We're always on the look out for stories that involve explosives and young children here at Londonist, so we were particulary excited to see the headline Bomb disposal team called to school in the Harrow Times today.
Turns out that Auriol Junior School in Stoneleigh has to be evacuated last week due to a hand grenade which had been brought in by one of the pupils as part of a "World War II display".
The display had been there since half-term but the alarm was only raised when Tim Richardson ("a former firearms licensing officer for the Metropolitan Police") came in to give a lesson on World War II:
Mr Richardson, who now works at Bourne Hall Museum in Ewell, said: "I looked across during a talk and saw a hand grenade. On closer inspection I could see it was dated 1940.
"One of the pupils had brought it in, it belonged to his grandfather... I have experience in dealing with explosives and so was able to recognise it immediately.
Wow, this guy certainly is an expert! Any other person might have looked at that hand grenade-shaped object with 1940 written on it and concluded that it was a Georgian mahogany sideboard.
Tim went on to say "It just goes to show that the history we do for the museum is about the present as well as the past." A statement which manages to contain not one ounce of sense.
After Tim had identified the hand grenade as a hand grenade the police were called and 15 of them transported the grenade to "the middle of the school field" before the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called in to deactivate and dispose of the device.
The report in the Harrow Times states that "the children were said to have reacted calmly," which we can only take to be a blatant lie, as we were schoolkids once and if we'd known there was a hand grenade on our playing field we would have gone bananas.
