When King’s Lynn Went Conkers: children, chemistry, and the work of war

King’s Lynn played a part in one of the strangest schemes of the First World War.

In 1917, as Britain struggled to keep up cordite production, children were sent out to gather conkers in huge quantities. Those horse chestnuts helped supply acetone, a chemical essential to making propellant, and King’s Lynn’s works at Alexandra Dock were part of the story. It sounds absurd, but it is true.

Conkers
Conkers (Horse Chestnuts)

The autumn when conkers became war material

It is easy to see why the story has lasted. It brings together things that do not seem to belong in the same sentence: children, conkers, chemical engineering, and munitions. Yet that is precisely what made the First World War so intrusive. It had a way of dragging the ordinary into the orbit of the urgent. A child stooping beneath a horse chestnut tree in Norfolk was not merely collecting something for a game. For a brief period, he or she was helping to feed a wartime supply chain.

Why acetone mattered

The key to the whole business is acetone. Cordite, the smokeless propellant used in British ammunition, depended on it. Without acetone, cordite production faltered. That made it strategically important, and wartime shortages turned it into a problem of national urgency. Britain could not simply rely on older methods and imported supplies while shipping came under growing threat.

One answer came through the Weizmann fermentation process, which allowed acetone to be made from starch-rich material. At first maize was important. But maize itself was vulnerable to wartime disruption, so attention turned to other possible sources of starch. Horse chestnuts, however odd they seem in this context, were one of them.

This is the point at which the familiar conker enters a very unfamiliar world. It ceased, briefly, to be a pocket treasure or playground missile and became raw material. That alone makes the episode memorable. More than that, it reveals how wartime government thought. Nothing useful was too ordinary to be ignored if it could be made to serve production.

Alexandra Dock and the King’s Lynn works

King’s Lynn was not dragged into this scheme by accident. The town already had the right sort of industrial plant. A modern history of the acetone butanol industry records that in 1912 the Synthetic Products Company acquired an oil-cake factory at Alexandra Dock and converted it for the production of acetone and butanol from starch-bearing feedstocks.

Once the war deepened and the need for acetone sharpened, the government took control of the works. A national factory listing identifies HMEF King’s Lynn as an existing factory of Synthetic Products Company Ltd, nationalised in March 1916, with acetone as its product. That places the Alexandra Dock site squarely inside the wartime industrial system.

The factory was not one of the giant national works that dominate standard accounts of the home front, and it does not seem to have had a long life after the war. Yet that is part of what makes it interesting. Local history is full of places that mattered intensely for a short time and then slipped from view. Alexandra Dock’s chemical works belongs to that category. It was not grand, but it was important.

The paper trail

The best evidence is hard and specific. In the Royal Society catalogue, a letter dated 24 April 1917 from Sir Frederic Nathan to William B. Hardy discusses the possible use of chestnuts to manufacture acetone and states that 500 tons a month would be needed at King’s Lynn. That is not rumour, not memoir, and not local legend after the event. It is official wartime correspondence, and it names King’s Lynn directly.

A second Royal Society catalogue entry, dated 14 September 1917, shows the campaign taking organised form. It refers to The Times publicising the appeal, to villages offering prizes for the school that gathered the most chestnuts, and to supervised groups of schoolchildren wearing armbands so that they could collect on private land. It is a wonderful detail because it turns the story from anecdote into scene. One can suddenly picture the business properly: the schools, the competition, the sacks, the adults trying to regulate access, the sense that even conker gathering now belonged to the war.

Later evidence points in the same direction. In a House of Commons speech in 2014, it was stated that 3,000 tonnes of conkers reached the Synthetic Products Company of King’s Lynn, where they were used to produce acetone for cordite. Hansard is not the same thing as a factory return written in 1917, but it is a serious public source, and it sits very comfortably beside the Royal Society material. Taken together, these sources make the basic case plain. King’s Lynn had the plant, official planners expected chestnuts to be used there, and later public testimony stated that they were.

The children’s war

What gives the episode much of its staying power is the role of children. They were not a sentimental extra. They were part of the machinery of collection. Historic England notes that in the autumn of 1917 schoolchildren and Scouts were asked to gather horse chestnuts and acorns for urgent war work. That fact alone says a good deal about the texture of home-front life. The war was not a remote adult affair observed from the edges by the young. It entered childhood directly, not only through absence and anxiety, but through practical labour.

3 children collecting conkers
Children Collecting Conkers

One can imagine the excitement of it. The notices in schools, the sense of secrecy, the importance attached to the task, the pleasure of being allowed to do something that felt useful. Yet the mood should not be romanticised too much. The children were being drawn into a system they could scarcely understand. They knew the nuts were wanted. They did not know that the nuts belonged to a chemical chain leading to cordite and shell-fire.

A scheme that was real, but awkward

The conker campaign was not fantasy. Acetone really was produced from horse chestnuts. But the scheme was difficult, cumbersome, and far from ideal. Removing the shells was laborious, the material was awkward to handle, and the whole process was less efficient than the scale of collection might suggest.

That helps explain one of the best remembered details. Hansard recalled that so many conkers were gathered that some piles rotted at railway stations before they could be used. It is a vivid image, and in its way a very British one: patriotic energy outrunning administration, children and communities doing exactly what they had been asked to do, and the transport system failing to keep up.

West Norfolk, Sandringham, and the local landscape

The local Norfolk side of the story is particularly appealing because it brings the campaign closer to home. A Norfolk First World War history piece, drawing on material associated with True’s Yard, states that the Ministry of Munitions appeal led to the collection of horse chestnuts by schoolchildren and that Queen Mary encouraged staff at Sandringham to help because supplies there were abundant.

That detail has the right local texture. West Norfolk had the trees, the estates, the schoolchildren, and the factory. The pieces fit together neatly. Official documentation names King’s Lynn as a place where chestnuts were wanted. National evidence shows that children were mobilised to gather them. Local material then places Sandringham and the surrounding district inside the same effort. One does not need to strain the evidence to see how the story worked on the ground.

There is also a trace of the campaign in the regional press. A September 1917 Eastern Daily Press item refers to the collection of blackberries, acorns, and horse chestnuts, showing that the appeal was being discussed in Norfolk at exactly the right moment. The surviving newspaper trail is patchy, but the broad outline is secure enough. This was not merely a national story with a local gloss added later. King’s Lynn and west Norfolk belonged to it.

The second war was different

Conkers were collected again during the Second World War, and children were involved then too, but the purpose was different. Evidence cited by Royal Berkshire Archives shows that conkers gathered in 1942 went to Macleans Ltd for the extraction of glucoside and aesculin for laboratory and related uses, not for munitions. So the King’s Lynn story belongs firmly to the First World War. That is the moment when the acetone shortage, the Alexandra Dock works, and the mobilisation of children all came together.

© James Rye 2026, with thanks to Nick Michaels for first alerting me to the story.

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