These camouflaged gas holders were planned for ICI, Billingham in 1936. Does anyone know anymore about them?
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
These camouflaged gas holders were planned for ICI, Billingham in 1936. Does anyone know anymore about them?
Both the Evening gazette and the Hartlepool Post websites have colour photographs of the Billingham ICI site in full WW2 camouflage. I believe this was part of a general strategy to minimise damage to Teesside industry and maintain production.
During WWII, ‘camouflage’ painting for both stationery objects and military vehicles (inc aircraft) was considered so important and so ‘technical’ that many professional-artists were commissioned, or recruited, to design these patterns in order that they blended so cleverly from above, or offshore, into the local terrain… be it heath-land, desert, or forestry. What’s more they often had to be regularly changed, in order to suit the various ‘seasons’ of the year…
I would argue these are storage or holding tanks as they appeared to be fixed, Gas Holders were of a movable nature.
A gas holder had a bottom tank with an inner tank with water sealing trays fitted to it, the inner tank rose as the pressure increased within the holder, when empty it looked small, full it almost doubled its height.
The Gasification plant at ICI had smaller gas holders although the principle was exactly the same, as a lad I almost fell off a pipe bridge alongside one of them as it filled rapidly and shot up turning as it went, I had never seen one do that.
My biggest surprise was repairing them when the roof section leaked it was only thin plate. We trepanned a hole having already cut a disc that would fit just inside the hole, fit a rubber disc over the metal disc that had a bolt welded to it and fed it inside the trepanned hole, a tight fit then put another disc over the bolt and hardened the nut down, the rubber inside the tank now formed the seal as the actual gas pressure was quite low even when full, we could be sitting on the top working whilst it was moving as the stairway moved with it, a bit smelly though. All well before health and safety of course.