Originally published at: Lawn ornament turns out to be live military shell
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I’m picturing the wife, who refused to leave, speaking in that Monty Python fake-woman voice, completely indignant the entire time.
“It’s a bomb, it’s just a naughty pointy bit!”
I loved that she used to bang the shovel on it…What a great story that I needed to read today.
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Milford Haven and Pembrokeshire are in Wales, not England.
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Artillery experts (I am trying to remember, wasn’t @NukeML in artillery in the army? Mea culpa if not.)
How stable are shells? I thought they were pretty stable unless triggered by the time in the nose? Like you had to have the charge set of the rest of the explosives (Sort of how C4 is very stable until you get a blasting cap to it), otherwise it was fairly inert.
But I also know some explosives become more volatile over time. The fact that they MOVED it to a quarry says to me that it was, over all, pretty stable and not a lot of immediate danger (though certainly not something you want lying around.)
I hear old farmers get up to all kinds of shenanigans in the UK.
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If you’re dumb enough to not leave your house for a couple hours while a bomb is defused, I’m ok with you being a pink mist
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I suspect that something this old would be playing by different rules.
I’ve only encountered it in laboratory quantities; but I’d be most nervous about picric acid: timeline on the shell is about right to overlap with the period when it was used as a high explosive(before being discarded for slightly less sensitive options that were less likely to explode on contact with armor rather than after penetrating it); and its metal salts are considerably touchier and more shock sensitive than it is.
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Such a good movie. I’ve had it for ages and only just watched it over the summer. The policewoman had me howling every time with her remarks.
If you haven’t had the chance, give it a try. Great dumb funny movie.
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Pembrokeshire is in Wales, not England.
Rocket artillery nominally. But the battery I was with was tasked with guarding tactical artillery nukes which were shells for howitzers and self-propelled guns.
So yeah, a pre-WW I shell with a… gun cotton? black powder? dynamite? charge is kinda cute
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The result of this landscape gardening could be similar…
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Ah, Annie was a bit before my time. They never told us any details, but based on the hardware the brother units we trained with had to fire the things, 155mm W48 and 203mm W79 shells.
Unless we were decoys guarding an empty bunker, always a possibility.
To paraphrase Lazlo Hollyfeld, the military is always so uptight about things.
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Mr Edwards was interviewed on the PM programme last night (from 52:50) and said he was told it “split in two” rather than being “blasted to smithereens”.
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At least it wasn’t gnomes with the bomb.
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