BACKGROUND

The odd thing is quite why fireworks have the global appeal they do. Ask most people for their abiding memory of Millennium Night and they will probably mention fireworks - Sydney Harbour, Eiffel Tower, the Thames. They may well remember those images more clearly than the company they were with, for fireworks have that effect. Possibly this is because fireworks appear to tap into a collective and instinctive human fascination of light and fire.

We are drawn towards light, savour the warmth and protection of fire and yet at the same time live in fear of the harm fire can inflict. Most cultures celebrate with light and most celebrate the cleansing ritualistic facet of fire. We may live in a modern hi-technology age but we do so with candles on restaurant tables and were in thoroughly modern, everything on demand homes a real fire is still regarded as both an innovation and a major selling point.

We are utterly fascinated by light and in its effects, stare trance-like into the embers of a fire, make wishes under shooting stars, become excited by a flash of lightning and are still curiously impressed in adulthood by rainbows, despite having seen hundreds before. Cut glass is better than plain, plain is better than plastic. Stained glass inspires admiration and worship. Visual art is light and the movies are nothing without it.

As for fire, it is quite possibly is the most singularly useful commodity we have. Beyond its obvious direct uses it is there, fixed and preserved in virtually all of our everyday items, its heat used in the processing and forming of metals, plastics and silicon chips; its energy used to propel our motorised society through the air, across the seas and along roads surfaced by flame melted tar. We heat our homes directly with it and power them electrically through energy largely derived from it. We use fire as both a live saver and as a weapon, it makes winter survivable, can be a romantic addition to a setting or a terrifying entity to flee from. Controlled it is our friend, uncontrolled it has no limits and no scruples. Our love affair with fire is partly heightened by the close proximity of danger which has wrapped its simple structure with myth.

With fireworks, these primal entities are presented together in the clearest possible way and our fascination and celebration with and to a degree of fireworks is partly in recognition of this heady mix of fire and light accompanied with a hint of danger.

In the British Isles, fire and light have found their place in a number of local, regional and national festivals and celebrations one of which, one of the most ancient in fact, was to evolve over time into the modern night of bonfires and fireworks on November the Fifth.

Many people might wrongly assume that the Fifth is just a memorial of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when Catholic conspirators including Guido Fawkes attempted to rid the land of the Monarch, King James I and his government in one single subterranean explosion of gunpowder. The plot was famously foiled, the conspirators tortured and then executed and the memory of the moment preserved in popular culture ever since. This much is true, but in reality the Guy Fawkes celebration hijacked a much older nighttime festival, one with its roots bedded deep in Pagan times over three thousand years earlier. This was the major Celtic autumn festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-en) and our modern day celebrations of Halloween and Guy Fawkes are the last vestiges of this ancient festival of spirits and ghouls.

The Celtic summer ended on the night of October 31st and one theory has it that on that night it was believed all the year's dead would return to this world to find themselves new bodies to possess. To protect against this unfortunate occurrence home fires would be extinguished to make dwellings as unwelcoming for the spirits as possible, meanwhile people would venture out into the darkness dressed in macabre and fantastic costumes. The fires would ritually be lit again the following day, on November 1st. That’s one theory anyway.

This celebration of Samhain became assimilated firstly into Roman festivals and then later still by the Roman Catholic church into All Hollows Day, meaning All Saints, celebrated on November 1st each year. In time the ghosts and spirits found their own spooky celebration residing on Halloween and the fire element of the original festival was transported to the following week, to November the Fifth, following the momentous events of the Gunpowder Plot.

From those early Celtic celebrations, Firework Night as we know it today would have to wait another couple of millennia for someone, somewhere to stumble across and realise the fiery potential of the one material that unleashed the full spectacle of fireworks upon the world and gave the night real lasting resonance. Gunpowder.

To try and determine the origin of this troublesome and yet most useful compound is almost impossible. Its discovery lies before dependable records and although several distinct cultures and their associated supporting historians lay claim to gunpowder's invention, most historians manage to point their ink-stained fingers in one general direction, to the east, to China.

