Schoolboy discovers he's been juggling with bombs

The bomb squad was called in to blow up a pair of live Second World War bombs found on a farm by a teenage boy. When Ben Stannard, 13, found the incendiary bombs on farmland in Margaretting, Essex, he thought they were harmless and began to juggle with them. But if he had dropped them, the sulphur would have caught fire and killed him instantly, bomb squad officers told him. "The police wouldn't go near them," said Ben, of Purcell Cole, Writtle.

"They moved everyone away and waited five hours for the bomb squad to arrive for a controlled explosion. I was in shock – I feel really lucky. I've learnt my lesson and will always call the police in future." Ben, a Hylands School pupil, wants to become a gamekeeper and was helping prepare for the shooting season at the farm, when he stumbled across the unearthed bombs.



"I was waiting for my mum to pick me up and they caught my eye," he said. "I thought they were strange, but just bits of concrete, so I started to throw them up and down. Then I noticed the serial number on one of them. When my granddad died he left me a shell casing and it had similar numbers, so I grew concerned, put them down gently and told my mum when she arrived." His mum Molly said: "I didn't take him seriously at first. He is always scavenging around and finding all sorts of different things.

"I am an antique dealer and get him all sorts of stuff, and he likes collecting things. But when he told me about the serial number, I told him to stay away from them and we told the farmer. He called the police, and the bomb squad then came along, confirmed they were incendiary bombs – probably hidden by the Home Guard as they were English. They then put sandbags around them and promptly blew them up. I thought I am so glad they didn't go off when he was holding them."