IT looks almost cartoonish as a worker crouches over a detonator with a plunger ready to blow something up hopefully well out of range. It's a scene captured regularly by Wile E Coyote. Notice of course that the bosses wear bowler hats and workers wear cloth caps.
However there is a tragic background to this picture taken at St Rollox, near Springburn in Glasgow in 1922.
The structure they are about to blow up is a chimney known as Tennant's Stalk which, when it was built 80 years earlier, was the tallest chimney in the world, at 453 feet.
It had been reduced in size over the years, but it was still 90 feet tall in 1922 when a bulge was noticed in its side and it was decided to remove it entirely with a team of eight workers who were painstakingly knocking out the bricks from the top. However it suddenly collapsed killing four of the eight workers. The collapse happened just five minutes before the end of their shift.
One of those at the top of the chimney was thrown clear and lived. One of them was not injured in the fall but suffocated from the dust that clogged his airwaves. Three of the bodies were still in the rubble when it was decided that the remains of the chimney were still a danger and had to be blown up.
It took two attempts, with the second scattering bricks over a wide area and cracking numerous windows.
The chimney was at the chemical works of Charles Tennant, a weaver who thought there must be a better way of bleaching linens and cottons rather than laying them out on bleaching fields for months after being dipped in urine.
He came up with a combination of lime and chlorine which was manufactured at St Rollox earning him a vast fortune. His now rich children married into aristocracy, and the plant later closed.
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