It seems highly likely that the early combination of gunpowder's raw ingredients was stumbled upon in China, sometime very early in the last millennia. The ingredients of the mixture were known of and in common enough use for their accidental coming together to be inevitable at some point. Charcoal was abundant, wood being the primary source of fire, sulphur was used in medicine and saltpeter, a white powdery material with a strong salty taste was used in cooking even though its source was less than savoury, being found in association with animal urine and usually found as a fine powder adhering to stones in stables. It is easy to see how somewhere, one day, next to a fire there would be an interesting coming together of the three materials and a moment of either pure terror or wondrous realisation on the part of the person present.

Fairly soon the three materials and their relative combination became understood enough for their use to become predictable and more importantly controllable and their use in simple fireworks evolved in short term, providing the community with both a form of noisey entertainment as well as offering a useful method of warding off evil sprits, or enemies for that matter.

Of course the mixture was not known at that point as gunpowder, the Chinese interestingly called it Fire Drug and in those early years the idea of exploding some of the material in an open-ended tube and shooting out a high-speed projectile was not realised. That momentous event is believed to have happened in the early thirteenth century, in Germany, at the hands of an inventive, inquisitive Franciscan Monk named Berthold Schwarz who it is said was attempting to create a new form of gold paint when the mixture he was working with exploded, firing the mixing pestle across the room no doubt to his immediate alarm. The gun was thus invented and mankind has not looked back since. On the brighter side the discovery did at least give us a simple, memorable name to label the explosive mixture with.

Fireworks, as items for entertainment, very rapidly evolved through knowledge and experimentation, from simple burning piles of loose powder into the fountains, rockets, shells, wheels and roman candles we know today. Although the colours of those early fireworks would appear muted by today's palette, being predominantly shades of yellow, the form and function of the firework was there to be seen and over time better containers, new metals for brighter sparks, metal salts for newer, more brilliant and purer colours and finally better methods of manufacturing and loading were introduced to help create the safer, more spectacular and more predictable mass produced consumer fireworks of the present.

FIREWORK ART concentrates solely on the British produced fireworks of the 20th Century, a time of great strides and innovation within the industry and within its art, both pyrotechnic and graphic. The century began with firework manufacture standing in the flickering shadow of the grand firework masters and great public displays of the 18th and 19th centuries. These large-scale and highly organised displays were gradually replaced in common popularity by the more familiar, smaller-scale private celebrations. These intimate events, set against the backdrop of the suburbs in back gardens and on common land, were supplied with affordable fireworks produced by an increasing number of small and often local family-run firms.

To accompany and fuel this shift in involvement, there arrived on the retail scene a myriad of firework filled shop displays and poster bedecked windows through which the promise of fun projected onto the autumnal streets outside. Advertisements, printed in popular magazines and comics, fed a strong brandidentity, individuality and year-by-year usage. Although organised public displays would continue to prove popular, it was this displacement of participation towards shop bought fireworks, taken home to be lit amongst the suburban environment, which helped turn the night into something truly different and special.

Bonfire Night became a people's night. Rockets rushed into the darkness from gardens and yards, roman candle stars appeared momentarily behind rooftops, fountains flickered behind hedges and pinwheels whizzed on fences whilst the air thundered to the electric flash and boom of air bombs, or the crackling burst of noise from a Jumping Jack.

Instead of merely being an observer in the event, a person became part of it, adding their own bit of noise to the whole cacophony with a lit banger, or through the wail of a screaming rocket. Others watched your flying saucer spin dizzyingly into the darkness as you earlier had watched theirs. Your bonfire sparks swirled into the same sky as countless others, its smoke added to the cool mist which usually began to appear in the air as the evening drew to a close.

The century saw the Guy Fawkes celebration become an increasing part of the yearly social cycle, for children particularly so. The late summer would find them saving their hard-earned pennies, possibly joining one of the firework clubs, organised by a local shop. Besides the fireworks there was the small matter of making a Guy or lending a hand to collect scraps of wood for the local bonfire. With such a close personal involvement and a vivid memory of previous years, interest in the impending event began early. From the start of October, up and down the land, keen eyes would be on the lookout for the appearance of the first firework poster or the tell-tale clearing out of space beneath a counter ready for the fireworks.

