Man finds live bomb in roof

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 1

Man finds live bomb in roof

JOHN BURNING

For Trevor Lovegrove, a plumber, it seemed like any other day at work until just after lunch yesterday when he was fossicking in the roof of a house for tiles.

“We had taken this copper and flue out of this house and I went up through the manhole to find some tiles to cover the hole we had made in the roof. “I pushed aside a few pieces of junk and the next thing I knew was that I had uncovered a mortar bomb.

“It was only about two feet from where I was working. It gave me a helluva shock and I didn’t want to be working around it, so I gingerly picked it up and threw it through the hole in the roof on to the lawn below," he said last evening. Mr Lovegrove immediately notified the police who in turn called the Army bomb disposal crew.

The bomb was found to be “live.” Five houses neighbouring the Bryndwr Road

property were evacuated while the Army disposed of the bomb. “It was about nine inches long and had ‘mortar 1943’ written on it.

“I probably did a silly thing by throwing it out the roof but I did not want it near me,” he said.

Mr Lovegrove said that he knew the bomb had to be primed before it would explode and that even if it was “live” it would no' prime itself when it hit the soft lawn. A resident of the house, who did not want to be named, said she had lived at the property for 13 years.

“If I had known that something like that was up in the ceiling I would not have slept so well at night.

“From what we can gather the bomb may have been there for 30 years.

“You would think the house had been blown up with me inside the way the story has got around the neighbourhood,” she said.