Game Bombed Off

The story of a ticking time bomb near Bramall Lane.

Words: Matthew Bell

What a monster! This is the bomb found on Lancing Road in February 1985. The man in charge of the lifting operation is Captain Paddy Bowen of the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Branch. You can see the partly-built houses behind Captain Bowen.

In early February 1985 Sheffield United were due to play Oldham Athletic at home in the old Second Division. The weather at the time was cold, the temperature dropping below freezing at night, the days grey and dull with snow flurries. It was the type of cold that seeps into your bones. It was no surprise, then, when news reports came through the night before that the game had been called off.

However, those who listened further discovered that the reason for the postponement was not the freezing weather, but the discovery of a German wartime bomb on Lancing Road, only a stone’s throw from the back of the Shoreham Street kop. It had been there since the Sheffield Blitz of December 1940, when eleven bombs fell inside the boundaries of Bramall Lane, destroying the changing rooms, a large section of the John Street Stand and the roof of the Shoreham Street kop, and leaving several large craters on the pitch. One third of the ground’s seats were destroyed. Remarkably, there were no human casualties in the immediate vicinity.

A team of construction workers was using excavators to prepare the footings for new houses when the men unearthed something large, cylindrical and metallic that they didn’t think should be there. The police and council officers were called in to try to identify the offending piece of hardware. They suspected it might be dangerous but weren’t sure, so decided to call in the army. They confirmed what everybody believed - it was a bomb, but it would need the real experts to determine whether or not it was still live. Corporal G. Jennings of the Chatham-based Royal Engineers, writing in the regimental magazine The Sapper, takes up the story:

Well, there we were, watching everyone knocking off at dinner time to go home for the weekend, when in comes Captain Bowen. “Corporal Jennings,” he says, “it looks as if there could be a bomb up in Sheffield. We’re just waiting to confirm it.”

“Sheffield,” says Sapper Paul Hulmes, “that’s north of Watford, and my passport’s out of date. I can’t go…. all right, Sir, we’ll get the kit ready.” After a half-hour wait the final word comes in. It looked as if it was a 500 lb one, near Sheffield United’s football ground. So off we set to Sheffield. Travelling up the motorway with a blue light flashing and two-tone horns blaring must be the quickest way to travel - also the most dangerous with some of the idiots on the road. The weather didn’t help much either. By the time we got there the lighting tower looked like a mobile snowball. When we got to Bramall Lane it was utter chaos. It was a toss-up as to who was looking after the site - the police or the council.

Our first job was to make sure the equipment was working after the long journey, which proved to be a problem as everything had frozen up. Corporal Dave Milnes worked through the night, with the help of a blow torch, to get it working. A sight I won’t forget is seeing him at 4.00am, with ice on the bottom of his coveralls, saying, “Hey up Chuck, it’s freezing out here.” A quick look at the bomb and it was obvious it was a 1,000 kg (Hermann). The next task was to find the fuse. The worst possible place would be underneath. Bets were taken as to where it would be found. After 1-1/2 hours of gentle digging we came across it… not quite underneath, but still a problem. A bit of gentle cleaning with a light brush and water and we could see it had a cap on it, meaning it couldn’t be identified. The language at this point can well be imagined - even the police took it up and wandered around swearing! After looking at it for half an hour or so - trying to will the cap off - it was decided to drill it off with a trepanner [a machine used to cut circular holes], a dodgy process as the cap was only 3mm thick. A touch too deep and we would be into the fuse and the bomb would go off.

Finally we got the cap off. The fuse turned out to be an ECR, which is an impact fuse using an electrical capacitor. It is only recently that the EOD School has decided that any electrical charge that the capacitor held would have gone, so the only problem would be with picric acid crystals, which are highly volatile. To get rid of the acid we drilled into the side of the fuse and injected a solution. Now it was time for a rest while we waited for the solution to dissolve the picric crystals. While we waited, it was time for everyone to pose for the press - or try to hide from them. While Captain Bowen dealt with their questions, the rest of us had a quick discussion as to how we were going to do the next stages. We decided that we would cut holes into the side of the bomb while it was still in the hole, then lift ‘Hermann’ out and put it in a prepared trench to steam out the explosive. With the help of a Muirhill borrowed from 106 Squadron (TA) [based in Sheffield and Bradford] and a Poclain excavator from the council, everything went smoothly - except that our steamer kept on freezing up.

Corporal Milnes and Sapper Danny Christian both had ice hanging off them. There were no other words for it except that it was ‘bloody cold!’ With the explosives steamed out, the next stage was to remove the fuse pocket. We had a couple of options open to us. One was to cut the fuse pocket, using explosive to detonate the explosives in the pocket, but this would destroy the bomb. The other was to cut the fuse pocket out using the trepanner. We decided to use the trepanner, and this method gave us hardly any problems. The bomb case was now safe. The last thing left to do was to burn the explosives, and to make sure that when we had steamed the explosives out we left no trace behind. This was done with two controlled explosions, one for the fuse pocket and one for the hole. The only damage was two cracked windows - not bad considering there were 650 kgs of explosives in the bomb. We then checked the site. Once satisfied all was safe we headed back to Chatham with our bomb, the whole operation taking 60 hours door to door.

The site now declared safe, Sheffield United’s game against Oldham was played the following Tuesday night.

United won 2-0, and it was still ‘bloody cold!’

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Matthew Bell was editor of Sheffield United fanzine Flashing Blade from 1989 to 2019 and wrote a weekly column for the Green ‘Un and Sheffield Star newspapers between 1993 and 2015. He has also published several books on local history and the social history of sport.