Following two unavoidable cessations of Guy Fawkes Night celebrations during the war years, the public hungrily returned to using fireworks with an absence-whetted appetite. Without doubt, the largest growth in firework usage occurred post-1946, when firework production for retail sale returned after six long years away. After a devastating war in which civilians were bombed on a regular basis, with Flying Bombs and V2 Rockets falling from the sky, it is rather interesting to consider how people chose to celebrate and have fun with noisy, exploding fireworks. And yet they did, in their millions, in every village, town and recently bombed city.

In the late 1940's a burst of new firework companies appeared to meet this high demand. At the same time the number of retail outlets increased and successful advertising pulled in ever greater numbers of eager customers. Between 1946 and the early 1960's Britain saw the heyday of Bonfire Night celebrations, retail firework sales and more importantly home-grown firework production. This was also the period during which the associated artwork of fireworks found its full and unrestricted palette, its wild imagination and eccentric brilliance.

The popularity and growth in use of retail fireworks throughout the course of the century owed much to the development and spread of those social way-posts otherwise known as the newsagent, corner shop and local toyshop. These small-scale, independent and therefore adaptable outlets enabled the firework companies to sell their products initially within the local environs and then latterly, with motor vehicles increasingly allowing mobile selling to be thrown into the equation, regionally and nationally. More outlets meant more sales, which in turn meant more product types and subsequently more designs.

Timing was everything. For the retailers, there were but a few precious weeks in which to sell their costly firework stock. For the manufacturers, forced by the demand levied upon them by the shops for better 'point-of-sale' presence they often looked no further than their own company for artwork and design inspiration. With the intention being to dress a new product, rejuvenate an old one or sometimes make an old item look like an entirely new one, an open door policy allowed the ordinary worker to dream up new designs and then see their creation manufactured.

This unrestricted and some might say pure source of ideas, free from the stifling hug of market research and serious design gurus, meant that a measure of common touch creativity and originality came forth from the manufacturers. The resultant posters, display boards, oversize replicas and sales cabinets filled to the brim with fireworks sporting fresh colourful labels, shone a charming and sometimes naive light within the busy interiors of the small corner shops. Fireworks added seasonal spice to the shelves and helped fill the retail gap between the outdoor goods ofsummer and the gifts of Christmas.

British fireworks became unique, their artwork began to far exceed the basic requirements of packaging and mandatory clear instructions. Even the smallest and least significant fountain, only ever supplied as part of a selection box, never singularly and therefore without the need to be made individually attractive, could and did benefit from a full colour makeover and redesign.

The wealth of new designs and colours erupted within the shops, particularly newsagents, which rapidly grew to become the main local outlet for firework sales across the country. Through their busy windows and beneath the finger-smudged glass of their counters, customers were afforded an accessible and tantalising portal into the otherwise closed-off and distant world of the firework maker.

All things must inevitably change and over time the newsagent would have its day. The gradual decline of these once useful retail outlets and by proxy social hubs in the face of the daunting, trampling rise of the supermarket is clear to see on every high street. Compared with the past, very few newsagents today sell fireworks and although just as many fireworks are being sold at present as have been over the past thirty years, a greater proportion of them are now being sold through supermarkets, garden centres and DIY stores and increasingly through mail order and the internet. It will be a sad day indeed when there are no more newsagent windows decorated in late October with firework posters, however that day can surely not be too far away.

The final chapter in the development of fireworks, particularly evident during the latter decades of the 20th Century, has seen the complete take-over of the retail firework market by foreign manufacturers. The quality of this modern import is on the whole excellent and many are unbelievably spectacular for their price, but even when at their crackling multi-shot best they lack a certain style and spirit the older, touch-paper lit fireworks possessed by the box full.

Of the famous old firework makes, only Standard remains today within the retail market, and they have not manufactured here for over a decade. Brock's survive in name at least and Pain's are still with us, supplying and firing professional displays. All the other once popular makes have ceased altogether, taking with them their extraordinary hand-made product.

These bygone names now stand as mute witness to a time when thousands found employment making and selling these labour intensive and seasonal products. They capture a period of industrial and social history when several generations of a single family might work together under a brand name their own predecessor created. A time when the manufacturer meant useful contracts for local printing firms, for chemical suppliers, paper and glue-makers. A time when newspapers, comics, periodicals and television stations carried the adverts, making for an heirloom brand-loyalty of favourites-the makes, types, titles and designs we welcomed back as old friends to the shops each autumn.