Frank Arthur Brock Frank Arthur Brock ( 29 June 1888 – 23 April 1918 ) was a British First World War Royal Air Force Officer who devised and executed the smoke screen used during the Zeebrugge Raid on 23 April 1918 , the British Royal Navy ' s attempt to neutralize the key Belgian port of Bruges - Zeebrugge . Background . Brock was born in Cheam , Surrey , the son of Arthur Brock of Haredon Sutton , Surrey , of the famous C . T . Brock & Co . fireworks manufacturers . He was educated at Dulwich College where he blew up a stove in his form room . Frank Brock went into the family business in 1901 ( later becoming a director ) where he remained until the outbreak of the First World War . He originally obtained a commission in the Royal Artillery but was within a month loaned to the Royal Naval Air Service to which he transferred , becoming a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Lieutenant on 31 December 1914 . He was a member of the Admiralty Board of Inventions and Research and had founded , organized and commanded the Royal Navy Experimental Station at Stratford . Among his many developments were the following : By the time the Royal Naval Air Service merged with the Royal Flying Corps to form the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918 , Brock had risen to the rank of Wing Commander and had been awarded the O . B . E . for services to king and country . Zeebrugge Raid . On the night of 22 – 23 April 1918 , the Zeebrugge Raid began when an armada of British sailors and marines led by the old cruiser , , attacked the Mole at Zeebrugge , Belgium , in order to negate the serious threat to Allied shipping , that was being posed by the port being used by the Imperial German Navy as a base for their U - boats and light shipping . Brock brought on board with him a box marked ' Highly Explosive , Do Not Open ' which actually contained bottles of vintage port which were drunk by his men . For the attack , Brock was in charge of the massive smoke screens that were to cover the approach of the raiding party : " Brock ' s new and improved smokescreen , or " artificial fog " as he preferred to call it , was ingenious . Essentially , a chemical mixture was injected directly under pressure into the hot exhausts of the motor torpedo boats and other small craft or the hot interior surface of the funnels of destroyers . The larger ships each had welded iron contraptions , in the region of ten feet in height , hastily assembled at Chatham . These were fed with solid cakes of phosphide of calcium . Dropped into a bucket - like container full of water , the resulting smoke and flames roared up a chimney and were dispersed by a windmill arrangement . It was more toxic than its predecessor . Taking in a lungful was an extremely unpleasant experience . " At Zeebrugge , Brock , anxious to discover the secret of the German system of sound - ranging , begged permission to go ashore , not content to watch the action from an observation ship . He joined a storming party on the Mole and was killed in action . He is commemorated by a special memorial at the Zeebrugge Memorial because his body was never recovered . The Zeebrugge Memorial commemorates three officers and one mechanic of the Royal Navy who died on the mole at Zeebrugge and have no known grave . The memorial stands in Zeebrugge Churchyard where 30 Commonwealth servicemen of the First World War are buried or commemorated . 17 of the burials are unidentified but a special memorial commemorates the officer of the Royal Naval Air Service known to be buried among them . Henry Major Tomlinson wrote of Wing Commander Brock : " A first - rate pilot and excellent shot , Commander Brock was a typical English sportsman ; and his subsequent death during the operations , for whose success he had been so largely responsible , was a loss of the gravest description to both the Navy and the empire . "