NEARLY A TRAGEDY

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 228, 26 September 1929, Page 9

NEARLY A TRAGEDY

BOYS WITH SHIP'S KOCKET. NEARBY HOUSE DAMAGED. (By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.) NELSON, Wednesday. Two small boys yesterday buried an empty shell, which had been used in a field gun, and inserted in it a ship's rocket, two of which one of the boys had found. The shell was buried midway between the properties of Mr. J. Anstice and Mr. S. Cote. On the first rocket being set off, the boys watched from the shelter of a nearby garage, but nothing serious occurred. The second rocket exploded with a great noise, and the shell was burst into dozens of pieces, some of them being inches in length, and about half an inch in thickness. Several pieces went right through the wall of Mr. Anstice's house into a bedroom and tore holes in the paper. One piece came out between the mirror of a dressing-table and the table itself. A few minutes before the explosion Mrs. Anstice was in front of the mirror and had just left the room. Another hole was torn through the wall about two feet from the cailing. Mrs. Coote and some members of her family were on her verandah when the explosion occurred, but fortunately most of the pieces of shell went in the opposite direction. The hole in the ground made by the explosion is about two feet in diameter.