Boom ! An explosive past world just a few miles away...
Did you know there was a massive munitions factory just north of Retford?? The Retford area helped the war effort more than you think.....
The Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) at Ranskill was a UK Ministry of Supply Explosives Factory built to manufacture cordite, the site being located between the villages of Torworth, Lound & Ranskill.
In 1939, to increase the production of cordite alongside R.O.F. (Royal Ordinance Factory) at Wrexham and Bishopton, a new production site was urgently needed. A site was searched for and for safety reasons in the event of an explosion, it must be far from populated and industrial areas. It also required good road and rail access and a supply of cooling water, so a nearby river was essential.
The Ministry of Works indicated a suitable site near Retford at Danes Hill between Lound and Ranskill being the perfect location. The land requisitioned covered around 880 acres between Lound and Torworth and all within an electrified security fence. In addition, 6.8 acres
adjacent to the River Idle near Sutton for a water lagoon and pumping station, 13 acres at Ranskill for a hostel, 12 acres at Lound for housing for high ranking staff and 40 acres at Mattersey Thorpe to house the workforce from outside the area. The bungalows at Mattersey Thorpe were for married couples’. Single personnel were housed in hostels on the 13-acre site at Ranskill, while staff requiring accommodation were put up in two houses in Lound, ‘Highfield House’ and ‘White Lodge’.
Approval for the construction of ROF Ranskill was granted in 1940 and it was built with the Ministry of Works acting as Agents. It was designed as an almost self-contained explosive factory producing Cordite. Cordite is a family of smokeless propellants developed and produced in the UK to replace gunpowder used by the military.
The general public were excluded from the site so the road between Lound to Torworth was closed together with a footpath from Sutton to Danes Hill.
For the construction of the factory, much of the material came by rail, and further land adjoining the site near the East Coast Main Line was requisitioned and sidings were built to include 8 goods and 2 passenger sidings.
Construction took place between 1940 to 1941, with production starting later that year. It could produce 300 tons a week of cordite to suit the many types of military weapons in use. The factory comprised of six main areas. To the north were the administration block, workshop, acid production works and rail sidings. To the south were the cordite works, magazine production, main canteen, laundry, surgery and passenger train platform. The process was continuous with three shifts, seven days a week and required a workforce of around 4000, the majority being women. Two trains per shift transported workers to and from nearby towns and buses from local villages.
3 million gallons of water a day were used by the factory, this water came from a pumping station next to the River Idle at Sutton. This was connected to two 15” underground mains and filled 2 large tanks of 30,000 gallons.
The workers were not allowed to wear jewellery and had special clothing and felt shoes to prevent sparks. Wages were high (£9 per week) because of the dangerous and important work being done. Fortunately, during cordite production, no major explosions occurred due to good supervision. However, some accidents and explosions did happen, the serious of these being acid burns on hands, arms and face. Headaches were common or being overcome by acid fumes.
To move equipment and people around the site, a light gauge railway system was used. However, to prevent any explosions from sparks, the
steam locomotive had no fire nor boiler but was powered by a stored charge of steam. Fire engines and ambulances were always on standby. For supervisors to get around the site, bicycles were used. Meals from the canteen were transported around the site by a van and cars were always on call to take senior staff to appointments at other R.O.F sites. Alongside the workers were 700 prisoners of war. They did basic work and wore a black uniform with yellow diamonds on the back.
It was the last Cordite-producing Royal Ordnance Factory to be built in the UK in World War II and was the smallest of the three Cordite ROFs (the other two being ROF Bishopton and ROF Wrexham).
Cordite production ceased at the end of World War II in 1945.
The site was retained by the ROF however until 1975 on a "care and maintenance" basis. The Torworth road remained closed to the public but following pressure from local councils, it was reopened in 1954. In 1963 following the ‘Suez’ crisis, production restarted making RDX, an explosive more energetic than TNT.
In 1975, responsibility of the site was handed over to the Defence Estates for disposal, with the land being taken over by Nottinghamshire County Council who started the task of decontaminating the area and dismantling the buildings. All large buildings together with the large water storage tanks were all demolished. All surface bunkers were levelled and were possible, the land was returned for farming purposes. The old gravel pits on the west of the site were landscaped and have become Danes Hill Lakes, the rest of the site has been landscaped and planted with conifer trees, with very few buildings surviving.
In the 1990’s, Nottinghamshire County Council turned part of the land they owned into a land-fill disposal site.
Today, unless aware, you would not know that all that existed near Ranskill, the Royal Ordinance Factory being just a memory.