Eurostar plea not to bring bombs back from France

[Moonraker]

Today's Daily Telegraph prints a plea from Eurostar for passengers not to bring back "bombs, shells or weapons", real of fake, from French battlefields.

 

On-line article

 

Moonraker

[ss002d6252]

1 hour ago, Moonraker said:

Today's Daily Telegraph prints a plea from Eurostar for passengers not to bring back "bombs, shells or weapons", real of fake, from French battlefields.

 

On-line article

 

Moonraker

Bad day when you've got to plead with people not to bring back things like that from abroad.

Craig

[pioneecorps]

Thriving industry over there with arms fairs

 

Regards

Gerwyn

[Ken Lees]

It happens all the time, sadly.

[healdav]

Just shows what they think of the DT readership. Dumb enough to take home bombs from the battlefields.

[suesalter1]

I remember on one of my first battlefield trips with the great Martin Middlebrook, someone putting a live hand-grenade on the mini-bus. Fortunately Martin found it before we boarded the ferry at Calais!

 

Sue.

[UKAIF]

They are quite active at asking passengers at station in Paris and Lille and have prominent posters. Unfortunately, it still happens....

[Terry_Reeves]

The late Rose Coombs MBE on her forays to France, used to note the vehicle registrations of battlefield tourists who loaded munitions into their vehicles and inform the appropriate authorities. I remember her telling me that she was particularly appalled by the coach parties who put shells various into the luggage holds of the vehicles and this was in the 1980's.

 

TR

Edited 24 November , 2017 by Terry_Reeves

[mills-bomb]

I will just have to use the ferry instead from now on then.

 

 

(only joking!)

[The Scorer]

I was on a locally guided tour in the Ypres area about ten years ago.

 

The guide took pains to state that if we found anything along the road - "The Iron Harvest" - it was there for a purpose (i.e. to be collected) and we should not touch it under any circumstances. A little way into the trip, we stopped by the side of the road for a view of a site (I can't remember where) and the guide, after telling us about it, got back into the bus.

 

Someone then said to him ... "I think that you'd better see this" ... so he went to the back of the bus. He was greeted with the sight of one of our American travellers cradling a rather large shell and wondering whether they could take them back to the hotel! Unsurprisingly, he wasn't too polite to them, although he didn't swear ... but they (the man and his wife) took great offence at being told what to do with the shells (No, not that!) and didn't speak to him for the rest of the trip.

 

It was obvious that they thought that he was wrong ... the "it won't happen to us" syndrome. We, of course, knew what might have happened, so we weren't very sympathetic at all.

[MAW]

Can people be punished with a fine or imprisonment for carrying wartime ordnance on public vehicles?

 

Mark

Edited 2 December , 2017 by MAW

[Bernard_Lewis]

On a Flanders Tours visit to the Somme in 2002 one traveller picked up what looked like a ball of mud which, on examination by Tony Noyes, turned out to be a Mills bomb.

 

It was placed down gingerly...

 

Bernard

[thetrenchrat22]

There is news item about the iron harvest on the CWGC website