Battles of the First World War Podcast · Mike Cunha

A Penny a Shell - A Discussion with Antony Bell

·49 min·3 clips

Bell says the explosion at Barnbow killed 35 women and left one survivor dying two years later.

1. Battles of the First World War Podcast speaks with Anthony J. Bell about A Penny a Shell and the Barnbow munitions factory explosion. 2. Bell is a historical fiction author, a former Royal Air Force air loadmaster, and a Yorkshire writer whose family story shaped the novel. 3. The episode asks why Bell turned a family death, wartime factory labor, and the Barnbow disaster into fiction. 4. Bell says he wrote stories for years, then began drafting the novel around 2007 after his son Alex was born. 5. He describes the first version as a long project stretching from the 1750s to the present before narrowing it during COVID research. 6. Bell explains that his grandfather Cecil told the family Sarah Ann Jennings died on a hospital ship at the Battle of Jutland. 7. Research in the Imperial War Museum records showed no match for that story, but Sarah Ann Jennings kept appearing as a Barnbow worker. 8. Bell says the discovery revealed that his great-grandmother was one of the women killed at Barnbow, not at Jutland. 9. He says the family also did not know about the Leeds memorial or the separate memorial for Sarah Ann Jennings in Warthole. 10. Bell says the Barnbow story emerged from deeper family research during COVID and from trying to verify his grandfather's account. 11. He explains Barnbow as a filling factory where TNT and amatol were mixed, dried, pushed down, and capped into shells. 12. Bell identifies room 42, or shed 42, as the place where the dangerous capping work was being done when the explosion happened. 13. He says the blast killed 35 women, most of them instantly, and one later died about two years afterward from shock and injuries. 14. Bell says the inquiry never clearly explained the cause and calls it "a sham" after digging through the records. 15. He notes that newspaper coverage reduced the event to "minimal disruption" to shell filling instead of naming the deaths. 16. Bell says room 42 was back up and running by the next morning, and many women returned to work because the war still needed shells. 17. He describes the tone of the episode as conversational, with the host repeatedly reacting to Bell's details about RAF service, Barnbow, and research. 18. The discussion moves between memoir, family history, and military history, with Bell speaking directly and without much formal distance. 19. Listeners interested in Yorkshire history, women’s wartime labor, or World War I home front stories should find this useful. 20. Listeners looking for trench combat history or fast-paced battle narration may skip it.

As heard by us

A personal WWI conversation that turns family memory and research into public history.

Anthony J. Bell brings a personal, carefully researched angle to the home front of the First World War, and A Penny a Shell gives space to the women whose lives have too often sat at the edge of the record.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Hear a WWI novel shaped by family memory, local history, and lived military service.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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