WHEN BASTON WAS THREATENED
 BY CHEMICAL BOMBS

DISCOVERIES OF unexploded bombs from the Second World War of 1939-45 are becoming fewer than in the past although in the years immediately following the conflict they turned up with alarming regularity. The majority were small incendiaries, or fire bombs, but many were huge German aerial bombs, often up to 1,000 lb. each, that had buried themselves so deeply in the ground that they were never discovered and busy civil defence teams working at full stretch at the time merely filled in the craters without making a thorough search.

As a result, they were often unearthed during subsequent building operations when the site was being developed with the usual precautions ensuing, the area being cordoned off until the bomb was made safe and then hauled away for a controlled explosion. It is thought that there are still some below the surface around the inner cities which took the brunt of the blitz that have not yet been discovered but are probably in a sufficiently safe place not to incur public concern.

Explosives and ammunition used by our defence forces have been another problem because when the Home Guard was stood down in 1945 small caches that had been hidden were forgotten and although these would be less lethal than the high explosive monsters dropped by the Luftwaffe, the danger from them is no less real.

An example of the threat they posed and the havoc they could cause in the community occurred at Baston, near Bourne, forty years ago. A gang of boys who were out searching for firewood on Saturday afternoon, 23rd January 1965, entered a disused pigsty and found four wooden boxes of Molotov cocktail grenades which had sufficient power to blow up the entire village. The boys ran home and told their parents who alerted the police and soon a bomb disposal squad from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps depot at the Northern Command Ammunition Inspectorate in York was on its way to the village.

A Molotov cocktail bomb is an improvised device consisting of a bottle filled usually with petrol or some other explosive material which is ignited and thrown as a grenade. They were widely used by resistance groups during World War II who named them after the Soviet foreign minister, Mr Molotov, and the Home Guard was encouraged to make them for use in the event of an invasion.

A close inspection of this hoard by the experts revealed that there were 92 grenades in all, two of them consisting of phosphorous, benzine and rubber, packed into bottles with crown tops but the contents of some had begun to deteriorate and the chemical evaporate and had they not been discovered, the result could have been devastating for the village as residents were soon to discover.

There was some alarm at the size and state of the hoard, particularly those bombs that had started to dry out to the point where they could explode and so these were placed in buckets of water and, together with the remaining 90, moved to a safe spot although during the operation, several soldiers sustained phosphorous burns. The following Wednesday, the deadly cache was split up into small consignments for transportation and each taken separately to the disused airfield at Folkingham to be detonated. The soldiers, all of them well experienced in bomb disposal, said afterwards that it was one of the most frightening explosions they had witnessed for many years. “It created a huge fireball in the sky”, said one, “and despite a strong wind, a pall of smoke hung over the spot for at least fifteen minutes afterwards.”

The pigsty where the bombs were found, 24 in each box together with a number of explosive charges, was at the rear of No 3 Church Street, a disused stone cottage owned by Mr John Thurlby of Hall Farm, Baston. During the war it had been used as a Home Guard post and as a store for explosives but the contents had been overlooked in the excitement of VE-Day and its aftermath and as the building was never again in use, they lay there forgotten but growing more unstable and dangerous with the passing of the years.

A policeman who witnessed the disposal operation, told the Stamford Mercury afterwards (Friday 29th January 1965): “Had the resulting explosion occurred in Baston, the whole village would easily have been destroyed, either by the blast or by the fire and intense heat caused by the phosphorous. The grenades had been made out of ginger beer bottles and had children tried to open one, thinking it contained pop, I dread to think what would have happened.”