Warbird Information Exchange

this is a very important matter all museum guardians must observe.


Don’t touch the display: Bombs on show at museum for the last 20 years detonated after it is discovered they were live

in Featured Article, War Articles / by Jack / on August 13, 2012 at 16:40 /

Deadly: A mortar round – similar to those pictured – was detonated by Army specialists after being discovered at the museum

Museum staff got a shock when they learned they had been letting visitors walk past a display of live bombs for nearly two decades. Now the Army has blown up the unexploded World War Two cannon shell and a military flare which were hastily removed from the display at Dorking museum in Surrey. The bomb squad was called in after they were checked during a stock assessment.

Kathy Atherton, from the museum, said staff would investigate how they got there but suspected they were historic donations from souvenir collectors. They were discovered by volunteers two months before the end of the museum’s three-year refurbishment programme. ‘A volunteer took photos and sent them off to the Imperial War Museum, and they came back, identified them and said ‘You can’t be sure with these things, even if they’re old they may still be explosive, you really need to get some advice on this.’

‘At that point we contacted the police who got the bomb squad in from Aldershot’ she said. ‘They’ve probably been in the museum’s collection for years, we’ve been collecting since the 1950s. ‘There’s a whole generation of people who during the war went and collected souvenir items, someone’s probably had it in the back of a wardrobe for years and at some point deposited in the museum and they’ve been in our stores ever since.’

The Ministry of Defence said the Royal Logistic Corps removed and destroyed a two-inch illumination mortar round…

http://www.warhistoryonline.com/feature ... -live.html

Yikes!

_________________
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone!

Bombs, motar round, cannon shells, which was it?

Say what!

_________________
A&P/I.A., A.A.S./Aviation Maintenance technology
Warbird salvage/recovery
One day I'll get that P-40!

Back in the days when RAF Scampton had a Lancaster on Gate Guard there was an array of weapons alongside it, including the Upkeep mine (Dam Buster bomb), Tallboy (12000lb) and Grand Slam (22000 lb).
Then came a bit of research that discovered that no inert Grand Slams had ever been made, so just to be sure the Scampton bombs were inspected and guess what, they still had their explosive fill but no fuses. So no longer could photographs of children sitting on these bombs be taken.
In a similar check a few years ago the Grand Slam body used at A&AEE Boscombe Down as a test weight for cranes since the end of WW2 was also found to be full of explosive!