A RETIRED doctor has solved the mystery of how a World War Two grenade ended up on a building site in Hexham.

Dr Howard Murray, from Oakwood, recalled a group of youngsters dicing with death while playing with the device at the old Tynedale High School in 1942.

The school was based in Orchard House, on Allendale Road, next to the site where the grenade was found by construction workers last week. The device was in top soil removed from a garden, on the exact spot where Dr Howard (81) remembers last seeing it.

He said: “I was about seven years old at the time. An older boy brought a grenade into school.

“I remember seeing it in someone’s hands. It looked like a cylinder, like a tin of beans or something.

“I remember one of the boys unscrewing one end, and putting it back in then unscrewing the other end. I had the feeling that would make it go off, but it didn’t.

“I don’t think the teachers knew what was going on. Presumably it was pinched from somewhere.”

Eventually the grenade was buried in a section of the garden, the same section where it resurfaced 74 years later.

Dr Murray says he would be interested to hear from anyone else who may know more about the grenade.

He said: “After it was buried I never heard about it again. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time before I saw it in the Courant.”

The grenade, which was destroyed in a controlled explosion, was a No. 69 device, developed in 1940 and used extensively in action during the war.