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NOSTALGIA: Bomb puts Glossop on full-scale alert

Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, a bomb disposal squad was rushing up the motorway to blow up an unexploded device in Glossop. 

For years, what was described as an incendiary bomb had resided peacefully among the myriad of exhibits in the heritage centre on Henry Street. 

That is until May 2005 when it was put on display as part of a VE Day exhibition and someone suggested it might still be 'live' and, as a result, dangerous. 

It was clearly a time for action as the Glossop Chronicle revealed in a story that had everyone talking, for it seems the device had once been taken to a local school and possibly handled by a countless number of people in the centre which was one of the most visited places in Glossop. 

Heritage director Mike Brown told the Chronicle they had been assured that the bomb - dropped by the Luftwaffe during a war-time raid on Liverpool - was safe. 

But putting safety first, the police and Army were contacted and, three hours later, a Royal Engineers' Bomb Disposal team from Saffron Walden had arrived on Henry Street. 

Two female officers entered the centre and examined the 14 inch-long metal container, one of thousands dropped on the UK by German bombers during the war. 

Packed with magnesium, they were primed to set fire to buildings on impact. 

This was one that got away, but not for long after the Army team got their obviously very careful hands on it. 

The war-time relic was taken to lonely Monks Road where, at around 9pm, it was blown up around a couple of hundred yards away from what the Chronicle described as a 'lovers lay-by'. 

Apparently there had been a faded label attached to the bomb, saying it had been on Mossy Lea, until a Chronicle reader called to say it had been brought by her father to his then home in Hadfield, from a blitz in Liverpool when he was a fireman in the city during the war. 

She later discovered it at her father's new home in Chunal following his death 17 years earlier and took it to the heritage centre. 

There it harmlessly lay, everyone certain it wasn't a danger, until that May day 17 years ago. 

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