunpowder and cakes of gun-cotton against it...The stockade was a barrier eight yards in length, built of timber posts, twelve inches square, firmly planted in the ground. It was a single stockade, the rear line of timbers being merely to prevent injury to the dockyard wall behind it. There was guncotton, to the amount of 10 lb., in the form of circular wads, each 2¾ in. in diameter and 1¾ in, in thickness. Some of these were strung together and hung in a festoon upon the face of the stockade, while others made necklaces around two of its massive beams four feet above the ground, and some were laid on the ground at its base; a small hole was also bored in the wood and plugged with two ounces of gun-cotton. These were all fired by fuses and an electric wire. At the same time a quantity of gunpowder, altogether 1000 lb., in bags hung or laid along another part of the stockade, was fired by the ordinary fuse'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.