‘Hero of Brum’ who stopped a plot to blow up Parliament
ine, 170lbs of explosives and a bath full of ‘liquid nitro’.
The lethal haul was in an extremely dangerous condition and could have exploded at any time, destroying a huge swathe of the neighbourhood.
Some two hundredweight of explosive had already been shipped to London in readiness to target Parliament.
The Birmingham discovery set alarm bells ringing for the then Home Office Chief Inspector of Explosives.
A former Royal Navy man, McCreadie’s reputation as a chemist was already legendary and with Nobel out of the country, it was his help needed. An article of the time, recently unearthed by his great grandson, David McCreadie, read: “The Home Office man recommended to Birmingham Police that the job of rendering the explosives safe would have to be done by an expert and told them to ask Nobel Explosives Co Ltd, at Ardeer, to send down Robert McCreadie, who had made a name for himself for his skill in handling dangerous explosives.” So it was with a wooden spoon and a sack of wood flour – which stabilises nitro-glycerine into dynamite – that McCreadie was dispatched with haste from Nobel’s factory (later ICI explosives division), to Birmingham. David said: that was so urgently “Nitro glycerine is usually stabilised with keiselguhr, a diatomaceous algae found in German lakes, but was later replaced with wood flour.
“So when the police alert came to Ardeer, and Alfred Nobel was out of the country, my great grandad was sent down with a sack of wood flour and a wooden spoon – this would make dynamite stable and then require a detonator to explode it.
“Birmingham had been evacuated and the Chief of Police took my great grandfather to a wash house behind a tenement where there was a big sink was full of liquid nitro.
“He set about gradually stirring in the wood flour, it effervesced, and the police left him alone all night.
“By morning he had stabilised the nitro, caked it with the wooden spoon and wrapped it in brown paper and string. He had to walk several miles to the police cordon and was then taken in the Lord Mayor’s Landau carriage through the streets and offered anything he wanted.
“To which he simply replied: ‘Occh, it’s my job. What time is the next train to Glasgow?’
“Apparently the case was believed to have been connected to an Irish Fenian plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.”
Two other Birmingham men helped McCreadie load seven heavy oak tubs, each weighing about 30lbs, into a police cart, including a member of the Birmingham Corporation and a young Birmingham reporter.
A report at the time said: “Birmingham Watch Committee expressed their thanks to Nobel’s Explosives Company and the thanks of the townspeople of Birmingham to McCreadie.
“After due deliberation they voted him an honorarium of 10 guineas.
“Nobel’s intimated to the Birmingham corporation that they would only need to reimburse him his travelling expenses and were happy to have put at their services an employee who undoubtedly had run serious risk in performing a public duty.”
But on his return to Nobel’s, McCreadie is believed to have been financially rewarded by the company for his brave deed and on retirement he received a gold pocket watch from Alfred Nobel himself, which his great grandson David, of North Yorkshire, later inherited.
McCreadie died in December 1916 during the First World War but the circumstances are not clear.
But what is known, is that his thanks from the people of Birmingham was more than well deserved.
McCreadie’s family later feared he would be targeted by the Irish brotherhood of Fenians following his involvement in thwarting the disaster, though nothing came to pass.
As for the Parliament plot, the accused would-be bomber Albert Whitehead and his accomplices – 20 in all – were all arrested in Birmingham, and tried in London.
Luckily for them they escaped the fate of Guy Fawkes himself, who was hung drawn and quartered.
Instead they were all sentenced to life penal servitude in a Victorian gaol. Some went end of the men later insane, a sorry to a plot that could so easily have changed British history for ever.