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Sapper Bangs

© John Barham

Whatever else took place in the run up to peace, the allies were determined to leave their side of Sevastopol in ruins. Work on the destruction of the port installations had started shortly after the decision was made in October 1855, but in the latter stages had lagged way behind schedule, mainly due to the bad weather. Also the docks themselves were a pretty hefty nut to crack.See plan. The British were responsible for the three southern docks and the southern half of the surrounding basin and installations.

The classic sapper method of demolition was to sink shafts at critical points from where they would tunnel beneath the foundations of the targeted structure and then to place explosive charges in the mines, which would be detonated by fuse or in accordance with the latest voltaic battery technology, by an electric charge. By mid-December, the shafts sunk behind the side walls had reached a depth of thirty feet, those sunk from the bottom of the dock, twelve. But after a prolonged downpour of rain during the whole night of 15th December, the side shafts were flooded to a depth of twenty feet, and the bottom shafts completely flooded with an additional two and a half feet of water slopping around the dock bottom. Although a large body of men - the labour came from 18th and 48th Regiments - were employed round the clock in shifts, a true case of 'all hands to the pumps', progress was slow as additional water kept seeping in through the surrounding sodden earth. Then a cold snap occured, freezing the pumps solid, so that for several days only hand bailing was possible.

The Commander Royal Engineers, Lieut Col Edward Lloyd, took personal command of these operations, in which he was assisted by Bt Lieut Colonel John Gordon and Major Lothian Nicholson. Originally they had intended to blow up each dock in a huge sapper bang, but because of the flooding this approach had to be abandoned and ad hoc demolition took place in any position dry enough to sustain it, often to the accompaniment of furious pumping. Nevertheless, with so little else happening, it made for a very popular spectator attraction. 'I saw the last one done' recorded Fred Dallas on 4th January, '& a singular spectacle it is to see a man with a single wire utterly destroy a beautiful mass of masonry that took so many thousands of money, men's lives, & days to make. The floors are first blown up, then the sides & all with very little noise & danger. The whole floor appeared to rise about 20 or 30 feet, & when one went afterwards to look at it, it had the appearance of a quarry - a great hopeless looking hole full of stones. It was fired by a galvanised wire."

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